SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (8 page)

And the shot, like the universe itself if gravity should prove powerful enough, than the re
pellent forces, has stopped ex
panding, the gum was rewinding again into its chewing maw, and Owen reversed with it, space contracting, but this time not to the eye, which swallowed its photons, but to the mouth, which swallowed its prey. The mouth to which the large whisky had now been lifted and gulped, greedily, to the chimes of the ice cubes. Red lips ticked mouth
, fleshy, ornate. A gratuitous
sign. The music began then like an obscenity, a tempo of swagger and swank, and he saw the man's back as he moved into camera. All you could see of him was the strength of his back, and the compliance of her gaze raised to meet him.

Owen knew that if he had to see any more he'd pass out, and he switched the set off. He had created that. But why?

*

When you make an image you leave the world. That's what Sylvie had come to believe and that was the answer to Henry's question, 'How can you bring it all together?' Lenses and constellations. The labyrinth, the caves at Lascaux and Chauvet, Goya's black paintings, Picasso's minotaur. Make an image, leave the world. Leave it by re-shaping it as your own. We look out there and see constellations. Of recurrence and desire. Sometimes of the recurrence of desire.

Deep down in those caves she reckoned there was only one thing we could be absolutely sure of: there were never any ibex or aurochs or bison around. Whether our ancestors from the Upper Palaeolithic were in a trance-state or not when they created those figures, they had taken away the image from the point of its perception, since the image was being created without any creature before them. And once we'd managed that mighty leap, to separate the image from its origin in perception, then we were condemned to carry the world around inside our heads. It grew heavier and heavier, our precious reliquary, filled as it was with so many sacred images. She was now on the A483. In twenty minutes time she'd be in Chester. Hardly any traffic.

At the end of a mile of an anthracite-black, constrictingly narrow passageway, you find the image of a woolly mammoth. He had certainly never come down here, now had he? He couldn't have even fitted through the pas
sageway. But his image had now
survived the creature's extinction. The afterlife of images. How would she explain it to them in her lecture that evening? She needed to get home and change out of her short dress and black stockings. Go from black-stocking to blue-stocking. A little bit of a queue up ahead. The roundabout.

How about manoeuvring around it like this?
In
the mouth of a cave stands one of those hominids whom we call prehistoric. Living, that is, before history and written records begin. Such bones might speak to us, should we ever find them, but nothing else will, except for the marks the creature has made on stone. Should some unforeseen miracle of science and technology bring our cave creature back to life, we might even hear the noises that once emerged from her larynx, but we wouldn't understand them. She stares out now at the night sky. She sees a shape, a form that comes into being if you join up the lights in the sky with your own eyes. And she remembers. She saw such a shape in that same corner of the sky the last time it was as cold as this, the last time it grew dark before they could find their prey, the last time leaves fell so wetly on her face. So it's a shape that returns then. Not only in the sky but in the mind, where it is now fast transmuting to a tree, a fish, a creature of the forest. Constellations.

I will tell them, she thinks, how this is a speculative moment, even if a highly possible one. If I can just clear that roundabout I'll be through it. This might be the furthest we can go back in time through the development of our species to find the extremities of perception.
It
is an edge not only because our prehistoric man is here seeing the furthermost object in his u
niverse, a signal sent from the edge of our reality, both in space and time; nor because this represents a boundary where we might find the origins of the patterned world we created and create, where we endlessly orienteer ourselves towards the existence that
surrounds and engulfs
us. It is also an edge because this is where perception begins. Before, there was a world of sentience and instinct, but now we have perceptions, which depend on memory for their function, and images for their representation. If a perception is to separate itself from the sentient flux, it must fo
rm a memorable shape; it must recur, if only in consciousness.
In
one manoeuvre we have given birth to perception, memory and the image. And in the process what we have created is
the first constellation.

I want you all to think for a moment about what it means to constellate. To fill the heavens with ploughs and goddesses and horses. What's interesting is that the shapes are both there and not there. We join up the dots in our minds; we relate stars and planets which are otherwise unrelated except by the weakest of the four forces controlling our world: gravity.
In
populating the skies with creatures both real and mythic, with implements that can't be too much use for ploughing all that inter-stellar dust, we are engaging in both science and art, since this is what they both ultimately do: constellate data into meaningful shapes and recurrent patterns. We make images, and then we can't escape them. They take over reality in the process of defining it. Our early woman in the cave-mouth has arrived at art's first moment, and science's too. Now she can no longer tell the image from the stars, and she never will again. She has become fully human. Poor bitch.

Sylvie pulled up outside the house behind Owen's car. She climbed out and ran her hand along the bonnet, the long sleek Morgan bonnet. It was still warm from its recent accelerations. He couldn't have been back long then. She couldn't face going in. For tonight the blue-stocking would have to be a black-stocking. She'd better remember not to cross her legs. Lionel already found it difficult to concentrate on her lectures as it was.

*

Owen had been making mental lists of things he couldn't remember the taste of: treacle, porridge, taramasalata, cauliflower, haddock, guacamole, cocoa and beer. He wanted to taste them all quickly. The words already had their own tastes on his tongue. He would go and get some beer now, and that would be one of them at least ticked off the list. He left the house and stopped at the first pub he came to.

'Beer please.'

'Which one?' the barman asked, and gestured at the array of his pumps. Owen pointed to the sign nearest the barman's elbow.

'That's a good beer.'

'Excellent. Because that's
what I really need now. A good
beer.'

'Been a long time, has it? 'Seems like a lifetime.'

As the barman pulled his pint, he resumed his conversation with the melancholy figure slouched over the bar. This fellow was in a grey tracksuit, but it didn't look as though he'd been doing much running lately.

'So what happened, Col?' The melancholy figure took a drink of his beer and sighed.

'Why can't women understand that men don't like shopping?

Can you tell me that, Dave?'

'It's a mystery.'

'It's a fucking mystery. Anyway, I was trying to escape having to go shopping that Saturday with the wife by going in to work instead. So it actually suited me to tell the secretary that she'd have to go in and do the work she'd missed out on by her absence. By the time I turned up that Saturday afternoon, her ladyship was already there, wasn't she, catching up on her admin with a certain amount of ... what's the word I'm looking for now?'

'Displeasure?'

'
That’ll
have to do.'

"Hello Dot,"
I
said.'

'Dot. That was my mother's name.'

'Well
I
sincerely hope the similarities end there, Dave. Dot did not reply at first but just carried on thwacking these green card files one against another. So
I
persevered. After all,
I
was the manager in those days, remember. "I said, Hello Dot.'''

This last statement, Owen noted, was issued in a raised voice, with a faint hint of menace. Now the voice quavered into a tremolo as Colin imitated Dot: '''You always had it in for me," she said.
I
was taken aback, to be honest. "I did not,"
I
said. ''At the beginning
I
was very fond of you." Now see how
I
walked into the trap, Dave.' His voice once more trilled to drag-queen proportions. '''There you are.
At the beginning.
Not any more though."
I
was convinced she was going to cry. Can't stand women blubbing.'

'I'll have a re-fill,
I
think. Thirsty work remembering all this.

Anyway she's still on her knees, isn't she, banging away at her bloody filing. Always wore this white blouse with the tight bit round the throat.'

'Choker.'

'That's it. White blouse and purple brassiere. No good pretending you didn't notice it.
I
mean, it was all designed to be noticed, wasn't it? I'd inherited her from the previous manager, and
I
reckon he'd been giving her one. Certainly didn't take her on for her typing speed or telephone manner, that's for sure. So muggins here starts feeling guilty. And
I
couldn't take my eyes off her back. There was a bit of loose silk showing just above the skirt.'

'That would have been a slip.'

'Don't get many of those these days, do you? For some reason.

Hardly an essential item of clothing for the practical business
woman, I'd say: worn primarily for provocation. Anyway I decide to pour oil on troubled waters. So what do I say? "I'm very fond of you actually, Dot." Now what's interesting about that remark, Dave, looking back on it from this vantage-point in time, is that it's completely untrue. I never could stand the stuck-up, hoity-toity fucking cow from the first moment I set eyes on her.'

'You were trying to be diplomatic, Colin.'

'Exactly.' Colin's voice rose an octave once more. '''You're very fond of me? Is that true, Colin?" So I nodded, thinking I'd resolved a problematic situation in the office. And before I know where I am she's
fleet footed
it across the carpet and she's giving me a tongue
sarnie
.'

'Oops.'

'Not just that. Before I have an opportunity to ... to ... '

'Collect your thoughts?'

'Collect my thoughts, her hand swishes down the inside of my tracksuit bottoms. And believe me, Dave, the girl knew what she was doing, if you know what I mean. She knew which bits of a man's anatomy to press, and in what order. Not her first encounter with a fellow's tackle, I'd have said. I mean, it was a difficult situation for any bloke to extricate himself from.'

'And you in a managerial role, of course.'

'And me in a managerial role. "God, Dot," I said, or something like that. I wasn't exactly keeping a diary of events at the time.'

'She should have been doing that, surely?'

'How do you mean?'

'Diarising events: it's a secretarial job.'

'Gotcha. "I've always like you, Col." The imitated voice now achieved a register of near-strangulation.
‘
''You should have given me some sort of sign."
’
 

'And what did you say?'

'What did
I
say?
Aaarghhh.
Or something like that. You don't always choose your words all that fastidiously on these occasions, let's be honest.
I
suppose
I
might have expressed some surprise at this sudden turn of events, but by now ... ' Colin halted and took a deep drink of his beer.