New Wave Fabulists Read online

  They leave the bedroom and walk down the hall. The Andrew drawings, the knobs, the dials, and stacked, shiny machinery, watch them go. There aren’t any other Susans around at the moment. They’re all busy downstairs. He can hear them hammering away. For a minute, it’s the way it used to be, only better. Just Ed and Susan in their own house.

  Ed holds on tight to Susan’s hand.

  When Susan opens the attic door, the attic is full of stars. Stars and stars and stars. (Ed has never seen so many stars.) Susan has taken the roof off. Off in the distance, they can smell the apple trees, way down in the orchard.

  Susan sits down cross-legged on the floor and Ed sits down beside her. She says, “I wish you’d tell me a story.”

  Ed says, “What kind of story?”

  Susan says, “When Andrew was a kid, we used to read this book. It had stories about horses, you go for a ride and you stick to their backs like glue, they ride you down into the sea and they either marry you or they drown you. Stories about trolls, people who go under a hill. When they come out, a hundred years have gone by. Do you know how long it’s been since Andrew died? I’ve lost track of time.”

  “I don’t know stories like that,” Ed says. He picks at his flaky green skin and wonders what he tastes like. “What do you think the aliens look like? Do you think they look like giraffes? Like marbles? Like Andrew? Do you think they have mouths?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Susan says. “They look like us.”

  “How do you know?” Ed says. “Have you been up here before?”

  “No,” Susan says. “But Susan has.”

  “We could play a card game,” Ed says. “Or I Spy.”

  “You could tell me about the first time I met you,” Susan says.

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” Ed says. “That’s all gone.”

  “Okay, fine.” Susan sits up straight, arching her back. She wets her green lips with her green tongue and says, “Tell me how beautiful I am.”

  “You’re beautiful,” Ed says. “I’ve always thought you were beautiful. All of you. How about me? Am I beautiful?”

  “Don’t be sarcastic,” Susan says. She slouches back against him. Her skin is warm and greasy. “The aliens are going to get here soon. I don’t know what happens after that, but I hate this part. I always hate this part. I don’t like waiting. Do you think this is what it was like for Andrew?”

  “When you get him back, ask him. Why ask me?”

  Susan doesn’t say anything for a bit. Then she says, “We think we’ll be able to make you, too. We’re starting to figure out how it works. Eventually it will be you and me and him, just the way it was before. Only we’ll fix him the way we’ve fixed me. He won’t be so sad. Have you noticed how I’m not sad anymore? Don’t you want that, not to be sad? And maybe after that we’ll try making some more people. We’ll start all over again. We’ll do everything right this time.”

  Ed says, “So why are they helping you?”

  “I don’t know,” Susan says. “Either they think we’re funny, or else they think we’re pathetic, the way we get stuck. We can ask them when they get here.”

  She pushes Ed back against the wooden floor, and sits on top of him. She reaches down and stuffs his penis, half erect, inside of her. Ed groans.

  He says, “Susan.”

  Susan says, “Tell me a story,” and then sits back down, gently. “Any story. I don’t care what.”

  “I can’t tell you a story,” Ed says. “I don’t know any stories when you’re doing this.”

  “I’ll stop,” Susan says. She stops.

  Ed says, “Don’t stop. Okay.” He puts his hands around her green waist and moves her, as if he’s stirring the Susan beer.

  He says, “Once upon a time.” He’s speaking very fast. They’re running out of time.

  Once, when they were making love, Andrew came into the bedroom. He didn’t even knock. He didn’t seem to be embarrassed at all. Ed doesn’t want to be fucking Susan when the aliens show up. On the other hand, Ed wants to be fucking Susan forever. He doesn’t want to stop, not for Andrew, or the aliens, or even for the end of the world.

  Ed says, “There was a man and a woman and they fell in love. They were both nice people. They made a good couple. Everyone liked them. This story is about the woman.”

  This story is about a woman who is in love with somebody who invents a time machine. He’s planning to go so far into the future that he’ll end up right back at the very beginning. He asks her to come along, but she doesn’t want to go. What’s back at the beginning of the world? Little blobs of life swimming around in a big blob? Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? She doesn’t want to play Adam and Eve; she has other things to do. She works for a research company. She calls people on the telephone and asks them all sorts of questions. Back at the beginning, there aren’t going to be phones. She doesn’t like the sound of it. So her husband says, fine, then here’s what we’ll do. I’ll build you another machine, and if you ever decide that you miss me, or you’re tired and you can’t go on, climb inside this machine—this box right here—and push this button and go to sleep. And you’ll sleep all the way forwards and backwards to me, where I’m waiting for you. I’ll keep on waiting for you. I love you. And so they make love and they make love a few more times and then he climbs into his time machine and whoosh, he’s gone like that. So fast, it’s hard to believe that he was ever there at all. Meanwhile she lives her life forward, slow, the way he didn’t want to. She gets married again and makes love some more and has kids and they have kids and when she’s an old woman, she’s finally ready: she climbs into the dusty box down in the secret room under the orchard and she pushes the button and falls asleep. And she sleeps all the way back, just like Sleeping Beauty, down in the orchard for years and years, which fly by like seconds, she goes flying back, past the men sitting around the green felt table, now you can see them, now they’re gone again, and all the peacocks are screaming, and the Satanist drives up to the house and unloads the truckload of furniture, he unpaints the colored rooms and the pentagrams, soon the old shy man will unbuild his house, carry his secret away on his back, and the apples are back on the orchard trees again, and then the trees are all blooming, and now the woman is getting younger, just a little, the lines around her mouth are smoothing out. She dreams that someone has come down into that underground room and is looking down at her in her time machine. He stands there for a long time. She can’t open her eyes, her eyelids are so heavy, she doesn’t want to wake up just yet. She dreams she’s on a train going down the tracks backwards and behind the train, someone is picking up the beams and the nails and the girders to put in a box and then they’ll put the box away. The trees are whizzing past, getting smaller and smaller and then they’re all gone too. Now she’s a kid again, now she’s a baby, now she’s much smaller and then she’s even smaller than that. She gets her gills back. She doesn’t want to wake up just yet, she wants to get right back to the very beginning where it’s all new and clean and everything is still and green and flat and sleepy and everybody has crawled back into the sea and they’re waiting for her to get back there too and then the party can start. She goes backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards—

  The cheerleader says to the Devil, “We’re out of time. We’re holding things up. Don’t you hear them banging on the door?”

  The Devil says, “You didn’t finish the story.”

  The cheerleader says, “And you never let me touch your tail. Besides, there isn’t any ending. I could make up something, but it wouldn’t ever satisfy you. You said that yourself! You’re never satisfied. And I have to get on with my life. My parents are going to be home soon.”

  Starlight says, “My voice is getting scratchy. It’s late. You should call back tomorrow night.”

  Ed says, “When can I call you?”

  Stan and Andrew were friends. Good
friends. It was like they were the same person, only of course it turned out that they weren’t. Ed hadn’t seen Stan for a while, not for a long while, but Stan stopped him, on the way down to the basement. This was earlier. Stan grabbed his arm and said, “I miss him. I keep thinking, if I’d gotten there sooner. If I’d said something. He liked you a lot, you know, he was sorry about what happened to your car—”

  Stan stops talking and just stands there looking at Ed. He looks like he’s about to cry.

  “It’s not your fault,” Ed said, but then he wondered why he’d said it. Whose fault was it?

  Susan says, “You’ve got to stop calling me, Ed. Okay? It’s three in the morning. I was asleep, Ed, I was having the best dream. You’re always waking me up in the middle of things. Please just stop, okay?”

  Ed doesn’t say anything. He could stay there all night and just listen to Susan talk.

  What she’s saying now is, “But that’s never going to happen, and you know it. Something bad happened, and it wasn’t anyone’s fault, but we’re just never going to get past it. It killed us. We can’t even talk about it.”

  Ed says, “I love you.”

  Susan says, “I love you, but it’s not about love, Ed, it’s about timing. It’s too late, and it’s always going to be too late. Maybe if we could go back and do everything differently, and I think about that all the time, but we can’t. We don’t know anybody with a time machine. How about this, Ed—maybe you and your poker buddies can build one down in Pete’s basement. All those stupid games, Ed! Why can’t you build a time machine instead? Call me back when you’ve figured out how we can work this out, because I’m really stuck. Or don’t call me back. Goodbye, Ed. I love you. I’m hanging up the phone now.”

  Susan hangs up the phone.

  Ed imagines her, going down to the kitchen to microwave a glass of milk. She’ll sit in the kitchen and drink her milk and wait for him to call her back. He lies in bed, up in the orchard house. He’s got both bedroom doors open, and a night breeze comes in through that door that doesn’t go anywhere. He wishes he could get Susan to come see that door. The breeze smells like apples, which is what time must smell like, Ed thinks.

  There’s an alarm clock on the floor beside his bed. The hands and numbers glow green in the dark, and he’ll wait five minutes and then he’ll call Susan. Five minutes. Then he’ll call her back. The hands aren’t moving, but he can wait.

  Entertaining Angels Unawares

  M. John Harrison

  I GOT TWO OR three weeks’ work with a firm that specialized in high and difficult access jobs in and around Halifax. They needed a laborer, someone to fetch and carry, clean the site up behind them. The job was on the tower of a church about thirty miles northeast of the town. I wasn’t sure what I thought about that. I wondered what I’d say to the vicar if he ever appeared, but he never did.

  Generally it was a quiet job. I was there on my own with the supervisor, a man called Sal Meredith.

  Meredith picked me up every morning in the firm’s van. He drove the van as if he expected it to be a motorcycle, changing lanes at high speed among slow traffic, overtaking on the inside. He made the engine rev and snap so that other motorists stared suddenly over their shoulders. Until I was used to this I didn’t have much to say, but we got on well enough, and after a day or two he began to tell me about a recurring dream he had. In it he found himself chasing people through a city.

  I asked him what sort of city. Larger than Sheffield, he said, but not as large as London. It was old. “Not right old—not ages and ages ago—but not right modern, either.” It was a Victorian city, blackened with soft coal smoke, rotten with industry. In the dream Meredith went up and down the stairwells of factories and tenements, sometimes at a run, sometimes a floaty dreamlike walk, broken glass and iron pipework all around him. “It were the usual thing wi’ dreams—corners turn into dead ends just as you get there, even though you’ve seen people go round them. Anyway, there I were, going along, and I had this absolutely mega sword.”

  I stared at him.

  “A sword,” I said.

  “Biggest fucker you’ve seen,” he said. “Biggest fucker you’ve ever seen.”

  His memories of this sword were vivid and exact. It wasn’t new. It had been resharpened many times. He could tell from irregularities in the chamfer of the blade. Its hilt—which he called “the handle”—was built up out of gold rings; and it came in its own long leather scabbard—which he called “the holster”—fastened with a press stud for quick access. “I can just imagine it now in front of me. I feel as I’ve got one of these somewhere. Anyway, this dream basically consisted of walking around, then going on to tube trains and stuff, and—”

  He stared at me, unsure how to proceed.

  “—and, well, just basically hacking people’s heads off.”

  “Fucking hell,” I said. “Steady away.”

  “Weird, eh? Isn’t that fucking weird?”

  I had to say it was. “Do you get it a lot,” I said, “this dream?”

  He thought.

  “Often enough,” he admitted.

  To get to the job you had to drive through wooded hills on steep, narrow roads. It was beautiful country, even the way Meredith drove. What the fuck, I thought, I might as well sit back and enjoy the ride. The trees were green and lush, oaks and birches. It was rainforest Britain in the first year of Century 21. Then you turned a corner suddenly and the church was in front of you, a blackened square edifice flanked on one side by a farmyard full of wrecked machinery, and on the other by a neat garden in which tame rabbits lolloped stupidly around all morning. Its blue-and-gold clock had stopped at half past five. They had strung the site sign across the tower near the top:

  VERTICAL ACCESS.

  The church was called for some reason St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness. The story on it was this, Meredith said: when it was built in 1830, the buttresses were an afterthought. They had no real engineering function. Instead of supporting the building they were just leaning against it. By 1900 they were beginning to sag and banana away. A hundred years later, eight-inch gaps had opened up, and the church had been condemned unless it could be fixed. That job was finished now. Meredith’s team had gone in and driven thirty-six ten-foot, twelve threads per inch, stainless-steel bolts through the buttresses into the fabric of the tower itself, cementing them in with aerospace resins. You had to hide that, of course, so afterward the restorers came along with something called “gobbo,” a kind of grout made from mud and goat hair, and sealed it all up. There were a lot of jokes about gobbo. Not counting assessment and planning it had taken less than a fortnight. All that remained was a bit of repointing. Meredith had also promised he would take the rotten stone louvers out of the bell tower.

  “They’re all laminated,” he told me.

  “You mean they’re fucked,” I said.

  “That too.”

  We decided to do the louvers first. We spent three or four mornings dropping them eighty feet to the floor, where they went off like bombs. It was tiring work getting them out of their slots. We would chuck a few of them down then go up to the top of the tower and have a drink of tea. From up there you could see that St. John’s stood at a confluence of valleys, streams, and lanes. You would never have understood that from the ground, Meredith said, because of all the hills and ridges. It would have been impossible to unravel by eye. I drank my tea and said: “That dream of yours. The one with the sword. I mean, what’s the point? What’s the story on that?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s no story. It’s more like a video game. Hacking people’s heads off, that’s the point. And it’s not just the odd person. It’s doing a lot. That’s the tick: getting loads of people all at once. Five or six people are stood round you, and you just sort of start spinning round with this thing—footoof!—and getting all their heads off.” While he was talking two houseflies landed on the parapet and began to copulate on the warm stone. The sun glittered off
them blue and green, and off the mica crystals in the stone around them.

  “Hey, look at these fuckers,” I said. “They’re at it.”

  “Leave them alone,” Meredith said. “You wouldn’t want people watching you.”

  I watched the flies a minute more. I could see they were unaware of me, unaware of anything. Every so often they buzzed groggily and lurched into a new position. “I hate flies,” I said. “I hate the dirt of them.” I crushed them with my thumb, then I wiped my thumb along the parapet to clean it.

  “Jesus,” Meredith said. “They were only fucking.”

  “Are you yourself?” I said.

  “What?”

  “In this dream, are you yourself?”

  “I suppose I am,” he said. “I never thought about it.” Then he said: “I’m taller.”

  We never ate lunch at the top of the tower. It was too hot by then. We could have gone to the Robin Hood in Hebden Bridge, but Meredith wasn’t much of a drinker. Anyway, as he said, at lunchtime it was always full of locals playing Fistful of Money. If they weren’t doing that they were selling one another shotgun cartridges. So most of the time we took sandwiches down into the back of the church, whatever that’s called, which had been converted into a miniature parish hall. It stayed cool there all day. They had a kitchen where we could make tea, chairs and tables, and a piano. It was all separated from the rest of the church by a long glass screen. Pictures and bits of writing by Sunday school kids were displayed on red felt pin boards. Every morning we found a fresh display of leaflets on one of the tables. Someone had arranged them carefully in a fan.

  “‘Keep Yourself Pure’!” Meredith quoted. He laughed. “What’s the difference between perverse and perverted?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re perverse if you tickle your arse with a feather. If you’re perverted you use the whole chicken.”