Only Forward
THE PAPER OVER THE CRACKS
But what if I'm mermaid
In these jeans of his with
Her name still on them
Hey but I don't care 'cos sometimes
I said sometimes
I hear my voice and it's been
Here, silent all these years.
Silent all these years
Tori Amos
Once there was a boy in a house. He was alone because his father was out at work, and his mother had run round the corner to the store. Although the boy was only four, he was a reliable child who knew the difference between toys and accidents waiting to happen, and his mother trusted him to be alone for five minutes.
The boy was sitting playing in the living room when suddenly he had an odd feeling. He looked around the room, thinking maybe that the cat had walked behind him, gently moving the air. But he wasn't there, and nothing else was out of the ordinary, so the boy went back to what he was doing. He was colouring a picture of a jungle in his colouring book, and he wanted to have it finished before his father got home from work.
Then there was a knock at the door.
The boy stared at the door for a moment. That's what the feeling had been about. He had known there would be a knock at the door, just as he sometimes knew that the phone was going to ring. He knew that it couldn't be his mother, because he'd seen her take the keys. He also knew that he shouldn't open the door to strangers when he was in the house alone. But something made him feel that this didn't count, that this time was different. After all, he'd known about it beforehand. So he got up, and walked slowly over to the door. After a pause, he opened it.
At the time his family were living high up in a block of flats. Outside their door was a balconied walkway which went right round the floor and led to lifts round to the right. It was mid-morning, and bright spring sun streamed into the room, the sky a shining splash of white and blue.
On the balcony stood a man. He was a big man, wearing tired jeans and nothing on his feet. His torso was naked except for tiny whorls of hair, and he didn't have a head.
The man stood there on the balcony outside the boy's flat, leaning against the wall. His head and neck had been pulled from his body like a tooth from the gum, and his shoulders had healed over smoothly, with a pronounced dip in the middle where the roots had been.
The boy did not feel afraid, but instead a kind of terrible compassion and loss. He didn't know what the feelings were in words of course. He just felt bad for the man.
'Hello?' he said, timidly.
In his head the boy heard a voice.
'Help me' it said.
'How?'
'Help me,' said the voice again, 'I can't find my way home.'
The boy heard a noise from along the balcony and knew it was the lift doors opening. His mother was coming back. The man spoke once more, spoke to the boy as if he was the only one who could help him, as if somehow it was his responsibility.
'I want to go back home. Help me.'
'Where's your home?'
The voice inside his head said something, and the boy tried to repeat it, but he was young, a child, and couldn't get the word right. He heard footsteps comings towards the nearest corner, and knew they were his mother's.
'I can't help you,' he said. I can't help you,' and he gently closed the door, shutting out the light. He walked stiffly back towards his book and all at once his legs gave way and left him on the floor.
When his mother came in moments later she found the boy asleep on the carpet, with tears on his face. He woke up when she hugged him, and said that nothing was wrong. He didn't tell her about the dream, and soon forgot all about it.
But later he remembered, and realised it had not been a dream.
I was tired.
I got up, crawled out of the maelstrom of sheets, at 9.30 this morning. I took a shower, I drank some coffee. I sat on the floor with my back to the wall and felt my muscles creak as they carried a burning cigarette from the ashtray to my mouth, from my mouth to the ashtray. And when I first thought seriously about taking a nap, I looked at the clock. It was 10.45.
a.m.
I was still sitting there, waiting to die, waiting to fossilise, waiting for the coffee in the kitchen to evolve enough to make a cup of itself and bring it through to me, when the phone rang.
It was touch and go whether I answered it. It was right on the other side of the room, for Christ's sake. I wasn't geared up for answering the phone, not this morning. If I had've been, I'd have been dying quietly on the other side of the room, near where the phone is.
It rang for quite a while, and then stopped, which was nice. Then it started again, and went on for what felt like days. Whoever was on the other end clearly didn't know how I felt, wasn't empathising very well. At all, in fact. I decided it would be worth getting to the other side of the room just to tell whoever it was to go away.
So I let myself sag gently to the floor and climbed up it like a mountain. I established a base camp about a third of the way across, and had a bit of a rest there. By now the phone had been ringing for so long I'd almost forgotten about it, and the sound wasn't bothering me so much. But once I've made up my mind about something I stick to it, so off I went again.
It was a long and arduous journey, full of trials, setbacks and heroic derring-do on my part. I was almost there, for example, when I ran out of cigarettes, and had to go back to fetch another packet.
The phone was still ringing when I reached the other side, which was useful, because now I was there I had to find the damn thing. Half a year ago some client gave me a Gravbenda® in part-payment for a job I'd done them. Maybe you've got one: what they do is let you alter the gravity in selected rooms in your apartment, change the direction, how heavy things are, that sort of stuff. So for a while I had the gravity in the living room going left to right instead of downwards. Kind of fun. Then the batteries ran out and everything just dropped in a pile down the far end of the room. And frankly, I couldn't be fucked to do anything about it.
It took me a while to find the phone. The screen was cracked and the ringing sound was more of a warble than it used to be, though maybe it was just tired: it'd been ringing for over two hours by then. I pressed to receive and the screen flashed 'Incoming Call', blinked, and then showed a woman's face. She looked pretty irritable, and also familiar.
'Wow, Stark: have a tough time finding the phone, did you?'
I peered at the screen, trying to remember who it was. She was about my age, and very attractive.
'Yes, as it happens. Who are you?'
The woman sighed heavily.
'It's Zenda, Stark. Get a grip.'
When I say I'm tired, you see, I don't just mean that I'm tired. I have this disease. It's nothing new: people have had it for centuries. You know when you've got nothing in particular to do, nothing to stay awake for? When your life is just routine and it doesn't feel like it belongs to you, how you feel tired and listless and everything seems like too much effort?
Well it's like that, but it's much worse, because everything is much worse these days. Everything that's bad is worse, believe me. Everything is accelerating, compacting and solidifying. There are whole Neighbourhoods out there where no one has had anything to do all their lives. They're born, and from the moment they hit the table, there's nothing to do. They clamber to their feet occasionally, realise there's nothing to do, and sit down again. They grow up, and there's nothing, they grow old and there's still nothing. They spend their whole lives indoors, in armchairs, in bed, wondering who they are.
I grew up in a Neighbourhood like that, but I got out. I got a life. But when that life slows down, the disease creeps up real fast. You've got to keep on top of it.
'Zenda, shit. I mean Hi. How are you?'
I'm fine. How are you?'
'Pretty tired.'
'I can tell. Look, I could have something for you here. How long would it take you to get dressed?'
'I am dressed.'
'Properly, Stark. For a meeting. How soon could you be down here?'
'I don't know. Two, three months?'
'You've got an hour.'
The screen went blank. She's a characterful person, Zenda, and doesn't take any shit. She's my contact at Action Centre, the area where all the people who are into doing things hang out. It's a whole Neighbourhood, with offices and buildings and shops and sub-sections, all totally dedicated and geared up for people who always have to be doing something. Competition to get in is pretty tough, obviously, because everyone is prepared to do what it takes, to get things done, to work, all the fucking time. A hundred per cent can-do mentality. Once you're in you've got to work even harder, because there's always somebody on the outside striving twenty-five hours a day to take your place.
They're a pretty heavy bunch, the Actioneers: even when they're asleep they're on the phone and working out with weights, and most of them have had the need to sleep surgically removed anyway. For me, they're difficult to take for more than a few seconds at a stretch. But Zenda's okay. She's only been there five years, and she's lasted pretty well. I just wish she'd take some shit occasionally.
I found some proper clothes quite easily. They were in another room, one where I haven't fucked about with the gravity. They were pretty screwed up, but I have a CloazValet® that takes care of that, another part-payment. It somehow also changed the colour of the trousers from black to emerald with little turquoise diamonds, but I thought what the hell, start a trend.
The walls in the bedroom were bright orange, which meant it was about seven o'clock at night. It also meant I'd spent a whole day sitting with my back to the wall. I don't think I'll ever make it into the Centre, somehow.
Getting to Zenda's building in Action Centre would take at least half an hour, probably more, even assuming I could find it. They keep moving the buildings around just for something to do in lunchbreaks, and if you don't keep up with the pace you can walk into the Centre and not know where anything is. The Actioneers are always up with the pace, of course. I'm not.
I told the apartment to behave and got out onto the streets.
The fact that Zenda had asked me to change meant that I was almost certainly going to be meeting someone. I meet a lot of people. Some of them need what I can do for them, and don't care what I look like: by the time I'm the only person who can help them, they're prepared to put up with sartorial vagueness.
But most of them just want something minor fixed, and only like giving money to people who'll dress up neatly for them. They insist on value. I hadn't been able to tell from Zenda's tone whether this was to be a special thing, or just a run-of-the-mill one, but the request for tidiness implied the latter.
All that stuff about the disease, by the way, it wasn't true. Well it was, but it was an exaggeration. There are Neighbourhoods like I described, but I'm not from there. I'm not from anywhere, and that's why I'm so good at what I do. I'm not stuck, I'm not fixed, and I don't faze easily. To faze me you'd have to prove to me that I was someone else, and then I'd probably just ask to be properly introduced.
I was just tired. I'd had three hours' sleep the night before, which I think you'll agree isn't much. I'm not asking for sympathy though: three hours is pretty good for me. In my terms, three hours makes me Rip van Winkle. I was tired because I'd only been back two days after my last job. I'll tell you about it sometime, if it's relevant.
The streets were pretty quiet, which was nice. They're always quiet here at that time: you have to be wearing a black jacket to be out on the streets between seven and nine in the evening, and not many people in the area have black jackets. It's just one of those things. I currently live in Colour Neighbourhood, which is for people who are heavily into colour. All the streets and buildings are set for instant colourmatch: as you walk down the road they change hue to offset whatever you're wearing. When the streets are busy it's kind of intense, and anyone prone to epileptic seizures isn't allowed to live in the Neighbourhood, however much they're into colour.
I'm not into colour that deeply myself, I just live here because it's one of the milder weirdnesses in The City, one of the more relaxed Neighbourhoods. Also you can tell the time by the colour of the internal walls of the residential apartments, which is kind of useful as I hate watches.
The streets thought about it for a while, then decided that matt black was the ideal compliment for my outfit. Some of the streetlights were picked out in the same turquoise as the diamonds in my trousers too, which I thought was kind of a nice touch. I made a mental note to tell the next Street Engineer I met that they were doing a damn fine job. Sort of an embarrassing thing to think, but I knew I was safe: I always lose my mental notes.
Last time I'd ventured out of the apartment the monorail wasn't working, but they'd obviously been busily busying away at it, because the New and Improved Service was in full swing. An attendant in a black jacket sold me a ticket, and I had a whole carriage to myself. I took a leaflet from the pouch on the wall and read that the monorail had been shut temporarily so they could install mood sensors in the walls of the carriages. I thought that was pretty cool, and the walls picked that up and shone a smug blue.
Little Big Station, Pacific Hue, Zebra One, Rainbow North: the stations zipped by soundlessly, and I geared myself up for whatever it was I had to gear myself up for. I didn't have much to go on, so I just geared up generally.
I judged I was probably geared up enough when the walls were a piercing magenta. 'Steady,' read a little sign that popped up from nowhere on the opposite wall. 'That's pretty geared up, fella.' I took the hint and looked out the window instead. Soon I could see the huge sweeping white wall that demarcated the Colour Neighbourhood from Action Centre. The Actioneers aren't the only people to have built a wall round them to keep everyone else out, but theirs is a hell of a lot bigger, whiter and more bloody-minded than most.