By Light Alone (20 page)

‘What are moonlights?’ Leah asked.

‘We’re working up there,’ said George. ‘Blasting – it is blasting, is it, Rode?’

‘A form of blasting,’ agreed the old man.

‘You say, we’re working up there?’

‘That’s it,’ said George.

‘
We
are not there,’ Leah said, looking from George to Rodion.

‘I mean the US. I mean
we
in that sense.’

Leah put her lips into the shape of saying ‘ah!’ Then she asked: ‘Up at the moon?’

‘Sure.’

‘How did we get there?’

‘How did we get there? We flew up there, of course.’

‘In a flitter?’

It was one of ‘those’ conversations. Leah was either playing some girlish game, pretending to be ignorant of absolutely basic things about the world, or else this was some late manifestation of the kidnapping trauma, some hole in her memory traceable to that event. Either way, George had long ago decided the best way to handle it was to answer her questions simply and to register no surprise.

‘A flitter couldn’t fly so high! No, they flew up in a spaceship.’

‘Leah,’ asked Rodion in his creaky old voice, ‘do you know what the moon is?’

Leah contemplated this question for a long time, her jaws moving in a figure of eight, until she had finished the pastille. Then she said: ‘Is it a mountain?’

‘It is a whole other world, child,’ Rodion said.

‘A mountain world?’

‘A big round ball in space,’ he explained in his patient voice, ‘just like the earth is a big round ball in space.’

The increasing darkness made it hard to read her expression; but she looked at Rodion for a long time, as if weighing the likelihood that this was an incomprehensible adult joke. But she said: ‘OK.’ She uttered these two letters with a perfect George-like inflection, and that gave him a twinge of pleasure.

‘Anyhow,’ he said. ‘The US is building big things – up there. On the moon, I mean. And from time to time they blast the ground. Levelling,’ he went on, realizing how little he knew about the process or infrastructure, ‘mountains, or, I don’t know. Filling craters. I don’t know precisely.’

‘There are specialist feeds,’ George said. ‘They post the timings. Some people like to watch.’

‘If it’s on the feeds,’ Leah said, ‘then why can’t we watch it on the feeds? Then I could watch
The Magic Shell
after.’

George’s Fwn bleeped. ‘It’s time!’ he said, and reclined his chair. Leah and Rodion followed suit, and the three of them stared at the moon.

‘We’re on the roof looking at the moon,’ Leah announced. ‘I think the moon is a roof.’

‘How do you mean, my love?’ George asked.

‘Are the people up there looking at
us
?’ Leah wanted to know.

‘Use your scope, Leah,’ Rodion advised.

‘I
am
using my scope.’ Leah replied, although she had in fact been fiddling with it in her lap. But she fitted it back over her eyes, and lay there. George put his on too. Magnified, the moon’s frost-grey surface revealed all manner of peculiar porelike detail: interlocking circles like the Olympics Logo, or starburst spreads of lines, frills of ink-black shadow with ragged edges like torn paper. White and cream, pale grey and dark, silver-black. Wrinkles and creases, patches of smoothness. ‘Where are they? I can’t see them.’

‘The big crater near the bottom, to the right.’

‘What’s
crader
?’

‘Those circles on the face of the moon. Those are craters.’

‘You should say circles then. Why say crader?’

‘Crater,’ said Rodion gravely, ‘is the proper term.’

‘I don’t like the proper term,’ Leah said, haughtily. ‘Marthe and I, we’re going to make our own language. When we do there will be no proper in it. Marthe speaks some German, you know. I said she and I will-would make our own language. It will-would be a new language, just for the two of us.’

‘What a splendid idea!’ said Rodion. ‘If you have your own private language, you and Marthe can tell one another secrets and nobody else will know what they are.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Leah, with splendid force and simplicity.

‘There,’ said George. They all fell silent. A button-mushroom of sharp brightness appeared on the crater wall, intense, an extraordinary focusing of the moon’s own silver light. And then, again, a second blister of bright whiteness. And in quick succession, a string of bright dots ignited soundlessly round the arc of the crater’s limit. The first explosion was a glass of light. A string of bubbles. And as the cascade of expansion swelled each in turn, the first began to dim, and little streaks of detail emerged in its orbit, puffs of outward-thrust dust and dirt.

George slipped his scope off, and looked at the lopsided brightness of the moon. Over the course of half a minute the flare on the bottom portion faded and the old regular gleam returned. ‘Can we go down now?’ Leah asked, in a bored voice. This, George understood, piercingly: this moment, when Leah is abstracted and bored, and I am sitting here replete with the beauty of what I have been watching, this is the perfect moment. Its perfection, a function of its asymmetry, and fashioned of the exquisite, elegiac rightness of the bond between them. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Let’s go down.’

A sunkite sailed blackly, silently, overhead, on its way to its night-tether, ceilinging them as they walked to the door.

Downstairs, George went through his messages. There was another, full of ire and contumely, from his assertivist therapist, raging at George’s continual absence, and heaping all sorts of abuse upon him. He watched the whole of it, up to the moment when the therapist said: ‘I shall, of course, bill you for these calls; they and their abuse in particular constitute a valuable therapeutic strategy’, when he closed it down.

21

How much longer? A year and a little more, and throughout this fragile perfect asymmetry, Leah’s childishness and George’s adulthood. Her semi-detachment from him as she found greater and greater focus in her own life and friends; his increasing settlement of all that mattered in the world on her life. They did very little, by the usual metrics of ‘did’. Leah improved at English Language and Creative Composition, and indeed showed flashes of genuine talent. George and she took a holiday in Antarctica – Marie was supposed to come as well, but some other pressing engagement kept her back at the last minute. Afterwards Marie, on (George assumed) the principle of equality, took Leah and Ezra both away to Argentina, leaving her husband behind. A week of dinosaur riding and adventure play for the kids. When they returned, George was almost embarrassed to ask Leah: ‘How was it?’ ‘Oh,’ she replied, folding her long legs beneath her and settling to a game screen (
just
like old times!) in a chair, ‘it was OK.’ ‘Just OK?’ ‘Whatever,’ she said.

There was a message from Ergaste: he was in NY and wanted to talk. George invited him to the house.

‘Can I say hello to Uncle Ergaste?’ Leah asked, putting her head round the corner.

‘He’s not here yet.’

‘But I saw him!’

‘That was just a message.’

‘No,’ Leah explained, patiently. ‘It wasn’t a “message”. I
saw
him.’

‘It was on the Lance.’

‘Oh! What’s the Lance?’

‘Leah,’ chucklingly, ‘don’t be silly. You know what the Lance is.’

‘Oh,’ she said airily. ‘I’ve heard people talk of it. But you know, by jiminy, I’ve never been wholly sure.’

‘You remember when Granda was alive, and he would call us on the Lance from Scotland?’ She squeezed her eyes between cheekbones and eyebrows, as if staring into a ferociously bright light, so George went on: ‘You used to like putting your arm through his chest.’ When this elicited nothing, he added, ‘Come along, Leah. The Lance makes a picture of the person you’re speaking to, in three dimensions.’

‘So Uncle Ergaste isn’t here?’

‘Not actually, not yet.’

‘OK.’ Leah said. ‘Can I have some food?’

‘Go ask Walter.’

‘Walter’s gone.’

George pondered this. ‘He shouldn’t have. He should still be here. Did you look in the kitchen?’

‘I
looked
in the kitchen,’ Leah replied, haughtily. ‘
Didn’t
I,’

‘Well, Walter is
supposed
to be there. Maybe he’d popped out for a moment. Why not go look again?’

‘I
will
look again,’ said Leah, as if making a concession. ‘But, Daddy, if he’s not there, can I just help myself?’

‘What – to food? Sure. I guess so. But I’m sure he’ll be there.’

She said ‘thanks Dad’ languidly, and disappeared round the corner. A moment later she was back. ‘Dad,’ she said, elongating the vowel.

Something prickled in George’s pelt. Some atavistic sense of grave danger on the very edge of his well-being. He didn’t know what cued him into this sudden apprehension. The little hairs on his arms lifted away from the skin. Naturally, the danger was not of a physical sort. He moved his face slowly towards her. ‘Yes, my love?’ he said, unable to keep the cautiousness from his tone.

‘I was just
thinking
.’

There was a silence. A flitter went past the window with a gushing noise. It was a bright, cloudy day. To fill the gap, George said: ‘Thinking is good.’

‘Wondering, rather: when can we go see Mother and Father?’

The subcutaneous tingle in George’s skin. He felt that caffeiney, or cSnuff-y, sensation of sharpened attentiveness. Something very large was balanced precariously on some teeter-totter, threatening to tumble down. He had known such contentment, the thought of losing it was ghastly. But there was nothing to do but tread very carefully, and hope he did not fall. Through a gummy mouth, George spoke carefully: ‘What do you mean, my love?’

‘Oh nothing,’ said Leah, and George’s heartbeat accelerated a little, as if at a dodged bullet. But then she said: ‘I just thought, we can fly to Antarctica and Argentina, and Ararat begins with a A.’

‘Ararat does begin with an A.’

‘I just wondered if we could go there, maybe. I’d like to see Mummy.’

‘You can see your mother right now,’ said George.

‘Other mother, oh it
doesn’t
matter,’ said Leah, launching into a slouchy gibbon-walk across the carpet in the direction of the window. ‘Only, it’s only that we never seem to go
there
.’

George swallowed. ‘It’s not a place with happy associations. After all. Now, is it, my love?’

‘I don’t mind so much about seeing my other dad, he was a boss and he wasn’t very nice to Mummy.’ Spoken with disdain. ‘But it might be nice to see my other mummy,’ said Leah, peering through the window, and showing her teeth to the world. ‘It doesn’t matter though. I’ll go see if Walter’s in the kitchen, and maybe he can make me something containing peanut-paste-and-pear.’

She lolled out of the room. George sat in his chair trembling like a man in a fever. But this was an overreaction. Kids say all sorts of idiotic things, after all. There was no point in getting
het
. In getting het
up
. He could see the sky through the window, so he looked at that. He directed his attention towards the bar of mottled blue and white that lay between the roof of the De Hoch Building and the top of his own window. It had a weirdly shimmery quality to it, as if it would not stay in place. But surely we can depend on the sky. White clouds moved, the sun breaking through intermittently and opening a bright claw of dazzle in the window glass. The screen was on, of course, in the corner of the room, sound off; and George turned his face that way for a change, letting his eyes rest on the silent images. It was a news feed, and the visuals were of a large mass of people compressed between two rows of stone buildings, surging and flowing up the passage in a tidal rush, encountering the fat metal posts of military police quadpods and being beaten back in spume-bursts of smoky sprayfire. All in perfect screen silence. The crowd recoiled and shuddered back down its street, and gathered itself, and surged back up again. George found it soothing, in fact: this great systolicdiastolic pulse of people. Forward they poured, in a mass, and back they washed, underneath a sky coloured from the brightest blue pigment. The margins of the images were crusted with infographics, little huddles of people waiting to be pulled out to provide commentary. George took a breath, and waved his hand in the beam to turn the sound on. Then he pulled out the News Genie from the bottom left. To the soothing wave-motion was superadded a white-noise roar and crash, and the Genie’s murmuring voice, saying (though George wasn’t really following it) ‘agromanagerial rebellion’ and ‘Mexico’ and ‘violence’ and ‘hydraulic society’ and ‘superstructure’ and ‘containment’.