By Light Alone (30 page)

She scowled at him. ‘What are you getting at? How could you possibly know?’

He returned a perfectly shaped smile. ‘Can I let you into a secret, Marie ? I’m a spy.’

‘You certainly
sound
like one.’

‘I’m not joking.’

She eyed him. The pause was just long enough for a crinkly smile to come into being on his face, and the moment dissolved into bonhomie. ‘Nobody’s tried this hard to get me into bed since I was fifteen!’ she said. ‘I mean – seriously! Don’t you think that maybe you’re working
too
hard to impress me?’

He took hold of her right hand, and kissed the knuckles with an exaggerated smooching sound.

3

That autumn there was trouble along the south stretch of the project, up and down the seafront and in Jamaica Bay. The monthly project security budget doubled. Longhairs were everywhere. The root problem: many of them had taken to living on rafts. As Arto explained, with grim satisfaction, it was perfect for them. With a simple desalination unit for their water they could live a completely open-ended, floating existence. This was a relatively recent development, at least off the US coast, though Arto said that the Indian Ocean had been lousy with longhairs for decades. But it
was
a problem, a real and present one. They’d walled the Nassau boundary with spiderfence – at vast expense. They could hardly fence the entire coastline as well. The coastal dykes could perhaps be raised, but that wouldn’t be that much cheaper, and probably wouldn’t keep them out either. What to do? ‘Exterminate all the brutes,’ was Arto’s grin-flashing solution. Obviously something a little more practical was required. Some of the longhairs had actual boats – Marie had to wonder how they got hold of them, not legally she supposed – but most of them had cobbled together makeshift rafts from anything that could float, loosely roped together, planked or covered with plasmetal sheeting, junkyard junks, rubbish heaps.

To look at a map of the whole of Long Island was to think: oh, but the Rewilding Project is a modest undertaking! But, here, on the ground, she was continually struck by how
huge
the job was. So much human clutter had been squeezed into such a small space! Uncovering some of the hills that urbanization had overwritten. Where giant subterranean knuckles pushed up the latex. Supine profiles, hawk nose and snub. The detritus of centuries of human habitation.

Important milestones were reached. Forest Hill was fully reforested! The entire cabal flittered in, personally, to enjoy a feast. The theme was greatness; the food (cherries the size of a beachballs; toast you could shelter under; sugar grains big as dice) appropriately gigantic.

The problem with the seaborne longhairs kept pressing. They hired a dozen wardens to patrol the southern coastline, to keep the longhairs from landing, but the work required endless vigilance. Workers, machinic or human, kept stumbling across vagrants living in the shells of as-yet-undestroyed buildings; or clinging to the tops of trees like monkeys. The sea-approach was the tricky one.

Arto addressed the cabal with a proposition for a string of oceanic platforms and automatic guns. Program them to shoot anything that moved. Place them far enough out to sea that if they did malfunction they couldn’t shoot anybody on land. After some exemplary executions the ragtag longhair flotillas would get the message and stay away. But ‘malfunction’ was the wrong word to use in this context; it spooked the meeting. ‘What do you mean, malfunction?’ Arto tried his grin: ‘Well, nothing’s perfect.’ But the cabal didn’t like it.

Leah and Ezra came back from the week with their father telling strange stories. George was now a fully tressed longhair. He had taken them to a radical Christian meeting, which (so far as she could tell from Leah’s sulky and unforthcoming summary) had proposed a solution to the problem of the longhairs via missionary work and Christian conversion. ‘So your father hasn’t become a Christian, has he?’ she asked.

‘Oh no,’ said Leah. ‘At least, I don’t think so. But he was talking about some hermit guy.’

‘What hermit?’

‘I don’t know his
name
,’ said Leah, with prodigious disdain.

Ezra, bless his heart, was at least
pleased
to be back in Marie’s apartment. None of that mopy selfish sulking for him – he
ran
from room to room at top speed, his new carer, Moore, scurrying anxiously after him, fearful that something would get broken.

‘I don’t know,’ said Leah, turning her flank to her mother and writhing as if all her joints had come undone under her skin.

‘Leah!’ Marie snapped. ‘Please act like a civilized human being, not a jelly
fish
.’

Panting, Ezra smacked to a halt against the wall, turned to his sister and mother and said: ‘I say we ship all the longhairs to the moon! Plenty of sunlight up there,
and
water at the poles!’

‘Not very practical,’ said Leah.

‘We need some sort of radical solution,’ said Marie, putting her arm around her boy and squeezing him affectionately. ‘I couldn’t agree more.’

4

But, oh, the active engagement with the world! A midday with Arto, out on what had previously been the Brooklyn-Queens border. A roto had been through the whole district here, pushing over rubble and crushing it, and now a mulch machine was being guided through parallel sweeps of its snouty head, dragging a long waterpipe behind it. Two workers – longhairs, with their hair out behind them (women, of course) – were walking alongside, making sure the waterpipe didn’t snag, and that the mulch mouthparts didn’t choke on any unexpectedly large pieces of rubble. The raw mulch didn’t smell very nice.

That was the autumn the poetry charts were dominated by Zuleika:

It was Marie’s life! It was her life in a poem! The joy of heartbreak.

The sky was motley: pale blue and pure to the west; a paintpot roil of purples and storm-blacks and dark grey to the east. ‘A rainstorm,’ Marie said, as if she were any sort of expert on weather. On
weather
!

‘There’s a storehouse a little way over there,’ said Arto, taking her hand. Taking her hand! Her heart was buzzing like a fly trapped behind a glass pane. Along they trotted together, like kids. Three hundred metres across yet-to-be-developed waste; then between low bushes, and over green grass, and past various splendid trees, and the stumps and chassis of old architecture, ivy and nettles, legumery. Sunlight spent itself prodigally amongst the leaves. The world so various, and beautiful and new. The corduroy of a fingerprint. A lacy girder, with diamond spaces punched out. This Jackson Pollock sprawl of tangled wiring. The unique pattern of swirls and line of a human face.

Eastwards the sky was increasingly occupied by the coming stormcloud. It was solid shadow, tangled with the etching lines of distant rain.

Clean odours of incoming storm.

Marie stood, the wind fumbling and mussing her shirt about her body. The cloud moved visibly; the gods fitting the lid to the box of the world. The air was cooling, and the wind increasing in strength. On the roof of the building was a five-states banner, the asterisks-and-stripes. The wind was trying persistently to shake crumbs from this flag, the rope slapping the flagpole with a rattlesnake sound.

Overhead, the fjordy coastline of the cloud shifted its aerial tectonics, and swallowed the sun. For a moment its high-above beaches glowed lit gold, and even its inland mountain-ranges, granite-purple and black, lightened and gleamed. And the cloud moved westward and the last gleam of the sun was smothered. It was much cooler now, dark as dusk at noon.

‘So thrilling!’ Marie called to Arto over the wind.

Look!

A fishbone of lightning, discarded by the cloud. It made Marie’s breath stick in her throat. Scaldingly white, coldly white, and then vanished. It was a bone picked clean, bleached clean, washed clean by the oceanic sky, glimpsed clean, and gone.

One, two, three seconds later: the cosmic empty-belly rumble.

‘Shall we go inside?’ suggested Arto.

A dozen or so longhair workers were inside the project shed, gathered over by the window and playing cards. The light was on, but the intermittent flickers of lightning lit the window more brightly than did the glowball inside. Arto marched over: ‘Clear off.’

All twelve stood up. Though none of them came up higher than Arto’s chest, they had the advantage of numbers, and for a moment Marie felt a fleeting fear. What if they all ganged up? But they didn’t. Of course they didn’t: they looked at Arto’s muscular, plump torso; his long legs; his cropped hair, and they filed out into the trembling chill of the newly falling rain.

In thirty seconds they had the whole place to themselves. The storm threw a million glass beads at the window. When Marie and Arto embraced, the rain on the roof sounded like applause – like
thunderous
applause – like
raptures
of applause. Marie kissed him; pressed her mouth against his. He responded to her passion. There was ozone in the air. He pulled her trousers off; and then dropped his own pants and stepped his left foot out and kicked them away with his right, like a sportsman. They fucked, naked only from the waist down, a partial nudity that made Marie feel, oddly yet excitingly, like a child again. She braced herself against a wall of packing boxes and he took her from behind. Then he sat on one of the chairs and she spread herself upon his lap. At one point he took hold of her ankles and lifted her feet up, so that she tipped backwards and her head touched the carpet. His long, fat arms opened wide, and Marie was conscious of her shocking, delicious openness – her delicious, shocking helplessness, upside down at forty-five degrees, dependent upon this large man to prevent herself collapsing. It wasn’t a very comfortable position, of course; which meant that she couldn’t come. But after a while they shifted again, and she laid her spine on the carpet and he got on top of her and she brought the palms of her feet together, yogalike, above the small of his back. And finally she felt everything shift and slide away into that place where nothing mattered any more and everything was blessed with heavenly pleasure. And – she was there, she was
there
, she was there.

Afterwards, she clutched him, both of them lying on the carpet and sharing their warmth. She dozed a postcoital doze – minutes, no more, but long enough to dream. It was a strange dream. She was watching the moon coming down to earth, but the closer it came the smaller it seemed, until it approached her face as a white bubble of light, small enough to tuck itself into the bed of her fingernail.

Her finger gleamed.

She woke up with a little hiccoughing twitch of her whole body. Arto was fully dressed again, and standing at the window looking out. ‘I fell asleep!’ she said, sitting up and looking for her trousers. ‘How long was I asleep?’

‘Not five minutes,’ he replied, not turning around.

And here were her trousers. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I had a weird little dream.’

He grunted.