Bang bang bang.
Listen to that. Feel that.
That noise was her.
She’d definitely register now in any heartbeat detector shed.
Film that, you cameras. Let’s see how much it’s possible to know about what’s really happening by filming me sitting here today. Go on, prove I was there. Show us what it meant, that I was.
Anna stood up. She faced one of the CCTV cameras. She put her fist in the air.
But then she felt a bit stupid doing it, standing there so alone. She pretended she’d been stretching her arm. She stretched the other one too. Ah. There. That’s better.
She sat down on the wall again.
Imagine the relief there’d be, in just stepping through the door of a spare room, a room that wasn’t anything to do with you, and shutting the door, and that being that.
There’d be a window, wouldn’t there?
Were there any books in there?
What would you do all day?
What would happen if you did just shut a door and stop speaking? Hour after hour after hour of no words. Would you speak to yourself? Would words just stop being useful? Would you lose language altogether? Or would words mean more, would they start to mean in every direction, all somersault and assault, like a thuggery of fireworks? Would they proliferate, like untended plantlife? Would the inside of your head overgrow with every word that has ever come into it, every word that has ever silently taken seed or fallen dormant? Would your own silence make other things noisier? Would all the things you’d ever forgotten, all layered there inside you, come bouldering up and avalanche you?
Did he want to know what it felt like to not be in the world? Had he closed the door on himself so he would know what it feels like, to be a prisoner? Was it some wanky kind of middle-class game about how we’re all prisoners even though we believe we’re free as a bird, free to cross any shopping mall or airport concourse or fashionably stripped back wooden floor of the upstairs room of a house?
Did he inhabit his cell for the good of the others, like a bee or a monk?
Or was he, say, a smoker and was it all an elaborate ruse to make himself give up?
Then she laughed out loud. Miles Garth, whoever he was, was making her join in all over again.
Yep iep iep iep!
The child was back. The yellow and blue force of her collided, breathless, with Anna still sitting on the wall.
Knock knock, the child said.
Come in, Anna said.
Ha ha!
The child buckled over on the pavement in happy merriment.
Come on, come on, the tunnel! she said. She says we can go!
Where’s the proof? Anna said.
I have it here in my head, the child said.
No, I’ll need something more substantial than that in this wicked day and age, Anna said.
Well, I am allowed to go to the tunnel with you, and that’s a fact, the child said. And my mother says it is a fact. She’s at home right now. She’s writing a paper about how nature says that God is dead.
About what says what? Anna said.
Do you get it? It’s a pun! It’s a pun! the child said. She told me it to tell you. Do you get it? She says it is a really good one, pun I mean.
We’re still not going to any tunnel, Anna said.
Then she asked the child about the window in the room the man had locked himself into.
It’s not just any tunnel, it’s the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, the child said.
She walked Anna back up the street and into the crescent, past all the front doors, then down some steps in an alleyway round the back of the row of houses where, next to their neat little walled-off gardens, there was a parking lot and a patch of grass.
She pointed at the houses.
That one, she said.
Three windows along on the first-floor level there was a nondescript shut window with a slant of blind across the top.
There were other people at the backs of the houses. There was a head-shaven man cleaning a motorbike, and a woman in a slit-skirt business suit taking photos with a BlackBerry. There was a teenage girl, about fifteen, perched on the end of a pile of planks and what looked like market stall scaffolding by the wall. She was listening to an iPod, rolling a cigarette and glancing over every few seconds at the man cleaning the bike. There was a Japanese-looking girl and boy, both about twenty, both dressed very fashionably, sitting on folding chairs outside a little tent. They called hello to the child, who said a polite hello back. The boy was sitting with a dishevelled-looking old man. The girl was doing something with a camera the size of the palm of her hand.
It is a wise man not found anywhere on the world wide web, the Japanese girl told Anna.
It sounded like something you’d find on a slip of paper inside a fortune cookie. Anna nodded a thank you. Maybe the girl meant the dishevelled-looking man. He didn’t look that wise. He looked more homeless. The Japanese boy was sharing hot water he’d boiled on a small gleamingly clean Primus stove with him.
They gave me their umbrellas, the man told Anna. For when it rains. To keep. They’re retractable.
He put his hands in his pockets and brought out a compact umbrella in each hand.
Let it rain, he said.
The child knew the teenage girl over on the planks. She took Anna’s hand and pulled her over to the girl. The girl took one earphone out.
Oh yeah, the girl said, you’re Anna K. They’re so waiting for you. She’s in a state because you didn’t get him out of there this morning.
She put the earphone back in.
Anna mimed taking an earphone out of her own ear. The girl blinked. Then she did as Anna asked.
Thanks, Anna said. Will you do me a favour and tell your dad I’m sorry I couldn’t make it, and that I wish them both all the best?
You mean, me talk to them about something? the girl said.
I don’t mind how it’s conveyed, the actual message, Anna said.
The girl put the earphone back in her ear, got her phone out and started texting.
The child jumped up and down. She took Anna’s hand and pulled like a dog on a leash.
Which window? Anna asked the child again. Then she went over past the Japanese girl, who was filming the backs of the houses. She got as close to the house as she could get, right up against its back fence. She leaned over it, put her head through the head-sized gap between the rows of razor wire. She brought her arms carefully through.
She cupped her hands round her mouth and she shouted up between the coils of blade.
Miles. It’s me. I’m here.
There was once, and there was only once. Once was all there was, even though it was the year 2000 and it was the future and they were an advanced race wearing silver space suits (for that classic 60s “Apollo” look) and driving around in point-nosed cars exactly like the ones that featured twenty years before on TV shows like the one called Tomorrow’s World. Even so, even here, now, in the future, there was no getting away from that faraway nostalgic look in everybody’s eyes.
It was very annoying, the boy thought.
The boy was a paragon of modernity. He had the expensive shoes with the rocket-jet-propellers coming out of the heels that made it possible to fly to the record shop, to which, had it been twenty years ago, he’d have had to walk. He had his special injection packets lined up in the fridge-freezer for cancer and heart disease and flu and the common cold and pretty much everything that could go wrong with you. He had the extra limb that everybody could now have if they wanted (he’d chosen to have his new limb protrude from his forehead. This was so he could hold a book when he was tucked up in bed and turn its pages without untucking his hands, which were keeping warm under the covers — innocently under the covers. He was a good clean boy. Though he wasn’t a saint. And anyway now, obviously, all pubescent sexual desires and urges were taken care of with 25mg per night of Junior Calmit, which you could buy at any good chemist’s, and was made by Shake n’ Vac, who had done a manufacturing about-turn shortly after floors became self-cleaning).