Here's the third chapter (probably) of The Family Plot. It's all gone a bit wierd and I can't really say whether it's alright or not. I seem to have got a bit wrapped up in my own dreams and it's not entirely unautobiographical. Comments would be most welcome because it's a new style for me and I'm not at all sure about it. Cash donations also welcome, as usual.
Alistair found himself on a wide flat beach of pale sand with black flecks in it. Far away behind him low dunes formed an impromptu half-hearted horizon, grey with the cold air, the coarse grass on them flattening and unflattening in waves under the influence of the keen cold wind. Behind them a bank of purple cloud reared and bridled, spooked by the sense of some impending something. The sea fell in exhausted lumps where the beach suddenly shelved and sent clods of white spume windmilling up the sand to where Alistair stood, his feet sinking. He was mesmerised by a low wind-sculpted dragon’s wing that ran along the beach, beautiful but fragile, solid but constantly changing, and followed its forlorn point with his eyes to where a grassy duned headland jutted into the icy sea. He wanted to stay with this dragon’s wing of sand. He didn’t want it to be destroyed by the sea, to be swept clean away by the racing tide, and so he stood and cried as first one wave and then another and another rushed in and over it and dulled its lines into a pillowy nothingness. Soon there was nothing but a blurred ridge beneath the shallow waves remaining, and now that the water had submerged it and the war-front of wave and foam had moved on he could see that nothing further was changing, that the dragon’s wing was still there, under the rippling shadows, waiting for the tide to retreat and for the wind to shape it afresh. Alistair’s sudden reassurance was just as suddenly washed away, though: the sea that had blurred the wing had cut him off from the dunes, and now he was standing on the remains of the ridge, knee-deep in icy water, with dizzying currents flowing around him. The sea rushing toward the land and the clouds rushing overhead made both headland and horizon animate and lurch out towards the sea in some sort optical illusion of idiotic retaliation, and Alistair fell to his knees in the water and foundered. He knew now that he would die here on the remains of the wing, alone, unable to swim, unable to save himself, with no-one even to hear his cries. If no-one heard them, he wondered, and if no-one saw him die, would he still be dead?
It was an uncomfortable thought that had run across Alistair’s mind before: dying alone, with no-one to know or to care. He manipulated the hot tap with his toe to run in some more tepid water and looked around the hotel bathroom. Laura, he found with some surprise, was not there. He had felt her near. He repeated the phrase to himself: felt her near. He wondered what he was doing, thinking this nonsense. She wasn’t near. She was far off, far away, safe, where no-one would find her. Perhaps the water wasn’t too cold at all. Perhaps it was too hot and he was going giddy. This dream was one he’d had before – not quite like this, not always on a beach – but he had often dreamt of being cut off somehow. Water usually featured: a causeway, a river, even rain that he was forbidden (in that irrational dreamlike way) from entering, all these things had severed him from something. The something was never specific. It was just the sense of being severed from whatever it was that remained. He frequently woke up wet with sweat from these watery dreams, frightened to turn on the light like a child.
The hot water made the bath much more comfortable. He did not know how long he had dozed – dawn had gathered in the petrified bubbles of the frosted glass as a warm pink light. Red sky in the morning, he thought, automatically. He never did complete the thought. It was one of those that didn’t need it – rather like wondering where the milk is but seeing the milk halfway through the thought. Half-thoughts. Dreamlike. The new warm water buoyed Alistair up and gave him a little tingle of boyish excitement, like going too fast over a hump-backed bridge in dad’s car, Grandma’s head bumping the roof to amuse him, but gentler and persistent. The water began to gurgle in the overflow, so he swivelled the tap to off and levitated there in the water listening to the drips from the tap and the heavy footfalls of someone in the room upstairs. The feeling took him to another time, another memory, another dream. It was one of those memories that are so old and so rarely thought, with so few witnesses and such a strange miasma of others’ emotion about it that it scarcely seemed real. He wondered, indeed, whether it was real or whether it was a dream or some feat of his young imagination. He remembered another sibling, a boy called Thom, younger than him and now gone. He remembered a balloon. Thom the gone-boy’s balloon. They, he and Andrew and their mother, at Grandmother’s house: one of those large Edwardian tile-hung ones that always looked like a nursing home and now is. All porches and gables and finials; a cottage that ate too much. Grandmother had died when Alistair and Andrew were four, so they were younger than that, and Thom must have been two or three: just talking. Always laughing. They had, all of them, been to a fair before fairs and fairground folk had become sinister. There had been such entertainments as hook-a-duck and hoop-la and throw a wet sponge at someone-or-other. Perhaps it had been the vicar. And there had been a balloon man selling helium balloons. Thom had got a helium balloon. Neither Alistair nor Andrew had been allowed one because they had already had candy floss. Their mother’s egalitarian decision had caused an outrage at the time it had been made, but by the late afternoon the upset had been forgotten and Andrew had gone to play with the sand in the greenhouse and Thom was playing with Lego in the dining room. Alistair had been to the toilet under the stairs (that tiny, oddly-shaped wedge of a room that fitted so ill with the rest of the house) and had been on the way back outside to Andrew when he had spied Thom’s balloon through the open parlour door.
Alistair had taken the balloon from where it hung in the dust-filled stillness of the sun-gilded parlour into the lofty polish-scented echoes of the hall. It buoyed his small body and he marvelled at the upward pull it electrically transmitted through the creased blue ribbon to his fat fist. If he let it go, he wondered, could he catch it again? He let the ribbon run through his fingers and watched the bulbous sac accelerate up to bump off the rococo swirls of the cornice and caress its way across the blue-painted expanse of the sky-ceiling, chattering little silver syllables as it whispered over the ceiling like a vampire. He could still reach the ribbon. He pulled the balloon back and released it again, pulled it back and released it, pulled it back and released it, tormenting it with false freedom in a false sky. This was not sporting. The balloon must have its chance. Here in the hall it could never escape. It was no test of Alistair’s skill, and not fair to the balloon. In the dining-room Thom laughed and rooted in the Lego like an industrious pig. Alistair quietly took the balloon into the kitchen, there to allow it to explore the barley-white expanse of the snow-laden kitchen-sky, and pulled on his red Wellingtons, then to creep out through the aluminium door, carefully not agitating the treacherous letterbox, to crunch across the powdery tarmac of the drive and onto the lawn. The balloon tugged upwards with more vigour in the cold outside air, straining it its blue leash to ascend into the limitless blue ceiling of the cloudless winter day; the depthless expanse of blue, the dome of the world, invitingly arced and the balloon drunkenly swayed with anticipation, four fat fingers from freedom. Alistair marvelled at the enormity of the firmament, wondering how high it was, how far before it became tangible. Sky. It was a beautiful word. A beautiful thing. Alistair released the balloon and it lurched upwards like the whole world was falling away from it, instantly out of reach and instantly tiny. Alistair did not try to catch it. Too late. It rose vertically, ascending to God knows where to be with the moon and the stars and the clouds; so much better company for it than the parlour and Thom. And then it was gone. Lost in the blue. Into the blue, not out of it. Guilt and Loss, then unnamed, assailed Alistair and he sat on the Talbot’s bumper and watched the point where the balloon had disappeared for a long time, ashamed of his own stupidity.
Soon after, Thom had gone too. Andrew didn’t know where he had gone, and neither did Alistair. The twins had lived at Grandmother’s house for a little while, but then she had had her heart attack and they had to go home. Their mother had been different – she had looked the same, but she was different. Their father had become jollier, and drunk more of his special juice than he had before. Eventually everyone had forgotten Thom had existed except Alistair. But he did not mention him; to do so might remind everyone of the day he had lost the balloon, and anyway, perhaps it had all been a dream. Perhaps Thom was like Derek Fowlds diving for babies or like that crocodile in the tea – a dream so real that it had seemed, well, real. Alistair wondered often about Thom. He wondered whether he should ask his mother about him or not. Ask whether the atmosphere really did turn to electrified glass whenever a child died in a film watched by his mother, or whether that was a dream too. He wanted to ask whether that other dream, the one about the river and the path and Andrew crying and pointing, was relevant – whether it was even a dream. But his mother had followed his father into the ground or up a chimney, he couldn’t now remember (like Victorian pauper’s children), and it was too late.
Alistair added more warm water and picked his nose. It was a strange thing, that memory-dream. It wasn’t the only one, but it was the one that worried him the most. He resolved to ask Andrew what he thought of it when he saw him again. That phrase jabbed another thought into his head: seeing people again. It had been a week for it. When he had passed through Crakethorne railway station on his way to Whorlton he had seen a woman he had not seen for years – ten, at least. He had half-recognised her from behind from the shape of her head, which was top-heavy like Aldous Huxley’s but without the corresponding brain-power, and because of her hair, which looked like an oiled gannet squashed flat. She had been the girlfriend of a colleague of his when he had worked in Rapley’s Department Store (or Rapley’s Department Sore as they had all called it) in Crakethorne part-time while he was at school. He had only ever been on the most tenuous of nodding terms personally, but he had known all about her from his colleague, her boyfriend. She had stopped, walking through the station, and turned to look at the clock and their eyes had locked for slightly too long to be comfortable. Alistair had smiled an awkward smile and kept walking, and she had quickly glanced back to the clock. He wasn’t certain it was the same woman, but she seemed to recognise him, and she seemed to recognise that he did not remember her name. She most probably did not remember his. Although Alistair and the woman (he could not recall her name – Sheena Easton refused to be driven out of his brain; maybe it was Sheila or Sharon or something) and the man that had been their intermediary while he had been her lover had shared a pleasant evening or two all those years ago, the acquaintance was out of date. He wondered if it had ever even happened. Perhaps he’d dreamt that too. Maybe he’d just given a crooked half-smile to a total stranger just off the ‘plane from Australia. Maybe she thought, now, English people went around given weird half-smiles to total strangers in railway stations.
It didn’t matter. Alistair focussed on the main reason for his bath. His ritual of every other day, his ceremony of determining how much time – decimal or otherwise – he imagined he might have left. He put his hand between his legs and felt for the now horribly familiar lump, like a tiny ball of rubber, which had taken up residence inside his right testicle and inside his mind. It was there. Of course it was. It would hardly vanish, this terrible interloper. He moved it around between his fingers, soft but hard, mobile but firmly fixed, and contemplated his position. He could scarcely go to the doctor now. The police would probably be there. Or at least they would probably have informed the doctor that they were searching for him. And the doctor would question him. How long had it been there? Too long. By rights, Alistair thought, he probably ought to be dead. Every day now was a bonus. Or perhaps one of the other names he had found in his surreptitious enquires in the library was in fact the right one. Perhaps the number one suspect, cancer, was wrongly accused – perhaps it was something else. Varicocele. Hydrocele. Either of those was not improbable. And they were not fatal. He thought. But the possibility of cancer gave him the drive to finish his work on International Decimal Time – it gave him a drive to work on it when he could not otherwise have been bothered. In any case, knowing the name of whatever this thing was struck him as being like knowing the registration number of the bus that knocks you down and runs you over: useful for those that pick up the pieces, but not to the man tangled round the axle. He thought, for the first time, that being arrested might not be such a bad thing – they would, presumably, give him a medical before trial and he would, presumably, be treated for whatever it was that they found. A life saved, but to do life, probably (unless he was acquitted: there wasn’t exactly a great deal of incriminating evidence). It was too late now, anyway, he told himself. If it was cancer it would be too far advanced to do anything about, and if it wasn’t, well, that was good. He laughed to himself, a little, silent, mirthless laugh – he laughed this laugh, this empty laugh, every time he did this and sometimes out of the bath, too: if this lump, he thought, had been in my neck I would have gone to the doctor without delay. But in a ball, no. It was just too terrifying. He wondered why he couldn’t have had a cancer in his neck – so much less difficult to explain, to treat, to survive. Or in his torso, somewhere, so that it could grow unnoticed and therefore unworried about, to kill him by surprise. This way he was quite likely to worry himself to death or step under a bus with the preoccupation of it. He wondered, again, madly, if this thing in his ball was Laura come back to punish him. He laughed. Reincarnation was rubbish, he told himself again – and surely you can’t be reincarnated as a bit of somebody else, can you? That thought brought him back to himself. He looked at his pale white body floating in the bath like one of those pickled specimens you see in some museums and wondered if one day he really would be pickled like that in a huge jar, with the label “too stupid to see a doctor” etched in copperplate script on brass. This wasn’t something else, some alien thing inside him, this was him – this was his, Alistair’s, body failing to operate correctly. This was the biological malfunction that he always knew would claim him, come to claim him. This was it. He had weeks, maybe months, to live. He was a dead man. Like his brother. He told himself, sternly, that he must stop referring to his body as some sort of irritating thing separate to him that kept causing him trouble. It was not a car or a washing machine that had developed a fault, it was him. This thing was him. It was him that had gone wrong. Where are the warranty papers? He wondered about his mind, too. It kept on subverting his will like a naughty child: he’d insist on International Decimal Time and yet his mind would still automatically wonder about midnight and midday and, perversely, four o’clock teatime – his body colluded with his mind by waking him up at dawn, even when International Decimal Time dictated that he shouldn’t wake until the middle of the solar day. He insisted with his logical scientific knowledge that there were no ghosts and yet his mind would suggest that the figure at the end of the bed was one, not some rationally explained corporeal visitor – here his body colluded with his mind again by increasing its heart-rate in irrational fear. It was like mutiny – Alistair felt as though he were some sort of philosophical Captain Bligh, overthrown by himself. He, Alistair, could not escape his body or his mind, could not control them, could not eradicate the idiotic influences of his earlier, benighted, pre-International Decimal Time life. His body and mind could not be reset. He could not bring himself to live the life his new logical rules suggested, no – confirmed beyond doubt – was right. Always he was tormented by the fact that instead of seeing the sunset as a disastrous hurdle for energy consumption reduction he saw it as a beautiful event that set him thinking about useless outmoded entertainments like Homer’s Odyssey. It maddened him, at times like this he was at the very edge of reason. He told himself: you are all one thing, one compound, one faulty haunted machine. Live with it. Or die with it.
Probably it would be the latter.
A bang on the bathroom door made him jump and a fat wave of water flopped out onto the floor. He was immediately himself. An impatient hand tried the handle and Alistair momentarily wondered in panic whether or not he’d locked the door. He had. There was a noise and an envelope scudded under the door and across the boards and came to a gentle rest at the edge of the puddle of bathwater. Alistair picked it up and listened to the footsteps going away from the door. He had not noticed any approach. The envelope was a nice one, thick and creamy and textured like a wicker basket, and someone with impeccable handwriting had written “Mr A Caine” across the exact centre in exotic inky swirls of Mediterranean blue. Tearing it open felt like a crime, such was its beauty, and inside was another beautiful thing: a single sheet of heavy headed watermarked paper, folded twice with razor sharp accuracy, and bearing a single line of that same Corinthian hand in that same intoxicating colour. The heading was thus:
Sir Mandrake Daniels OBE
Whorlton Castle
Whorlton
Nr. Peasefurnace
North Yorkshire
PF6 8WC
The single line of handwriting was a simple invitation (or was it a command?) for Alistair to dine with Sir Mandrake Daniels that evening. No response, it said, was required, arrive at dusk. Alistair obeyed and did not respond. He had no idea who Mandrake Daniels, knight of the realm, Order of the British Empire, was and nor did he care. Nor did he care how this man, of whom he was utterly ignorant, knew he was in the second floor bathroom of the Hotel Atlantis. He had something else to do. He was going to go and see the undertaker.
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