Song Of Time (9 page)

“It’ll take a few minutes.”

“I don’t mind.”

“You’re a very easy guest…Adam.”

Less and less, I see him as a danger. More and more, as a victim. After consulting what little there is in the fridge I decide on a meal, and the blades and arms of the kitchen implements soon set to work, slicing off shocked Os of bell pepper and getting garlic and olive oil sizzling with strips of chicken, pieces of crab, whilst I mostly watch, thinking as I have often thought of those magical plates and spoons which tended to Beauty in the palace of the Beast.

“That smells lovely.”

“Thanks. It’s a kind of Cornish paella—one of my favourite recipes, although I can’t claim much credit for it nowadays.” More for the sake of show than because it’s needed, I add a pinch of saffron and sea salt to the bubbling rice. “There’s some bread over there in that bin, if this seems too rich, or you can’t wait.”

“No. I’m fine.”

“Do you know how to work this?” I gesture towards the space which the kitchen screen occupies when it’s active. “If you look in on the news channels, it might help trigger something…”

Another one of my cack-handed tests, but, in what I’m coming to think of by now as his usual accepting way, Adam does what I suggest. He touches the silver ridge which causes it to activate, and images leap into life above my kitchen counter. As I taste the perfect sauce, and with a dizzying speed I associate more with my grandchildren than my children (of course, he’s closer to them in age) he starts flicking through the datastream. There it is, tumbling by me—the whole world outside Morryn, although Adam’s accessing it at a rate that’s far too quick for me to follow. In a spill of impressions, I catch glimpses of dark shantylands and bright cities as chopped tomatoes are slid into a pan. Amid torrents of smiling advertisements for purposeless products, I see the suppurating skies and tombstone forests of goaded nature’s atrocities. The scenes tumble, as well, in the stormy grey of Adam’s eyes. His face, suddenly mobile in the light which plays over it, mirrors amusement, horror, concern. Steam roils whilst the armies of cults bow and raging mouths call down some fresh apocalypse. Somewhere, the heavens explode. Oceans rise, duststorms blur, and graphs of international profit and loss soar ever-upwards as I pointlessly stir the fragrant broth which the machines have made. Then there are places which might not be this earth at all. Acid plains and petrochemical swamps expand under clouds of extraordinary hue and turbulence. Is that Venus, Mars, Titan? Is that
Venice
? But it’s always gone in the moment before I can grasp it.

“All of
this
—you know?” I ask him.

“Do you?” Adam’s eyes are glittering. He’s close to tears.

I shake my head as the larger implements finish laying the table, withdrawing to their discreet apertures within the walls. There’s something impossibly touching about seeing two place settings facing each other after so many years of eating alone. Not quite a last supper, perhaps. But almost.

In the dark heart of Africa, the penitents of some cybernetic cult of the life-beyond-living queue up to die.

“Perhaps I should turn it off?” he asks.

“It’s not helping, is it?”

He shakes his head. The screen fades. “And I shouldn’t have just sat here. I should have helped you prepare this.”

“No, no—I hardly had to do anything. Anyway, you’re my guest…”

Serving by hand, I ladle a moderate-sized helping for him onto the warmed plates, and then a slightly lesser one for me. Sitting down to face him, I take a forkful and place it in my mouth. I chew and then I swallow, but my jaw aches and most of the flavour’s muffled as if by some olfactory equivalent of the deafness I’ve long had to combat with implants. Is this what is happening to me—that I’m becoming a cold spectator of the last moments of my life? Is it an effect of my illness, or of the crystal?

Adam, meanwhile, eats gracefully. He might be hungry, but, just as his body suggests, he can’t have been starved. He even pauses to make the sort of kind comments any socially adept adult would make about a decent meal, and I mumble my acceptance in return, grateful that at least someone’s enjoying what my machines have prepared. I still can’t work out his accent, nor the ethnic origins of the features of his face. Everything about him is so vaguely specific, so specifically vague. He has to be someone, to have come from somewhere. Those fine earlobes. That dull bronze skin. The near-perfection—despite those rope-marks, which I wonder if he’s noticed—of his wrists against the ragged fabric of Claude’s ancient clothes. I try looking for cultural signs. That passing of the bread basket, the way he wields a knife—it’s all so elegant. An American laying aside of the fork here, a near-Indian use of pinched fingers to dab up the sauce there, and the easy way he handled that screen. How can someone know and do so much, and yet not know who they are? It’s beyond eerie—it’s impossible—but it’s so
nice
to have a guest that half of me simply thinks of the many other days which we might, despite every-thing, still spend together here in Morryn, eating, talking, drinking, discovering each other…He’s saying between forkfuls how he likes his name—he waves a hand much as a Frenchman might—the whole idea of being called Adam. But he still doesn’t quite say Adam. There’s that characteristic stumble over the d and the a which he doesn’t make with any other word. Abandon…? Abaddon? My icicled brain squirms. The mush in my mouth turns to maggots and the magical kitchen fades. What
are
you?

Finally, I’ve re-arranged the mess of the food I started with to make it look as if I’ve eaten some of it, and Adam’s cleared both of two helpings, the second mopped clean, but not scrupulously so, by the bread.

“No…” He smiles and lays a hand upon mine as I attempt to move. “I’ll do this…”

I slump back in my chair. No use pointing out that the implements will see to the clearing, for I realise from the crawl of metal across the counters he’s using them already. But they don’t dominate things in the way they do with me. He moves about,
possesses
, this kitchen so easily. Even since Maria designed and built it, I’ve always felt a stranger in this place. It’s as if it’s been waiting for him—for this moment.

The sea’s turned dark outside. Beneath a rising moon, it’s manacled with silver.

“Well…” Adam wavers as he looks about him at the cleared kitchen. There’s a catch in his breathing. For a moment, he sways.

“Are you alright?”

He gives one of his nods, which isn’t quite a yes.

“You’re probably still tired.”

He nods again.

“I have a bed—a guestroom…”

I’m not sure who’s helping who now as, moving by what feels remarkably like habit, we both prepare for bed. That’s the oddest thing—just how natural this seems. The finding of sheets, the hiss of taps and the closing and opening of doors and the flush of a cistern. Doors stir as I touch them. Rooms exhale.

“This was my daughter Maria’s room,” I tell him as we hover at the threshold. He and the light both seem to hesitate before we enter, and I’m half-expecting that heap of animated furry toys of which my daughter was so worryingly fond to still be squirming beneath the window until the air resolves into the clean and near-empty space this room has become.

He sits down on the soundless new mattress and all the towels and pillows I’ve given him flop from his arms. Once again, he appears dazed.

“I’m just up the corridor,” I hitch a thumb, “if you happen to need me.”

He gives me a smile.

“Perhaps it’ll all have come back in the morning.”

“What…? Oh yes.” I’d meant to be reassuring, but his gaze slips away.

“Anyway…” I turn to go. “You know where everything is.”

It’s down to you now Sis.

I spin back, and the room spins with me.

“What—?”

But Adam just looks up at me, innocent as always, with eyes you could fall into, a gaze you could drown in. He’s lost—a blank message in a bottle, cast up on Morryn’s shore. I touch his shoulder in final reassurance, then close the door. Although sleep and I are strangers these days, I head for my own bed.

MY BROTHER LEO’S FUNERAL WAS A SECULAR CEREMONY at the local crematorium. More out of habit than any remaining conviction, my parents had resisted family pressures for something more Hindu, or more Catholic, than a simple godless farewell. Afterwards, as we all stood milling outside on the blustery gravel, I was surprised to discover that you really could smell smoke. To me, this day was empty, without significance, and I resented every hug, wail and tear.

Tall, elegant, composed, Blythe Munro emerged on the gravel from a cluster of white-clad Indian relatives debating who should travel in what car back to our house. Something had hardened in her face. She had a short and efficient new haircut, was dressed in court shoes and a tight-fitting black suit, and she already looked like the lawyer she planned to become.

“I suppose these days must happen,” she sighed, and I thought for a moment that she meant Leo’s death. “They’re just something to be endured.”

I shrugged, suspicious as ever of any common ground between us.

“I’m not sure that you’ll be seeing that much of me now at your home, Roushana. When I’m around your parents, I’m sure I just remind them that Leo isn’t there.”

“That’s
not…
” I trailed off. I wanted to break through the bland assurance which she was able to bring even to her grief, but I couldn’t. Since Leo’s death, no one had asked me about what I’d known or suspected, nor whether I’d been into his room on that last night. Just as he’d wanted, it had remained our secret. Unlike my parents and the rest of the world, I regarded his suicide not as an act of madness, but as an exercise in will and logic. But as Blythe and I stood there, her expression changed and her lips parted, and I thought she was about to ask why I’d reneged on that promise I’d once given her as we sat in that glade in the far reaches of the gardens which surrounded her house, and why I hadn’t tried to stop Leo, but at that moment her bracelet chimed, and then Nan Ashar spotted me and waddled over. The last I time saw Blythe Munro, she was raising her arm and whispering guiltily into her phone on the crematorium forecourt.

My grandmother had slowed and sagged recently. Life, I thought, as she leaned against me and gave off her characteristic odour of mothballs and armpits, is a series of acts which we eventually grow tired of performing. But at least here was someone who seemed to be able to accept the fact that Leo was dead.

“People, the whites, they keep saying they can’t believe it,” she said as the long black car which had borne Leo here pulled off, empty, along the driveway. “But I had two sisters back in the village, both gone already. Also, my mother’s brother went young. Then there was a baby…”

The crematorium grounds through which we wandered were surprisingly large, with neat wastebins and discreet signs warning against the leaving of floral tributes, although many flowers fluttered and tumbled in their cellophane.

“Sometimes I wonder why we all came here to England at all. They told us they wanted our men to be conductors, and then they decided they didn’t need them. Everything’s automatic, so-called labour-saving. Even the buses.”

Once I’d got past the puzzling image of Indians in tuxedos with batons, I nodded. Nan had taken to confiding in me more lately. I may have been only a girl, and a half-caste at that, but, because of my look and skin colour, she was able to relax into the supposition that I was essentially Indian.

“Glad to see you’re looking so
nice
today, Roushana. Wearing decent clothes instead of all that workman’s stuff you put on usually. And at least you don’t dress like some girls, showing all their legs and then the belly button.” She stroked my arms. “And you’re got such a
lovely
skin. So pale. It will be much admired. All this…” She pulled a sour face and waved dismissively at the bending fir trees. “Meaninglessness. Even here in England, people are coming to see how wrong it is. It isn’t about being Hindu, or Muslim or Christian. Leo was too young, too troubled, too uncertain of his path with nothing ahead of him but music, but your dear cousin Kapil…” She clucked and gave me a harder squeeze. “He never misses prayers, can name saint’s days I’ve never even
heard
of. Believe, me, there is to be a resurgence…”

Overhead, a helicopter loomed as the cars pulled away towards home and the buffet which waited back at our house, slicing the air with storms of grit and dead flowers.

Leo was right. WRFI didn’t go away in the months and years to come, but it did slowly vanish from the public’s consciousness to be replaced by other, more dramatic, diseases and disasters. It had spread worldwide, and sufferers in underprivileged countries were already dying in their tens of thousands whilst even those who lived in the wealthy First World continued to escalate in their intolerances. Just as my brother had predicted, they all either succumbed to some infection, or gave up, or simply faded away.

Weakened as he was, I don’t think Leo could ever have lived the musicianly life he’d wanted, although I still wish I’d said more to him on that night in his room. After all, Paganini had a genetic disorder, TB and syphilis, Pearlman was disabled from childhood polio, and Beethoven had famously fought his deafness. Even now, when I hear of someone who has battled physical odds to make their mark on the world, I think of Leo, and wonder if things might have turned out differently if I’d tried harder to dissuade him.

Dad, meanwhile, got promoted to Head of Year at his school. He threw himself into his work, as his hair, which had been denser and more ginger than Leo’s, greyed and fell away in the space of that one horrendous winter. Tornadoes ripped up streets, and it rained as it had never rained. Then came sleet and snow borne on rumbling waves of thunder, and after that a glacial chill which blistered lips and cracked paving until that, too, was blown away in a fortnight of falling chimneys, shattering slates and keeling trees. The roads and the railways stopped working. The powerlines failed. The atmosphere was feverish, and with it came a new wave of flu. Everyone feared it was WRFI, or worse.