Any moment I would vanish like steam into the clouds.
It was beautiful up there, far above those streets – I’ve trodden them so many times, but now they were like patterns of dark and light, the people forming clusters, shifting again and again – Silver and blue, so pretty, I wished I could tell them how beautiful they looked. Even the grim-hearted, struggling home. You couldn’t see the lines on their faces, you couldn’t hear them coughing into their mobile phones, or lying to please each other and all of them trying so hard not to care about the flaming discourtesy of the fates, the way they’d been stamped on over and over. You just saw them as endless flitting shadows, one human, another, another ghost of a person, another. They filled the doorways of shops, then they vanished again.
Would it console you at all, if you were tired, lost in the murk and someone told you – from above, from up here – where I fly – you are beautiful – would that console you?
I had become quite unusual, perhaps I was escaping this prison, my body, perhaps I was ascending towards something else entirely. White light, above the clouds, perhaps it was the sun, so bright—
Now I was in the silence, the clouds merging into further clouds, the sky like an ocean, the world inverted. Myself, somewhat transformed. I saw the houses so far below, terrace after terrace – everything so geometrical, as if someone had been busy with a gargantuan ruler. It was so neat and tidy. The people had been tidied into their terraces and told to be good. There you are, you interchangeable being. A box. Be good now. The whole city bearing down on each little box, with its inherent culture of humans. They mustn’t stray too far. Of course, they absolutely mustn’t fly away.
You could tell the houses where people lived alone. They were bedraggled. They slumped as if they had been bombed and knocked carelessly back together. Sallow light emanating from the windows. Inside, the serried ranks of people cooking up a meal in a saucepan. Washing up even as they ate it. Erasing themselves from the kitchen. The lights flashed from one room to another, charting their solitary progress. Up in the bedrooms, they found their place again. Flat on their backs, gripping the mattress as the planet went whirling through space…Every morning they left, to trade their lives for more money. Not too much, just barely enough.
House after house after house – it went on and on until the bedraggled fields. Russet countryside for a while, and then another town. Each house was ringed around with a halo, there was coloured smoke streaming from the chimneys.
I was above the ancient centre of the city. Oxford. The colours were brighter here, some of the chimneys spewed gold and silver. The low hum again – the smoke descending towards the ground below, where it turned black, deep black, vanished as if the ground had swallowed it.
Swooping down—
There was a window before me, I didn’t know which college I was in. One of the oldest, most lavish. Cloistered vaulting. A smell of gently rotting timber. A voice within – I could just discern it – a man, saying something. Really rattling on. The words were blurred, he sounded as if he was speaking underwater.
I could hear him careering around his room, knocking stuff over. He sounded half mad, and anyway his window was engulfed in black vapour. There was a musty ruined smell, something ancient, rotting, murky. I turned upside down, so all the buildings were standing on their heads, and the roads were like smoke trails, and I tried to get to his window, I was I suppose like a bat, but then I just got stuck in the black fog, I couldn’t make anything out at all. I could really taste it – what was this man doing, weltering around in it—
I tried to soar out of it – I was feeling dreadful, I thought I might faint—
But then I saw something else – in the depths of the murk – a yellow glow – really in the depths of that toxic black smoke, there was something shining like gold—
I was being drawn away—
Oh God, the return – gravity coming to snatch me back – Newton dragging me down. I was flying along the streets—
Like tunnels now – my nose nearly scraping the hedgerows – I could hardly keep myself afloat. It was close. I just made it. Over my gate, the shared gate of my block – across the sterile stretch of car park dirt – I scraped my fingers on the door mat – found I was briefly upside down again.
Ah the agony. I was back.
I was slumped in my chair again. Awake—
Quite blameless and almost functional.
I should start at something like the beginning—
I was living in a real little dump in what I understood to be a good part of town. My flat was buried deep at the bottom of a grandiose villa; the sort of place a single family once owned, lavished it with frills and ornaments, parked their servants somewhere squalid and rang bells whenever they discerned an insufficiency. But now it had been sliced into flats and each flat had been doled out for some extravagant price because the place was in such a good part of town. I lived in the basement and so the whole weight of the building seemed to bear down upon me; it made my head ache. And then the place was dank even at the height of summer, and the moment the temperature dropped it got pretty vicious down there. I coughed myself sick at night. There were two windows in the whole place; one for the bedroom, one for the living room. The rest was lit by angle-poise, you felt you had burrowed deep down and now you had to stay there, with the blind crawling creatures and other things that fear the light.
I’d furnished it with cheap rickety furniture, tailored to an aesthetic that was not my own. I was an interloper in this good part of town. Around the corner, people told me, lived an international rock star. It was highly probable he hadn’t furnished his house with flat-packed monstrosities, but anyway I had. Then the place was adorned with accidental sculptures. Piles of unsold books. Floor to ceiling, a stacking system so perilous that there was a chance one day I’d get buried alive.
People like books, I had thought. Second hand, cheaply priced. You advertise them on the internet, and people buy them. Well, people quite like books. Not as much as other things, it turns out. And they quite like them but perhaps they buy them from other people. So instead of a thriving online business I had a series of abandoned stacks of books, reproaching my poor judgement, and some of them even blocked out my few remaining strands of light. I had a few scattered emails, occasional requests, nothing that amounted to a real living. Just these phrases—
Is there an earlier edition? Thanks… Nick Graham
Dear Amelia, I wonder if you could let me know…
Amelia, whoever you are – from whoever I am—
And sometimes I would knock into one of the piles and then the thing was like a miniature city falling down, skyscrapers tumbling. And then I got to stack them all up again.
Perhaps it was making me slightly sick in the brain. All this staring at the flickering screen. Skimming from one site to another, all of them beamed to me from wherever and typing so frantically as if time was very precious – even though I wasted every second – and hunting, I was really hunting around in that ether-world trying to find something – an answer. What was it? A secret? A sign that others felt as I did? Some word I had never heard before, that would encapsulate it all? I wasn’t greedy, I just wanted a single word. Just a few times I alighted on something, it made me half-hopeful, but then it faded under the general teeming mass of gossip and lunatic facts, perversions masquerading as common sense, things I’d half-read and not really understood. I cheated myself, called this justifiable distraction.