Cloud Atlas (22 page)

“Yeah …”

“Then I’m ten months late! This is terrible! I’d better get back before my absence is noticed—and remarked upon!”

The boy did a cartoon kung-fu pose and waved his chain saw at me. “Not so fast, Green Goblin! You’re a trespasser! I’m telling the police of you!”

War. “Tell-tale-tit, are you? Two can play at
that
game. If you tell on me, I’ll tell my friend the Ghost of Christmas Future where your house is, and do you know what he’ll do to you?”

The wide-eyed shitletto shook his head, shaken and stirred.

“When your family is all tucked up asleep in your snug little beds, he’ll slide into your house through the crack under the door and
eat
—
your
—
puppy!”
The venom in my bile duct pumped fast. “He’ll leave its curly tail under your pillow and you’ll get blamed. Your little friends will all scream, ‘Puppy slayer!’ whenever they see you coming. You’ll grow old and friendless and die, alone, miserably, on Christmas morning half a century from now. So if I were you, I wouldn’t breathe a word to
anyone
about seeing me.”

I pushed myself through the hedge before he could take it all in. As I was heading back to the station along the pavement, the wind carried his sob: “But I don’t even
have
a puppy …”

I hid behind
Private Eye
in the health center’s Wellness Café, which was doing a fine trade with us maroonees. I half-expected a furious Ursula to turn up with her grandchild and a local bobby. Private lifeboats came to rescue the stockbrokers. Old Father Timothy offers this advice to his younger readers, included for free in the price of this memoir: conduct your life in such a way that, when your train breaks down in the eve of your years, you have a warm, dry car driven by a loved one—or a hired one, it matters not—to take you home.

A venerable coach arrived three Scotches later. Venerable? Ruddy Edwardian. I had to endure chatty students all the way to Cambridge. Boyfriend worries, sadistic lecturers, demonic housemates, reality TV, strewth, I had no idea children of their age were so hyperactive. When I finally reached Cambridge station, I looked for a telephone box to tell Aurora House not to expect me until the following day, but the first two telephones were vandalized (in Cambridge, I ask you!), and only when I got to the third did I look at the address and see that Denholme had neglected to write the number. I found a hotel for commercial travelers next to a launderette. I forget its name, but I knew from its reception that the place was a crock of cat crap, and as usual my first impression was spot on. I was too ruddy whacked to shop around for something nicer, however, and my wallet was too starved. My room had high windows with blinds I couldn’t lower because I am not twelve feet tall. The khaki pellets in the bathtub were indeed mouse droppings, the shower knob came off in my hand, and the hot water was tepid. I fumigated the room with cigar smoke and lay on my bed trying to recall the bedrooms of all my lovers, in order, looking down the mucky telescope of time. Prince Rupert and the Boys failed to stir. I felt strangely unconcerned with the idea of the Hoggins Bros. plundering my flat back in Putney. Must be lean pickings compared to most of their heists, if
Knuckle Sandwich
is anything to go by. A few nice first editions, but little else of value. My television died the night George Bush II snatched the throne and I haven’t dared replace it. Madame X took back her antiques and heirlooms. I ordered a triple Scotch from room service—damn me if I’d share a bar with a cabal of salesmen boasting about boobs and bonuses. When my treble whiskey finally came it was actually a stingy double, so I said so. The ferrety adolescent just shrugged. No apology, just a shrug. I asked him to lower my blind, but he took one look and huffed, “Can’t reach that!” I gave him a frosty “That will be all, then,” instead of a tip. He broke wind as he left, poisonously. I read more of
Half-Lives
but fell asleep just after Rufus Sixsmith was found murdered. In a lucid dream I was looking after a little asylum-seeker boy who begged for a go in one of those rides in the corners of supermarkets you put fifty p into. I said, “Oh, all right,” but when the child climbed out he had turned into Nancy Reagan. How could I explain that to his mother?

I woke up in darkness with a mouth like Super Glue. The Mighty Gibbon’s assessment of history—”little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind”—ticker-taped by for no apparent reason. Timothy Cavendish’s time on Earth, in thirteen words. I refought old arguments, then fought arguments that have never even existed. I smoked a cigar until the high windows showed streaks of a watery dawn. I shaved my jowls. A pinched Ulsterwoman downstairs served a choice of burnt or frozen toast with sachets of lipstick-colored jam and unsalted butter. I remembered Jake Balokowsky’s quip about Normandy: Cornwall with something to eat.

Back at the station my woes began afresh when I tried to get a refund on yesterday’s disrupted journey. The ticket-wallah, whose pimples bubbled as I watched, was as intractably dense as his counterpart in King’s Cross. The corporation breeds them from the same stem cell. My blood pressure neared its record. “What do you
mean
, yesterday’s ticket is now invalid? It’s not my fault my ruddy train broke down!”

“Not our fault neither. SouthNet run the trains. We’re Ticket-Lords, see.”

“Then to whom do I complain?”

“Well, SouthNet Loco are owned by a holding company in Düsseldorf who are owned by that mobile-phone company in Finland, so you’d be best off trying someone in Helsinki. You should thank your lucky stars it wasn’t a derailment. Get a lot of those, these days.”

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage. A feisty stagger was needed to reach the next train before it left—only to find it had been canceled! But, “luckily,” the train before mine was so late that it still hadn’t departed. All the seats were taken, and I had to squeeze into a three-inch slot. I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. The Diagonal People.

Cambridge outskirts are all science parks now. Ursula and I went punting below that quaint bridge, where those Biotech Space Age cuboids now sit cloning humans for shady Koreans. Oh, aging is ruddy unbearable! The I’s we were yearn to breathe the world’s air again, but can they ever break out from these calcified cocoons? Oh, can they hell.

Witchy trees bent before the enormous sky. Our train had made an unscheduled and unexplained stop on a blasted heath, for how long, I do not recall. My watch was stuck in the middle of last night. (I miss my Ingersoll, even today.) My fellow passengers’ features melted into forms that were half familiar: an estate agent behind me, yacking on his mobile telephone, I could
swear
he was my sixth-form hockey captain; the grim woman two seats ahead, reading
A Moveable Feast
, isn’t she that Inland Revenue gorgon who gave me such a grilling a few years ago?

Finally the couplings whimpered and the train limped off at a slow haul to another country station whose flaky name board read “Adlestrop.” A voice with a bad cold announced: “Centrallo Trains regrets that due to a braking-systems failure this train will make a brief stop at this—sneeze—station. Passengers are directed to alight here … and wait for a substitute train.” My fellow travelers gasped, groaned, swore, shook their heads. “Centrallo Trains apologizes for any—sneeze—inconvenience this may cause, and assures you we are working hard to restore our normal excellent standard of—huge sneeze—service. Gi’ us a tissue, John.”

Fact: rolling stock in this country is built in Hamburg or somewhere, and when the German engineers test British-bound trains, they use imported lengths of our buggered, privatized tracks because the decently maintained European rails won’t provide accurate testing conditions. Who really won the ruddy war? I should have fled the Hogginses up the Great North Road on a ruddy pogo stick.

I elbowed my way into the grubby café, bought a pie that tasted of shoe polish and a pot of tea with cork crumbs floating in it, and eavesdropped on a pair of Shetland pony breeders. Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led. Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don’t, will is pitted against will. “Admire me, for I am a metaphor.”

I groped my way to the ammonia-smelling gents’, where a joker had stolen the bulb. I had just unzipped myself when a voice arose from the shadows. “Hey, mistah, got a light or sumfink?” Steadying my cardiac arrest, I fumbled for my lighter. The flame conjured a Rastafarian in Holbein embers, just a few inches away, a cigar held in his thick lips. “Fanks,” whispered my black Virgil, inclining his head to bring the tip into the flame.

“You’re, erm, most welcome, quite,” I said.

His wide, flat nose twitched. “So, where you heading, man?”

My hand checked my wallet was still there. “Hull …” A witless fib ran wild. “To return a novel. To a librarian who works there. A very famous poet. At the university. It’s in my bag. It’s called
Half-Lives.”
The Rastafarian’s cigar smelt of compost. I can never guess what they’re really thinking. Not that I’ve ever really known any. I’m not a racialist, but I do believe the ingredients in so-called melting pots take generations to melt. “Mistah,” the Rastafarian told me, “you need”—and I flinched—”some o’ this.” I obeyed his offer and sucked on his turd-thick cigar.

Ruddy hell! “What
is
this stuff?”

He made a noise like a didgeridoo at the root of his throat. “That don’t grow in Marlboro Country.” My head enlarged itself by a magnitude of many hundreds,
Alice-style
, and became a multistory car park wherein dwelt a thousand and one operatic Citroëns. “My word, you can say that again,” mouthed the Man Formerly Known as Tim Cavendish.

Next thing I remember, I was on the train again, wondering who had walled up my compartment with moss-stained bricks. “We’re ready for you now, Mr. Cavendish,” a bald, spectacled coot told me. Nobody was there, or anywhere. Only a cleaner, making his way down the vacant train, putting litter into a sack. I lowered myself onto the platform. The cold sank its fangs into my exposed neck and frisked me for uninsulated patches. Back in King’s Cross? No, this was wintriest Gdansk. In a panic I realized I didn’t have my bag and umbrella. I climbed aboard and retrieved them from the luggage rack. My muscles seemed to have atrophied in my sleep. Outside, a baggage cart passed, driven by a Modigliani. Where in hell
was
this place?

“Yurrin Hulpal,” the Modigliani answered.

Arabic?
My brain proposed the following: a Eurostar train had stopped at Adlestrop, I had boarded and slept all the way to Istanbul Central. Addled brain. I needed a clear sign, in English.

WELCOME TO HULL
.

Praise be, my journey was nearly over. When had I last been this far north? Never, that’s when. I gulped cold air to stub out a sudden urge to throw up—that’s right, Tim, drink it down. The offended stomach supplies pictures of the cause of its discomfort, and the Rastafarian’s cigar flashed before me. The station was painted in all blacks. I rounded a corner and found two luminous clock faces hung above the exit, but clocks in disagreement are worse than no clock at all. No watcher at the gates wanted to see my exorbitantly priced ticket, and I felt cheated. Out front a curb crawler prowled here, a window blinked there, music waxed and waned from a pub across the bypass. “Spare change?” asked, no, demanded, no, accused, a miserable dog in a blanket. His master’s nose, eyebrows, and lips were so pierced with ironmongery that a powerful electromagnet would have shredded his face in a single pass. What do these people do at airport metal detectors? “Got any change?” I saw myself as he saw me, a frail old giffer in a friendless late city. The dog rose, scenting vulnerability. An invisible guardian took my elbow and led me to a taxi rank.

The taxi seemed to have been going round the same roundabout for a miniature eternity. A howling singer on the radio strummed a song about how everything that dies someday comes back. (Heaven forfend—remember the Monkey’s Paw!) The driver’s head was far, far too big for his shoulders, he must have had that Elephant Man disease, but when he turned round I made out his turban. He was bemoaning his clientele.
“Always
they say, ‘Bet it ain’t this cold where you’re from, eh?’ and always I say, ‘Dead wrong, mate. You’ve obviously never visited Manchester in February.’ ”

“You do know the way to Aurora House, don’t you?” I asked, and the Sikh said, “Look, we’ve arrived already.” The narrow driveway ended at an imposing Edwardian residence of indeterminate size. “Sick teen-squid Zachary.”

“I don’t know anyone of that name.”

He looked at me, puzzled, then repeated, “Sixteen—quid—exactly.”

“Oh. Yes.” My wallet was not in my trouser pockets, or my jacket pocket. Or my shirt pocket. Nor did it reappear in my trouser pockets. The awful truth smacked my face. “I’ve been ruddy robbed!”

“I resent the insinuation. My taxi has a municipal meter.”

“No, you don’t understand, my wallet’s been stolen.”

“Oh, then I understand.” Good, he understands. “I understand very well!” The wrath of the subcontinent swarmed in the dark. “You’re thinking, That curry muncher knows whose side the fuzz’ll take.”

“Nonsense!” I protested. “Look, I’ve got coins, change, yes, a pocketful of change … here … yes, thank God! Yes, I think I’ve got it …”

He counted his ducats. “Tip?”

“Take it.” I had emptied all the shrapnel into his other hand and scrambled outside, straight into a ditch. From my accident-victim’s-eye view I saw the taxi speed away, and I suffered a disagreeable flashback to my Greenwich mugging. It wasn’t the watch or even the bruises or the shock that had scarred me so. It was that I was a man who had once faced down and bested a quartet of Arab ragamuffins in Aden, but in the girls’ eyes I was … old, merely old. Not behaving the way an old man should—invisible, silent, and scared—was, itself, sufficient provocation.