But the hotel is still standing, my old home, and it’s still in good order. It’s not a hotel any more. I’m not sure what it is. There is a new fence, and a wrought-iron gate. A sign on the retaining wall sports the logo of a high street bank.
The housing estate has declined. There are a lot of unroadworthy vehicles hidden under tarpaulins or simply left to rust on the verges and in gardens overgrown with weeds. The gardens have grown up at last, but they are straggly, untidy. The place has reached old age without acquiring maturity. It still looks as though it was thrown together yesterday – then doused in neglect.
Poppy’s garden, with its dwarf this and dwarf that and miniature the other, is still the neatest of the lot; she must police it from beyond the grave.
In order to wrap up Poppy’s affairs, Michel needs to go through her papers. First, of course, he has to find them. This is not going to be easy. Poppy was always putting things away in safe places. I remember I ran into her one time she was visiting Michel at university. She said she had some money to give him. Off she went to the toilet. She had it hidden in her knickers. Michel unlocks the front door. ‘Check for loose floorboards, for papers stuck in books.’ I imagine us dressed in paramilitary black leather, hunting out seditious literature behind skirting boards and inside ceiling lamps.
A local house-clearing firm has been booked for the middle of the week to take away the furniture. Poppy used to make a big production out of it, but all in all it’s very poor stuff.
I find instant coffee in the cupboard. The kettle is so clean, so polished, it might have been unboxed yesterday. We stand in the lounge, sipping instant coffee. Neither of us dares to sit on Poppy’s sofa.
‘Has Hanna told you we’re separating?’
‘I can’t think why.’
‘It’s not what you think.’
What do I think? What am I supposed to think? ‘What about Agnes?’
‘I’m doing this for her.’
‘Doing what? Quitting? Disappearing? She misses you.’
‘I’m around.’ He sounds very sure of himself. I know this confidence. I have heard it before, and have fallen under its spell. Michel has a project. ‘Let’s look at your hands.’
‘What?’
‘Come on, Mick.’ I take his coffee cup off him and set it down in the sink. ‘Show me your hands.’
He holds them out for me. He smiles.
‘Christ, Michel. What is it? What are you building? A ship?’
‘Why build a boat when the sea will come for you?’
‘Where is it?’
‘Near.’
‘Will you show me?’
He hesitates, caught between his self-myth – the brave survivor, girding himself for the war of all against all – and his pride. Even his most committed and literal-minded fans cannot know, as I know, the deep seriousness that underlies Mick’s stories of the Fall. At last, he shakes his head. ‘Some other time.’
How casually we talk of this! But I have lived with Michel’s project all my life. His determination to survive. It’s nothing new. Nothing strange. He was always going to do this. He was always going to build this. It was only ever a question of when.
Michel wants to get up in the loft straight away. He finds the garage key in the drawer of the telephone table. He wrestles the ladder out from behind buckets and bags of garden fertiliser and carries it into the house. It’s as well that Poppy’s not around to see this. ‘
I’m not having you clambering about the loft. I’m not having you up there stamping about in my things!
’
The loft hatch is in the hall, directly in front of the frosted-glass kitchen door. The hall is only just wide enough for the stepladder. I can’t get past. The old claustrophobia grabs me suddenly. It is daunting to think of Michel living out his entire childhood in these few, cell-like rooms. ‘How is it up there?’
‘There’s not much.’ Michel is disappointed. He is moving directly over my head and through the ceiling, his shuffling sounds hollow and at the same time oddly intimate – a scratching in the ear.
‘Shall I come up?’
‘If you like. There’s not a lot of room.’
I need the toilet first. I’d forgotten how bloody small the lavatory is – the size of those cells you see in dungeon attractions, meant to contort the body of the inmate before he’s hauled off to interrogation.
The toilet roll holder is mounted on the wall on my right. It is a simple chrome bracket. A sprung plastic rod holds the toilet roll in place. On the wall, above and to the left, there is a blemish. I remember it. It is, as far as I know, the only blemish in the whole, seamlessly white house.
It must have come from the rag of the roller. The fleece. I’m not sure, though; it looks more like a piece of paper. It’s no bigger than the rim of a baby’s fingernail and it’s folded over itself at right-angles to make a circumflex or tail-less arrow, pointing towards the corner of the skirting board. I remember, every day, several times a day, I would stare at this blemish as though it were a sign, pointing me the way out of this place.
I get my thumbnail under the blemish and dig in. The fleck slides under my nail, into the quick, hurting me, and a spot of pinkish gray plaster appears on the wall.
Something pops. A loud, hollow sound, followed by a rain of sand. Michel’s voice cuts sharply through. ‘
Fuck
.’
I finish up on the toilet and hurry out. ‘Michel?’
A sound of tearing cardboard.
‘Shit.’
Michel has knocked a hole in the ceiling of the dining room – not with ‘great big feet’ after all, but with the corner of a cardboard box. It looks as if the whole thing may fall through. I stand well clear. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Fucking stupid!’
‘What?’
‘There are boxes here stuffed so full you can’t lift them. What’s the point of that?’
‘Are you all right.’
‘Yes, yes, I’m fine.
Shit
.’
The living room table is smothered in plaster fragments and dust. I run my finger through it. Above me, Michel wrestles the box back through the gap. Dust rains down. I stand back, heels crunching plaster into the dog-hair-thin pile of the floor tiles. ‘Do you need a hand?’
He doesn’t reply, so I go to the dining room and open the drinks cabinet.
There are bottles in here I remember from my youth. Melon liqueur, blended whisky, various fruit ‘creams’. Small, pretty, stemless glasses with coloured bands round the outside. I pour half a glass of sherry, open a bottle of chocolate liqueur, and upend it to see what, if anything, comes out. A brownish syrup winds its way through the sherry.
I knock it back.
I take a second glass out of the cabinet, a half-bottle of coffee liqueur and an unopened schnapps. There’s white wine at the back of the cabinet. A corkscrew in the drawer above the cabinet, amongst the cutlery. I press the screw in, and the cork plops into the wine.
Above my head comes a second pop, louder than before. I look up in time to see Michel’s foot rise and disappear into the hole he has made. A neat, foot-shaped piece of plaster lies intact under the window. It might have been stamped out by a die. The air is full of dust. Light enters between the room’s slatted blinds and cat-cradles the room.
Michel moves from rafter to rafter over my head.
The kitchen ceiling gives way. I go to see. The ribbed plastic shade covering the fluorescent ceiling light has fallen to the floor. The tube has shattered into fragments.
I take the second glass to the foot of the stepladder. ‘Michel.’
He’s still moving about up there, back and forth, back and forth – a cat trapped in a shed. ‘Yeah.’
‘I’ve got you a drink.’
‘What?’
‘A drink. I’ve got you a drink. Come over to the ladder.’
He kneels down on the loft hatch and I lift the glass up to him. He says, ‘Why did you fuck my wife?’
‘What?’
‘You heard.’
‘She wasn’t your wife back then.’
‘Did you think I would never find out?’
‘You said it was all water under the bridge.’
‘I want to know why.’
‘We nearly got ourselves killed driving back from that fucking dreadful party you took us to. We took a moment.’
Michel comes down the ladder, very fast. I offer him his drink again. He slaps it out of my hand, but suddenly it all goes out of him. The anger. The frustration. ‘Fair enough,’ he says.
‘Your mum knew.’
‘Yes.’
‘She told you, that Christmas.’
Michel tries to laugh. ‘Not in so many words. She thought I ought to know. Because of your mum. Her depression. The way she vanished. All that.’
‘Well. Yes.’
I wish to God I’d said something before. It’s too late now.
The Margrave is still trading, in spite of the flood, the broken bridge, and all the petty emergencies snaggling the area. It’s a destination restaurant now, with a star. Green eels from the river in dill with a cucumber salad. Somewhere down the lane I dragged my mum’s body down, the water must be roiling by. I wonder what it looks like. I wonder if the flood is ploughing under all the changes that have been made since I was here last. I wonder if, unseen by me, it is returning the landscape to something I would recognise. I doubt it. Things do not ‘return to nature’. Nature fucks everything up and in the process fashions something new. The mind does not remember old geographies because, at its base, the mind is not nostalgic. It knows how the world is wired.
‘You think it’s coming, then. The Fall. In spite of this.’ I wave the menu – a symbol of human tenacity. It seems to me things are still pretty resilient. They’re serving puddings here, for crying out loud.
I tell him, ‘It seems to me there’s still a lot of rain left to fall before civilisation gives out.’
‘The flooding isn’t going to bring things down. I’m not talking about disasters.’
‘No?’
Michel shoots me a look. ‘Since when did disasters have anything to do with the collapse of civilisations? There’s always a flood, a drought, a plague of something. Civilisations
deal
with catastrophes. It’s why we commit to them.’
‘So why choose this moment to go play Noah in the woods? Christ’s sake, Michel, Agnes—’
‘Thank you for reminding me.’
‘Michel.’
‘I know I have a daughter. Why do you think I’m doing this?’
I push my plate away. ‘Try telling me, Mick. I’ve been a long time in the real world. It’s hard to think my way back into your bullshit.’
‘When civilisations collapse, it’s because they fall out of joint. They deafen on their own feedback. They can no longer imagine themselves.’
This is an insight Michel has wisely – or at any rate cynically – omitted from his commercial fiction.
He says to me, ‘Have you seen what Ralf is doing?’
This I don’t expect. But of course, Michel is still writing, and his writing is still grist to Bryon Vaux’s production mill. Of course Michel will know what Ralf is up to.
‘Broadcast AR.’
Michel’s smile is predatory. ‘Be careful how you blink.’
‘It won’t catch on.’
‘It won’t?’ He leans forward. ‘
How will you know?
’
It’s not something I want to think about. But it’s another reason, perhaps, why Michel and Hanna have been having such a bad time of it recently. Michel, sneaking off to construct his long-planned redoubt. Hanna with her outpatient’s appointment, her simple procedure, her permanently AR-enabled eyes.
On the way back to Poppy’s house we detour by the river. Or we try to.
‘Where is it?’
Though Michel knows the town better than I do, he’s as startled as I am by this change. ‘Fucked if I know.’
It’s not in flood. It’s not in spate. It’s not even here. It’s been paved over. Canalised. There is no millrace, and no bridge crossing the millrace, just a horseshoe of low stairs and a concrete ramp for prams and wheelchairs, and – where the river used to be – a bicycle lane winds through landscaped parkland. The underbrush and low trees that used to conceal the water have been cleared away and lime-green exercise machines put in their place. It’s nothing like I remember. It’s devastating. In a way I can’t put into words, it’s almost the
opposite
of what I remember, and as we walk, I can feel the memories of my youth begin to fizz and react in the solvent of this new real. I stare at my feet, afraid of how much of myself I am losing.
The same high, forbidding fence runs around the hotel garden. The lawn is the same but the beds have matured out of all recognition. They stand like eruptions of wildwood in all that close-cropped green. On the lawn, teams of young executives in branded T-shirts and sloppy pants are attempting to build a bridge from one flowerbed to another without stepping on the lawn. There are wooden poles, large, brightly coloured foam cushions, ropes and buckets. It is some sort of team-building exercise, and it seems to be working. At least, there is a lot of laughter.
‘Conrad?’
‘I’m okay.’
‘Come on, Conrad,’ Michel says. ‘Let’s go home.’
Up in Poppy’s loft there’s light of sorts – a weak, dusty bulb shining from a socket screwed to a joist. Really the light from the bulb does little more than blend everything into everything else: cardboard, wood, roofing felt. Even the shadows are the colour of dried meat.
Light rises in white columns from the holes Michel has made. These shafts of dusty light do nothing to dispel the darkness; if anything, they make it more intense. I’m trying to orientate myself, but it seems to me that the holes are far too close together. If
this
is a hole in the living room ceiling, how can
that
be a hole in the dining room? The bungalow has always felt small, but this is ridiculous. Up here, you can move from room to room in a single stride.
Because the boxes are so heavy, Michel has been decanting their contents, balancing boxes and plastic-wrapped bundles on the rafters.
There’s a box full of toys. A metal dumper truck, heavy as a bastard. A pair of binoculars in a leather case – I suppose they must have been his father’s. In a plastic carrier bag I find an old film camera – Michel’s, confiscated by his mum when the school discovered him taking photographs of his elderly clients. Bit by bit I bring the stuff down. I try to interest Mick in keeping some of the toys and bits and pieces for Agnes. Agnes. Agnes this and Agnes that. I cannot help myself. I am afraid for her. Michel’s redoubt is for her – a bolt-hole for her when the world falls down. The thing is, the Fall will not declare itself. One day, Michel will simply draw a line in the sand and bear her off. ‘Does Hanna know what you’re planning?’