BY FOUR O’CLOCK I’M STANDING outside the house from Burlem’s memory: the one he lives in with Lura (or, at least, the one where he lived in December); the one you get to by walking past the cheese shop and turning right and walking up the narrow cobbled street. It’s a tallish, thin grey stone cottage with green wooden shutters over the front windows. It looks cosy, but it also has an air of the fortress about it. Maybe that’s the effect of the shutters, or just my paranoia. I’m not actually sure I should be here at all, but I’m fairly certain no one’s been following me. Well, at least, no one in the physical world. I realise suddenly that I should have gone into a church just in case one of those Project Starlight guys (or the dead KIDS) is in my mind. It’s too late now, though. It was probably too late almost from the moment I set off this morning. If they’ve been with me at any stage, they’ll know where I’m going. But if they’ve been with me at any stage, they won’t need to know where I’m going: they’ll have their recipe.
But I don’t think they are here, anyway. I think I’m on my own.
In fact, I know I’m on my own. I don’t think I’ve ever been so alone in my life. I hesitate before lifting the heavy brass door knocker. My eyes are filling with tears, but I don’t want to seem unbalanced when, and if, someone opens the door. When did I last cry? I didn’t cry after Patrick fucked me at the university, or in the service-station toilet; I didn’t cry when my parents finally abandoned me for good; I didn’t even cry when I left Adam at the priory, probably hating me, probably gone for ever. But now, standing here in the early twilight, in the cold air, with seagulls squawking above me and stars already beginning to prick the sky, I want to cry more than I ever have before. I gulp it back. But if this doesn’t work, then I’m totally fucked. I have no home. I have no money. I have no family.
I lift the knocker and bang it twice against the door.
Please be there, please be there, please be there.
I see smoke coming from the chimney: someone is in.
After two minutes or so I’m just about to knock again, but then a woman opens the door. It’s Lura. I recognise everything about her, from the flowing clothes to the grey shoulder-length hair streaked with pink. I suddenly realise that I haven’t worked out how I should play this. I know what it’s like to make love to this woman; to lie to her; to live with her. But I should probably pretend I don’t know her at all. As long as I remember I am me, that’s perfectly true.
She doesn’t say anything.
‘Hello,’ I say. ‘I wonder if . . .’
‘Sorry?’ says Lura. ‘Who are you?’ Her voice, which I recognise anyway, is educated and low-pitched, with just a hint of a German accent.
‘I’m sorry to bother you, but . . .’
‘Yes?’ She’s trying to hurry me up. Maybe she doesn’t like people pissing her around, wasting her time. But I’m not sure she’s going to like what I’ve got to say, either. Although she has to. She has to, because I’ve got nowhere else to go.
‘I’m looking for Saul Burlem,’ I say.
Lura’s face looks as though it’s been freeze-framed in one of those movie special effects that lets the rest of the world just carry on as usual around the frozen object. Then she’s normal again, except for the fear I can now see in her eyes, like the beginning of a storm.
‘You’re looking for whom?’ she says.
‘Saul Burlem,’ I say. ‘I need to see him. Would you mind telling him that Ariel Manto is here? Tell him that I found the page and I have to speak to him.’
As I speak, the fear in Lura’s eyes hurricanes outwards and now she reaches a hand up to her face, as if to steady it: to stop this; to confirm, perhaps, that she’s imagining it. This must be the last thing you need when you’re in hiding. This, if you’re in hiding, must be your worst nightmare.
‘Who are you?’ she says.
‘I’m Saul’s PhD student.’
‘You’re . . . No. I know where you’ve come from.’
‘I’m not with them. I’m not part of Project Starlight.’
‘How do I know that? If you aren’t with them, then why the bloody hell did you come?’ She takes a deep breath and touches her hair. ‘Saul isn’t here, anyway. He moved on, about two months ago. He went . . .’
‘Ariel?’
It’s Burlem. He’s standing behind Lura.
‘Saul,’ I say, ‘can I . . . ?’
‘Let her in, Lura,’ he says, in his gravel voice. And then, leaning against the wall in the hallway while I walk in: ‘Oh, fuck.’
The downstairs of the house is an open plan space with wooden floorboards and oak beams that you access by walking through a wide hallway and through an arch. A fire is burning at the far end of the large room, and there are red, brown and dark yellow rugs everywhere. There’s a large dining table on the left-hand side of the room. At the moment it has a newspaper spread out on it, with a half-finished cup of coffee on a wicker mat. Just beyond the table there’s a black-and-white dog asleep in a cane basket, and then, at the edge of the room, what must be a set of patio doors covered with heavy curtains. As if the dog knows I’m looking at it, it glances up at me and then falls asleep again. There’s a mantelpiece over the fireplace with an assortment of items on it: a couple of rosettes, a framed black-and-white photograph of a man and a woman, a hairbrush, a set of knitting needles and a vase of blue flowers. The closest thing to the fire is an armchair with some knitting balanced on the arm. There are two sofas – big, deep and yellow – and they face each other across the fire but set slightly back from the armchair. One of them looks more used than the other, and there are books and papers scattered on it. There’s a coffee table – a polished section of tree trunk – between the sofas, with books and old crosswords and Biros all over it. There are tall piles of books on every surface, and the whole right-hand wall is covered with thick pine shelves, a bit like the ones from Apollo Smintheus’s apartment, but stocked with what must be hundreds and hundreds of books. There’s no TV.
I’m not quite sure how I feel to be here. I’d expected something like relief, the emotional equivalent of having come home after a long wet journey, or having a drink when you are thirsty. But I still ache for that kind of safe, fulfilled feeling, the feeling that I’ve achieved something by coming here. At the moment I feel rather as if I’ve dropped in on one of my university professors at home, at the weekend, when his wife is there. And worse: I know, and Burlem must suspect, that I read his mind to get here. What felt like a necessity at the time feels somehow wrong now. I didn’t really come here for him: I came here for me. Then again, he must understand that I didn’t have any other choice. But I know too much about him now, and we’re both aware of that.
The kitchen area is around to the left and runs adjacent to the hallway.
‘I’ll make tea,’ Lura says, walking off towards the kitchen. I hear water running and then the click of the kettle being switched on.
Burlem motions for me to follow him to the large dining table. He folds the paper and puts it to one side. Then Lura comes and picks up his mug and takes it away. For a whole two or three minutes now no one has said anything.
‘I’m sorry . . .’ I begin.
‘How did you find me?’ Burlem says.
‘Through Molly,’ I say.
‘Molly doesn’t know where I am,’ he says. ‘No one in my bloody family knows where I am. That’s what you give up when you go into hiding like this. One of many things.’
‘Pedesis,’ I say. ‘I used Pedesis. I’m sorry. I’ve got the book.’
He closes his eyes for a couple of seconds and then opens them again; then he runs a shaky hand through his dark hair.
‘Fuck,’ he says again.
‘I’m sorry . . .’ I say again. There’s a long pause. ‘They came after me and I didn’t know what to do. I realised that the same thing must have happened to you, and so I logically thought that if I came to where you were I might be safe.’
‘The curse,’ says Burlem.
‘Yeah,’ I say.
And I think we’re both remembering his paper in Greenwich, where we both agreed that we’d read the book if we could, regardless of the curse. I know I’d do it again, but I don’t know about him. His face looks rougher and more lined than when I last saw him, and he now has several streaks of white-grey in his hair. Or maybe he used to dye it, and now he can’t be bothered. What must it be like to have to leave your job like that? To leave behind a daughter?
‘How is Molly?’ he asks.
‘She’s doing normal teenage things,’ I say.
‘But she’s OK?’
I weigh this question in my mind. All right, so Molly’s fucking an unsuitable guy, but then we all do that. When I was in her mind, I didn’t detect any obvious anorexia, self-harm or drug abuse. But then, of course, she has the potential for all of that: I knew that from the connection I felt with her.
‘She’s fine,’ I say.
Burlem sighs. ‘Are you still smoking?’ he asks.
‘Yeah, why?’
‘Can I have one?’
‘Sure.’ I take my tobacco out of my bag. ‘Roll-ups,’ I say. ‘I’m a bit skint.’
‘Can you do it for me?’ he asks. ‘I’ve lost the knack.’
And his hands are shaking too, I notice. I roll two cigarettes and give one to him. We both light up.
‘Oh, that feels better,’ he says. ‘Fucking weird, but better. Why don’t we go over by the fire? You’d better tell me what’s been going on. Let me know how terrified I should be.’
We get up and walk over to the sofas. He takes the messy one and I take the other. It does feel amazing, sitting in a warm, comfortable room after everything that’s happened. But somehow I don’t feel quite comfortable. I don’t sit back in the sofa, although it’s soft and vast. I perch on the edge, as though I’m having an interview. There aren’t any ashtrays, but I notice that Burlem flicks his ash into the fire, so I do the same.
‘You shouldn’t have come here,’ he says.
I think I’m going to cry again. ‘I know . . . But I . . . I had . . .’
‘But, well, it’s good to see you again.’ He smiles now for the first time.
‘Oh. Thanks, I . . .’
‘And I’m sorry about the book.’ He sighs. ‘I feel responsible.’
‘Don’t be,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry I freaked you out by coming here.
But I honestly couldn’t think of anything else to do. I mean . . . Just to be in the same room as someone who has had the same experiences as me is . . .’
Burlem cuts me off. ‘How sure are you that you weren’t followed?’ he asks.
‘A hundred per cent,’ I say. ‘Or, well, maybe ninety-nine. But they only want the recipe, don’t they? They can get that from me now. They wouldn’t need to use me to get to you. They’d only need to get into my head. I’ve got all the information they need. I can promise you that after the last time I met them in the Troposphere – or MindSpace, as they seem to call it – I’ve got no intention of letting them anywhere near me, my mind, or my body. That’s why I ran. That’s why I came to find you. I can’t go anywhere any more. I can’t go home; I can’t go to work . . .’
‘That’s neat logic,’ he says. ‘That stuff about only needing to get into your mind for a few minutes to get the recipe. But they want all of us dead. You do know that?’
‘No. I didn’t know that. Well, I mean, I know they’re violent, and they’ll use force to get the recipe . . . And maybe even for fun. But I thought that once they had the recipe, they’d go away.’
Burlem coughs and takes a drag on the roll-up. ‘When they sell the patent for the mixture – or cook it up illegally; I don’t know what they’ve got planned – they won’t want people like us coming along and undercutting their price. They’ll want to get rid of any competitors. Well, I don’t know for sure, but I expect they do want to sell it; that seems logical.’
‘They do,’ I say.
‘How do you know?’
‘I . . .’
Lura comes through the large room carrying a yellow tray with a teapot and mugs on it. Burlem quickly shifts some magazines and newspapers out of the way and she puts it down on the coffee table between two stacks of books. Then she sits down in the armchair and looks at me.
‘Are you all right?’ she asks me, peering over her silver glasses.
‘I’m sorry if I was rude at the door. We’ve been hiding for so long, and . . .’
‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Ariel knows about Project Starlight,’ Burlem says to Lura. ‘She knows what they want.’
‘Yes, I overheard that,’ Lura says. ‘How do you know? I couldn’t find out anything about them on the occasions when I tried – well, beyond the very basics.’
‘I got into one of their minds,’ I say. ‘Martin Rose.’
Burlem half laughs and half snorts. ‘How the fuck did you do that?’
‘They were waiting for me in their car. I was in a priory and they couldn’t come in, obviously, so they were kind of staking me out. I got into the Troposphere from inside the priory and ended up in one of their heads by accident. I didn’t even know they were there before that.’
‘What were you doing in a priory?’ Burlem asks.
‘Hiding from them. It’s a long story,’ I say.
Burlem pours the tea, spilling at least half a cup onto the tray.
‘I think maybe now’s the time to tell us all of it, if you don’t mind.
How you got the book, what happened next, and so on,’ he says.
‘No, that’s fine,’ I say. ‘But can I stay here, tonight at least? I don’t want to impose, but . . .’
‘It’s all right, Ariel,’ says Lura, but she doesn’t look happy about it.
‘Yeah,’ says Burlem. ‘You’re fucked in the outside world, just like me.’
Lura shakes her head. ‘How long is this going to go on?’ she says softly. Then she looks at me. ‘You’re more than welcome to stay as long as you like,’ she says. ‘We’ve got a room for you.’ Then she looks at Burlem. ‘But we’re going to have to stop this before we wake up and find that there are ten of us, and then twenty, and then that the whole bloody world knows about the Troposphere.’
‘It’s OK,’ Burlem says. ‘Ariel won’t have told anyone else.’
‘No. I haven’t,’ I say. But I don’t mention that I’ve left the book – intact again – in the priory. I think that will make more sense as part of my whole story.
I sit back on the sofa and start telling them about the day the university started falling down, and the secondhand bookshop and everything that happened after that. And as I speak, I finally realise that I didn’t imagine any of this: as much as anything can be said to be real, this is real.
Telling the story takes hours. At first Burlem keeps interrupting to ask me things, but after about half an hour of intense conversation about the university, and then even more speculation about how Burlem’s books ended up in the secondhand shop (his ex-wife, he thinks, claiming the house), Lura steps in and forbids any more questions until after I’ve finished. At some point she gets an A4 notebook and starts writing things down in it. I get the impression that although Burlem has obviously spent more time in the Troposphere, she’s the one who possibly understands how it all works. Which means I’m going to have plenty of questions for her, too. She scribbles most furiously (and has to shut Burlem up again, too) when I talk about Apollo Smintheus, and also when I get to the detail about the underground network, and how I travelled on a train of fear to get back to myself before I made the mistake that was surely going to kill me. At the point when I explain that I was able to change things in people’s minds, they both seem to freeze and exchange a look, but neither of them says anything to me about it, and Lura doesn’t write anything down.
At about eleven o’clock, I’m almost done. My throat hurts from all the talking and the cigarettes I’ve smoked. My mouth feels dry; that hangover mouth you get when you’ve only had a couple of hours’ sleep. We’ve drunk about four pots of tea since I got here, but I haven’t actually eaten anything since lunchtime and my stomach is audibly growling, although I don’t feel hungry.
‘We need to eat,’ says Lura, after my stomach makes the noise again.
‘I’ll phone for a curry,’ says Burlem.
But he waits until I finish my story before he does. The story isn’t complete. I’ve left out the detail about fucking Patrick in the Little Chef toilets, obviously. But I haven’t made it clear that the book is in the priory, either. So I’m not surprised when the first question Burlem asks is about the book.
‘Where is it now?’ he says. ‘You’ve got it with you, presumably.’
I shake my head. ‘I did what you did,’ I say.
‘What I did?’
‘Yeah. I left it behind, thinking it would be safer than carrying it with me.’
‘Fuck,’ is all Burlem says before he goes to collect the food.
While he’s gone, I am left on my own with Lura and the dog, who has now woken up properly, stretched, slurped some water, and then come to sit on the sofa next to me. Lura hasn’t said anything at all since Burlem left, and I feel I have to say something.
‘What’s his name?’ I ask.
But I know already: Planck; presumably after the quantum physicist.
‘He’s called Planck,’ she says. Then she sighs and shakes her head. ‘You’ve had some lucky escapes,’ she says. ‘I can’t believe . . .’
‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing. There’s even more to the Troposphere than I thought. Although it all makes sense, of course.’
‘Sense?’ I laugh. ‘Please tell me how it makes sense.’
‘Oh, we will,’ she says. ‘But not now. It’s late.’
There’s a silence for a few seconds. I’m not sure Lura likes me. I scratch the dog between his ears, and try to think of something simple I can say that doesn’t simply amount to ‘Tell me whatever it is I don’t know – that no one knows – about how the world works, now! Tell me what could possibly make sense of the experiences I’ve had, because I haven’t got a clue.’
‘How did you come to be here?’ I ask her in the end. ‘How did you make it so they couldn’t find you?’ I remember that when Burlem cut me off by walking into the church, he was still in the railway tunnel. I have no idea how he came to be here, with Lura, and how they remained undetected for so long. ‘How did Saul even get out of the tunnel?’ I ask.
‘He shifted the pile of rubble,’ she says. ‘Brick by brick. From the sound of what you’ve said, that tunnel was unstable anyway, and I’m surprised it took another year to collapse after he disturbed it.’
‘Oh – you think he made it collapse, then? How weird,’ I say, thinking that the tunnel collapsing was the reason for everything starting: that if the tunnel hadn’t collapsed, then I wouldn’t have got the book, or found the page. Or maybe I would; maybe I would have found those things eventually, anyway.
And I realise that someone will find the book in the priory eventually, as well.
‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘he got out of the tunnel and got on a bus to anywhere. He just travelled randomly until he was far enough away to get his thoughts together. He went up to Scotland and lived in a bed-and-breakfast for a while, during which time he explored the Troposphere – and was very lucky not to get killed. He sent me a mobile phone and asked me to go into a church on a certain date, at a certain time, and that he would phone me.’ She smiles. ‘It was a bit like being in a film. He was completely paranoid and didn’t trust me at all at first, and we kept having to have these coded conversations with me standing in a church talking on a mobile phone – which did not go down well with church people at all. But we got through it. I’m retired now, as you probably know, so I wasn’t tied to London when all this happened. We came down here temporarily at first, and then ended up staying. It’s actually my brother’s place, but we have an arrangement.’ She shrugs. ‘He needed a place in London, and we’ve sorted out all the paperwork so we are officially renting this place from someone else entirely, under assumed names. It’s complicated, but we thought it was quite solid.’
‘I have to ask,’ I say. ‘What is the logic behind the church detail: you know, that no one can jump into your mind if you’re in a church?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘I know hardly anything beyond what I’ve worked out, and what Apollo Smintheus has told me.’ I shrug. ‘I can make a guess, but . . .’
‘What’s your guess?’
‘That all the prayer in a church – all the extra-charged thought and hope – somehow scrambles the signal, if that makes any sense. You know, like interference.’
She smiles. ‘That’s good. That’s exactly what I think as well.’
Now the smile goes. ‘I’m assuming you know about my book?’
‘No.’ I shake my head. But the way she says it – I realise that this is why she has a problem with me. She thinks I know her as intimately as Burlem does because I’ve been in his mind. She thinks there’s a possibility that I know everything about her. For the second time I get the feeling that she’s the wife and I’m the mistress, and she knows her husband hasn’t just been screwing me; he’s been telling me things about her as well. I remember when I used to have affairs with married men whose wives didn’t know, and wouldn’t have approved, and those marriages were always in crisis. Inevitably the guy would tell me things about his wife that I didn’t want to know – and didn’t feel I had any right to know. The special dinner she arranged to try and get their marriage back on track (and during which he called me on his mobile, from the toilet); the special dress she bought to try and get him interested in her again (and which he told me made her look old and fat). I shudder to remember these exchanges. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so bad in my life as when I heard those things, and I stopped sleeping with men like that because I didn’t want to be a party to anything so sad.
I want to say something to make this all right, but I can’t think of anything.
‘Hm,’ is all she says in response to my not knowing about her book.
A couple of seconds later the dog’s ears prick up, and he acts as though something’s about to happen. Then, two or three minutes after that, I hear the sound of Burlem’s key in the lock and feel the blast of cold air as the front door opens and closes again.
The dog knew, I think. The dog knew that Burlem was almost back.
How does that work?
For the first time since all this happened, I feel my understanding of the world start to shift, as if it’s only now – now that I know this is all true – that I can allow myself to start answering all the questions I have: to start adding up all the pieces of information and all my experiences. The dog knows, I realise, because we all potentially know everything about what other people are thinking and doing. We all potentially have access to one another’s thoughts. I wonder properly where the Troposphere is, and what it is, now that I’m convinced it isn’t just a figment of my imagination. Is it hovering less than a particle away from us, perhaps in another dimension to which we have access only some of the time? Or does it work in another way entirely? But I am suddenly sure that the moment when you catch someone’s eye, or the moment you think someone’s looking at you, or the moment when you think of someone and then they ring, or the moment when you start getting lost in a building you know so well because most other people in it are lost – these aren’t accidents. They relate in some way to the structure of the physical world, to the fact that all our minds are as connected as everything else.
I wonder what Lura’s book is about? I was lying, of course, when I said I knew nothing about it. It was sitting there in the back of Burlem’s mind the whole time I was with him. Lura’s book. Lura’s book. It’s important, but she hasn’t taken this opportunity to tell me anything about it. I wonder what would make her trust me.
* * *
We eat vegetable curry and rice at the table with a bottle of white wine from the fridge. Planck goes back into his basket and falls asleep as we all start questioning one another on the Troposphere, and what my experiences in it could possibly mean.
‘I’m intrigued by this god, Apollo Smintheus,’ Burlem says.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I thought I was going mad.’
‘Maybe you were,’ he says. ‘I never met any gods in the Troposphere. In fact, I’ve never met any other beings in the Troposphere. I didn’t think it was possible.’
We talk about Apollo Smintheus some more, and all the questions of religion I was thinking about earlier today. It seems that neither Burlem nor Lura has thought about the Troposphere in a religious context, apart from noting the detail about the interference caused by churches. Lura seems vaguely – but only vaguely – impressed by my feminist analysis of all major religions, but Burlem seems uncertain about me lumping Buddhism in with everything else.
‘Zen,’ he says gruffly. ‘Zen’s different. And the Tao.’
And I remember his desire for the void, tempered by his need to lose desire altogether. And that makes me think of Adam, and what happened to him. I hardly know Adam, but I miss him more than I thought possible.
‘We’ve all got our own ways of aiming for enlightenment,’ Lura says. ‘I’m writing the book, but he’s meditating all the time, trying to see outside everything we already know. There’s still so much . . .’ But she doesn’t finish the sentence. Instead, she yawns. ‘Oh. What a day.’
Our conversation has meandered around so much. We’ve discussed Pedesis, and the possibility of time travel using people’s ancestors, and Burlem has confirmed that the milky images you get in the console when you’re in someone else’s mind relate to all their living ancestors: that’s why the mice had hundreds and he only had one (his mother). The way you can most effectively go back in time is to use living ancestors until they run out (presumably, for example, Burlem’s mother has none, so, if you got to her, you’d have to jump into another person rather than pick another image from the console, and then go back as far as possible using that person’s ancestors). We discussed this point for some time, as I couldn’t quite see how you’d ever get beyond people who are living now. But then Lura reminded me that distance is time in the Troposphere, and that by jumping across the world using ancestors, you also go back in time, sometimes by years rather than months. When I jumped from Molly to Burlem, I was jumping from Hertfordshire to Devon, and that’s what got me back to before Christmas. If Burlem had been in Scotland, I may have ended up in August or September; if he’d been in Australia, I may have gone back three or four years. If you’re lucky (or if your journey is well planned), you’ll eventually find living ancestors who were dead when your journey started, and each time you jump, you’ll go further back in time. It sounded like a slow process, but Burlem reminded me that the jumps themselves are very quick. He also pointed out that this is obviously what Mr Y was doing when he died. Mr Y is a fictional character, but Lumas isn’t. Burlem made it clear that this was also how Lumas must have died, and everyone else who was ‘cursed’ by the book. Pedesis is dangerous, just as I discovered when I did it to get to Burlem.
I’ve also learned that Burlem’s Troposphere is indeed the Victorian city he was thinking about when I was in his mind. Lura gets a little cagey when we start comparing our personal Tropospheres. When I ask her how she experienced it, she tucks her hair behind her ear and says simply, ‘Oh, a scientific matrix kind of thing. Not something anyone else could visualise, really.’ And then she gives Burlem a meaningful look.
‘We’d better all go to bed soon,’ he says. ‘We can pick this up in the morning. There’s still so much to talk about. And Lura, why don’t you make use of Ariel? She may be able to help you in some way. She’s better with science than I am.’
‘I’m really not,’ I say.
And Lura looks at me for a second as though she’s sizing me up, and then her eyes drop as I clearly fail. Whatever Burlem thinks, we’re not just going to settle down together cosily to work out a theory of the Troposphere, or whatever. Not unless I can convince her to stop disliking me.
All night I dream of Adam. In my dream, he’s telling me that he loves me; that he will never leave me. Dreams are so cruel sometimes. I’m never going to have that life. In fact, these shreds of life that I’m left with – I’m not sure they add up to anything very much.