The Gone-Away World (4 page)

And then it was over. Deal done. Job on. I sidled over to Sally and murmured in her ear.

“So, before Dickwash showed up . . .”

“Hm.”

“Phone call.”

“Yes.”

“Wrong number?”

Sally shook her head. “I lied,” she murmured, just as quiet. “It was a woman. Didn't know her.”

“What did she say?”

“She said not to take the job.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes,” Sally said. “She asked for you, in particular.”

And Sally didn't say “Keep your eyes open” because she knew me, and that was fine. She nodded once and took the keys to her new truck from the pencilneck's unresisting fingers.

Sally and Jim in the first rig, me and Gonzo in the second, Tommy Lapland and Roy Roam in the third, and on to the back of the line. Twenty of us, two to a cab, ten trucks of bad hair, denim and spurs, with Tobemory Trent wearing his special-occasions eyepatch bringing up the rear. Trent was from Preston, born and bred in pork pie country with coal dust in his blood. He lost that eye in the Go Away War, had it taken out in a hurry so he wouldn't die or worse. Trent spat on the road and roared, Captain goddam Ahab of the new highways, harpoon rack over the driver's seat in case of trouble. He vaulted into the big chair and slammed the door hard enough to make the rig rock, and there was only one really important thing left to do. Sally and the pencilneck shook hands, Sally turned to look at us from the running board of her truck and there we were, proud and wired and dumb with eighteen-wheel delight. And Gonzo William Lubitsch of Cricklewood Cove, five foot eleven and broad like a Swiss Alp, dropped his trousers and pissed on our front right tyre for luck. Annie the Ox and Egon Schlender hollered and hallooed from number six, and Gonzo dropped his shorts too, exposing a muscular arse in their direction, then leaped into the truck and punched the starter. I had my feet on the dash and I was sending up a tiny prayer to the God who ruled my personal heaven.

Lord, I want to come home.

M
OSTLY
when we left the Nameless Bar, we headed westwards along the Pipe. Exmoor was a mile or so south of the main trunk road, and the mountains kicked up funny weather, so eighty or ninety miles in the other direction was one of the pinch points in the Zone where you paid close attention to the people you saw in case they weren't really people at all. Every so often, traders came through town, and there was a special guesthouse in the back of the Nameless Bar where Flynn put the ones he wasn't sure about. It was comfortable and safe, but it was further from his family. Flynn's a decent man, but a cautious one.

This time, we went east, very fast. Bone Briskett's tank was the kind with wheels which can do a decent speed, and he was getting everything he could out of it and asking for more. We drove through the night, and either they'd cleared the road or no one was coming the other way. We hurtled through a steep-sided valley and on along the pinch. The wind was blowing in our favour, off the mountains and away, but even so you could see a broad misty curtain to the south, maybe five miles distant, strange shadows twisting and turning. In a few miles, we could turn left, under the Pipe, and there was a loop of road which would bring us north-eastwards fast. I waited. We didn't take it.

Instead we drove on, and on, and on, and the dawn was building in the sky, and I started to get that feeling which says “Be ready” because there was one route out here which would bring us over towards Haviland City and full onto a big thick section of the main Pipe. It was an old road, and it would get us there damn fast, but we'd never taken it before because it went through Drowned Cross. I nudged Gonzo and he glanced at me, then shrugged. Drowned Cross was bad country, the far edge of the Border. That was why it was empty, and dead.

We rolled out onto a flat meadow, and there was no more desert. A wide green plain stretched into the distance in front of us, cut by a grey line like a dowager's eyebrow which departed from the main trunk and headed south. Bone Briskett's tank took the corner without slowing, and Gonzo tutted—whether at this haste or at our destination, I didn't know, but I could feel him paying more attention, looking at narrow places on the road and measuring them with his eyes, checking the escort and wondering whether they were good enough.

Right after the Reification and the Go Away War, there was a period of what you might call undue optimism. One particular town was built with two fingers up to the recent past, first of a new breed of bright, safe places where we could all get on with real life again, pay tax and worry about our hairlines and middle-aged spread, and is the guy next door flouting the hosepipe ban during the summer heat? They called it Heyerdahl Point, and they sold it as an adventure in neo-suburban frontiersmanship. About five thousand people lived there. It had its own little capillary of the Jorgmund Pipe making it secure, and it perched on a hilltop so the people there could look down on the valleys below, and out into the dangerous mists of the unreal, and know that they were pushing back the boundary just by being here.

“One day,” they could say to one another over decaf, “all this will be fields.”

Now it was called Drowned Cross.

We came around a curve, and there it was, tucked up on its little hill and dark and empty as your dog's kennel after you take him to the vet and say goodbye. The road went straight to it, and so did Bone Briskett, and so did we. Drowned Cross got bigger but no lighter, jagged and sprawling across the sky. The big broken tooth over the whole place was the church spire, and the rough-edged thing it had fallen against was the town clock, stuck at five fifteen for evermore. The houses were clean and pale, with terracotta roofs. The windows were unbroken. A couple of cars were parked neatly in the main square, and one had the door open; the kind of town where you left the keys in the ignition while you bought your paper. Birds flew up out of the sunroof as we went by, grey and black pigeons with mad pigeon eyes. One of them was too stupid to dodge in the right direction and bounced off the windscreen. Or maybe the others had pushed him—it's not hard to believe in murder among pigeons. Gonzo swore. The stunned bird tumbled away and lay in the road. If it was still there when Samuel P. came by, he'd drive right over it.

No one really knew what had happened in Drowned Cross. There weren't any survivors. No one showed up, addled and desperate, at the next town along the way; no lonely shepherd saw the whole thing from an adjoining hill. Whatever it was, it made no noise, in the grand scheme, and left no image of itself. Something came up out of the unreal and swallowed the place. Perhaps the hill under Drowned Cross eats villages. I heard a story once, on the radio, in which a group of sailors cast adrift came at last to an island where they moored for the night. They had not expected land, so far off course and bewildered by foreign stars; they had anticipated thirst and madness. They wept and kissed the ground and lit a fire to cook their supper, and at last fell into a fitful sleep. Of course, in the middle of the night they woke to a dreadful howling, and the isle on which they stood began to shake, and then great, boneless arms reached from the water to snatch at them, and they realised they had sought refuge on the back of some horrid monster of the deep.

I loved cautionary tales like that when I was a child, but sitting with Gonzo and looking down on the clean, vacant houses of Drowned Cross, I kept thinking of clams slurped with garlic sauce, and the shells thrown back into the bowl. What had happened there was nasty, plain and simple, and there'd been others, since. In the still hours of the night-time in houses all around the Pipe, people woke, and listened, and were afraid of things from beyond the Border. Somebody out there ate towns, whole, and went on his way. People said it was the Found Thousand. I hoped that wasn't true.

The Cross itself—our road and the other one, the east–west road which went through the town and headed out into what they all figured would be the next slice of reclaimed land—was on the far side of the square. We went slowly, partly because the cobbles were slick with dew, and partly because you don't squeal your tyres in a graveyard, no matter how much you want to leave. Something glimmered in the dust where the roads met: a silvered piece of metal engraved with what could have been a new moon or a bowl of soup with a spoon in it. It looked expensive, and I wondered how long it had sat there. Since the day Drowned Cross got its name, most likely. It could have been a cuff link, or a bracelet. It seemed sad that someone was missing it—maybe it was one of two, and he still had the other one—and then I felt guilty and crass because whoever owned it was almost certainly dead, and his missing watchstrap whojimmy wasn't bugging him any more.

And then, as swiftly as it had come upon us, it was gone. A small place, after all. Gonzo turned the wheel, bringing the truck in a wide, powerful turn, and the last empty cottage vanished behind us. Bone Briskett's tank went roaring out ahead, and Gonzo rapped his hands on the wheel,
papapapahhh!

“The open road!” I shouted into the radio.

“Oh, ecstasy!” cried Jim Hepsobah and Sally Culpepper.

“Oh, poop-poop!” yelled Gonzo Lubitsch.

Bone Briskett didn't say anything, but he said it in a way which made it clear he thought we were mad.

Please, dear Lord.

I want to come home.

Chapter Two

At home with kid Gonzo;
donkeys, girls, and first meetings.

I
T'S
time to eat,” Ma Lubitsch says, a broad expanse of apron topped by a summit of greasy peanut-coloured hair. Old Man Lubitsch doesn't hear over the buzzing of his hives, or he doesn't care to join us, because his baggy white figure remains out in the yard, tottering from one prefab bee house to another with a can of wispy smoke. Ma Lubitsch makes a noise like a whale clearing its blowhole and sets out knives and forks, the delaminating edge of the table pushing into her belly. Gonzo's mother is big enough that she takes up two seats in church and once near-killed a burglar with a rolled-up colour supplement. Gonzo himself, still able to count his years without resorting to two hands, has his father's more sparing construction.

One of my first memories, in all the world: Gonzo, only a few months before, staring into my face with a stranger's concern. He has been playing a game of indescribable complexity, by himself, in the corner of the playground. He has walked from one end of the sandpit to the other and rendered it flat in a particular place, and he has marked borders and bridges and areas of diffusion and lines of demarcation and now he needs another player and cannot find one. And so he turns to look about him and sees a small, lost child: alone in a moment of unfathomable grief. With presence of mind he directs his mother's attention to the crisis, and she trundles over and asks immediately what is the matter and am I hurt and where are my parents and where is my home? And to these questions I have no answer. All I know is that I am crying.

Gonzo answers the disaster by approaching the white ice-cream truck at the far gate, purchasing there a red, rocket-shaped ice with a sticky centre, and this he hands me with great solemnity. Ten minutes later, by the alchemy of sugar and artificial flavours and the security they represent, I have joined Gonzo's incomprehensible game and am winning—though perhaps he is going easy on me—and my tears are dry and crusty on my smock. During a momentary ceasefire, Gonzo informs me that this afternoon I may come to his house and meet his father, who is wise beyond measure, and partake of his mother's cooking, which is unequalled among mortal men, and even feed biscuits to the Lubitsch donkeys, whose coats are more glossy and whose eyes are more lambent than any other donkeys in all the wide world of donkey-kind. Ma Lubitsch, watching from a small distance, recognises by the instinctual knowledges of an expat Polish mother that her family has grown by one, and is not perturbed.

In her oven gloves and enveloping apron, Ma Lubitsch gazes through the French windows a bit longer, but Gonzo's father is now chasing a single errant bee around the hives with the smoke gun. Political dissent among the bee houses is not permitted. Ma Lubitsch makes a seesaw turn, stepping from one foot to the other once, twice, three times to bring herself back to the table to dish up, swearing the while in muttered Polish. The infant Gonzo, mighty with filial affront, dashes out to rebuke and retrieve the Old Man; I follow more slowly, five years of age and cautious with brief experience; appearances deceive. Honest faces lie and big boats sink where small ones ride out the gale. But ask me how I know, and I will not be able to tell you.

“Ma says lunch,” Kid Gonzo says firmly. Old Man Lubitsch holds up a single gloved hand, a sinner lost to apiarism, requesting indulgence. The bee is on the flagstone in front of him, presumably coughing. It appears for a moment that Gonzo will stamp on it, rid himself of this impediment to family harmony, but his father is fast for all that his face looks like faded wool, or maybe it is just that Old Man Lubitsch understands the value of strategic positioning: he swoops, his body blocking Gonzo's line of attack, and, lifting the bee in gentle fingers, he pops it into hive number three.

“Lunch,” Old Man Lubitsch agrees, and for a moment I believe he smiles at me.

We return to the house, but Gonzo's mother is not mollified. Things are strained. They have been strained since before I arrived, since Gonzo's older brother Marcus went to soldier, and neglected to duck on some forgotten corner of a foreign field that is forever Cricklewood Cove. Lunch is Ma Lubitsch's small white witchery, her article of faith—if she can provide Gonzo with hearty nutrition and a solid, dependable centre, he will be well-fitted to the world. He will conquer, he will survive, he will feel no need to seek adventure. He will not leave her. For Ma Lubitsch, lunch defies death. Old Man Lubitsch, however, knows that sometimes, for reasons which are obscure even to bees, the hive must disgorge its children and see them set upon the wind. And so he prepares for the moment when this son either finds a queen and starts a family, or flies and flies until he cannot continue and falls to the dirt to become once again a part of the mossy meadow carpet all around.

Ma Lubitsch doesn't speak to her husband during the meal. She doesn't speak from the first potato to the last flake of chocolate icing, and she doesn't speak over coffee, and she doesn't speak as Gonzo removes himself to the creek to fish. It seems that she will never speak to him again, but when I return unannounced for a forgotten tackle box, I glimpse her, the enormous body racked with sobs, cradled in the arms of her tiny mate. Old Man Lubitsch is singing to her in the language of the old country, and his shadowed, sharp little eyes lay omertà upon me, dark and deep;
these are secrets between men, boy, between the true men of the heart.
I know it. I understand.

It is this image which comes to mind later whenever Gonzo is about to embark on some act of unconsidered heroism: a bird-like man in white overalls lending his strength to a shattered mountain.

Gonzo fishes. He catches two tiddlers of uncertain species, and throws them back when they appear unhappy. I never tell him what I have seen, and when I turn around, five years have passed.

G
ONZO
L
UBITSCH
at ten: a ringmaster and a daredevil, he leads with the chin, gets back on the horse, hates rules and is the object of a thousand crushes. Lydia Copsen holds hands with him in public, making Gonzo the most envied boy in the region, though none of us is able to source our bitter disappointment, and collectively we put it down to the fact that Lydia's mother is free with her sweet jar. Lydia is a tiny, imperious girl, proud owner of a selection of dresses with fruit patterns on them. She is also, it is clear to me from this distance, the daughter of Satan and the Wife of Bath. By turns haughty and adoring, Lydia dishes out featherlight kisses with an instinctive political acumen, and she deploys her ready access to confectionery to create a powerful and loyal clique of girls who yield secrets and obeisance to their mistress of the watermelon frock. At nine years of age, Lydia Copsen is somewhere between a tabloid editor and a Beverly Hills madam. Her admiration for Gonzo is matched only by her scorn for me, but Gonzo, loyal friend, will not ditch me, and thus I am gooseberry on their daily walks around the playground, and chaperone as he escorts her home. At Lydia's insistence, I walk ten paces behind them, but here she scores her own goal, because my only wish is to be as far from the loving couple as possible.

It is around this time that I lose, absolutely, my faith in a merciful deity, through the agency of the headmistress of our school. Her
real
name is the Evangelist, and it is thus that God and his angels and Yahweh and his angels and Allah and his angels and all the other gods of the world and their angels, demons, avatars, servitors, minions and mugwumps know her, and it is thus that she is inscribed in the hundred lists of the living and the dead that they all carry around like so many celestial bookkeepers. She masquerades, however, as Mrs. Assumption Soames, of the Warren, Cricklewood Cove, where she is headmistress of the eponymous Soames School for the Children of Townsfolk. She is small and slim at an age which has never been disclosed, but any child with access to a Bible (and all children at the Soames School have plentiful, even overwhelming, access to Bibles) would confidently date her from the tenth chapter of the Book of Genesis as coming somewhere between Aram and Lud. It is rumoured among the brave and foolish who speculate on such matters that she may be as old as fifty. Mr. Soames, whose father's father's father founded the school, died sometime back of a marsh fever, and the tacit consensus among the parents is that it was with a considerable sense of relief. Mr. Brabasen even suggested that Mr. Soames's sole intention in his frequent and prolonged fishing trips to the darkest and most pungent area of the Cricklewood Fens was to infect himself with said disease, a virulent virus which in 80 per cent of cases claimed either the victim's hearing or his life, either sad outcome being, in Mr. Brabasen's opinion, reason enough for Mr. Soames to seek it out.

If Assumption Soames's nickname sounds sophisticated for our infant wit, the reason is that it originates among the teachers, a flea-bitten and secular motley of brilliant minds culled from institutions too prissy to put up with their foibles. To the Evangelist, these weaknesses are burdens given by Providence along with their gifts to test their metal. In accordance with the perfect wisdom of the divine plan, failure in these trials serves only to bring them into her healing and censorious arms so that they can teach her charges and atone and learn restraint. More than one of them has a nervous collapse during my time at school, and at least one of those surviving is heavily medicated purely as a result of Gonzo's inventive deployment of a thirty-foot spool of number seven line, a plastic skull and a ragged horse blanket. For all this, they're a solid lot, and despite the Evangelist they push the educational boat out further than they otherwise might. Mr. Clisp the gambler teaches us not only mathematics but also materialist ethics, setting logic puzzles on the board which appear to be value-neutral but which, when resolved, condemn the vituperative harridan in ringing tones. He also explains the rudiments of poker and the business of making book. Ms. Poynter (whose precise sin is whispered to involve negotiated services of a physical nature) includes in her biology classes a smattering of first aid and natural history, and also sexual education of increasing sophistication as the years pass, so that by the age of ten we can recite a list of erogenous zones and appreciate the difference between primary and secondary sexual characteristics in humans, and by the onset of puberty no one is in fear about the inevitable swellings and expulsions. Later, Ms. Poynter is temporarily relieved of duty by the Evangelist before the Board of Governors can object to her decision to teach a class on sexual technique to the girls and impart a stern lecture on mores and self-restraint to the boys (spiced with a brief but memorable digression on the theory and practice of cunnilingus). Mary Jane Poynter takes two weeks in Hawaii with Addison McTiegh, the PE teacher, and both of them return quieter and less twitchy and when the exam results come in with a near-perfect pass rate, the Evangelist elects not to fire her on the condition that no more parents are given cause to complain. The Board, who would for the most part have liked to see Ms. Poynter burned at some form of wooden upright, are too busy battling the Evangelist's blazing determination to ban on religious grounds several of the texts students are required to study that year.
Gulliver's Travels
survives the scissors, as does
A Christmas Carol,
but
Modern Short Stories in English
is consigned for ever to the forbidden zone. Sadly, it is so dull that not even this recommendation can make any of us read it more than once.

My loss of faith is sudden, and it's not so much a conversion as a reappraisal. Children are still modelling the world, still understanding how it works; their convictions are malleable, like their bones. Thus, I experience no sudden horrible wrench as my belief is uprooted, but rather a feeling like the right pair of glasses being put in front of my face after some time wearing someone else's. The Evangelist brings me to her study to tell me off for one of Gonzo's outrages, and I sit waiting for a higher power to intervene and tell her that it isn't my fault. I look upward, naturally, to the place above my hairline where adults come from, the place where, broadly speaking, heads can be found and persons in authority exert their will in the name of justice. There is no one there. It is unclear in my mind whether I am looking for God in person or a more earthly parent as his instrument, but neither appears. The Evangelist adds a charge of “rolling your eyes at me” to the sheet, and I spend a week in detention after school. Gonzo is mysteriously unwell for the period, with a vile sore throat which is probably infectious but doesn't stifle his ability to loaf, and which Lydia Copsen also develops. They convalesce a great deal together, feet touching under the blanket as they sit at opposite ends of the sofa and choke abominably.

Spring becomes summer, summer becomes autumn, and Gonzo and his beloved part company over her inability to comprehend the importance of muddy walks and frantic leaf-kicking. She takes the opportunity to inform him that she went with him only to gain access to his parents' donkeys, to which Gonzo responds that the donkeys loathe her, despise her silly hair and stupid upturned nose, and they have asked him, by means of sign language, to convey to her their deepest and most unalterable disdain for her opinions in all matters of consequence. Thus avenged, the wretched girl departing in a frozen fury, Gonzo retires to the riverbank and we fish in silence, and this time Gonzo catches a decent-sized trout with his new rod, although it is left to me to kill the creature and present it to Ma Lubitsch, who dutifully guts and cooks it for dinner. Though fortunately it is served alongside a more enjoyable dish of meatloaf.

Gonzo is not the only person with relationship issues. At Old Man Lubitsch's insistence, we sit in Ma Lubitsch's parlour one night in lone-some October, watching the world have something of a tizzy. Ma Lubitsch's television is very much a curiosity—a wood-panelled thing with chunky buttons which whines and gutters alarmingly and occasionally overheats and has to have a rest. But on the screen, all the same, are more people than I have ever seen in one place, and half of them appear to be very pleased about something and the other half extremely cross, and neither side has a great deal of patience about it. Old Man Lubitsch explains that this is normal in what is called
politics,
which is essentially the business of countries and big groups of people trying to make everyone see things their way. Since no one ever does, very little is achieved and practitioners are voted out and others voted in who reverse the process, so government (as Old Man Lubitsch explains it) is not so much a journey as a series of emergency stops and arguments over which way up to hold the map.