Forget Yourself (25 page)

But the last time, that was when I couldn’t get the tears to stop. Nothing would work. I told him over and over that they loved him, they loved him, I was so startled. Haven’t they said so? No, he’d said that they hadn’t. He’d said ‘I love you’ and they didn’t say it back. He should have known, he cried, he should have known it would never happen. Why would it?

I’d left to get him some water and when I’d returned he was gone.

No, it wasn’t uncommon for people to drop dead. Tie had dropped dead, with a sliver of metal in his hand and criss-crossed wrists, he had dropped dead. And Burberry had dropped dead. She’d gone back to the triangle-home. She had used a shard of mirror hanging from a string, yanking it from the window-frame and plunging it into her neck, spurting herself over the floor, collapsing in a grunt, with a shudder, and a moan, on her hands and knees, trembling, then face to the ground, panting, panting, panting. She’d grown weaker, and who knows what she’d thought of, lying there, lost and sleepy, tired and alone, as she’d spread her last breath across the lino.

I lay on the stretch of foam. I traced her outline with my finger. I clasped a rope of her hair in my other hand.

“You’re thinking of her, Blondee.”

“Be quiet, Tie.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Be quiet, Tie.”

I shuffled my body across the foam, over until I was resting in her outline. I inhaled, deep as my lungs would go, hoping to taste her. I spread my hand wide, hoping to feel her fingers entwined with my own. My toes, her toes. My lips, her lips.

Nothing.

I mumbled her name to myself. Burberry. Burberry. It wasn’t me, Burberry, it wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t have had both of you. That’s not how things are done. I did this to help. Burberry. I never stopped you, you could have found a husband yourself, you could have been happy. I’m not responsible for you, it’s not my fault. I never stopped you.

I loved you.

Why did you leave? Why were you so stupid? You lost me, not yourself. You don’t understand the world, you never did. I am building something that will last. We were in the way. That wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t mine.

I never stopped you.

BEFORE I KNEW IT THE HUT WAS GONE
. The book’s hut—which had stood since the start of the world—was gone. I wandered along a chill breeze, which had gently guided me to its location, but there was no location—it wasn’t there: only a flattened patch of smooth earth and brown-limp grass. It had left, it had escaped. Where had the book gone?

Even Frederick knew.

Pilsner, he said. Pilsner took it. It had been left, unread and untouched but he wanted to keep it. He’d take good care of it. Frederick said he didn’t mind, and none of the others cared.

I asked question after question, forgetting myself, and he grew bored, more and more, with each one. His voice turned hard. The hut had been taken down, no use any parts going to waste. Only the least really knew, but no-one else had noticed. “No, no, no-one at all. For fuck’s sake, please, don’t look so worried. None of it is needed. We changed everything; we changed it all for the better. That thing isn’t wanted, he can have it. Quiet, please, I want to think.”

I left for the lake. The world was still. Each hut I passed was silent and not a single flame jumped or danced. Each hut seemed abandoned, empty. I wasn’t sure if it had ever been so dark.

I had some relief, mixed with anxiety: the classes were over. I had failed in my duty. There were no more lessons to tell. Frederick offered to let them know via their husbands, quietly, one by one: though the women with wives would find out last.

“No-one would mind,” he’d said. “We’ve done enough for everyone, we’ve remade the world. Think about that.”

I was trying not to.

By the time I reached the water my eyes had grown used to the darkness. It was warm, and as I smelled the streaming stench of chlorine a trickle of sweat tickled my armpit.

The lake was at peace. Some of Frederick’s twigs had been blown away by two days of wind and gush-heavy rain. The forest—leafless and in tatters.

It had rained when she died. She liked to sleep when it rained.

I pulled up a twig, then another, and another, throwing each onto the water, scattering them about the gentle bob of the waves. A few steps away was one lonely twig, the last one left. I took it in my hand as it grated the skin of my fingers, and threw it into the water. I watched them all slowly circle, toward me, then away, and back. Each edged further and further out, until eventually they vanished, carried out to sea.

Perhaps there was a way out. Perhaps I could swim out, under the wall, and follow the twigs to the old world.

“Perhaps there’s a way, Blondee.”

“He said there was a pipe, but that it was too small to fit through.”

“Too small for him.”

“Tie. There’s no point. I remade the world. It’ll be the same out there as here.”

Perhaps I was Hermee. Perhaps I was that man, but it seemed more likely I had been a bride, with a smile and a slush-toned dress. There would be no way out. The water might drain away, but wherever it went no person could follow. It started to rain again.

I decided to go and look at the courtyard—now the lessons were over it was almost exclusively the domain of the men, and I wanted to see how it was. The dusty row of vacuum-tubes which lined the flagstones had barely come into view before I was spotted.

“Blondee.”

“I turned by head just enough to see him. “Tanned.”

“How are you doing?”

“I am good, Blondee, I am good. I see you’ve been good too.” He slanted his head slightly, watching me at a diagonal.

“Yes.” I couldn’t see how he had been with her. I couldn’t imagine her planting her face on his, their hands tearing at each other.

“Things have changed.”

He righted his head again and we stood in front of each other. I had never noticed I was taller than him. It didn’t feel right, so I rested my weight on my hip.

“You got married too, then?” I asked. He must have married.

“No.”

“What?” I asked, my voice a little more shrill than it should have been,

“No, I didn’t get married. Thespie married someone else.” He looked sad, sadder than I thought was possible.

“We haven’t spoken in quite a while, have we?”

“We haven’t.”

I could have found out the details of his life, his giddy excitements and slow, long heartbreaks, but the conversation trailed and there was nothing worth knowing. Sooner or later he’d have mentioned her name, or I would, and there was the risk that everything would collapse, that the walls would fall down but they’d fall in on us, that everyone would be buried in an endless crush of rubble, falling ever inwards, until finally it mashed us two here in the centre of the world. It wasn’t worth it. I wished him well and, with a glance around, even kissed him on the cheek. He was alone, he’d have time to think. Perhaps he’d even copy her and drop to death. But there wouldn’t be any talking.

He left for the land of the minors.

I was in a different place, and I couldn’t see the farm anywhere. Who was I now? I looked down. I had clothes on: that was something.

A tattoo spread over my arm.
Pilsner
. It had been a joke at my expense, a drunken stag party gesture.

I was pacing the room, from chintzy china ornament to tacky glazed decoration. The walls were wood-brown, and I was surrounded by tiny faces, hand-painted and sold in magazines. I was waiting for the door. Where was she? Where was she?

There it was, there was the chime. I knocked over a girl, her face and her parasol shattering on the floorboards. Fuck fuck fuck. I pulled the door open, almost hitting myself in the face. What did my face look like? There was a mirror in the hall, but no time to check—

“Minos,” the post-woman greeted.

“Helene,” I replied, my voice heavy and solid. “Helene, how is he? How is Hermee?”

“I don’t know if I should tell you,” she answered.

Was she joking? Was she?

“Helene.”

“If he’s not responding to your messages—”

“Helene.”

I tried not to cry, I tried not to let my eyes fill with water and burst in front of the post-woman, but I couldn’t help myself. “He’s my brother, Helene,” I managed to choke out, “He’s my brother.”

She ignored my outburst. She was good like that. Helene had an honest face, and was the first delivery person I had ever spoken to. Usually delivery people were invisible, there one minute and gone the next. You could never ignore Helene.

I took a deep breath and wiped at my eyes with a used tissue.

“Would you like some tea, Helene?”

“Oh all right. I could do with some tea. People are sending one another lead boxes for a joke, I’m telling you.”

We made our way to the kitchen. I made the tea in silence, silence aside from the whine of the kettle, and she waited with equal quiet. Porcelain figures stared down from the shelves at the top of the walls, right near the ceiling.

I needed to hear about Hermee. There had been nothing from him in so long. I hadn’t meant for us to be on bad terms—I’d just wanted him to be safe. The farm wasn’t safe, the farm was being monitored. I had told him that he could still see the others; he just had to be discreet. He had told me that there was nothing more important than living the life you chose. The world had changed but he hadn’t.

We had still been speaking, even after he’d left, but I’d wasted my messages trying to convince him to come back. You can love everyone you want, Hermee, but you must keep quiet. The world is watching. Eventually he had grown sick of my nagging and stopped responding entirely. I couldn’t blame him for that.

I worried about him.

I poured the tea into two delicate cups—ordered from the other side of the planet, no mean feat—and placed one by her, the other at my place on the other side of the table.

She took a sip of the tea before she spoke.

“They’re going to remove them. You knew that’d happen, Minos, you don’t need me to tell you. That’s just what they’re doing. That’s life.”

I covered my face with my hands. I must have knocked my cup off the table because I heard it burst over the varnished floor. That’s life. I wondered if I could convince him to leave, if it wasn’t too late. But I couldn’t. He would stay, he would stay until the very moment they came and took him away, along with all the others. Hot tears stung my hands. My lungs burned.

When I looked up Helene was gone. She had finished her tea.

“The world is unravelling, Blondee.”

“Is it, Tie?”

I didn’t know if that was true: the world was simply going through a change. ‘Things change’, that had been written somewhere in the book, and that was the rule we had broken the most. Nothing had ever changed, not really, not before the magazine. We changed the world, Frederick had said. He was wrong, it was me: he had been innocent.

Now when I wandered from hut-to-hut in the lands of the least, the minors, and the moderates, I did so without Frederick. He said he was going to the courtyard, but when I hid and watched from a distance he was never there. There was Green, there was Fluffed, and Tanned, but no Frederick.

He was away with Pilsner, that much was obvious, and the right thing to do would have been to break down Pilsner’s door—and then?

Instead I explored.

The world was quieter: many of the huts were now empty. The others were louder, raised voices and accusations. It was the same in each of the lands—least, minor, and moderate. Accusations of penises in foreign vaginas, foreign mouths, foreign arseholes. Defensive manoeuvres: questions, counter-accusations, pleads.

“The world is unravelling, Blondee.”

“They just need to get used to it, Tie.”

Of course they didn’t argue in every hut: some were quiet but clearly had people inside—some were at peace. Each of the three lands was the same—only the size of the huts really differed.

But there was one more land, the land of the severes, where they lived all in one hut, the hut made from the dregs of the world. There they lived together.