490

X

At first, I am too weary for anger. Gwent takes my trembling hand and helps me shuffle back to the méridienne, shattered crockery tinkling against my shoes. It is shame that predominates this time, the prickling violence of knowing one has been fooled by a con man. I touch my face, the deep wrinkly grooves, the sag of skin, as though this elderly body is slowly sinking into the ground. When I raise my eyes to Gwent, a deep sadness wells up inside me. His wife must still wonder and wait for his return. The hope of escape for Rachel and me is ebbing by the minute …

‘He murdered her!’ I burst out. Spit spools from the edge of my lips.

I AM ALIVE! THE POINT IS THAT HE TRIED TO KILL ME AND DID NOT SUCCEED. I WON!

‘You have no body!’ I roar at her. ‘What if, in the cottage, you are also—’ I notice Gwent’s confusion and I press my lips together, and take a breath. I reach for my handkerchief and dab my face and lips with a shaking hand.

‘We are in a book, yes,’ says Gwent, in the kindly manner of a parent informing their child that Santa Claus does not exist.

‘I’m sorry …’ I pause again, attempting to calm the flurries of my heart. ‘Remind me how long you have been here again?’ 491

‘Oh, I lose track, I am afraid,’ he says in a resigned tone. ‘A decade – no, a little longer, actually.’

‘But why not simply use the Soma tea? If it has the power to awaken us – then surely a triple dose would suffice to bring us back to the real world? A quadruple dose! The whole box if necessary!’

Gwent looks melancholic. ‘Several years ago, I met a man who claimed he had escaped to Fate’s narrative from a book by Andrew Gallix. He attempted a strong dose of Soma, against my advice – and was found dead the next day. It is too toxic on the liver; one cup is all we can permit.’

DAMN.

‘You told us to find the Storyteller and we met several possibilities, but none seemed to guide us. How do we get back?’

‘You found no answers?’ Gwent asks. ‘There was no Storyteller?’

‘None … unless we missed them …’

Gwent is silent for a while as he digests this. Rachel whispers sorrowfully in my ear how much she feels for him. Then he speaks:

‘The last memory I have of Augustus Fate is meeting him many years ago. I found him perfectly charming and witty company before I passed out from the Grand Kuding tea. I felt him carrying me, with a curious kind of tenderness, from his basement to the bedroom upstairs. I tried everything I could think of, but I ran out of time. My body must be dead by now. I’ve long since been unable to take flight from book to book. It is only possible, it seems, while you still have a body. And needless to say, escape is 492definitely not an option. Fate has, at least, allowed me to remain youthful: I grow no older here.’

I hate the gentleness of his tone; I never want to become resigned to this fate.

‘Good God. So you can never escape Fate?’

‘You know, my dear boy, I am happy to be here. I make do. It is how we react that counts.’ But his smile is forced, his cheerful tone unconvincing.

‘I remember you saying to us, in the last book, that we cannot change what Fate does, but we can change how we react – that we still have a modicum of control. But if your narrator is throwing fucking helicopters at churches and murdering your wife, how are we supposed to act as anything other than angry and sad and human. Not to react would be sociopathic. But if we react, we’re doing just what he wants. What he dictates.’

Gwent looks pale.

‘I do concede that it is a limited form of living, but debating it will not change a thing. The noose is around your neck; struggle and you only pull it tighter. Come, you are an old man now! You have gained some maturity, learnt the value of stoicism. If you stop seeing Fate as your enemy, he may be less inclined to provoke you. Being a novelist myself, I know that when I am blocked or frustrated or disconnected from my characters, I tend to start shaking things up …’

OH, WE KNOW ALL ABOUT THAT.

‘We were enjoying our story in Manchester, until you sent us into a recession,’ I frown.

‘I gave you complete freedom in that book,’ Gwent reasons. ‘It was character-driven; it was your story. You must 493have willed that destruction into being – you must have found a stable, happy existence rather tedious in some respect.’ Seeing my irate expression, he hastily changes the subject. ‘Look, I know it must be hard, having lost Rachel, but she is also a warning of what will come if you continue to defy Augustus.’

FUCK HIM.

‘I’ve learnt to stop fighting and accept it all,’ Gwent continues. ‘It makes life much easier.’

‘You’re being abused and gaslit. It doesn’t sound like acceptance, it sounds like passivity, it sounds like the tone that people take when – what’s that saying?’

WHEN GOOD PEOPLE STAND BY AND DO NOTHING, THEN EVIL IS DONE—

‘Yes! When good people stand by and do nothing, then evil occurs.’

Gwent frowns and replies, ‘You have to consider that our definitions of “good” and “evil” and what we each believe is a life worth living may be quite different. All I can conclude is this – there is no getting back for me … And I am afraid it may be too late for you, so make peace with your situation.’

‘No, you’re wrong,’ I assert, for a memory is seeping back into my mind, gaining detail and colour, and filling me with wonder. ‘I know we can go back. I saw him – between the books. I saw him!’

WHAT? WHEN?

‘When we moved from 2047 to this book, I woke up. Just for a short time.’ I recall the moment when I woke and felt my consciousness ebb through my real body: the beauty of being able to flicker my own fingers, of feeling truly at 494home in myself. ‘I saw Rachel lying beside me. I banged on the door. Fate said we had to endure one last book – it was a pact. He would keep us safe, give us a happy ending. He said then he would allow us to wake.’

A PACT? A HAPPY ENDING? IN A BOOK BY FATE?

‘There was no choice. He said I had been in his cottage six weeks. In here, we can live for years, but time in the real world moves more slowly. I saw the first daffodils in his garden – it is nearly spring. We arrived at Fate’s just before Christmas 2019 – well, Rachel a little earlier than me. The point is, we’re still alive and there is hope!’

‘Perhaps you are, perhaps you are …’

‘What about your wife? She thinks you’re missing, doesn’t she? We can give her closure.’

Gwent twiddles his sideburns, stroking them lightly and then tugging at the hairs. ‘I’m sorry, Jaime, but I fear there is no way …’

THERE MUST BE A WAY.

‘Rachel thinks there is a way,’ I assert.

‘Rachel?’ He asks incredulously.

‘She died but her spirit, for want of a better word, remained. She’s carried on talking to me.’ I am conscious of how ridiculous the words sound. ‘She is here with us now.’

‘You should be careful, if you are hearing voices: all you are hearing is Fate. Once or twice, I have heard him speaking in the third person, dictating the events of the day. If he has adopted Rachel’s voice, then perhaps it was intended as … a consolation.’ His voice fades to a whisper: ‘If a character dies in a book, they die up there too …’

I AM ALIVE! 495

‘Thank you,’ I say, rising unsteadily. ‘I do believe that I should return home now.’

‘You are welcome to return whenever you wish,’ he says cheerfully, clapping his hands together. Before we depart, he gifts us a copy of 2014, adding our names and his swirling signature to the title page, and the message, You will soon get used to your fate.

‘Sssh,’ I whisper to her in the back of the hackney carriage, ‘he can hear, and he has no doubt listened in on our conversation with Mr. Gwent.’

I yank the curtain across the window, shutting out the false streets and other creations strolling past, though through the slit I can see the threat of a storm in the grey cumulus gathering like an army overhead. My fear renders me rigid, my hand taut around my cane. I think of my darling, of the state she was in when I woke up and saw her. Even if … and even if she is … I picture the moment of awakening: opening my eyes in Fate’s cottage to find her body foul beside me. Or, perhaps: simply a blank space. He might be burying her body right now.

The real world would be impossible without her, a falsity. How could I believe in the stars and the sky? How could I wake and believe in the purpose of a day? What would I say to her father, her friends, who would be forever waiting and wondering where she had gone? How could I explain?

496At home, Ginny greets me at the door. I stare into her face, as though I might see a trace of Augustus Fate beneath her translucent pallor.

‘Are you quite all right, sir?’ she asks, for I jerk away as she tries to help me with my frock coat. I shrug it off my shoulders, then pause, hanging on to it tightly, as though it is a cloth separating me from a bull. Finally, I relinquish and hurry to the parlour, calling over my shoulder that I must not be disturbed. Inside, I throw Gwent’s book on to the cabinet and sink down on to a chair. I want a mirror, but I am too scared to go back into the hallway, so I have to make do with gazing at my reflection in the grandfather clock’s face: the absurdity of my white hair and wrinkles and drooping jowls. My eyes continue to shine out of my face, clear and blue, just as they always have done, and I experience a fleeting relief. I help myself to a whisky from the drinks cabinet.

‘Rachel?’ I whisper.

IT IS ME, YOU KNOW, she whispers.

‘I know it is,’ I reply uncertainly.

I FOUGHT HIM. HE TRIED SO HARD TO KILL ME …

At the thought, I have to pour myself a double measure and gulp it down. ‘Oh God, what if he goes for me next? What are we going to do?’ The whisky does not agree with me, for it hits a stomach already cat’s-cradled with fear, and I retch it back up, all over the cabinet. ‘Oh God, oh God …’

STOP PANICKING. SIT DOWN.

‘I am too old for all this,’ I say, and then realise what I have said, and laugh. I never understood my grandfather when he said that you never truly age as time goes by, for 497you feel the same inside, it’s just that your body becomes an increasing embarrassment. ‘I feel as though I am still twenty-five!’ he would croak through rotting teeth, and I would smile in appalled disbelief. Well, now I know. I am twenty-six years old and sixty-two years old and both are true.

Then I think of my mother, at her home in St Albans; she always said that she found the evenings hardest, when her only friend was a dancing screen; I cannot even write her a letter to say a goodbye.

THE STORYTELLER, Rachel muses. WE NEVER ASKED GWENT HOW HE CAME ABOUT THE CONCEPT.

‘It all sounded so plausible,’ I say. ‘A mythical figure; the sort you’d expect to dispense wisdom and solve things, ready for the finale … I’m sorry, I ought to have asked – my mind was so dazed …’

I THINK GWENT MOSTLY SPEAKS NONSENSE ANYWAY.

‘True. I once thought him reliable and clear-headed, but now I fear he is much too prone to whimsy …’

TELL ME MORE ABOUT THE MOMENT WHEN YOU WOKE UP, WITH FATE. HOW DID WE LOOK?

‘We didn’t look our best … I made the worst of mistakes with Fate. You won’t leave me, my darling?’

WHY? NO. I AM HERE WITH YOU ALWAYS.

‘I should have fought him, Rachel. I was awake, there, in the room, banging on the door. I should have just jumped from the window and risked a broken leg. Instead, I let him trick me with empty fucking promises. I was so weak, 498and so beaten down. A month, he said. Drink the tea, give me one more month, I’ll release you. He didn’t say anything about you dying. How is that a happy ending? Some “pact” … I should have broken down that door.’

Silence.

‘Perhaps we will have to find another book to escape into. We can’t stay here: that is the only truth I am certain of. In another book, you could be more than … that which you are.’

I hear the chiming of the grandfather clock: it is six now. There is a crick in my neck, which I rub with stiff fingers. My sadness is a cello note in my stomach. The future seems nothing but a long row of books stretching out before us: a variety of fonts on white pages sketching plots and torments. I am tired of third-act finales where we are driven out and on to new beginnings. I scan the room, musing on the scope of Fate’s imagination. When my gaze settles back on the grandfather clock, however, I recall that there was one much the same back in Fate’s cottage, which I noted when I came to interview him. It had chimed six during my visit. A century or so back, that very clock was only an idea in the mind of a real clockmaker, who must have sat and sketched it carefully, and then dreamt of refinements in the folds of his sleep. The cognition that the clock is the property of many minds gives me a faint feeling of peace, the tautness of our surroundings loosening just a little.

‘Rachel?’

YES? Her voice is sad.

‘I cannot even remember what they are called. You know – the modern telephones. The ones which light up.’ 499

I hear a knock at the door: a sharp, bold rap. I curse at the sound of Ginny’s footsteps in the hallway; I should have informed her that I did not want to receive any visitors.

Noise; agitated voices; Ginny’s protests. Rachel cries, THE POLICE!, and then they are in the room, led by an Inspector Woolf, who informs me that I am under arrest for the theft of apples from the orchard of Mr. Parker.