Last and First Contacts (Imaginings) (16 page)

Besides all that – what fun to find yourself living on such a peculiar little planet, a World with a Fold! Don’t you think…?

Date unknown.
Sorry, I’ve given up counting. Not long after the last entry, however.

With my affairs in order I’m jumping ship. Why?

Point one: I’ve eaten all the food. Not the Spam, obviously.

Point two: I think I’m running out of world, or at least the sort of world I can live on. It’s a long time since I saw a mastodon, or a dinosaur. I still cross over island groups, but now they are inhabited, if at all, by nothing but purplish slime and what look like mats of algae. Very ancient indeed, no doubt.

And ahead things change again. The sky looks greenish, and I wonder if I am approaching a place, or a time, where the oxygen runs out. I wake up in the night panting for breath, but of course that could just be bad dreams.

Anyhow, time to ditch.

It’s the end of the line for me, but not necessarily for the
Goering.
I think I’ve found a way to botch the flight deck equipment: not enough to make her fully manoeuvrable again, but at least enough to turn her around and send her back the way she came, under the command of Hans. I don’t know how long she can keep flying. The Merlins have been souped up with fancy lubricants and bearings for longevity, but of course there are no engineers left to service them. If the Merlins do hold out the
Goering
might one day come looming over Piccadilly Circus again, I suppose, and what a sight she will be. Of course there will be no way of stopping her I can think of, but I leave that as another exercise for you, dear reader.

As for me, I intend to take the Spit. She hasn’t been flown since Day 1, and is as good as new as far as I can tell. I might try for one of those slime-covered rocks in the sea.

Or I might try for something I’ve glimpsed on the horizon, under the greenish sky.
Lights
. A city? Not human, surely, but who knows what lies waiting for us on the other side of the Fold in the World?

What else must I say before I go?

I hope we won’t be the last to come this way. I hope that the next to do so come, unlike us, in peace.

Mummy, keep feeding my cats for me, and I’m sorry about the lack of grandchildren. Bea will have to make up the numbers (sorry, sis!).

Enough, before I start splashing these pages with salt water. This is Bliss Stirling, girl reporter for the BBC, over and out!

[Editor’s note: There the transcript ends. Found lodged in a space between bulkheads, it remains the only written record of the
Goering
’s journey to have survived on board the hulk. No filmed or tape-recorded material has been salvaged. The journal is published with respect to the memory of Miss Stirling. However as Miss Stirling was contracted by the BBC and the Royal Geographic Society specifically to cover the
Goering
’s Pacific expedition, all these materials must be regarded as COPYRIGHT the British Broadcasting Conglomerate MCMLII. Signed PETER CARINHALL, Board of Governors, BBC.]

No More Stories

‘It’s strange to find myself in this position. Dying, I mean. I’ve always found it hard to believe that things will just go on afterwards. After
me
. That the sun will come up, the milkman will call. Will it all just fold up and go away when I’ve gone?’

These were the first words his mother said to Simon, when he got out of the car.

She stood in her doorway, old-lady stocky, solid, arms folded, over eighty years old. Her wrinkles were runnels in papery flesh that ran down to a small, frowning mouth. She peered around the close, as if suspicious.

Simon collected his small suitcase from the back of the car. It had a luggage tag from a New York flight, a reminder that he was fifty years old, and that he did have a life beyond his mother’s, working for a biotech company in London, selling gen-enged goldfish as children’s pets. Now that he was back in this Sheffield suburb where he’d grown up, his London life seemed remote, a dream.

He locked the car and walked up to his mother. She presented her cheek for him to kiss. It was cold, rough-textured.

‘I had a good journey,’ he said, for he knew she wouldn’t ask.

‘I am dying, you know,’ she said, as if to make sure he understood.

‘Oh, Mother.’ He put an arm around her shoulders. She was hard, like a lump of gristle and bone, and didn’t soften into the hug. She had cancer. They had never actually used that word between them.

She stepped back to let him into the house. The hall was spotless, obsessively cleaned and ordered, yet it smelled stale. A palm frond folded into a cross hung on the wall, a reminder that Easter was coming, a relic of intricate Catholic rituals he’d abandoned when he left home. He put his suitcase down.

‘Don’t put it there,’ his mother said.

A familiar claustrophobia closed in around him. ‘All right.’ He grabbed the case and climbed the stairs, fourteen of them as he used to count in his childhood. But now there was an old-lady safety banister fixed to the wall.

She had made up one of the twin beds in the room he had once shared with his brother. There wasn’t a trace of his childhood left in here, none of his toys or books or school photos.

He came downstairs. ‘Mother, I’m gasping. Can I make a cup of tea?’

‘The pot’s still fresh. I’ll fetch a cup and saucer.’ She bustled off to the kitchen.

He walked into the lounge.

The only change he could see since his last visit was a fancy new standard lamp with a downturned cowl, to shed light on the lap of an old lady sitting in the best armchair, facing the telly, peering at her sewing with fading eyes. The old carriage clock, a legacy from a long-dead great uncle, still sat in its place on the concrete 1970s fireplace. The clock was flanked by a clutter of photos, as usual. Most of them were fading colour prints of grandchildren. Simon had no grandchildren to offer, and so was unrepresented here. But the photos had been pushed back to make room for a new image in a gold frame. Brownish, blurred and faded, it was a portrait of a smiling young man in a straw boater. He had a long, strong face. Simon recognised the photo, taken from a musty old album and evidently blown up. It was his grandfather, Mother’s Dad, who had died when Simon was five or six.

Just for a moment the light seemed odd to him. Cold, yellow-purple. And there was something strange beyond the window. Pillow-like shapes, gleaming in a watery sun. He saw all this from the corner of his eye. But when he turned to look directly, the light from the picture window turned spring green, shining from the small back garden, with its lawn and roses and the last of the azalea blossom. Maybe his eyes were tired from the drive, playing tricks.

‘It’s just for comfort. The photo.’

The male voice made Simon turn clumsily, almost tripping.

A man sat on the sofa, almost hidden behind the door, with a cup of tea on an occasional table. ‘Sorry. You didn’t see me. Didn’t mean to make you jump.’ He stood and shook Simon’s hand. ‘I’m Gabriel Nolan.’ His voice had a soft Irish burr. Maybe sixty, he was short, round, bald as an egg. He wore a pale jacket, black shirt, and dog collar. He had biscuit crumbs down his front.

Simon guessed, ‘Father Nolan?’

‘From Saint Michael’s. The latest incumbent.’

The last parish priest Simon remembered had been the very old, very frail man who had confirmed him, aged thirteen.

Mother came in, walking stiffly, cradling a cup and saucer. ‘Sit down, Simon, you’re blocking the light.’

Simon sat in the room’s other armchair, with his back to the window. Mother poured out some tea with milk, and added sugar, though he hadn’t taken sugar for three decades.

‘Simon was just admiring the portrait of your father, Eileen.’

‘Well, I don’t have many pictures of Dad. You didn’t take many in those days. That’s the best one, I think.’

‘We find comfort in familiar things, in the past.’

‘I always felt safe when Dad was there,’ Mother said. ‘In the war, you know.’

But, Simon thought, Granddad was long dead. She’d led a whole life since then, the life that included Simon’s own childhood. Mother always had been self-centred. Any crisis in her children’s lives, like Mary’s recurrent illness as a child, or the illegitimate kid Peter had fathered as a student, somehow always turned into a drama about her. Now somehow she was back in the past with her own father in her own childhood, and there was no room for Simon.

Mother said, ‘There might not be anybody left who remembers Dad, but me. Do you think we get deader, when there’s nobody left who remembers us?’

‘We live on in the eyes of Christ.’

Simon said, ‘Father Nolan, don’t you think Mother should talk to the doctor again? She won’t listen to me.’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Simon,’ Mother said.

‘Best to accept,’ said Father Nolan. ‘If your mother has. Best not to question.’

They both stared back at him, seamless, united. Fifty years old he felt awkward, a child who didn’t know what to say to the grown-ups.

He stood up, putting down his tea cup. ‘I’ve some shirts that could do with hanging.’

Mother sniffed. ‘There might be a bit of space. Later there’s my papers to do.’

Another horror story. Simon fled upstairs. A little later, he heard the priest leave.

The ‘papers’ were her financial transactions, Premium Bonds and tax vouchers and battered old bank books. And they had to go through the dreaded rusty biscuit box she kept under her bed, which held her will and her life insurance policies, stored up in the event of a death she’d been talking about for thirty years. It even held her identity card from the war, signed in a childish hand.

Simon always found it painful to sit and plod through all this stuff. The tin box was worst, of course.

Later she surprised him by asking to go for a walk.

It was late afternoon. Mother put on a coat, a musty gabardine that smelled of winter, though the bright April day was warm. Simon had grown up in this close. It was a short, stubby street of semi-detached houses leading up to a main road and a dark sandstone wall, beyond which lay a park. But his childhood was decades gone, and the houses had been made over out of all recognition, and the space where he’d played football was now jammed full of cars. Walking here, he felt as if he was trying to cram himself into clothes he’d outworn.

They crossed the busy main road, and then walked along the line of the old wall to the gateway to the park. Or what was left of it. In the last few years the park had been sliced through by a spur of the main road, along which cars now hissed, remote as clouds. Simon’s old home seemed stranded.

Simon and his mother stuck to a gravel path. Underfoot was dogshit and, in the mud under the benches, beer cans, fag ends and condoms. Mother clung to his arm. Walking erratically she pulled at him, heavy, like an unfixed load.

Mother talked steadily, about Peter and Mary, and the achievements and petty woes of their respective children. Mary, older than Simon, was forever struggling on, in Mother’s eyes, burdened by difficult kids and a lazy husband. ‘She’s got a lot to put up with, always did.’ Peter, the youngest, got a tougher time, perceived as selfish and shiftless and lacking judgement. Simon’s siblings’ lives were more complicated than that. But to Mother they were ciphers, dominated by the characteristics she had perceived in them when they were kids.

She asked nothing about his own life.

Later, she prepared the evening meal.

As she was cooking, Simon dug his laptop out of his suitcase, and brought it down to the cold, formal dining room, where there was a telephone point. He booted up and went through his emails. He worked for a biotech start-up that specialised in breeding genetically modified goldfish, giving them patterns in bright
Captain Nemo
colours targeted at children. It was a good business, and expanding. The strategy was to domesticate biotech. In maybe five or ten years they would even sell genome-sequencing kits to kids, or anyhow their parents, so they could ‘paint’ their own fish designs.

That was a bit far off in terms of fifty-year-old Simon’s career, and things were moving so fast in this field that his own skills, in software, were constantly being challenged. But the work was demanding and fun, and as he watched the little fish swim around with ‘Happy Birthday Julie’ written on their flanks, he thought he glimpsed the future.

His mother knew precisely nothing about all this. The glowing emails were somehow comforting, a window to another world where he had an identity.

Anyhow, no fires to put out today. He shut down the connection.

Then he phoned his brother and sister with his mother’s news.

‘She’s fine in herself. She’s cooking supper right now… Yes, she’s keeping the house okay. I suppose when she gets frailer we’ll have to think about that… I’ll stay one night definitely, perhaps two. Might take her shopping tomorrow. Bulky stuff, you know, bog rolls and washing powder…

‘Things are a bit tricky for you, I suppose.’ Exams, school trips, holidays. Mary’s ferocious commitment to her bridge club – ‘They can’t have a match if I don’t turn up, you know!’ Peter’s endless courses in bookkeeping and beekeeping, arboriculture and aromatherapy, an ageing dreamer’s continuing quest to be elevated above the other rats in the race. All of them reasons not to visit their mother.

Simon didn’t particularly blame them. Neither of them seemed to feel they
had
to come, the way he did, which left him with no choice but to be here. And of course with their kids they were busier than he was, in a sense.

Mother had her own views. Peter was selfish. Mary was always terribly busy, poor lamb.

She’d once been a good cook, if a thrifty one, her cuisine shaped by the experience of wartime rationing. But over the years her cooking had simplified to a few ready-made dishes. Tonight it was boil-in-the-bag fish. You got used to it.

After they ate, they spent the evening playing games. Not Scrabble, which had been a favourite of Simon’s childhood. She insisted on cribbage, which she had played with her father, in her own childhood. She had a worn board that must have been decades old. She had to explain the arcane rules to him.