‘Are you all right?’ He looked far from all right. Stupid question. I asked a better one. ‘How long have you been awake? You should have gone downstairs and made yourself a pot of tea.’
He raised his head and gave a mad chuckle. ‘Tea?’ He looked at me with an intensity in which I recognized ingredients of fear: laboured breathing, deep and darkened eyes, a small but perceptible tremble, failure to contain the contents of a bladder. Fear has a distinct and unpleasant smell. Slowly, deeply: ‘Have you lost your mind?’ Alf asked. I hadn’t lost any more of it than I’d been missing yesterday, but Alf looked as if his might have made progress along that
road
. ‘A pot of tea? You’re insane, Pike! I wouldn’t set foot on those stairs again, down or up, for all the rice in Asda.’
‘Again? Do you mean …?’
‘I wouldn’t step outside this door if … if …’ Alf sobbed.
‘Is that where you’re from, Asda?’
He shook his head. Watching him broke my heart. But I did nothing other than watch, as he sniffed and regained his ability to speak. ‘I woke in the middle of the night. I had to use the bathroom.’ He sought the correct words, rejected an approach and decided there were no correct words, just some words that were better than others. ‘I’m a grown-up, Edward. You don’t know just how grown up I am. It shouldn’t have this effect on me. I’m an experienced, mature muse.’
While he sniffed, and wiped his snout on the back of a hand, the idea entered my head that Alf might slip, when necessary, into his muse persona as a tortoise slips back inside its shell when threatened. Being a sensitive soul – certainly a fish out of water – he must have felt threatened all the time at Whitehead House.
‘Is this common, Edward? Are you accustomed to this?’
‘Accustomed to what?’
‘For want of a better word: ghosts.’
‘Did you see one of our dead?’
‘One? How many have you? I forgot, you’ve a fledgling city of the dead out there. And, by God, they’re in here too.’
‘Was it the White Lady?’
His blank stare told me no, not her.
‘When daylight’s here, I have to leave, Edward. Thank you for your hospitality, but I can’t remain another hour in this place. I’ve seen many things. I know many things. I’ve had frightening experiences before now. I’ve even seen what I believed to be spirits disembodied. But last night …’ He got to his feet and the quilt fell off his shoulders. He sprang at my bed. I thought he was going to grab my neck, but he spoke passionately into my face. ‘You must get Sophia away from this place. It’s unhealthy and there
isn
’t much time. I’ll take her with me, now. You must leave too.’
‘Steady on, Alf,’ I said, swinging my legs out of bed. ‘You’re traumatized. This is Sophia’s home.’
‘It’s her prison. She’ll die here.’
‘No she won’t.’
‘Won’t she? How can you know she won’t die here?’
‘How can you know that she will?’
‘How can I know? The grandfather paradox?’
‘Time travel and all sorts. You’re a time traveller.’
‘Yes. If you travel back to a time before you were born and kill your grandfather, then you’ll never be born, and, therefore, you’ll never be able to travel back in time and kill your grandfather. I know about Sophia because I’ve seen your future.’
‘I don’t believe you. According to the paradox, time travel shouldn’t be possible.’
‘On the contrary. There are good reasons why it needs to be possible. It’s just very difficult, unless you’re someone like me.’ His eyes were dry now. He had overcome his distress with unusual speed. He cocked his head, amused by my clueless face. ‘You can think of such a paradox as a mechanism built into nature’s laws to prevent contamination. And … I wasn’t going to tell you this …’
‘Tell me what?’
‘Unfortunately, I have inadvertently broken the law. I have contaminated.’
‘Beg pardon?’
‘I have contaminated your environment.’
‘Charming. In what way?’
Alf breathed a deep sigh. ‘Let me explain something first. Theoretically, according to the Standard Model, contamination through interference shouldn’t be possible. However, in practice, things are different. That’s why the Standard Model is still only a model and not a unified explanation. Have you read Wineburger’s
Principles of Stability and Chaotic Variables
?’
I’d never heard of it. ‘Not recently.’
‘To cut a long story short, Wineburger says the probability statistics associated with variability dysfunction are unpredictable in relation to the higher degrees of sub-subatomic interaction between matter and conscious thought emanating from a matter-based source.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘It follows from Wineburger’s formulae that the consequences of contaminating interference can be calamitous.’
‘Such as?’
‘When I came here …’
‘To the Manse?’
‘No. To this universe.’
‘O-kay.’
‘I brought a small book of poetry. It contains a poem that was never written in this universe by a poet who never lived in it.’
‘That was clever of him, Alf. What’s his name?’
‘His name is … His name isn’t important. What’s important – indeed, potentially disastrous – is that I’ve lost the book.’
I dared not tell him that I’d stolen it and given it to Sophia. ‘What’s so bad about losing a book? You can buy another copy.’
‘There is only one copy in this universe. Before I came, there were none. I can’t leave without it. If I can’t find it, in all probability the universe will have to be shut down as a precautionary measure.’
‘Oh, great! And I haven’t even had breakfast.’
‘We can’t have poets from a different universe infecting art in this universe with their work. Where would it end?’
‘Personally, I don’t see what harm it would do.’
‘Oh, don’t you? It’s happened before, and more than once, with devastating consequences.’
‘Like when? Give me an example.’
‘Well, for a start, before Galileo Galilei put pen to paper the sun was perfectly happy rotating around the earth.’
Alf played his role so seriously that – if I’d possessed a better
imagination
– his fantasia might have sucked me in, swallowed, and made me a true believer. I wondered whether speaking his make-believe world aloud to me helped him in its construction.
‘You see, Edward, the poem that hasn’t been written in this universe, in the book that hasn’t been published in this universe, by the poet who never lived in this universe, was written by a famous poet who lived in one of the really real universes. However, it still needs the inspiration to write it because outside the specificality of space-time, and the parameters of matter, it needs to be written. It needs to be written perpetually.’
‘The poem needs to be written for ever?’
‘Like a mouse on a wheel. You might think the life of a muse sounds like fun, but believe me, it can get mind-numbingly tedious.’
‘I see.’
‘Do you?’
‘No.’
‘I think I can still salvage the inspiration for the poem, Edward. The poem’s what’s important. But I can’t salvage the universe.’
‘The really, really, really, really real universe?’
‘No. This one.’
‘This universe isn’t real?’
‘Don’t get me wrong. It’s real enough for those, like you, who live in it. But for those who know better, it isn’t.’
‘That’s a spot of bad luck. We’re doomed, then … Alf, maybe you should speak to someone. A psychiatrist.’
‘No need, Edward. I’ve worked with the best. Who do you think is responsible for the Oedipus Complex?’
Deep down, I admitted that Alf had a point. Deeper down, down in my soul where, until now, until Alf forced me to, I was afraid to look, I knew he was right about getting Sophia out of the Manse. Unless I acted to save her, Sophia would die here – maybe from getting old and worn down long before her time.
‘Universes and time travellers apart, Alf, what can I do? Even if I
abandon
the Manse and take Sophia with me, Edgar’s coming home. He’ll need looking after, and so will Mother and Father. Gregory can look after himself.’
‘You need to look after Sophia, Edgar and your mother. But not your father.’ He paused. I awaited an explanation. ‘You said your father’s immobile? I’ve news for you, my friend: he isn’t immobile any more. Not now that he’s dead.’
‘What?’
‘I met him in the corridor, God help me. One of your dead.’
‘Father isn’t dead!’
‘Believe me: your father is dead. The living don’t look like candles in the dark. The living don’t float six inches off the floor.’
I started to go directly to Father’s room. Alf stopped me by putting his hands on my shoulders.
‘You’ve never seen Father,’ I said. ‘How do you know it was him?’ Alf inclined his head a fraction to one side. I thought he would beseech me, again, to take flight from the Manse.
Instead, he surprised me. ‘Edward … I’m in love with Sophia.’
My lips parted before I knew what to say in response. Alf thrust his face forward and pressed his mouth to mine. He kissed me and, finding pleasure in it, I kissed him back. Maybe I experienced not genuine pleasure, but real confusion. ‘Why?’ I breathed, when our lips parted a hair’s breadth.
‘You are Sophia,’ he said. ‘She is pure at heart.’ We kissed again. Oh God! Had the White Lady appeared, I’d have said, Take me I’m yours. But as soon as Father came to mind I went clean off kissing. I pushed Alf off me and went to Father’s room.
… where Sophia was already standing over the naked corpse, towels, a sponge and a basin of water on a table at her side.
Alf changed his mind and stayed. The three of us had tea and toast in the kitchen. Mother had awakened and gone back to sleep. Sophia said she wouldn’t need seeing to for an hour or two.
Sophia said she would help me to dig a grave for Father, since Gregory wasn’t around to help – he’d gone off again after the murder. Alf, restored now to something like his old self, said he would lend a hand too. I, however, didn’t want to dig a grave: the ground was saturated. There would be cave-ins, it would take all day, and look at what happened last time I dug a grave; there’d been more Tennyson outside than under.
I suggested, ‘Why don’t we bury him in the cellar?’
‘You have a cellar?’ asked Alf.
‘The trapdoor’s right underneath us.’
‘The floor’s cement,’ said Sophia.
‘That doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘We don’t have to dig through it. There are coffins down there. Remember? We can put Father in a coffin in the cellar, and lock the trapdoor. It’ll be like a crypt.’
‘A foul smell will soon rise upwards,’ said Alf, ‘no matter how well you seal the trapdoor.’
I had an idea. It came to me all at once. I don’t know where it came from. It must have came from somewhere, and it probably came from many places. Suddenly, having bubbled up to my vocal cords, it was there. And I spoke it. ‘We’ll bury Father in the cellar, take Mother a safe distance from the Manse, douse it with petrol and burn the wretched place to the ground.’
Sophia stared at me, and, staring at me, she appeared to have turned to stone. Then she melted and appeared to be in two minds, perhaps more. I thought I knew what she was thinking, but maybe I gave her too much credit: we couldn’t carry my plan through, not least because of uncertainty about the date of Edgar’s return; when we fled the burning Manse we would have to take him too.
‘This is your prison,’ I said to Sophia. ‘It’s my prison too. To a lesser extent, yes; but it’s my prison too.’ She remained as stone. ‘This is a bad place, Sophia. It took me a long time to see it, but I see it now. It’s worthless. The Manse is worth less than nothing. In destroying it we are setting ourselves free.’
‘Free,’ said my twin as if free were a new word, one she liked the sound of and wanted to surf from her mouth again, and again: free. With two syllables and stress on the second: Fr
eeee
. ‘But I live here,’ said Sophia.
‘Alf saw one of our ghosts last night.’
‘Which one?’
Alf said, ‘I saw your …’ but I raised the palm of a hand and stopped him. I didn’t want Sophia to know that he saw Father.
Me: ‘The ghosts, Sophia.’
Sophia: ‘I haven’t seen a ghost for ages.’
Me: ‘I saw the White Lady the other day.’
Sophia: ‘And now Father’s dead.’
Me: ‘Think of the moans and howls. Think of the Cold. You don’t have to live with those.’
Sophia: ‘They don’t bother me.’
Me: ‘The Dark. The Shadows.’
Sophia: ‘I’m half-sick of Shadows.’
Alf: ‘Yes! Gosh, yes!’
Me: ‘What?’
Alf: ‘Nothing.’
Me: ‘Nothing my left buttock! You had a eureka moment!’
Sophia: ‘What’s a eureka moment?’
Me: ‘What Alf had just now.’
Alf: ‘No, I didn’t.’
Me: ‘Yes, you did.’
Alf: ‘I did not.’
Me: ‘You did.’
Alf: ‘Yes! All right! I did.’
Me: ‘What was it?’
Alf: ‘A possible line for the poem. A pivotal line.’
Me: ‘For the poem that’s already been written.’
Alf: ‘It’s complicated.’
Me: ‘What is it?’
Alf: ‘If I told you that, I’d have to kill you.’
Sophia gasped and placed a hand on her heart.
‘Only joking,’ said Alf.
‘He can’t kill me,’ I said. ‘He needs me. I’m his muse.’
‘Yes,’ said Alf. ‘I suppose you are, in a way.’
‘What’s a muse?’ asked Sophia.
I told her it was a long story. She said, in that case she didn’t think she liked muses much, although she quite enjoyed shorter stories, especially when they were funny.
Mother took the news of Father’s death surprisingly well. Her words were, to Sophia, ‘That will make things much easier for you.’
I introduced Alf to Mother when she was dressed. She was uninterested. He might have been invisible, or an old brown coat.
It was a bit of a struggle – a huge struggle, actually – but between Alf and me and a bed sheet, we got Father downstairs and into the cellar. He’d lost a lot of weight and there wasn’t much of him. Sophia stayed with Mother, dressed in her old Sunday best, in the living room – I didn’t want Mother to witness unfortunate spillages. Fortunately, however, there were none.