By Light Alone (31 page)

‘The moon!’ she said. But she didn’t elaborate.

The rain was still coming down as white noise on the roof and sides of the little storehouse. Marie pulled her trousers on, dialled the colours up and changed the design of show. ‘What are you looking at?’ But, joining him at the window she could see what he was looking at. The dozen longhairs they had shooed out of the building had taken shelter – or approximate shelter – under a twenty-metre planar tree a little distance from the hut. They were bunched together, some of them hugging one another, others standing awkwardly with their arms pressed at their sides. All twelve were looking in the direction of the storehouse. Staring, really.

‘They’re looking at us,’ Marie noted, redundantly.

‘You know what they’re thinking?’ said Arto, in a strange voice.

‘What’re they thinking?’

‘They’re thinking how much they’d like to eat us.’

She snickered at this, as at a joke, and draped her arm round the back of his neck and over his plump shoulder. But he wasn’t joking, and the more Marie looked at the twelve women, all of them looking back at her, the more sinister they appeared. ‘Not literally eat, though,’ she tried.

‘That depends what you mean by literally,’ said Arto. ‘Food is a pastime for us. But it’s an obsession for them. They want what we have got, which is to say they want to
be
us, which is to say, they want to
internalize
us. They’re so numerous, the poor, you know? They are so many and we so few. Soon enough that fact is going to embolden them. And then what? There isn’t enough food in the world for everybody to eat. There hasn’t been for a hundred years. So let’s say they’re successful, and sweep us away; they eat our supplies of food and it lasts them a day. Then what? Us.’

She didn’t know what to say to this. ‘What a horrid notion,’ she said, quietly.

And he turned to her, and embraced her properly, and spoke in a warmer tone: ‘I don’t mean to be gloomy!’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. That was such a lovely thing we just did. Being put in touch with such joy prompts a kind of equal-and-opposite reaction in my head, perhaps. But the world is still a lovely place.’

She looked through the window, deliberately ignoring the knot of surly longhair women under the tree, and instead looking across the spacious prospect; broken old buildings yielding to the green of nature. It
was
beautiful. Spawning strands of water eeled through the beautifully inconstant skies.

‘Lovely!’ she agreed.

There was no point in trying to avoid it. She was in love. She wrote him upon sheets of paper, like a character from Shakespeare. Love letters. My heart is with the butterflies, she wrote, for they can only be and move in the world by folding themselves in half, over and over, like a letter that is finished to be tucked into its envelope. Butterflies live in the crease; they are the living crease; and so am I.

He didn’t write back. But he did send a Helios message, and they arranged to meet again. It made Marie thirteen years of age all over again.

He came to stay over at her place, and they made love in the bed and in the shower and back in the bed. Afterwards she watched him sleep. He was a restless, fidgety sleeper. How could anyone, she wondered, regard sleep as
repose
? Watching him reminded her of the
urgency
of sleep; of how
effortful
and
strenuous
it can be. It’s a puzzle how anybody could confuse, even for mere poetic effect, sleep and death. Not siblings, those. Not related at all.

Later they talked about her previous life, and she felt a cartilaginous protrusion, somehow, on the inside of her throat. It was hard to talk about it, and she didn’t want to talk about it. But he asked, with his big ingenuous face. She didn’t want to talk about it, but she did. ‘Your husband,’ said Arto. ‘He was hardly faithful, though. The rumours – you know.’

‘I know. And I knew.’

‘And didn’t it bother you?’

She thought about it. ‘It might have bothered me,’ she said, in a queer voice, ‘if I had desired him more.’

Arto’s eyebrow came up like a sideways question-mark. ‘You didn’t.’

‘At first I did: when we were young. He’s quite handsome. And he used to be more handsome, when he had the sheen of youth on him. But he’s – a kid, really. And I fell into habits of – mothering him. I suppose I did. And that kills desire, you see. It ended up with him having these flings, and me indulgently, I don’t know, noting them, giving him permission.’ She didn’t add, because she didn’t think she needed to, or perhaps rather that she hoped she didn’t:
that’s not how our relationship will work
. Arto was man, not boy. Apart from his silly spy play-acting. But that, Marie told herself, that would go away.

5

The spy stuff didn’t go away. One day Arto was at her apartment, and Marie took a Helio message from Rodion, the old man who’d owned the other half of their previous mansion-block. She still met up with him, from time to time, in the park.

‘Who was that?’

Arto’s tone was sharper than usual. She might easily have rebuked him for the rudeness of this; but instead she only said, ‘An
old
friend, just arranging a time to hook up.’
Old friend
was to distinguish him from the newer friends she had made since her divorce. Although of course, it was a stretch describing Rodion as a
friend
.

‘Friend?’ said Arto, suspiciously. Was that jealousy? Dimples appeared in Marie’s cheeks.

‘It’s not like
that
!’ she said, cajolingly. ‘He’s more a friend of Ez and, and – Leah. He meets them in the Park, buys them ice creams.’

‘Rodion?’

The dimples dissolved back into the flesh. ‘That’s right.’

A peculiar expression took control of his eyes. ‘Can I come?’ he asked. ‘I’d like to meet him.’

She wasn’t sure why she felt uneasy at this. And of course there was no reason to deny him. She said: ‘Sure.’

They all went to the park. There was Rodion, with his old-fashioned tunic, and his big bald head, at once fragile-looking and brutal, and his absurd black eyebrows like two simcards stuck over his eyes. ‘Rodion,’ Marie said, ‘may I introduce my friend, Arto?’

‘Let’s not be bourgeois,’ said Arto, bouncily, shaking Rodion’s hand with vigour. ‘Marie and I are lovers.’

Rodion’s eyebrows slid a long way up his big wrinkly forehead at this forwardness, but he mumbled ‘Good to meet you.’ Although he didn’t meet Arto’s eye. Then he bowed down to bring his face closer to the level of Leah and Ezra: ‘Would you like ice cream?’

Ezra gave voice to his opinion: ‘Ice-cream is yucky.’

‘Oho! So you don’t want any?’

‘Strawberry,’ Ezra said, looking pointedly past Rodion at the sky.

Rodion went to the booth and returned with two globes of coral-pink iced goo. Leah, at least, thanked him. The three adults sat on a bench and watched as the children, self-consciously, ate their treat.

‘Has Marie mentioned me, to you, I wonder?’ asked Arto, beamingly.

‘I can’t say she has,’ Rodion replied in an embarrassed voice.

‘No matter. She’s a special human being, Marie.’ He patted her knee. It was all very embarrassing. Indeed, it was so embarrassing that Marie almost literally couldn’t believe it. It had that weirdly jointed clumsiness of dreaming. Perhaps Arto was playing some peculiar game.

‘So, Rodion,’ he said. ‘You don’t mind if I call you Rodion?’

‘Not at all,’ Rodion said.

‘How old are you? More than a hundred, I’d wager. You have the look of a three-figure fellow.’

‘Arto!’ Marie cried.

He turned an ingenuously wide-eyed expression on her. ‘What! It’s an achievement! It’s an index of vigour. Now I’ve always said,’ he added, expatiating for the general benefit, ‘that one thing we can bring to the cosmos is the vigour to live long and well.’

‘ “We”?’ queried Rodion, mildly.

‘The wealthy. Oh, the longhairs sometimes
hang on
, I know, for ages and ages, like – moss or something. But I don’t call that really
living
. And in my experience jobsuckers wear themselves out, like components in a machine, with their ceaseless activity. They don’t usually live long.
We
are the pinnacle of existence, though, aren’t we? We’re what existence is
for
. We’re the overmen and the overwomen.’

‘I was a jobsucker myself,’ said Rodion, unassertively, ‘for many decades.’

But Arto bounced straight off this implied rebuke. He was beyond shame. ‘Our eminence carries with it certain responsibilities, you know! Certain duties and responsibilities. Do you travel much, Rodion?’

‘Are you drunk?’ Marie asked.

Arto laughed at this. ‘It’s an innocent question, my love. There’s a lot of world to see! I bet, Rodion, that you’ve seen a good deal of it in your time?’

‘I did travel, a long time ago,’ said Rodion stiffly.

‘But you don’t travel nowadays? Wise of you, Rodion. Manhattan, Manhattan! Wouldn’t you agree, Rodion, that Manhattan has all that a person needs right here?’

Rodion sat straight up on the bench at this, and looked more closely at Arto. Then he said a strange thing: ‘You’re one of
those
, are you?’

Arto didn’t stop grinning, but he did stop talking. In that moment Marie was simply grateful that her lover (shudder!) had ceased embarrassing her. Only afterwards did it strike her as strange that Rodion’s mildly spoken words would have such an effect on Arto’s impregnable ego. But the weather was nice, and the sound of the ocean rubbing itself, catlike, upon the Hough Wall was a pleasant distant susurration, and the air tasted clean, and for a while Marie just sat and permitted herself to enjoy the moment. She let her eye drift over the great bank of blooms opposite. Properly beautiful flowers, a well tended horticultural display. All the reds and purples and pinks. The great variety of greens. The empty skullcaps of the hyacinths. The cabbage in-folded pinks of roses. The purity of lilies. The long grass-coloured tubing through which the bindweed blew its effortless white trumpet.

‘We’ve finished our ice creams,’ said Leah. ‘Can we
go
?’

Later, back at the apartment, after a strenuous but oddly unsatisfying session of lovemaking, Marie asked him: ‘What did Rodion mean when he called you
one of those
?’ Arto was face down on the bed, and his reply sank inaudibly into the mattress. But Marie wasn’t in a mood to let it go. ‘What did he
mean
? One of
what
?’

‘Spy,’ said Arto, turning his head.

‘This nonsense again?’

‘A spy,’ said Arto.

‘You said Manhattan has all that a person needs, and he replied that you were a spy. That hardly makes sense, now, does it?’

‘Oh he recognized me well enough. Which is to say; he recognized my type. He’s had plenty of run-ins with people like me.’

‘Spies?’ Marie sneers.

‘People telling him not to leave the city, I mean.’ With a heave and a
hup
! Arto was off the bed and padding towards the shower, his bulgy buttocks wobbling. Listen! Those tender little smacking sounds, as his thighs chafed step by step: the somatic percussion of affluence.

Marie lay on her back. ‘Why can’t he leave the city?’ she called; but the whoosh of the shower had started up and she couldn’t be heard. So she sat up and thought about the idiocy of Arto’s game-playing, and how infuriating it was, and how infuriating
he
was. When he came back, dribbling water from his naked body all over the floor, she was waspish: ‘It doesn’t impress me, you know.’

His tone was mock-innocent. ‘What doesn’t?’

And she saw that a fight was coming. More, she welcomed the possibility. ‘Your nonsense about being a spy,’ she said, belligerent. ‘You do it to impress me. Well, I’m not impressed. You can drop it.’

He stood at the foot of the bed, dripping water. ‘You have no idea.’

‘Don’t I?’

‘You’re an innocent. You don’t have the faintest
notion
.’

‘You’re so condescending,’ she returned. ‘You know nothing
about
me! You don’t know what I’ve gone through.’

‘The world is one lit candle away from going up in flames!’ He was yelling, he was really shouting. ‘You have no idea now precariously we’re positioned! You don’t know what we do to keep you safe.’