Twenty-Three

When Lin woke up the following morning, she knew at once that something was different. With her eyes still closed, her head buried deep in the pillow, she tried to work out what it was. And then it came to her: there was no more noise. There were no more people.

Immediately she turned on her back, opened her eyes and propped herself up on one elbow. Her hospital room was empty and there was no sound from the corridor. The incessant whispering and shuffling of feet had gone. There was nothing beyond the window but the now-still lime trees, outlined by the first faint light of dawn. No one at all … an empty world. She could feel the clarity of the space, the vacuum left by their absence.

They have slipped …

She swung her legs out of bed.

At once, her fingers and feet seemed abnormally large. She held out her hands and looked at them, lifted her feet and inspected them. Both hands and feet felt twice their normal size. She edged herself to the side of the bed and put her feet on the floor. The room swayed a little as she stood up, then righted itself. For the first time, she inched towards the window.

There was a quadrangle of grass three floors below, and a pathway, and beyond that a car park. There was no one visible on the paths, or in the car park.

‘Hello,’ said a voice behind her.

It was the nurse who had been there the first day, the nurse whose hands reeked of her husband and his last afternoon.

‘Hello,’ Lin replied. ‘You’re back again.’

‘I’ve been on duty all night. You look better.’

‘I feel better.’

The woman walked in. She glanced at the chart at the end of the bed, but didn’t pick it up. ‘Can you walk OK?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you want to try?’

‘Yes.’

‘See if you can walk a little on your own.’

Lin picked up her dressing gown from the chair. She was not dizzy, but the huge-feeling feet and hands remained a problem. The nurse headed back to the door, and Lin followed her, feeling for the wall. She realized that things had a heightened quality, more so than on any day since the illness began. The wall paint beneath her outstretched fingers was very smooth and thick, like cold fondant icing; almost as though, if she pressed hard on it, it would depress to form the shape of her hand.

‘Would you like a drink?’ the nurse asked.

‘I would, yes.’

‘Come down to the lounge, then. Take your time. I’ll make a cup of tea and leave it there. You can have a shower, too, if you feel up to it. But don’t lock the door—so I can keep an eye on you.’

Luxury! Lin thought. A shower and hot water and a toothbrush, and a comb through her hair. She felt as if she had been asleep for weeks. Her body ached mildly all over, as if she had been pushed and pummelled in some rotating machine. The nurse left, and Lin eventually stepped out of the door after her, looking down the corridor. She could see herself in the reflection of the window opposite. She was suddenly overcome with a need to see Theo, or at least speak to him.

She had no money, and did not know where her handbag was. Still, she could phone him. She could reverse the charges. She pushed open the swing door and looked around the square landing beyond. There was a lift and a stairway, but no phone. As Lin stood indeterminately in the half-open door, a light above the lift registered, and the doors opened. A hospital cleaner stepped out, carrying a box of detergent.

‘You all right?’ the woman asked.

‘I wanted the phone,’ Lin said.

‘Downstairs. Ground floor.’ She held the lift doors open with one foot. ‘You OK to get down there?’

‘Yes,’ Lin said. ‘Fine, thanks.’

Once inside, she pressed the button for Ground. The doors shut.

They have slipped, for a moment, into another wheel …

She knew what she had been dreaming of now. She knew who had told her that. The lift bumped, then dropped smoothly away. Lin rested her head on the slippery wall.

She had been waiting for a train going in the opposite direction to his when she had met the boy who talked about time. And it had been him she had been dreaming of: dreaming that she was still standing on that station while the soft rain blew in.

Lin had finished working at the Hunting Dog; she couldn’t face Michael. And she no longer lived at home. For the whole of the last summer she had worked for a holiday-chalet company, starting at eight, finishing at six, cleaning out rooms. Social Services had placed her in a bedsit. She was very lucky to have it. It was only a fifteen-minute train journey from the chalets.

He, too, had been waiting for a train. Lin had bought a bar of chocolate from the vending machine and sat down on a bench. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast. After a while, she had glanced over to see that the boy sitting nearby was drawing a complicated pattern on an exercise book lying open on his knees.

Fine rain, fine August rain, floated gently in on them, fanning and folding as people moved past. Other local trains came, but still not hers. Then, no trains came at all. The crowds on the platforms increased. Over the tannoy came a long, rambling announcement.

The boy on the bench had looked up.

‘Please—what is that message?’ he asked her. He sounded French. ‘I don’t hear what they say.’

She had noticed a round globe in the drawing on his lap—intersected by some kind of grid.

‘There’s been an accident,’ she told him. ‘On the track back there. So there are no trains.’

‘No trains? For how long?’

‘They don’t know. It’s a cow.’

‘I am sorry—a what?’

She had started laughing. ‘A cow’s dead on the track. Stopping the trains.’

He had smiled. ‘How can that happen?’

‘I don’t know,’ she had said. ‘Ask the cow.’

His eyes dropped to—and remained fixed on—the page. She had considered him for some time: the very neatly cut hair, the smooth face, the long-fingered hands. He seemed utterly unperturbed by the delay.

‘Will you miss any connection?’ she had asked finally.

‘I don’t know.’ He carried on drawing.

‘Where are you going?’

‘London. St Katharine’s Dock.’

‘Why St Katharine’s Dock?’

He glanced up at her. ‘There is a kind of clock there that I want to see.’

‘A clock?’

He continued drawing. At last her curiosity overcame her. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

He sighed and put down the pen. For the first time he really looked her over. ‘You are at school?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Sixth form.’

‘And what do you do in this school?’

‘English,’ she said, and he had smiled. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘You stretch your mind, I suppose.’

‘Maybe.’

Their eyes met. She waved at the page in his lap. ‘And what’s this?’

‘This? For past time.’

‘You mean a hobby.’

‘Yes, hobby.’

‘You do this at college?’

‘At university, yes.’ She had been surprised: he didn’t look old enough. ‘I do physics, mathematics,’ he added.

‘So what’s this?’

‘Dials. You know dials—like clocks?’

‘Dials … you mean sundials?’

‘Yes, I do dials.’

She had been completely floored. ‘You design sundials?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘Not design. Not make. I learn.’ He waved a textbook at her, which he had been resting on to draw. ‘That is why I go to London, to see an upper equinoctial dial.’

She flopped against the back of the bench, grinning. ‘Sounds like fun.’

‘I have been here looking at another dial on a church. I am taking … the course, the work …’

‘An option?’

‘Yes, an option at university. An option to do time.’

She began to laugh. ‘Oh, you’re going to do time?’

He didn’t pick up the joke. ‘I work on mathematics and time.’

She had shaken her head. ‘Well.’

‘It is interesting, the way we look at time.’

‘Oh?’

‘This month is Fructidor, you know that?’

‘It’s August.’

‘Yes, in French Revolutionary months, Fructidor. Do you know they divide the day into ten hours? They made decimal time, a new calendar. All the dials were changed.’ He sat forward towards her.

‘Revolutions attack time. There is nothing more important. Time rules us, rules everyone. After the revolution in Russia, they make five days in a week: the days with numbers, not names.’

‘I know the Anglo-Saxon name for August,’ she said. ‘Weodmonath—the month of weeds.’

His face had changed: enthusiasm had wiped away the closed, private expression of an hour before.

‘I don’t like Fructidor,’ she added. ‘It sounds like a canned drink.’

‘Vendemaire is next.’

‘Better.’ Then she said, ‘I’m doing Anglo-Saxon poetry … my name is Lin.’

‘Emile,’ he said. Solemnly they shook hands.

For a while they fell silent. A hundred yards down the line, the sun was trying to shine through a veil-like haze.

‘And you—you’re on holiday?’

‘No, I’m working the summer. Where do you live?’ she asked.

‘Paris.’

‘With your parents?’

‘My father. My mother lives in Milan with another husband.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘My mother …’ But she didn’t finish the sentence.

They had eventually walked along the seafront to a café. There were only a few resolute walkers about—elderly couples for the most part. This resort, in contrast to the home of the Hunting Dog five miles further along the coast, was quiet—alive only in having a few fortune tellers and fish and chip shops. As they got closer to the cafe, they passed the big concrete pool of the boating lake. Boys balanced along its knobbly, encrusted rim.

Emile had leaned on the railings, and looked down. ‘It’s a funny place,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It used to be fashionable here, in the Thirties. Now they don’t quite know what to do with themselves.’

He bought her supper at the café. People at the bar of the pub afterwards turned to look at him when he ordered drinks, listening to his pronounced accent. When they came out later, it was dark.

‘I’ll walk you back to the station,’ she had said.

It was half past ten. The only train running by then was the boat train to Ireland.

‘I don’t want to go to Ireland,’ he said.

‘I don’t put people up,’ she told him.

‘You don’t do …?’

‘Put people up. I don’t have anyone to stay—in my room.’

‘I see.’ He regarded her very seriously.

‘Look—you know what I mean.’

‘You don’t put people up, yes.’

She almost hit him in exasperation. ‘I mean, I’m not sleeping with you.’

He had shrugged.

It was with some embarrassment that she led him down the street to a terrace of flats where she had the very top room. They had to climb eight flights of stairs. At last she had opened the door to reveal the couch, chair, wardrobe, table and sink. The room was twelve feet square. She didn’t put on the overhead light because it made the place look bleaker than ever. Instead, in the dark, she walked across to the table to turn on the lamp.

‘No—don’t do that,’ he said from the doorway.

‘Why?’

He had walked in, closed the door and gone straight to the window. So high above the surrounding houses, Lin had a clear view of the sea. Down below were the backs of small hotels: their dustbins, yards. At night she would hear cats crying in those alleys and yards: sometimes, in high winds, their voices sounded like babies. In the last four weeks she had heard them crying all the time.

‘You have glass in the roof,’ he said.

‘It’s called a skylight.’

‘Skylight … skylight, yes,’ he repeated. ‘Pretty word.’ He stood looking up at it in the dark, then glanced at her. ‘You are all right?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘You are crying.’

‘No, I’m not.’

He had looked at her. ‘You are ill?’

‘No. Just … a bit sad sometimes.’

He said nothing, but his hand brushed her face, down the length of her cheek. He looked up again at the dark night sky and the stars. ‘There is the hunter.’

‘Where?’

‘There—in the stars.’

She looked. ‘Do you know the names?’

‘No, just some. There is Cassiopeia, I think. But I don’t know which. And the Great Bear …’

‘I’d have thought you’d learn them by heart. For the sundials and time thing.’

‘I will,’ he said. ‘I will learn.’

Together they stared upwards.

‘You look up at them when you sleep?’ he asked. There was no curtain on the skylight, and it was directly over her bed.

‘No,’ she replied. She was still thinking about babies, and there were tears in her throat, in her mouth. She put her hand to her mouth to stop it trembling. ‘I don’t like looking at them,’ she said. ‘They make me feel funny.’

He had laughed. ‘I think you are funny. Everyone likes stars.’

‘They make me feel small.’

‘But we are small—just cells. Just like … when you close your eyes quickly …’

‘Blinks?’

‘Yes, blinks of the eye.’

‘That’s why I don’t like them,’ she said. ‘I’m not a blink of the eye.’

‘But it doesn’t matter if we are blinks. We come again a million times.’

She had turned to look at him, at the shadows and the planes of his face in the half-light. ‘What do you mean?’

‘We live all those lives … a million lives.’

‘Are you Hindu or Buddhist or something?’ she had asked.

He had laughed. ‘No. My father is Catholic.’

‘Like my mother,’ she said. ‘And these lives we all have, you think … but that isn’t Christian.’

‘No. Just sense.’

She sat down on her only chair, and rested her arm along the table.

‘One life is a waste,’ he said. ‘Where do we go, all the people that die? We stack up, maybe—like on shelves, endless shelves of the soul … that is right? With a million dying every day. Another shelf in heaven. It gets overcrowded, don’t you think?’

She had smiled. ‘Yes.’

‘There is no sense. But to recycle us, to use us again, that makes sense. To try again. And then I think …’

‘What?’

He looked back again at the stars. ‘I think maybe, sometimes, that outside of us there is no time at all, or that it is all the same time, all these lives …’

The room fell silent while she tried to work out what he meant. ‘We live a million lives all at the same time?’ she asked, incredulous.

He sat down opposite her, on the edge of the bed. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but it would explain how people say they see the future.’

‘How would it?’

‘Each thing that happens, it has a place,’ he said thoughtfully.

‘Like you and me, we sit in this place. In this place, maybe a hundred years ago, there is no house. Maybe five hundred years ago, no road. It is a field by the sea—yes?’

‘Yes …’

‘OK. Five hundred years ago, in a field by the sea, a man is walking. He is walking in a turning wheel. That is time. That is the century. Alongside him, but he does not see, are other wheels that turn—other centuries and lives. They all belong to this place. And then suddenly the man, he sees something different. Not the field, but a house, very tall. Or he sees what is outside now, a car coming towards him. What does the man think? He thinks he has seen a devil, maybe. And the man driving the car—’

‘He sees a ghost.’

‘That is right. A ghost. Just for a moment, the wheels slip together. The man in the field and the man in the car, they have slipped, for a moment, into another wheel. A wheel that is turning at the same time over the same place.’

She leaned forward towards him. ‘I read about someone who was driving along a road in the south of England somewhere, and he saw a man riding a horse bareback, parallel with his car. He was shouting and screaming, staring at him, galloping full-pelt to keep up with the car. The driver didn’t know what to make of it, and then he saw that the man on the horse was wearing skins. He had a spear in his hand. He was staring at him, as if he were terrified, shaking the spear in his hand, shouting, and then the car came to a turn in the road, and the horse and its rider vanished …’

She paused, smiling at him. Sometimes, as a small child, she had imagined herself as being much greater than she physically felt: as if the inner person were capable of stretching and popping out from the body and becoming immensely linear.

At Theo’s age, she hadn’t been able to put words to it, but she had seen herself curled around the world like a strand of wool reeling round a ball, going on and on for ever. Sometimes, looking at the stars, this feeling had blossomed uncontrollably, so she had always looked away, as she still looked away, with a sense of dropping into infinity, and of being invisible, strung out, lost. It had been that way all her life. She was alone—and the outsider. Never sure of having been loved, only tolerated.

‘And you think it’s possible that we are all living a million lives, all at once, in different wheels?’ she asked.

‘Yes. I don’t know … it’s a theory.’ He reached forward, and took her hand. ‘Time is in the middle, where we stand. It goes out, making ripples. We touch others—more ripples. We do things—more ripples. Soon you don’t see the centre any more, only the ripples. On the ground under this house, on this very place, is what others have done. What we do, what others will do, we are all connected—all one. One time.’

‘Ripples,’ she said.

‘This is what I think of.’

‘And we could learn to see the other wheels?’ she asked.

He smiled, squeezing her hand. ‘That I don’t know about,’ he said.

They have slipped, for a moment, into another wheel …

She took him back to the station in the morning. He gave her his address in Paris. She wrote to it a month later, when she hadn’t heard from him. But he never replied.

She had never forgotten their conversation.

The lift doors opened.

Lin stepped out now, looking to left and right for the phone. A large foyer stretched in front of her, with a central display of flowers. On the far side were the main entrance doors to the hospital, and to their left a reception area where two uniformed security guards had their backs to her, talking. She looked up at the clock: it was twenty minutes past six.

She walked over to the flowers, which were raised up in a large circular bed with a seat running all the way round. Their colours, she thought, were more vibrant than she could ever remember: in fact they had a kind of frequency that was almost vocal.

She could smell the geraniums … Lin stopped. No, that wasn’t true. It wasn’t only them. It was the grey-leaved cotton lavender underneath them, and the ageratum and verbena. Their wiry little stalks were almost bitter, like cumin, or cloves … She could smell their colours. Her heart began a prolonged beat, heavy with anticipation of something she could not name.

All their colours: the pink with hardly any depth at all, and the weight and complexity of the darker blues. She could smell the difference between the flower and the leaf. She could smell the soil underneath them. She could smell the brick that surrounded them—it had a flat, gritty contour—and the flowers themselves were a knotted mass of fruit, bruised even by the stakes that the stems were tied to. She stood for a long moment, dazed.

She sat down on the seat and placed her hands, for balance, on either side of her.

There was a connection.

There was a connection between the brick and the flower and the floor, and the flesh of her hand. There was a connection between the construction of the room and the building. There was a connection between the building and the flower and her hand. Connections everywhere. All around her. All around everyone.

She looked over at the two men standing at the desk, and saw with sudden and certain clarity the link between them. It was a kind of current. She saw it leap backwards and forwards. She heard it, to a lesser extent, in the way the desk faced the door, in the relationship between the door and the desk. It was universal, it ran like an urgent message through every fabric. Every object, moving or still. Everything living or dead.

Except that nothing was dead. Down through her hands, she felt the vibration shuddering through different tones and notes. The foundations under the floor: the cabling,’ the ventilation, the steel frame—even the ground under the lowest layer of concrete. Connected like links in a chain. Connected, like long strings of chemical or mathematical formulae, not static or lifeless at all but weaving perpetually to and fro, subtly altering.

Inside the most silent of objects, matter convulsed in wild patterns. The sand inside the brick that held the flowerbed writhed with the memory of its original flowing shape. Millennia echoed in the sand and in the genetic code of the plants, and in her own endlessly rewoven body. And the thing that held them together pulsed with a permanent imperative.

Life. It must fulfil life.

Life …

Lin stood up.

She could hear the motor engine before it came close. A vehicle was roaring up the long drive. A connection. Another important connection growing more intense every second. She started to run.

As she passed the desk, she felt the friction of a pulse—that urging, unbreachable command—arc between her and the guards on the desk.

‘Where are you going?’ one called.

‘Out,’ she called over her shoulder.

She heard, then instantly forgot, their reply.

The ambulance was accelerating towards one wing of the building which extended at right angles to the entrance. It disappeared for a moment behind trees—the same lime trees, she realized, that she could see from her window. She then saw its roof apparently floating between their leaves. She took off across the forecourt, tying the belt of her dressing gown as she ran. The paving stones were slippery with dew. As she rounded the grass bank that formed a barrier between Admissions and Casualty, a great wave of fear rolled over her. It was pinpointed, like a beam of light, on the back of the ambulance, where a paramedic was already pulling open the doors.

I can hear that sound, she thought. I can hear the thing he hit. The thing that hit him. I can see it. I can see the last flash before it impacted.

Oh God! The car!

I can hear him.

The roses clamoured as she passed, filtering the different fluctuations of air that carried a thousand existing messages. She could feel the roses turned in wholly on themselves, trying to decipher the possible threat in the changes of temperature and sound.

Two nurses had come out from Casualty. Between them and the paramedic, they were taking out a stretcher and looking down at the teenage boy. A woman was in the ambulance, frantically talking at the top of her voice. As they tried to lower the stretcher she tried to hold onto it.

Lin stopped behind the group.

‘Put him down,’ she said.

The nurses looked back at her. The mother, half in and half out of the ambulance, gaped in confusion.

Lin shouldered her way through, pulling the paramedic’s hands from the neck collar. The boy’s face above the white band was livid. A series of thin, deep lines had already closed one eye. He looked as if he had been hurled along a pavement on his face. Blood soaked his hair. But that was only the minor injury; the worse one was to his chest. She felt the force of the injury, and gasped. She felt the jumbled circuitry in the shocked, labouring heart.

She put her hands flat on the boy’s chest. There was a moment of stunned silence, then one of the nurses hauled on her arm.

‘You can’t do that. Step back now. Come on—’

‘Who the hell is this?’ the paramedic demanded.

The other nurse was pulling at the foot of the stretcher. ‘For God’s sake, move her away,’ she said.

The link was twisted, wrenched. But it wasn’t broken.

‘Nothing ever breaks,’ Lin said. ‘You just … make the shape straight. It can’t break. Nothing ever does.’ She took away her hands.

At that moment, with a renewed and increasing charge, she thought of Caroline Devlin, her counsellor last year. The image was so intense, and so unexpected, that for a second Lin shut her eyes tightly. She felt this other heart, so much older than the boy’s, bending like cracked wood, wood weakened and warped by rain; felt the bridge that had been made between them weigh under the pressure. She had not seen Caroline for months, but she sensed her now, as if Lin were standing on one side of a glass wall and Caroline were on the other, and she could see the other woman’s flattened hands pressed to the pane, see the lines on her skin, the flesh crushed to the barrier.

The paramedic grasped her wrist. ‘Jesus!’ he muttered.

Lin opened her eyes, gasping.

They swept the boy past. At the door of the hospital, a doctor was standing waiting. He was already questioning the nurse. His voice peaked, raw at the edge, acidtoned.

‘Who are you?’ the paramedic said.

‘No one,’ Lin replied.

Both Caroline and the boy receded, swept away.

She listened.

The sun was warmer now.

Under the grouped green regiment of trees, the garden was blissfully singing.