Part 8 (1/2)
I went back to the yellow house once, nearly a year after that awful morning. It was winter. I remembered the last time I spoke to Mrs. Miller and I felt so much older it was almost giddying. It seemed such a vastly long time ago.
I crept up to the house one evening, trying the keys I still had, which to my surprise worked.
The hallway was freezing, dark, and stinking more strongly than ever. I hesitated, then pushed open Mrs. Miller's door.
It opened easily, without a sound. The occasional m.u.f.fled noise from the street seemed so distant it was like a memory. I entered.
She had covered the windows very carefully, and still no light made its way through from outside. It was extremely dark. I waited until I could see better in the ambient glow from the outside hallway.
I was alone.
My old coat and jumper lay spread-eagled in the corner of the room. I s.h.i.+vered to see them, went over and fingered them softly. They were damp and mildewing, covered in wet dust.
Looking for Jake, By China Mieville The white paint was crumbling off the wall in scabs. It looked as if it had been left untended for several years. I could not believe the extent of the decay.
I turned slowly around and gazed at each wall in turn. I took in the chaotic, intricate patterns of crumbling paint and damp plaster. They looked like maps, like a rocky landscape.
I looked for a long time at the wall farthest from my jacket. I was very cold. After a long time I saw a shape in the ruined paint. I moved closer with a dumb curiosity far stronger than any fear.
In the crumbling texture of the wall was a spreading anatomy of cracks that-seen from a certain angle, caught just right in the sc.r.a.ps of light-looked in outline something like a woman. As I stared at it it took shape, and I stopped noticing the extraneous lines, and focused without effort or decision on the relevant ones. I saw a woman looking out at me.
I could make out the suggestion of her face. The patch of rot which const.i.tuted it made it look as if she was screaming.
One of her arms was flung back away from her body, which seemed to strain against it, as if she was being pulled away by her hand and was fighting to escape, and was failing. At the end of her crack-arm, in the s.p.a.ce where her captor would be, the paint had fallen away in a great slab, uncovering a huge patch of wet, stained, textured cement.
And in that dark infinity of markings, I could make out any shape I wanted.
Something was in the bread. Morley was cutting, and on the fourth strike of the knife, the metal braked.
Behind him his friends talked over their food. Morley prised the dough apart and touched something smooth. He had marked it with a scratch. Morley could see the thing's colour, a drab charcoal. He frowned. It had been a long time since this had happened.
”What's up?” someone said to him, and when he turned his face was relaxed.
”It's gone mouldy.”
He put the bread in the rubbish, where he could reach it again.
Looking for Jake, By China Mieville When the others were gone Morley took the bread out and pulled it apart. From its crumbs he drew a tube, a grey baton that fit thickly in his hand. The line of a seal was just visible at one end. Morley did not open it. He turned it over. There were instructions on it, in small type, embossed as if punched out from within.
CONCEAL BY RUBBISH BIN AT EASTERN MOST EXIT ST. JAMES PARK, it said.
ASAP. YWBC.
Morley turned it over. He felt the crack of its opening and the larger more ragged mark he had made. The mar made him anxious.
He packaged it tightly in a hard cardboard tube. Walking to the park, he clutched the cylinder, until he realised how he must look, and he turned slowly and he hoped seemingly idly to see who if anyone was watching him, and he relaxed his grip on the tube until he thought perhaps it was too much and that someone might now be able to s.n.a.t.c.h it. He reached the gate with relief and paused, fussed ostentatiously with his newspaper, put down the tube and tucked it up to the bin with his foot before walking away.
The next day he completed the evaluations he was working on. Morley ate lunch out, and when he headed for home he stopped and bought two new hardbacks, started to read one on the train.
(He opened it with a moment's frisson, but it was all there.) He had ice cream in a cinema cafe until the next showing of a film that he sat through until the end of the final credits. He ate at a pizzeria, sitting outside, reading his book, but nothing did any good.
Through it all he never stopped waiting. He imagined the park wardens, the dustmen and - women becoming intrigued by the cardboard tube, looking to see that they were not watched and taking it from the piles they collected. He imagined them opening his package, uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g that grey rod and drawing out whatever it was he had been charged to deliver. He should be calmer, he knew, but it had been so many months since he had last had to do this. Finally, two days later, when he thought it must have arrived wherever it was going, he felt relief.
He pushed his life back into its usual shape, quickly. Though he could not think that this was the last of it, he was pleased that he had not obsessed as he sometimes did, that he had lost only two days to his duty. Early on it had been more. He was so successful that when he at last received another instruction it came as a shock.
* * * October, and Morley was enjoying London's autumn smell. In a newsagent's he picked up a copy of the Standard, and hesitated by the chocolate, looking at the low-fat version he had trained himself to pretend he liked but suddenly hungry for a real bar, which with guilty devil-may-care he took and paid for. He unwrapped it as he walked. The first bite he swallowed: it was on the second that his teeth touched something hard and he gasped and came halting, and stared into the wet and melting sweet at something much darker and more cold inside.
He stared at the chocolate and thought but I was about to take the other one. It was a long time Looking for Jake, By China Mieville since he had dwelled on that phenomenon. He had thought himself inured to his instructors'
unerring knowledge of what he would pick.
In the first months he had been constantly aghast at the fact, had imagined unseen cadres watching him, gauging what he was about to buy, somehow pus.h.i.+ng their messages into things just before he touched them, but that was impossible. The inserts were there already, waiting for him.
Morley, always knowing that it was useless, had attempted to trick those who contacted him. In shops he would hover for many seconds, his hand over a specific item; he would pick it up, walk on, then suddenly return and grab a replacement.
It made no difference. For weeks and months at a time his shopping was untouched, but when they wanted to pa.s.s on a command, he could not evade them. Twice, obscurely shaped, opaque containers were delivered in products he knew he had taken quickly and at random: in a jar of mayonnaise; threaded through a pack of dustbin liners.
Once Morley had spent days living only off translucent products, holding each gla.s.s or plastic container up to the light to see it was uncontaminated by commands before buying it, but he had been too hungry to continue like that for long.
* * * The chocolate contained something like a fat pen-lid. Thankfully Morley had not bitten it.
LEAVE ON YOUR SEAT ON THE LAST SOUTHBOUND VICTORIA LINE TRAIN.
BETWEEN PIMLICO AND VAUXHALL, it said.ASAP. YWBC.
Morley stared at the order, and hated it.
This time, when he obeyed it, he did not try to distract himself. With something between resentment and self-indulgence he let himself think only of his task, of what might go wrong.
From the station at Vauxhall he went straight home and drew a chart of all the places the little package might be intercepted. He ranked them, in order of potential danger.
The next day and the day after that he called in sick and spent the day watching news. Police intercepted a bomb in Syria; Greek doctors saved the lives of twins; a strike by baggage handlers in Paris was averted; a serial s.e.x offender caught in Berlin. It might be any of these, Morley thought, and he stared at the screen at these and other stories, and tried to read some secret nod to him in the reporters' words, in the facts of each case.
Of course his actions might have their effects in the work of hidden agencies, which measured their successes precisely in stories that no one would ever hear. Morley knew that. He knew he could not know, that he might be wasting his time.
He knew also that what he forwarded might have no effect at all, on anything: he did not Looking for Jake, By China Mieville believe it, but he knew it might be.
This must be important work. He had long ago decided that was the only thing that made sense.
It was what had first changed his opinion of his tasks, had turned his paranoia, his fear, into something like pride.
The truth was that it was not just the tedium of clear soups and water or white wine that had aborted his experiment with see-through goods: it was also a growing sense of anxiety, a fear that he was succeeding, that he was missing messages, and that he must not, that important things depended on him doing the duty given him.
He had never believed that the insertions were everywhere, that everyone received them randomly but that no one said a word. He had been chosen, for opaque reasons, to be the middleman. Whoever was contacting him must need anonymity, certainty that they were not traced. Hence this subterfuge, entrusting their deliveries to a stranger.
Morley had been watched for years, since he was a boy. It was the only thing that made sense.
They must have had to make sure he was suitable, that he would not fail, that his curiosity would not goad him to open the little containers and let their contents get into the wrong hands, into his hands.
A few days on there was another grey baton in his bread. CONCEAL BY RUBBISH BIN AT EASTERN MOST EXIT ST. JAMES PARK, it said again. ASAP. YWBC. Morley was horrified. He had never had an instruction repeated before. He winced at its corrective tone.