By Light Alone (24 page)

26

He had lunch with Rodion. ‘When I sit down to break bread with you, old boy,’ he started, but stopped, uncertain how to go on. ‘What I mean is: what I always feel,’ he said, ‘is that you have a secret.’

‘I’m sure we all have
secrets
,’ Rodion replied, mildly.

They were sipping coffee. George’s coffee had a skin of nectar floating on its surface. To drink the coffee, his lips touched the molecule-thin skein, and his tongue was aware of just enough of its flavour to take the brittle edge off the coffee’s sourness. It was a beautiful cup of coffee.

‘I’ve come to the conclusion,’ said George, ‘that the secret in
my
life was – me.’ He couldn’t help looking at the old man with a triumphal expression on his face, a self-satisfaction, as if he had uttered something terribly profound and original. Of course, he had not. Of course he had only touched on the most mundane baseline, universal feature of human existence. Rodion, though, was too polite to do anything other than smile and nod gently, and lift his own coffee cup (plain black, of course) to his withered lips. His lips were withered because there comes a point where even the most elaborate genetic treatments reach the limit of their efficacy. Otherwise, we would all live for ever.

Rodion waited a decent interval, such that changing the conversational subject wouldn’t look too rudely abrupt. In fact he needn’t have worried; George wasn’t expecting to be probed on his so-called revelation. Had he been politely asked to say more about this secret self he had supposedly uncovered, he would have been reduced to cliché, or to flailing about. Birds flew left to right, over their heads, and right to left, and appeared from behind them. George considered the clouds. They were fishscale silver against the dark blue sky. They were painted-looking. George could almost see the brushstrokes.

‘This Florida news is a bad business,’ Rodion said.

‘What’s that?’

‘I sometimes wonder why it’s so terribly unfashionable to follow the news,’ Rodion said. ‘I mean, I
am
unreconstructedly old-fashioned, I suppose. Once upon a time, and I don’t think we want to go into the details here and now – but once upon a time, you know, I
was
news. So I’ve kept a kind of weather-eye on it ever since. I just haven’t been able to discuss it at polite dinner parties!’ And he chuckled to himself.

If he hadn’t been so eager to talk about himself, George might have followed up on this
I used to be the news
hint. Instead he said: ‘As for my news-watching, well. It’s one of my things. I mean, I’m not a slave to the head-in-the-ostrich of fashion.’

‘And what
do
you think about the events in Florida?’

‘Events in Florida,’ said George, nodding. Then: ‘Events – when?’

Rodion drew a thumbnail across his bald scalp. ‘Over the last few weeks.’

‘There was something,’ said George, looking into the maw of his white stone coffee mug. ‘There were riots, I think. There are always riots, though.’

‘Well,’ said Rodion, uncertainly. ‘I suppose that’s true. Not in New York, though!’

‘There
was
trouble, back when they cleared Queens.’

‘Oh, yes! That’s right. I suppose I meant: not in Manhattan.’

‘Christ, no,’ said George, with feeling. ‘Thank heavens, not here.’

‘I think,’ Rodion said, tentatively, ‘that the Florida business was more than just “riots” ’, you know.’ And when George peered at him, with that doll-like intensity, his large black-pupilled eyes like a shark’s, Rodion added: ‘I think it was more concerted. An attempt at revolution.’

‘Really?’ Now here was a subject George felt he knew something about!

‘Longhairs seized pretty much all the Keys. Lots of people got killed. They called themselves Spartacists – not that,’ George was blinking, ‘not that it matters what they called themselves. There are hundreds of thousands of them at sea now, in tens of thousands of little boats. Going by that name.’

‘At sea!’ George, now that he thought of it, had noticed a lot of news imagery of ragged-looking flotillas. But since he was in the habit of watching the news with the sound turned down, and the tickerfeed disabled, he’d not been quite sure what those images meant.

‘They can live at sea for as long as they like,’ said Rodion. ‘A desalinator in the boat for water, and endless sunshine. It’s the ideal place for them, really. Anyway, the anxiety was that they were coordinated. They did all this D-Daylike stuff, seized the Keys. Then they started to encroach on the mainland. The deaths numbered in the thousands. In the several thousands.’

‘Good grief,’ said George

‘It’s been contained, now, of course,’ said Rodion, unsure why he felt the urge to reassure this man. Except, of course, that this man – his hair down to his shoulders, like a teenage rebel – sparked some sort of paternal instinct in him. ‘Luckily the authorities have gotten pretty good at containment after Triunion.’

‘I’ll always remember Triunion,’ said George, piously. ‘I remember, the riots were going on in Triunion when Leah was kidnapped. The two things are kind of linked, in my memory.’

‘Better to watch the news,’ Rodion said, ‘than get caught up in the news.’

‘I like to
watch
,’ said George, with unconscious quotation.

‘And
those
clouds,’ Rodion said, after a while. ‘The ones sliding overhead from the east. Now, they look a little too
café noir
for my liking. Shall we go inside before the storm breaks?’

‘Yes,’ said George, getting to his feet. ‘Let’s.’

 TWO

LEAH

The thing about the fridge was the way it was just
there
, all day and all night, and always full, and always accessible to anybody who just walked up to its door. For Leah it was a continual source of amazement. It wasn’t so much the size of it, although it
was
big. Rather, it had something to do with the way the heavy door was perfectly hinged to swing open at the lightest touch and reveal the cavernous wonders beyond it. Shelf after shelf of food and drink. A great, stacked structure of different foods, reaching high over her head. When she opened the door the genie in the box said,
Hi can I help you?
, and after she’d breathed in the lovely cold wafts for a while he said in a deeper voice:
Wow, you’re leaving the door open for an age and an age!
So she heaved it shut and the deep-set thunk of its closure was very thrilling to her. It sounded like some lost portion of the cosmos reclaimed and clicked into place. It was much bigger than the fridge in the village, but that was hardly a surprising fact, when you came to think of it. When she had been kidnapped, as she had learned, the Big Man in the village had a fridge, in his house; and there was that one time she’d gone into the house with Shabine to do what Aga H. had told them to do – retrieve a knot of plastic leads and cords from the room behind the kitchen, for whatever incomprehensible purpose Aga H. had needed them. The two of them had passed the humming monolith. ‘You know what’s in there?’ Shabine had said to her, and she had replied: ‘Go on, open it – take a strawberry.’ This had been a joke between them, because the day before Shabine had told her that strawberries were a kind of crunchy straw, of the same family as the splinterish blades that grew all over the narrow field behind Isman’s. But Leah had said, no, she’d seen a picture show with strawberries and they were red as lips. And, lacking any strawberries, real or imaginary, against which to test their disagreement they had moved on to other things.

Now, today, in New York, Wally came in the kitchen, and
wsht
-
wsht
ed her away. Wax, mother called him. Leah could tell from the way she said this that it was one of her jokes, although she didn’t understand it at all. So she went away, and went up to the roof instead. It was a hot afternoon, the sort of weather that still sometimes made her feel a little homesick, although, mostly, she’d gotten on top of all that nonsense a long time ago. And homesick was a stupid word, anyway. The feeling that people called homesick wasn’t in the least bit a nausea, nothing sicky-of-gutty about it. It was more a tingling, or kindling feeling in her heart. And it had nothing to do with ‘home’, for wasn’t she home right now, standing on the roof of her home and looking about her at her city? It was for something else that made her soul fizz with yearning; an idea of something, a simple loss, like the chopping off of her hair. Where was that hair now? What did people do with hair when it was cut off? Did it go in the organic waste chute, or in the plastic chute, or in the compressibles? Which category did hair belong to? She lolled about the roof of the building, and checked out the cityscape, making sure everything was in their proper places. Overhead a sunkite lay sprawled on the air, two linked triangular sheets spread over an invisible mattress. Leah didn’t understand why they had to be so big. They had done sunkites at school a few weeks earlier, so she understood the principles involved; but she still didn’t understand why they had to be so
big
. They were doing Antarctica tomorrow.

Her father and mother were going to divorce, just like Tercier’s parents, and Kelly’s. But there was a difference, because this was her fault. She broke the fridge, and it made her parents break-up – though not because they were cross with her, because oddly enough they didn’t seem to be cross with her. But there was, obviously, a connection. She had told her father that Wally was out of the kitchen, although she didn’t say that he was in Trotters again. He went there to kiss-and-cuddle, she knew, but she liked not telling anybody – except Marthe, of course. She had no secrets from Marthe.

How it happened, was.

It was still an astonishing thing to her, even after all these years. To think that food filled every shelf of this huge box, and that the door was not locked. She’d said that Wally wasn’t in the kitchen, and Daddy had said to go back down there and look again. So she had. She’d considered this a permission. Alone in the long room, she had stood before the fridge. Stainless-steel-coloured dolphins played endlessly across its wide door; shaped by the waters they swam in, as pebbles are shaped by the millennial stream. A purple-blue sea. She flicked the door with her thumb and the images changed to another of Wally’s presets – she assumed Wally had preset these, for who else would have done so? Breakers on a beach, curling like peeled rinds and crumbling in a blizzard of white spray. What was it with Wally and the ocean? Did he have, like, a thing for it? Another thumb-flick and another preset: the constellations of myriad globular jellyfish, pulsing like hearts, like wafer-walled, transparent hearts, against a green-blue background. Talk about boring. So, postponing the moment of actually opening the fridge (because she
was
going to open the fridge, and because it
was
pleasant to prolong the anticipation), she pulled a menu out of the pictures and scrolled through to something a bit less
gique
. She found a scene from a new book,
Angels and Pain
, and let that roll for a while across the door: Mica, who was the coolest angel, soared through rainbow clouds chasing Aer, who had killed Mica’s mother. They shot heatrays from their wings.

She got out her Fwn. She had begged Daddy not to get her a Fwn. Fwns were so
over
. But he had got it for her anyway, with that vague expression on his face that was so completely him. There was a small burden of shame involved in speaking to Marthe on a Fwn, knowing that Marthe was speaking to
her
on a Helio. ‘So, Marthe, you know strawberries?’