Song Of Time (15 page)

“That
is
you, Roushana.”

She smiled. She was almost looking directly at me now, and I saw she was blind.

ADAM’S THE PERFECT GUEST. After taking over from the kitchen machines to make and clear away our breakfast, he then found enough food left in my sparse fridge to make us both this passable lunch. Morning went by in a rush of memories, and it’s past noon already as we sit here eating bread, which he’s freshened up in the oven, and a couple of varieties of decent-ish cheese. There are even grapes, although I don’t know where he got them, or these succulent slices of saucisson, from, nor this jar of pickled walnuts. To me, it’s a feast, although it feels strange to be sitting here in my own flesh, in my own house, when part of me still feels as if I should be squatting with thousands of others on the concrete floor of an airport warehouse…

“You’ve been rather quiet,” Adam says as he pours me water from the carafe.

“I have these…” I wave a hand as I dryly masticate. “Preoccupations.”

“Of course. None of my business.”

Is he fishing? I let it pass.

“Might as well finish this off.” The tattered edge of Claude’s old sweatshirt raises as he slices the remains of the cheese, and I notice that the waterproof covering which I sprayed over that rent in his side is now becoming discoloured. “I was wondering,” he then says as if the subject hasn’t changed, “what would happen if I left this house and kept on walking.”

“I don’t know…” I think again of Birmingham, of being a refugee in my own country. “If you went inland towards the road, or anywhere near a town such as Fowey, you’d probably be detected by the waymarks as a moving, human shape. Your presence would be—I believe the term is
interrogated
. If it turns out you have a right to be here, you’d be welcomed, taken back into whatever your life really is. If not, you’d be captured, imprisoned, sent away.”

“Hardly seems fair, does it? I mean, I’m the same person either way.”

“Things aren’t fair, Adam. Don’t you know that?”

He blinks. His perfect teeth bite his perfect lip. “You’re too negative, Roushana.” He makes a feminine gesture, which seems both sexy and charming in someone so resolutely male. “There
has
to be hope. Otherwise, we wouldn’t both be here, would we? Otherwise, I’d be dead already on that shore.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. Do you remember anything more now? You seem so familiar with everything here in this kitchen.”

“I do, don’t I?” He gives a furtive smile, then lowers his head.

“And these rope cuts…” Reaching across the remains of the food, I take his hands, turn them palm upward and ease back the cuffs, although the marks have already faded. “Have you noticed them? There are similar ones on your ankles. Don’t they look to you as if—well, as if you’ve been tied up?”

Breathing together, sharing the soft warmth which his body emanates, we stare down at his wrists, although it seems there’s nothing else to be said.

Finally, as the silence stretches, I let him go.

“Anyway,” I say. “Thanks for getting this meal. You’ve done really well to find what you did. But I think we’ll both starve if I don’t get some more food in. Of course…” I gesture towards the kitchen screen. “I could order it through there, and it would come in the matter of an hour. But I enjoy shopping, and—well, to be honest—I don’t think that it’s a particularly good idea that we let even some dumb delivery vehicle know that you’re here.”

Pausing in my coat outside on the front porch, I decide to enter the command which will cause all Morryn’s doors and windows to seal. Better, I tell myself, that Adam stays inside and away from harm…

An almost-warm wind buffets me as I follow the old road down towards Fowey. Amid its changing, booming, whispering, hissing sound, I can still hear echoes of the Sibelius which I once filled my head with as I walked the Cornish cliffs. If I squint in this lemony sunlight, the abandoned fields become sheep-cropped once again and the distant wind generators begin to turn their sails. But, thin as the breeze, pale as the light, the vast mote of some leviathan is floating across the sky as it mouths and digests whatever poisons have been cast here from other, less fortunate lands.
This is the future, Sis.
Just half-close your eyes, look up at the sun. It’s that easy—that close…

Bezant Bay lies twinkling where the antique tarmac gives out in a freshly-hewn drop. The beach has grown slimmer in recent years and fresh rockfalls foam their jagged mouths. I’d pause here to rest, but I know I’ll be kidnapped by memories if I dawdle, and I have to get on. A broader landscape unfolds as I follow the coastal footpath beyond, revealing the Fowey estuary and then the gothic turrets of Place House. Fowey hasn’t changed so very much since I first came here with Mum and Dad. Clay barges still slide towards the deepwater harbour between the dragonfly boats, cars crawl along the esplanade, and the ferry still noses across from Bodinnick, even if none of these activities now require human intervention. The tightly down-tilting streets which I enter even smell the same: coaly and fishy, faintly damp, and with that sudden feeling of cold when you pass into their near-perpetual shade. As always there are people about, and many of them are real—shopping, talking and gawping in the old-fashioned way as I shoulder thinly past them— but there are other presences, trails of voice and colour like wind-blown scarves gone too quickly by for me to register them.
Ah, look…!
A voice exclaims, and hands which have no body flutter in delight. Tourists, I suppose, just like so many other of the visitors which Fowey has long accommodated, but borne here from some other place along the network of silvery veins which shine across these pavements like the winter’s first frost.

I head into the market and set about filling my striped shopping bag with all the varied produce of the stalls and shops. Herring outstare me from their beds of ice. So do fat pimento-eyed olives. Some sort of consideration before I set out from Morryn as to what I needed to buy here might have been an advantage, but I still have no real idea what Adam likes, or how long he’ll be staying. I aim for a scattershot approach. Effectively, I buy larger than usual quantities of all the things I enjoy—or used to. So it’s kippers and taramasalata, it’s brown eggs and bacon, it’s freshly circumcised button mushrooms and coriander of dewy fragrance, and saffron buns and, yes, strawberries as well. The stall-holders are friendly, obliging, and ridiculously proud of their displays. This grow this stuff themselves, or smoke it, or make it, or catch it—my bacon’s even labelled with the pig’s smiling snout and name. I’m sure it led a happy life, just like all these happy, willing people who hand me their produce with a greaseproof-wrapped flourish and a mouthing of something approximating to my name.

I have a sort of vague celebrity here in Fowey which exceeds even Bessie the flayed but fondly-remembered pig. I’m that woman, you know, the musician, plays some sort of acoustic instrument, the fiddle or something, lives in that nice house up on Sithy Hill. They promise to attend my occasional local recitals, but mostly they don’t. Even as my arms start to feel the weight of the bags which jostle against my legs, the whole exchange seems saccharine. There’s no payment, for a start—I’m simply given whatever I ask for. I know that sensors are registering each transaction, but it still doesn’t seem right. I’m like an extra in a film set, and the feeling is compounded by how good-looking everyone is these days. Amid the tall, the dashing, the handsome, the finely-boned and authentically ethnically-detailed, the only living ones who stand out are the few elderly souls like myself, and those yet more ancient who are supported by discreet but nevertheless distracting frameworks as they shuffle along like withered robots, clinging to this earth when they should have long done the obvious thing and passed on.
The future’s here Sis.
It’s been and gone. And I’m still here. And so, now, are the dead.

They’re not everywhere yet. But they’re getting there. The cities nowadays—London where Edward lives, and Maria’s Barcelona—are filled with these spillages of strange movement which catch at the edges of your eyes. Even in solid, stolid old Fowey, it’s often hard to tell exactly what people are seeing now that its main streets are enmeshed in the ever-spreading network of crystal. For most of my life, the idea of someone talking animatedly to something you can’t see has been commonplace. My grandchildren chase ghosts across Morryn’s lawns on the rare occasions they visit me, and that woman over there is laughingly embracing a near-invisible friend as she stands outside an antique shop and debates some purchase. The crystal fields have expanded. They lie in that extra sheen which glazes the steps beside the harbour, and in the plays of shape and shadow above them. I’ve seen it for years in concert halls, in the empty seats which aren’t truly empty, and at parties after-wards in the great palaces and hotels.
Look, Roushana Maitland…Excellent performance—I don’t believe we’ve met…
A swirl, a smile, a touch of impossible hands and a sense of genuine presence as I’m introduced to someone who isn’t here, and may not even be alive. Mum, with her intricate VR suits and Hindu attitudes, would probably have been enthusiastic, but, just as with my old friend Daisy and my old agent Adur, I’ve always found it easier to step back, make my excuses, look away…

Now I really do have sit down and rest. I can’t possibly make my way back to Morryn without doing so. I head for St. Fimbarrus’ church, which I’ve always liked in my atheistic way, because it’s old and empty, and all the more so now because it hasn’t yet been invaded by ghosts. Blessed, musty calm descends on me as I bang shut the doors and sit down amid the shining rows of empty pews.

I used to come here even when the kids were young, although for Maria it was always full of signs and mysteries. Everything about this place is unchanged, and my daughter’s breathy questions as she touched stones and brass inscriptions in what I used to think was a worrying reverential way still echo in my head.
Why’s that man bleeding? What’s resurrection? What’s that thing with holes like a face?
It’s a skull, darling, and why on earth should I have to come up with excuses for this misogynistic, death-obsessed mumbo-jumbo? But one of the challenges of parenthood is having to explain the world as if it’s something you’ve personally invented, and Maria always looked so hopeful and helpless as she stood there with that protuberant lower lip of hers pushing out. There was something in her soft and somehow unfocussed eyes which I sometimes still see. The buildings she makes now all have a taint of St Fimbarrus’ about them. It’s most obvious in that piece she did in the square beside that church—the Sagrada Familia, which Gaudi, another religious obsessive, wasted his life on—but you can see it just as plainly in the glass and iron planes of Morryn’s new kitchen.

I’m wandering, drifting—it really is time I got going again. Fumbling the plastic hoops of the once-gaudily striped bag which I’ve filled with my shopping, I begin to shuffle along the pews. Then, as a deeper rush of the past comes over me, I have to sit down.

MUM TIPPED OUT THE MULTI-COLOURED SHOPPING BAG which contained all her passes.

“This one,” she said, feeling for a white cube scrawled in with faded marker pen Arabic, “is proper
military
. I shouldn’t have it at all really. But it’ll get you through most of the barriers to the underground offices in NCT. Should have been supplanted, but it hasn’t. Go on—feel…”

I was sitting with her in the steamy heat of a café on Maiden Lane in London. It was mid-afternoon, and I’d finished my day’s studies at the Royal College of Music. The cyclists streamed by outside: mere blurs as Mum talked about her continued travels to India, each of which became epics of Mahabharatan proportions.

Here was a stopover at Aden.This was the fruit of an interview— interrogation, really—in Krakow. Some of the passes were fat and some were thin. Some rolled like marbles and some were buttons and some bore spikes for insertion into something else. Some you had to be careful with because they bonded instantly with your flesh, whilst others excreted poisons although she could tell all of them apart merely by their feel. My thoughts drifted as she continued. Then I realised from the blind glare of her ruined eyes that she was studying me.

“Are you
alright
, Roushana? You seem…”

“I’m fine,” I said, a little too insistently.

I was fresh from the end of another short-term relationship. It had been a lad this time, although by now I’d also got around to trying girls. Somehow, the similarities always seemed great, and the differences small. The endings, as well, were similar, as I found myself in receipt of accusations and angers I scarcely understood until I’d learned to find people who could be as casual as I was about the giving and taking of physical affection. But now, even in this warm café, all I felt was cold.

In her other shopping bag, a differently-striped counterweight, Mum kept recordings of her trips. To peer inside them was to experience the sounds and smells, even the rainy light, the hot metallic skies, of war-ravaged India. Voices clamoured from the depths in Gujarati, Hindi, incomprehensible local dialects or pidgin English. As she tromped around with her two pannier bags in grey salwars and open-toed sandals, Mum kept a bright scarf tied piratically around her head to disguise her thinning hair. She and her headscarves had achieved a sort of fame in Ahmedabad Two. Some called her
ñhe gooda ladya
, others said she was a saint, a
sadu,
and their many voices called out as she pushed aside my coffee and slid the clamorous images towards me.

“No more excuses,” she said. “Next time, in the summer break, you’re coming to India with me. You could be useful to me now. You can make a difference. They were even playing your tune in the airport lift…”

In Memory of an Angel
, the title pinched from Berg’s Violin Concerto, which has caused confusion ever since, hadn’t exactly stormed up the charts in the seconds after its release, and its two successors had done considerably less well, but they had brought in some money, and my first small taste of fame. My idealism had taken a few jolts at the RCM, although I was surrounded by some of the best musicians and teachers in the land. The flats of my cheap rent were a swamp from the risen Thames on their lower floors. Dangerous insects droned in through my windows, or wormed and burrowed in search of the comforts of my skin, sheets and clothes. Dad’s insurance money had faded by now, our house in Moseley hardly paid for itself in rental, and Mum poured everything she could find into her projects. For all that I’d already achieved, for all the beds I’d briefly shared and the bodies which I’d allowed to share my own, London felt worrying empty. When a music promoter had offered me what he called star-billing to make a few recordings, I’d been interested even after I’d found out exactly what was involved.