The Gone-Away World (52 page)

It occurs to me that I may be in the bull's-eye of some kind of irony. Perhaps the noxious Stuff at Station 9 (slipping over my suit, into the cracks, touching my matter, infiltrating and co-opting me,
yuck
) has reacted with my guilt at being George Copsen's right hand in the operations room long ago. I started all this. Now I am living it. Sort of. Perhaps, by some trick not yet understood and by my own subconscious needs, I have Gone Away. Or half-gone, so that I can (and the taxonomist within is making a note for Grandma Wu of this new and exciting variation) experience the Personal Hell of Living Your Own Life from the Outside. People have forgotten me, and the world has rushed in from all sides to fill the gap I have left. Leah is chaste, Gonzo is innocent. I am my own ghost. The situation is not irretrievable.

It's a lovely idea.

It's a comforting lie.

I'm starting to see the truth. The truth is worse.

I look at Sally Culpepper—last hope. Her face is clean and cold. There is not one flicker of recognition in her eyes. If this were anyone else—if it was Samuel P. and Tommy Lapland, say, coming down the steps of some ghastly bordello and pulling iron on me on sight, I might believe that they were scared to talk to me, or guilty, and this was a dodge. Not Jim, who never backs away from the unpleasant, and never in front of Sally. The shame would kill him, to dissemble in the face of responsibility. And not Sally, in front of Jim, who must only ever see her perfect and composed. She cannot realise that it's her imperfections he loves: the bump in her arm where she broke it as a kid, the moment when she laughs mid-sip and snorts beer from her nose—which is why he doesn't propose. He is afraid of blemishing her.

“Sorry,” I say. “My mistake. I'm leaving now.”

And I back out, arms in the air. The Al Capone gun follows me to the door.

What the hell.

“James Vortigern Hepsobah,” I say, and it goes right into his face from all the way across the room, “you need to ask that woman to marry you. She's your beating heart and every drop of blood in your veins, but in the small dark hours before the dawn she worries maybe she's not enough. So stop being a prick and do the thing.”

And I walk out into the front garden having done at least that much.

.                           .                           .

I
N MOVIES
it's cool to be the Man With No Name. You get all manner of female attention and you're somehow more dangerous than everyone around you. You have no past, and a mysterious destiny awaits you. All very exciting. But I've never wanted a destiny. I was happy with having a life. And while, in movies, having no identity is a noble grief which brings profundity and romance to the hero, in real life it's just a cold, sad place with no horizon. Plus also, if my life were a movie, my dog at least would remember me. When all about me were staring at me in blank incomprehension, and some piece of well-chosen Sibelius was emphasising my pain, the simple, loyal canine would trot out of my old house and demand to be a part of my adventures, for good or ill, and no doubt would save my life in the last reel. Of course, I don't have a dog. Gonzo has a dog.

All of a sudden I think I understand Annie the Ox's puppet head collection.

I go back to the mime mobile. Ike Thermite doesn't remember me from the Ace of Thighs, when I ask. He remembers a whole bunch of us, but not me in particular. I don't tell him that I'm wondering if I've Gone Away (revised version) and I don't speculate on the Other Possibility either. Instead, I ask him if he would mind taking a detour from his itinerary to go see Malevolent Pete. Pete may not remember me either, but this is completely normal. Pete does not acknowledge customers as anything other than annoying people who bring him work which shouldn't need to be done and pay late. But Pete has my one remaining friend boarding with him, and I want to go see her, touch her (to make sure she's real) and ask her to come along. Otherwise I will go mad.

The thing which sets Malevolent Pete aside from humanity as a whole is his tininess. It's not that he's especially short. There are many short men who are also nice, and many who are not afflicted with what the French call Napoléon's syndrome and the descendants of the Golden-Eared Bey refer to as Mustafa's colic. They go about their business and have no urge to dominion or empire, probably because they have been raised successfully to believe that being short is an advantage, predisposes one to be an acrobat, looks better on celluloid, fits into Italian sports cars, and doesn't bang one's head when having sex in the lower bunk bed. Malevolent Pete is otherwise. He has made his loathing of height into a definition. He is not so much short as antitall. He stands out in a group of people because he is belligerently, loomingly short. He brings his anti-tallness to everything he does; his lean, agitated face is a map to the town of Bad-Tempered Git. He is obsessed with measurement. Specifically, with measuring his own superiority. There are no errors in Pete's garage. He has analysed them into extinction. He kept lists and tallies, re-organised and re-examined, performed complex genealogical investigations of failure, and fired two hundred and thirty-one assistant mechanics in four years.

In Pete's garage there are no compromises and no substitutions. He releases your vehicle when it is ready, or not at all. He warns you not to slip the gears unless you want a new box in a month, and if you bring the thing in stripped, he will take the keys from you in a way which makes you feel like you're grounded and in disgrace. He tuts better than any other person alive. He does not embellish his bills—they are exacting, and written in perfect unjoined print. Each letter is the image of the others of its own kind, no bigger, no smaller. No deviation is possible, let alone permitted. The workshop is clean, except in those specific areas where oil and grease are tolerated and necessary, and these are marked with yellow and black chevrons. Safety procedures are followed. Hard hats are worn. Pink and blue slips make their way to you inexorably through the system to Purchasing and Tallies respectively, while the
goldenrod
pages (this is the proper name of the yellow slips, and therefore the name used in Malevolent Pete's garage) go through Pete's in-tray to his self-invented filing system, which allows him to backstop, check and recheck everything, and also monitor his employees and their working patterns by checking the time stamps on each one. The last time Pete was audited he sent two suits back to Haviland City holding their slide rules and whimpering, because he caught two errors and a fudge in their calculations in the scant forty-nine minutes they were there.

Pete may or may not be God's own mechanic. He never swears, and he absolutely will not cheat. He is perfection as viewed through the lens of precision. On the other hand he thinks
caritas
is a branded cola. God comes in a variety of flavours, but almost all of them would be offended by something about this hatchet-faced little squit with his blunt certainty and his sneering ungenerosity. To Malevolent Pete, there is one hell, and this is it: that he lends us these vehicles we own, and we take them away and do irresponsible things like drive them through muck and dust, and he has to take them back all dinged up and make them work so that we can torture them again. That we pay for this service is not relevant; Pete would have work whatever the circumstances, his fame is ubiquitous in the Livable Zone. The point is that we make unnecessary problems for him, which are measurable on a graph showing Reasonable Wear & Tear vs. Actual Necessary Repairs. We are reckless, one and all, and he is like a triage doctor in a war zone, patching men up so they can get injured again. Except that these are trucks, big dumb lugs, and they are far more important and vulnerable than a man could ever be. Narrow eyes survey me from his narrow face, and a precise amount of speculative disapproval is unwrapped and prepared for use.
Disapproval, anticipated,
x i from stores.

“What do you want?” Narrow mouth moving just enough to form words, main hand still making notes, because time is, if not money, at least time, and there's no point wasting it. Indeed, there's probably paperwork for non-chargeable units. Pete would be an impossible boss. He hires no one who is not utterly subordinate. If ever I am king of the world, I will make sure, absolutely sure, that there is not one single Pete in my government. If Pete cared about anything other than trucks and precision, he'd be a monster. As it is, he's just an elemental of the internal combustion engine.

“I ride with Gonzo. Shotgun seat.”

“Never seen you.”

“I try not to get in the way.” And this appears to be the right thing to say, because Malevolent Pete nods in a way which suggests I have been degraded from Threat to Nuisance, and Nuisance is a broad category which includes Paying Customer. He parks the pen. I show him my company badge, one of the few things recovered by K from the sad little bundle of bloody rags which were my good shirt and trousers, in the aftermath of Gonzo's radical reconceptualisation of my outfit and my body. stakeholder, it says, because I am. Stakeholders are permitted access to company equipment. It's in the charter. Pete knows it. So now I am downgraded still further to Legitimate Nuisance, and we're all friends, to whatever extent Malevolent Pete accepts that classification. His left hand, which has been idly tapping the bench near a big wrench (
hand-to-hand combat, for use in,
x i), snaps to his side as he stands up.

“What do I call you?” he demands, not asking my name but what name he's going to use on the paperwork, because Malevolent Pete does not need superfluous information in his life. The formalities are obeyed. He cannot be reproached. I think about it, and since I'm currently not anyone in particular, and it seems to be in vogue, I tell him “K,” and he writes down Kaye as a surname. I do not correct him, and he does not check. We walk together to the main workshop.

“Number thirty-seven,” I remind him, and he nods without answering.

Our old truck—
my
truck—is in bay 37. It is big and ugly. Not even Pete's garage can get the thing entirely clean. The dirt is part of the paintwork. The pipes are not chromed. I found it—“her”—in a burned-out barn when we were still working out of Piper 90, and spent the whole summer taking it apart and putting it back together. The seats are leatherette, and they have holes in them from where someone has driven a ballpoint pen through the fabric. There are little scribbles around the edges, in the shape of flowers and faces and human genital organs. There's no tape player and no air-con, but there's a rifle clip over the wheel and the engine absolutely will not quit until you have got where you're going.

Annabelle, the truck. My last old friend in the world.

I sign Pete's chitty (press hard; blue and pink and goldenrod must be clear, and Pete has added carbon paper so that he has a white copy for me and a clear copy for his new microfiche system), and he walks away without saying goodbye or thank you. Pete does not do customer relations. I run my fingers over the steering wheel.

Voiceless Dragon
gong fu
is a soft style. The relaxed muscles and receptive mind allow you to follow your opponent's movements, react to his tensions before his strikes are executed. You strive to retain contact, learn him, understand him, so that you own him. Experimenting with this doctrine during Ronnie Cheung's advanced tactical (and strategic) driving course, I established that it is possible to learn an inanimate object too, so that you can—for example—read the road through the wheels of a vehicle, know the surface and the conditions. It's what I was doing in K's Airstream. It is infinitely easier if you know the vehicle concerned. At that point the steel and rubber around you is an extension of your body into the world. Feel that? That's a pebble on the left wing. Wind speed? Twenty to twenty-five, coming from (assuming the battered chrome mandala on the front of the truck is zero degrees) bearing oh three five. Right now, in the garage, there's a man leaning on the rear fender, and it's probably Ike Thermite. It's not Pete, whose touch is angular and invasive; it's someone quiet and subtle, someone who flexes and listens with his hands. An acrobat or a scholar. Ike Thermite is both, of course. Wu Shenyang would have liked him.

Ike opens the passenger door.

“Where we going, cowboy?” He's found a mime to drive his bus, a woman named Lianne who specialises in a sort of combination of tightrope and dance; they roll her along poles and ladders as if she were a beach ball, and she emerges at each end looking fuddled and swaying, and then some accident propels her back along another pole, another impossible, gravity-defying tumble. It's great for slapstick routines. Lianne has fabulous balance and depth perception, and is almost totally impossible to rattle. Exactly the sort of person you want to entrust your driving to. In the meantime, Ike is coming with me. It's weird, having him sitting there in my seat while I sit in Gonzo's. I feel a vertiginous, cliff-edge lurch: the strange, inverted desire to do the worst imaginable thing. In the case of a cliff, of course, it's to jump; here it is to become like Gonzo, to reach for a gun and pepper him with bullets. I shunt it back into the mad and bad section of my subconscious, where it belongs.

I rev the engine. Annabelle growls tunelessly, like a bear hibernating on a bassoonist.

“Home,” I tell him. “Cricklewood Cove.”

Ike Thermite looks at me curiously. Once again, he's got that face going on, the one which says there's things happening here he ought to know more about. I probably ought to know too.

“You've been there?” I ask him.

Ike Thermite shrugs. “Heard of it,” he says.

I take Annabelle off the leash.

.                           .                           .