The Ephemera (26 page)

Roger is pushed roughly forward, and then for a second time his britches are cut from him. He feels the Captain's fingers, dry as paper, tracing lightly the scabbed outline of the inky island on his arse.

"Describe it to me!" the blinded man demands.

And Roger does so as the dawn reveals more and more of this little chunk of rock in the sparkling blue. It has its hill, and its jungle. It has a long strand of white beach, and there's a dazzling glitter that might be imagined to be a waterfall. There is no sign of habitation, and no sign of the Ship at anchor.

"We're the first then!" The Captain roars, grasping the oars once more. "Now keep me straight and we'll be rich before nightfall."

As the Captain rows, and Roger directs him with shouts of
port
and
starboard
, the music provides a suitable accompaniment to the heave and draw, but there's something desultory about it, half-hearted.

They make landfall within the hour, and find the place to be very pleasant. There is water spilling from the mountain, fish in the lagoon and shade among the trees.

What there is not, is treasure. It becomes clear, as the day dilates, and another follows it, and another still, that no amount of arse fumbling and guesswork and scrabbling in the earth will find any treasure here. Then the question becomes academic anyway because a sour, yellow infection begins to seep from the Captain's eyes, and it is only a matter of a few days more before he is dead.

Roger waits for the music to tell him what next, but there is nothing. Not even faintly. At some point the capricious soundtrack that had lifted him, shifted him from his dreadful existence has died too, or faded from his ability to hear, or perhaps gone to bring gifts to someone else's life. He listens but there is only the surf and the cheek of gulls, the sounds of the jungle and the soft
shuff
of his breath. The adventure of his life is over, well before he was ready.

All there is now, is waiting to die.

But until that happens, he'll keep half an ear open. Just in case.

~

A few years back there was a brief boom in pirate-themed anthologies. I immediately thought of the best pirate movie ever: The Crimson Pirate, a vivid technicolour swashbuckling romp starring Burt Lancaster and Nick Cravat. My second thought was how much that movie's tone and verve reminded of an MGM musical. And so the extremely limited sub-genre of the musical/story was born.

The One Millionth Smile

Anthony Dowden stands at the window of his mother's hospital room, presses his face to the cool glass boundary between the uncaring world on one side and the end of a dwindling life on the other. The air outside shimmers with rising thermals bearing the sounds of the city: the jungle noises of traffic in the streets, the giant insect whine of aircraft circling the airport, the rabble roar from a football game across the river. Within the room, cosseted in a careful stillness that seems designed to preserve whatever life remains, the soft, water-torture electronica counting off her heartbeats, and the feeble wheezes leaking through the sour puncture of her mouth. Vital signs. He wonders how many of each she has left. He wonders if she knows. Once she would have. To the beat and to the breath.

His cellphone buzzes to life in his pocket. Guiltily, because he should have turned it off here, he answers it, thinking it might be Joy. Perhaps calling to explain why she is late.

"Tony?" A man's voice. It's Graham at work. "I really hate to bother you, but the Japs are asking about the RMS module —"

Anthony stares through the window as his engineer explains a problem he should be able to solve himself. Why are people so needy? They don't need his say-so, they just think they do. Anthony turns to one side and his reflection materialises in the glass. A ghost, smartly suited in middle-management camouflage. Feeling stifled by the room's sterility, he tugs free the knot of his tie.

"Hello, Tony? Smiler?" The voice on the phone is still there. "I need to give them a delivery date."

Smiler. Office humour. It's meant affectionately.

Anthony wants to tell Graham to just think of a random date and add an extra month for luck. Instead, he says "End of June, Graham. Offer them May if they'll agree to beta test it."

"Great, thanks." There's a pause filled briefly by a soft wash of static. "Tony, how's your mum?"

Anthony hears himself saying, "She's dying, Graham." It's what the doctors told him when he first arrived. Now he's seen her, he has little choice but to believe it.

He pockets the phone and attempts to open the window. It only extends to a two inch gap, but right now any flow of air is better than none. A breeze rustles the cut flowers in the vases, flips over get-well cards on the bed stand.

"Tony." His mother's voice is thin like the breeze.

Anthony goes over, but she's not really awake. He sits in the orange plastic chair, takes her bird-boned hand in one of his. He thinks of all the things her hands did when they were strong. When she had so much life, and seemed determined to enjoy it all in one go, use it up as fast as possible. In her fifties those hands had cast bells in Arizona and thrown pots on the shores of the Ganges. In her forties she had taught her hands the precise anatomy of the fiddle, and toured Scandinavia with a boisterous female ceilidh band. In her thirties the family income had come chiefly from aromatherapy massages in the back room. And in her twenties those same hands had punched out Anthony's bastard of a father, and gutted fish in a factory to be able make a home for her child in the little Fife cottage they had escaped to. Anthony remembers the fishy stink on her skin, but he hadn't minded because along with the smell his mother always brought home a smile that, in those days, had been dispensed as freely and as generously as sunlight.

The smiles, now, are all used up. Her face has the sallow, pulpy look of sodden paper. She looks as frail and worn as a ninety year old, but she is only fifty five.

The quacks haven't a clue what's killing her.

Familiar pain prickles the pads of his fingers, the heel of his left hand, and the soft venous ridges under his wrist. His hand, out of habit, has taken out his pocket knife, extended the sharp blade. It's something he does, sometimes. A nervous habit. Seams of blood run down his fingers, flecking the floor with tiny carnations. He watches abstractly as the cuts heal up. Vanish. He puts the knife away, a little ashamed.

The door opens behind him, someone enters the room. "Sorry I'm late, love." He recognizes Joy's fat Brummie accent. Her hand squeezes his shoulder. "How is she?"

The fact that no-one bothers to ask his mother directly any more should speak for itself. "She's doing fine," he says, knowing how Joy feels about what she calls his negative outlook. It doesn't matter. Nothing he says is going to change the outcome. She's not doing fine. She's dying and no-one knows why.

~

The hospital cafeteria overlooks a half-heartedly landscaped garden. Anthony and Joy stare out at the empty lawn, hands cradling cups of hot tea.

"Have you told her yet?" she asks.

Anthony shrugs. The tea is too hot to drink, but he takes a procrastinating sip anyway.

"Ant, I know you're not close, but she deserves to know," Joy says. "Before —"

"Next time she's awake," he cuts in. "I'll tell her then. I promise." There's a plastic bag on the empty chair beside Joy. "What's in there?" he asks, deflecting the conversation.

"Just a few things she asked me to pick up from her house." Joy's frustration with him twists into a sad smile. "Books, toiletries, her hair brush. Hardly seems much point, though, does there?"

Anthony would have let the conversation drop there, but he has seen something. Something familiar. He reaches across and lifts the bag on to the table. As he extracts the object he glimpsed, his heart hammers harder, faster than it has in years. He breathes slow, forces his pulse down to an even trip.

It is.
The book
.

He turns it over in his hands. The aged, marled leather feels just as soft and infused with secrecy as it did the first time he held it. It has the same brass hook-and-eye clasp that so intrigued him as a ten year old, the short tear near the spine, and no title, author or identifying marks of any kind.

Anthony takes a swig of tea to ease a sudden dryness. "She asked for this?"

"As a matter of fact she told me specifically where to find it," Joy says. "Bring back memories, does it?"

"You could say that." Perhaps it is not surprising after all that his mother was never able to give up this nonsense. Anthony himself had put it behind him when he left home in his teens. It had already caused him enough grief by then. His mother, though, she had been a true believer.

"What is it then?" Joy says, craning across the table. "You've never shown me your baby photos."

"I suppose it's a bit of an embarrassing family secret," he says, ignoring Joy's raised eyebrows, and placing the book on the table between himself and his wife. "You've met my mother enough times to get a flavour of what she's like."

Joy laughs. "She's a delight. One of a kind. I love her approach to life. I love her—you know that." She places her small hot hand over his. "And so do you. Deep down."

"Of course I do," he says absently. He regards Joy thoughtfully. She has to know some time. Might as well be now. "Look," he says. "Have you ever wondered how long you have to live?"

Joy's attempt at a reassuring smile melts. "I suppose everyone does," she says. "Especially at a time like this."

Anthony slides the book towards her. "Open it."

His eye is caught by a glimpse of something bright. He shifts his attention to the window. Nothing for a moment, then he spots a flash of brilliant blue. A tiny, sapphire bird is skitting around in the sparse shrubbery. He's never seen anything so vivid around here before. It must have drifted off course during migration, or escaped from a private aviary. The sound of riffling of pages brings wings to mind.

"It's just numbers," Joy says. "Calculations."

Yes, that's it. Just numbers, but not to his mother.

"It's a family tree, of sorts. At least that's what she'd have you believe," he says. "If you look at the top of each page you'll see a name and a date."

"Letitia Helen McAdam," Joy reads aloud from a page near the front of the book. He can see the tight, cursive script under her fingers. "Seventeenth July, Eighteen Seventy Six." She looks up at him over her glasses. Her eyes are bright. She loves spooky stuff like this. "How far back does it go?"

"Six generations," he says. "The first one is my mother's great-great grandmother. Most of our family is in there. They're supposed to be sort of like horoscopes. Don't ask me how it's all worked out, but do you see at the bottom of the page?"

Joy squints at the writing. "Looks like some sort of code. There's letters - H, B, and S. Each followed by a string of digits," she says. "What does it mean?"

"What it means is that, on the day she was born, someone—probably her own mother—worked out that poor little Letitia would have —" he leans in closer to see the numbers "— twenty nine million, three hundred and nine thousand, seven hundred and fourteen heartbeats, one million, seven hundred and eighty eight thousand, and twelve breaths, and one thousand, eight hundred and twenty six smiles in her life. I'm told she died of pneumonia after six not very happy months on this earth."

"That's incredible." Joy rifles through the pages, stopping randomly to check names and totals. He can see her calculating the years in her head.

"It's rubbish, of course," Anthony sighs, stopping himself from comparing it to horoscopes in that regard too. Joy would get upset, and he doesn't have the energy for that argument today. "It's just something bored Victorians dreamt up. Like ouija boards and numerology."

Joy isn't listening. "It's fascinating," she says. "Poor little Letitia's mother had eight children, and only two made it past their second birthday. Terrible thing in those days, infant mortality."

Anthony sighs. He doesn't care. Telling her all this was a mistake. She's hooked now. "Hey, your mum's name is in here," Joy squeals. "And so are you. Right at the end."

"I know," he says. "My grandmother wrote it when I was born, and my mother showed it to me on my tenth birthday. I had always been a bit timid as a child. Found it hard to make friends, didn't like to try new things. I think she thought that if I saw how much life I had ahead of me, I'd feel confident about going out and enjoying it as much as I could. Just like her. She always had some project on the go, even when we were poor and lived in that awful box of a cottage. If she wasn't learning to paint, she was writing a book. If not that, then she was racing dogs or doing volunteer work with the RSPCA, or something. It was as if she felt the need to make every one of those heartbeats count, every one of those smiles worthwhile. Me? She showed me my numbers and I freaked out. I was convinced I was going to die. I remember counting ten beats before it even began to sink in, and that made my pulse race all the faster. I was using up my life just by worrying about it. It became a morbid fear. A fear of life. As far as I was concerned, the more exciting I allowed my life to become, the shorter it would be. At school I was excused from PE class because even the sight of the gym block gave me panic attacks." Realising how agitated he is getting, Anthony pauses, manages a self-deprecating laugh. "Stupid isn't it?" he says. "Thankfully I grew out of it years ago."

"Well, it's not stupid for some people," Joy says, poring over the pages. "I mean even if it's not real —"

"Of course it's not real," Anthony says. "I've just told you that. Jesus, it's like growing up with the Moonies or something. Eventually, you realize what's real and what's not, and put as much distance between you and it as you can."

Joy watches him carefully for a moment before replying. "I was about to say," she continues, her words measured, "even if it's not real, your mum obviously still believes in it. It's clearly important to her to have the book with her right now."

Anthony feels a burn of shame. Joy can always be depended on to focus on what's genuinely important. They've been together three years and he still can't work out how she managed to get close enough to fall in love with him, but he is constantly glad she did. "Sorry," he says. "Perhaps I haven't left it as far behind as I thought."

"Is this why you haven't told her yet?" she asks. "About our baby."

Anthony is suddenly weary. His limbs are fizzing, and it feels as if energy is draining out of him through his fingers and toes. "If I'm being honest," he says, "I think it's more to do with the fact I haven't spoken to her in anything more than a superficial way for years. I think I've forgotten how."

Joy's expression switches abruptly from sympathetic to vexed. "Ant, I know you're stressed, but don't do that here. Please," she says, handing him a crumpled tissue.

He is suddenly aware of the pocket knife doodling a design in the flesh of his palm. They both watch the blood well from the dangling spiral of sliced skin. He dabs the blood away with the tissue before it dribbles onto the table. When he removes the half-crimson tissue the wound has vanished.

"Well," Joy says, "it's clear you're going to live forever, whatever this book says. You're never sick, and you never get hurt. You don't drink, smoke or eat spicy food. And to cap it all your last four cars have all been Volvos." She shoots him a grin. "As for your healing thing, it's not the sort of thing you go asking a doctor to find a cure for." Noticing his discomfort, she squeezes his arm. "But don't worry, I still love you. Even if you've only got so many million breaths left in that indestructible body of yours."

The hospital garden is empty again. The bird is gone. Encroaching cloud blankets the sun, and a gusting breeze bullies litter across the grass. Anthony suppresses a shiver.

Joy has returned her attention to the book. "I have a question," she says. "Theoretically, once a baby's numbers have been calculated, can they be altered?"

"No, of course not. It's just meant to be a record." He's tired of this, wants to put it back in the past where it belongs, but she won't leave it alone.

"Because that's what's happened here. Look."

Anthony forces himself to look, and sees that it's true. Joy shows him the page for Letitia McAdam again. Sure enough, looking closely, underneath the soft slatey script can be discerned the faint outline of erased numerals. She flips the page. It is the same for each of the unfortunate siblings. In each case the visible totals apportioned to them appear to be fractions of what had originally been written. As Joy flips backwards towards the page for Letitia's mother, Anthony knows with a sudden chill what is coming. By the confusion of the indentations of erased digits, it seems that Morag McAdam's totals have been revised a number of times. The implication is clear. If the book were simply a record, the revised totals of the children's lives could be explained by an original estimate replaced by a more realistic total at the time of each infant's death. But the multiple extensions of the mother's life—could that be explained by coincidence?