The World House (13 page)

  "The rope looks strong enough…" Tom pounded the base "…and the box sure is. As for the pulleys… well, there really is only one way to find out, ain't there?"

  "Jesus," Elise sighed, "this can't be a good idea."

  "Maybe not, baby, but it's the only one on the menu."

  "I am less heavy," said Pablo, "I try it first."

  "The Spanish bull takes one for the team. Like your style, Pablo. Hop on board the gravy train."

  "He means 'get in'," Elise explained.

  Pablo climbed into the wooden box. It was large enough for him to sit in if he pulled his knees up high and clutched his duffel bag tight to his chest. "Make gravy train leave station, cat," he said to Tom with a nervous smile.

  Tom laughed. "You've got the jive, Spanish bull, hold on tight." He began to pull on the rope, grunting with the effort as Pablo rose out of sight.

 

"A couple of years ago," Carruthers said while ushering Miles and Penelope into a bedroom almost identical to all the others, "I traversed the Great Victoria desert, that arid wasteland in Australia, filled with little but lizards and the most bizarrely painted fellows I have ever had the fortune to meet. In fact, had I completed the journey a week earlier it might not have been named after our Queen at all, but that damned Giles beat me to it. Still… who wants 450 miles of sand named after them, eh?"

  "I have a Martini in my name," Penelope admitted, "which is probably just as dry."

  "And eminently more practical."

  "Anyway…" Miles butted in, "your point was?"

  Penelope smiled. "Don't mind him, he's just sore that nobody's ever named anything after him."

  "The desert was an unreliable place," Carruthers continued, "you could never guarantee the solidity of the ground beneath your feet. When the sandstorms descended, navigation became impossible and the landscape would be utterly changed once the light returned. It was ever shifting, ever fluid. This house has certain similarities." He gestured for them to join him at the window. "Out there," he said, pointing into the darkness, "is nothing the human eye can discern and the house is filled with such spaces. Great swathes of absence that demarcate the barrier between one location and the next. As far as I have managed to comprehend it is impossible to travel far in this building without crossing these spaces."

  "And how, precisely, are we supposed to do that?" asked Miles.

  "Oh, you'll see, my dear boy. But first I must warn you of the wraiths that police the barriers."

  "I think I may have met one earlier."

  "Aha!" Carruthers patted Miles on the arm. "And lived to tell the tale, eh? You will know then that the wraiths are invisible phantoms that prey on the mind as much as the body. They fix you with terror, until – transfixed like one of our moth friends in a killing jar – the wraith strikes!"

  "Erm… yes, wonderfully dramatic… strikes
how
exactly?"

  "Oh…" Carruthers waved his hands in he air as if such details were not in the least important "…they can pulverise a man down to his very atoms, render him little but red mist and screams. But we're too clever to let it get to that, aren't we, my dears?"

  "I'm glad you seem to think so," Miles muttered.

  "Look at this way, dear boy," Carruthers said with a wink, "I'm still in the land of the living, eh? You just mark me well as I teach you the knack of it."

  "We're all ears," Miles replied.

 
 
 

Sophie decides the fellowship building is neither warm nor cold. It is No Temperature. It is also not too dark or too bright. The sun is shining today but a filter on the glass roof takes away the glare. She decides that the roof is made in the same way as her sunglasses and she holds them above her head to compare the two. The lenses in her glasses are darker. The roof does not look dark at all and yet somehow it does the same thing. Sophie decides this is very interesting and forgets to listen to the officer's words as he drones on about "a life well lived" and "a woman cherished in the memory of those she has left behind". Sophie finds the officer hard to listen to. His voice is a monotone. He sounds like a buzzing fridge. He is not interesting. The glass is interesting. Besides, mothers die every day. It happens to lots of people. It is very common. It is very boring.

  Sophie looks at her father. He is not bored, she thinks (or maybe he is – she has heard people talk about being "bored to tears", perhaps this is what has happened to her father). He is crying a lot. Watching his eyes squeeze out all that water (it is like sweat but it is not sweat) makes Sophie forget about the glass and think about tears instead. It is very strange, all that water coming out of someone's eyes. Sophie wonders what it is for. It seems to her that it serves no purpose. She cannot understand things like this. Her father looks at her and tries to smile. Perhaps he is not so sad after all. So why is he crying? All of this contradiction has stopped being interesting; now it is just confusing, and that makes her angry. She stares at the wall, humming quietly. This is how she becomes empty, how she becomes calm. The wall is what most people would call white but it is not white, there is a grey in it and a pearlescent sheen that makes it look as if it comes from the ocean. She studies it until she knows it, humming, humming, humming. Then she is calm.

  Outside, her grandparents lead her and her father to their car. Her grandmother kisses her on the cheek. She doesn't like that as her cheek felt perfect and now it is wet and won't sit right. Her grandfather doesn't kiss her, in fact he hardly looks at her. This is because he finds it hard to understand her. She can relate to this and therefore understands her grandfather very well. She likes her grandfather because she understands him. She feels they are quite alike.

  They are not going home; they are going to stay at her grandparent's house. This angers Sophie but she can tell that there will be no changing it so she doesn't shout or scream. She just sits quietly on the back seat, holding her head against the window so that the vibrations of the motor make her head shake and her teeth tickle. It feels as if she is cleaning her brain.

  When they arrive at the house she remembers that she does not know it. Her grandparents used to live in one place and now they live in another. This is not something that Sophie understands – why would you change where you live? Perhaps it is straighter, perhaps it is easier to draw. Sophie has drawn her house many times but there are so many rooms and they are all different sizes so it is difficult to get it right. What she needs is a piece of paper as big as the house, then she could trace it and get everything just right. She doesn't think it is possible to buy such paper.

  Inside the house she realises she has not remembered to listen to her grandparents. They have been asking her questions but she didn't hear them. She doesn't try and answer them now, it is too late. She just smiles – often this is the only answer people want anyway – and begins to get to know the house. She goes into each room, walking around the outside, running her hand against the wall. This is a good way to understand a room. You get to know its shape and what it feels like on the edges (which are the only bits of a room that are real anyway, everything else is just air).

  The house is quite big and this takes her a while as she has to do it three times. Three times is a good number, it is the amount of times it takes to really know something.

  Once she has finished she goes back outside. Outside is not the problem for her that some people assume it is. People think she will find the outside uncomfortable because there are no walls. This is a silly mistake. Here are the reasons:

 

 

  It is things that don't work as they should that make her uncomfortable.

  There are trees outside, planted in rows. Sophie walks along the rows, counting the trees. This is a good thing and she is happy to do it for hours. In the end she stops because it is getting too dark and it is hard to count.

  She goes back inside and eats her tea. She has spaghetti. She always has spaghetti because that is what she likes. If that is what you like then why would you eat anything else? Afterwards she eats half a tin of cold rice pudding. She knows it was half a tin because her grandmother lets her measure it. This puts her in a good mood and she goes to bed happy and smiles as she counts the way into sleep.

  In the morning she wakes up and there is a moment where things are difficult. She likes her mother to make her toast – medium, brown, plain, no butter or jam or marmalade or Marmite or honey or anything,
plain
. Her mother knows how crisp toast should be, she likes it cooked on toaster setting number four, that is the best setting. When she goes downstairs she remembers that her mother is dead and dead people cannot make toast – though they are cooked like toast. Her friend at school, Anya, has told her so: "They'll toast your mother," Anya said, "toast her until she's dust." Sophie thinks this must mean that they are using a setting that is higher than four. Her grandmother promises that her toaster – which looks very different from the toaster Sophie is used to, it is white not silver – also has a setting for number four and that they can make the toast together so that Sophie knows everything is fine. It is fine and Sophie takes her toast outside to count the trees again.

  After a while she doesn't want to count the trees any more, she wants to know new things. She walks through the forest only stopping every now and then to brush the pine needles off her boots (boots should not have pine needles). Soon she hears the sound of the sea. She has forgotten her grandparents now live near the sea. Lots of people like to live by the sea, it makes them happy. Sophie does not mind the sea but it does scare her a little bit. She can swim, but to swim in the sea is not to control the sea, it is to try and stop the sea controlling you and that is not the same thing at all. So the sea makes her a little bit scared. She walks toward the sound of waves anyway. There may be other things that are interesting to know, so it is worth being a little bit scared.

  The forest opens out and Sophie has to sit down for a while to close her eyes. There is too much sky and she has forgotten how big it can be. After a few minutes' humming and emptying herself she opens her eyes knowing that the sky is there and that she cannot fall into it. The sky is not scary any more; it is just there as usual. The ground falls at a slight gradient towards the coast and she continues to follow the sound of the waves.

  Once she reaches the edge of the cliff she takes the time to look and understand. There is a lot of sea, but that is all right, she has been expecting a lot of sea. The cliff is very tall but that is all right too, tall cliffs were only bad if you walked off them; if you didn't walk off them they couldn't hurt at all. She walks along the cliff back towards the house. Maybe she can even walk in a square (out of the house straight ahead into trees, turn right towards sea, turn right, walk along cliff, turn right, walk back to house). That would make her very happy: squares are good and always turning in the same direction is good. There is a lot around her that is not ground. There is a lot of air and a lot of water and a lot of space. It is like a very large room. She is enjoying it.

  Then she sees the box.

  The box is lying in the grass on the edge of the cliff and it should not be there. Not only is it the sort of box that should be inside a house, there is something wrong with the way the box is. It is like standing next to an electricity pylon. The box buzzes.

  Sophie sits down for a moment so that she can decide what to do. The box makes her uncomfortable and she would like to run away from it. But if she does that then it will still be there. She is not quite sure if it will still be upsetting even when she cannot see it, as she will still know it and sometimes that is just as bad. But the only way to make it right is to pick the box up and take it back to the house. Then the box will be inside a house. That is good. But, deep down, she knows that the box will still be wrong. That is not good.

  She has an idea. She can throw the box in the sea. The box is not supposed to be in the sea and that is not good but the sea will break the box down – turn it into broken bits of wood. You do get broken bits of wood in the sea, she has seen them on beaches. She still has to be brave enough to pick the box up and that is not good. But it is the only way. She empties herself again, becomes calm. Then she stands up, walks over to the box and picks it up.

  
Theboxbiteshertheboxbiteshertheboxbitesherthe
boxbiteshertheboxbitesher!!

  She is so scared when she feels the pain in her hand that she slips on the edge of the cliff. She falls, and that is not good. The box is still in her hand because she has forgotten to let go of it now that something more interesting has happened. She is falling through the air. Sophie is not supposed to be in the air. Sophie vanishes.

  This is good.

 

Instead of crashing into the sea below she finds herself lying on her back in the middle of a jungle. Her feelings about this are complex. She would not have wanted to die. She has not. This is therefore good. However, people do not vanish from the space halfway between a clifftop and the sea to reappear in the middle of a jungle. This is Not Something People Do. Never, never, never. But she has just done it. This is not good. The conflict between these two states is hard to reconcile and it takes precisely twelve minutes of counting and humming to achieve contentment (twelve is four multiplied by three, the sides of a box by the times it takes to know something, a good, solid, dependable number). After she has done this she sits up and prepares to understand the jungle.