The rain came down so hard it had real weight, beating my head and shoulders into a flinch, pouring heavy over my waterlogged clothes and streaming in flukes from my hood and from my elbows and from the bottom of my coat. Hard, heavy, roaring and angry. It was difficult to see. I brought a hand up to shield my eyes but this created a new shelf and a flow of fresh rivulets were soon throw-twisting themselves off the ends of my fingers and curling their way under my hood to run down my cheeks and chin. I struggled to blink away as much water I could.
Then I saw what was out there, and it staggered me.
God
, my lips said. The word was stillborn and tiny and bundled away in a sweep of the gale.
I’d been hoping the gateway might belong to an old house, the Willows Hotel according to my map, but it didn’t. I’d left the road too early or too late; this was the entrance to a park, not a driveway. Everything beyond the gateposts was furious: a river gone gigantic and deformed and crazy, banks burst and out on a greedy, rolling brown rampage. The size and force of it overloaded me, made me sick and dizzy. A
too muchness
.
My rain-blinking eyes struggled back from the flow and down to my feet. The water around my boots was peaty-brown and alive too, I realised. No boundaries. The river was here and reaching and grabbing and actually pulling at my feet and calves with a beautiful, mindless ache. A willpower in pressure. The river wanting to drag me off and smash me up and remake me as part of its pointless and stupidly powerful and passionate drive to change and obliteration.
Caught there, caught in that second of realisation and awareness, when
everything came into quick focus and this thing, this
event
I’d stumbled into was all around me and instant and real, I wanted it to happen. I wanted to let my knees buckle. Let my shoulders slump, just let it all go – fall forwards, down and finally, thankfully, out. This monster river could take me away and unknot me and spread me out however it wanted and however it liked because, honestly, finally, I just felt so fucking tired of endless hours of doing my shitty best to cling my component parts together as a human being. I wanted to pile up and silt-slide, wrap around the trunks of trees, a lost nothing of unthinking debris and high watermarks. Just to be all the way empty, just be all the way gone.
Seconds passed.
I sucked in a lungful of air and let it leak out – slow, wet and steamy. I took a heavy but careful step back against the wanting of the water. After a moment steadying myself, I took another, and then another. I turned, slowly, very slowly and very carefully, and began to make some progress back towards the yellow Jeep.
A cat is a responsibility after all. And feeding and keeping and caring about a stupid fat cat isn’t much, isn’t much in the entirety of what counts for being a person and the huge range of
what people do
, but it is something. It is something and it’s something that’s warm and that I still have.
I stood in the hotel lobby, backpacker’s rucksack slung over one shoulder, the cat carrier in the opposite hand. The warmth of indoors burned at the rain-sting on my cheeks and forehead, flood water leaked out at my feet. I had a strange feeling of the heat driving it out. The brown river water spreading flat and urgeless from me now – dying, or already dead.
Climate change.
“My God, have you ever seen the like? We’ve started work on an ark out the back.” The reception counter was quite high, but she must have
been very short or sitting unworkably low; it hid everything from her chin down. “And flood warnings on the radio, John said the water’s high enough to take cars away now.
Cars
. You wouldn’t want to be down in the valley now.”
“No,” I said, dripping. “I was down there, it’s pretty wild.”
“Really?” she grew half an inch through pure neck-crane. “Is it like they’re saying?
Cars?”
She was maybe early fifties, hot ginger hair, bright eyes and red generator cheeks powering a big-hearted but trouble-causing sort of a mouth.
An operatic mouth
, I thought,
big and decent
.
I’ve got good at faces.
The first step is to see
.
“Well, I missed your turning,” I said. “It was a bit touch-and-go.”
“Oh, love.” She gave me a tough guy’s smile. “And look at him too. We don’t normally take pets. John, John’s my husband, he doesn’t like animals, but it’s not like we can send you back out there tonight, is it?”
The last part wasn’t addressed to me.
“Thanks. He’s very grateful,” I said, looking down at the cat-carrier. “Aren’t you?”
From her laugh I knew the cat was still glaring out of his carry case, a big fat
fuck off
expression all over his face. “Well, anyway,” I said. “I’m grateful enough for both of us.”
“Don’t you worry, love, twenty-five years I’ve been with him,” she nodded her head to the rear of the building before turning back to smile at the cat. “Maybe the two of you’ll get along after all.” Then, to me with a wink, “Have you and smiler come a long way?”
“Further than I can remember,” I said.
Further than I can remember
. Pushing on the walls, rattling the handle. Testing myself. Testing myself and passing – not the slightest of bumps registered in the world. No slight widening of the eyes, no slight reddening of the cheeks, slight twitch of the mouth, slight pull of the scalp, not a single twist of blood in the water, nothing at all.
Further than I can remember,
I said, and nobody felt the pothole we’d travelled over.
I smiled. “He’s like a permanent attachment.”
She nodded, happy with that, then caught herself. “Oh, but would you look. I’m sorry, love, here’s me going on while you’ve both been out there in God-knows-what. You’ll want to get checked in and get those soaking clothes off, won’t you?” Her head disappeared then reappeared along with a hand holding a printed sheet of paper. “It’s only a straightforward form, it shouldn’t keep you long.”
I squelched to the desk, dropped the bag, put the cat down next to the phone, pushed up my coatsleeve to try to control the dripping then swivelled the paperwork to face me. She passed over a pen and I reached to accept it. Now I could see; she wasn’t short, she
was
sitting down. She was in a wheelchair. The cat didn’t look impressed.
“Old Ironside, that’s me,” she told the cat, “but you can call me Aunty Ruth if you’re going to be good while you’re here. What’s your name, cheerful?”
I looked up from the form. “His name’s Ian.”
Her eyebrows dropped and bunched just for a second, then were chased back up by a breezy grin.
It’s hurtful and wonderful how our jokes survive us.
Since I left home on this journey, I’ve thought a lot about this – how a big part of any life is about the hows and whys of setting up machinery. It’s building systems, devices, motors. Winding up the clockwork of direct debits, configuring newspaper deliveries and anniversaries and photographs and credit card repayments and anecdotes. Starting their engines, setting them in motion and sending them chugging off into the future to do their thing at regular or irregular intervals. When a person leaves or dies or ends, they leave an afterimage; their outline in the devices they’ve set up around them. The image fades to the winding down of springs, the slow running out of fuel as the machines of a life lived in certain ways in certain places and from certain angles are shut down or seize up or blink off one by one. It takes time. Sometimes, you come across the dusty lights or electrical hum of someone else’s machine, maybe a long time after you ever expected to, still running, lonely in the dark. Still
doing its thing for the person who started it up long, long after they’ve gone.
A man lives so many different lengths of time
.
A man
is
so many different lengths of time.
Change. Collapse. Reinvention.
The cat twitched his ear.
I passed the completed form to Aunty Ruth.
“Well, it’s a pleasure to have you, Ian and –” she looked down at the form – “Mr Richardson.”
“Mark. Call me Mark,” I said, leaning over the desk, holding out my hand and getting all of it, the whole Mark Richardson act, just right. I glanced to the front door and hitched the smile up one side of my face. “Believe me, it’s a pleasure to have made it.”
My room was small, functional but very clean – the kind of domestic clean that feels almost scrubbed raw. The thought crossed my mind that Aunty Ruth might be the kind of woman who would spit on a hankie and rub it very hard against the side of your mouth.
Ian jumped out of his box the second I turned the clasp and settled on the chest of drawers with his back to the radiator, half-open eyes fixed on me, left ear making sweep scans of the small space behind him.
I checked through the inside pockets of my drenched coat. It was worse than I’d thought – the letters were all ruined.
Every pocket offered up an elastic band-bound handful of lumpy pulp, each one on the verge of coming apart like dough and shot through with black spots of print, blue ink veins. I’d not been in the downpour very long, but with that volume of water it had obviously been long enough. Too, too long. My outer camouflage, my conceptual flak jacket was useless.
Shit
. No, not critical, but I’d be flying on three engines until the letters were replaced. Still, it wasn’t like I didn’t have other tools, other defences; my assumed identity was still rock solid. I’d proved that to myself again in
the lobby only fifteen minutes earlier.
A real job of work
. But losing the letters did mean tightroping without a safety net, swimming without armbands. And I was tired. Taking no chances, I started to set up the Dictaphones.
The little tape players tinny-chattered away to themselves in the corners of the room, at the edges of my thoughts. As I stripped off the wet clothes, I let the essence of Mark Richardson slip off my face and out of my body with a series of deep, purging breaths. I allowed my movements to become blank and then slowly to change, my hands and arms and shoulders finding their old state and stretch and rhythm. I pulled my face around its natural expressions in the mirror for a while before dropping backwards onto the bed.
Aunty Ruth had lost her chef because of the floods but would be making a cold buffet
for all you flotsam and jetsam
in the hotel bar in a couple of hours. I set the alarm on my new mobile phone, grabbed a handful of blanket, rolled and curled.
The Dictaphones talked treble and hiss.
I reached out, grabbed the rucksack and pulled a battered plasticwrapped bundle of papers and videotape from deep inside. The Light Bulb Fragment, still dry and undamaged. I’d been working to decode the second half for almost seven months now, at first in the house as I’d worked to perfect the Mark Richardson personality and then on the road, in blank, neat hotel rooms in friendless cities all across the country. A few more nights with the stark flashing tape and the first Eric Sanderson’s tables and charts and I
might
have a workable draft. There was no way to know for sure, the obscure QWERTY encoding meant you didn’t have anything until you had it all.
I rewrapped the bundle and pushed it back into the bag. In one hundred and nine minute’s time Aunty Ruth would be laying out her sandwiches. I
closed my eyes, reminding myself to bring back something with meat for Ian.
Flotsam and Jetsam is what Aunty Ruth had called those of us who’d washed up in the floods that evening, and we were. Storm refugees. It would be wrong to say the hotel bar was crammed with us, but I’d bet it hadn’t been so full for a long time.
Ruth laid on three platters of sandwiches and gave me a small bag of sliced ham for the cat. She said she’d put her husband to work on getting together a makeshift sandbox, so Ian wouldn’t have any
little accidents
.
“Cats get so embarrassed, I know,” she said.
I circulated just like Mark Richardson would and I coughed up a couple of his obvious jokes around the bar. It had been eighteen weeks since I’d seen the real Richardson, since I finished the training, left my job, loaded the yellow Jeep and set out on the cold trail of my lost past. Hull, Leeds, Sheffield, six weeks in each city. A total of one year and four months since the day I was born, face down on that bedroom carpet.
It was still raining outside. A dramatic wet sheet broke against the window followed by a haiku of fat rain taps as the wind took a breath. Orchestral for storm.
“You see,” the man opposite me was saying. “It’s the Pennines –”
I looked up.
Mark Richardson was a people person, a listener as much as a talker. That’s what made him such a good choice for my fake identity. Meeting people, communication, information gathering, all these things would have to be done in character if my defences were going to hold. If I was going to move through the world without creating ripples and being found and ripped all apart. But being Richardson meant being Richardson all the time, not just when it suited me. And so I was socialising.
Opposite, my new flotsam friend chewed out the middle of another
ham and mustard sandwich triangle, free hand circling in that way that means
hold on: swallowing then speaking
.
He gulped.
“It’s the Pennines,” he said again. “The hills are too high. The sky’s too low.”
I nodded.
“It grinds people up. Between the road and the sky.” He picked inside the sandwich crust before looking back at me. “Lots of accidents up there.”
This was Dean Rush, truck driver. He’d had to leave his truck – he called it a ‘unit’ – further down the hill, near a golf course. I’d invited him to join me at the table and that was the first thing he’d told me. Then –
the Pennines
. This was a man of scraps and fragments. No links or rhythms to his conversation, everything lonely and spare. There was something birdlike about him too, I’d decided; Bleak Dean Rush, the moorland crow.
He pulled a thin white string of ham fat from the remains of his sandwich, looked carefully at it, dangling, before laying it down on the side of his plate. He blinked once, twice.