Coalescent Read online

  "What are you looking for?"

  "Bin liners. The whole damn place is a mess." Everything seemed old, even the cans and plastic dispensers of cleaning stuff in the cupboard, old and dirty and crusted and half used up but never thrown out. My searching was getting more violent; I was scattering stuff around the floor.

  "Take it easy," Peter said. "Give yourself a minute."

  He was right, of course. I forced myself to back up.

  He had left this, my father had, this little set of dirty dishes. He'd never come back to finish the tea. He'd just stopped, his life cutting off at that moment, like a film breaking. Now I had to tidy this stuff away, a chore I used to loathe as a kid: He never would clean up after himself. But when it was done, there would be no more, no more dirty cups and greasy crockery, not ever. And as I worked my way through the house, room by room, I would be fixing messes that he would never make again.

  I said, "It's as if he's dying, a little bit more. Just by me doing this."

  "You had a sister. She was older than us, wasn't she?"

  "Gina, yes. She came over for the funeral. But she went back to America. We're going to sell the house; we share it fifty-fifty, according to Dad's will—"

  "America?"

  "Florida." My maternal grandfather had been a GI, an Italian American, stationed briefly in Liverpool some time before the war. You might say my mother was a premature war baby, conceived during that stay. After the war the GI had not fulfilled his promise to come back to England. I told Peter all this. "But there was a happy ending," I said. "My grandfather got back in touch sometime in the fifties."

  "Guilt?"

  "I suppose. He was never a true father. But he sent money over, and took Mum and Gina over to the States a few times, when Gina was small. Then we inherited some property in Florida, left to my mother by a cousin she'd met over there. Gina went to work over there, took the house, raised a family. She works in PR — I'm sorry, it's a complicated story—"

  "Family stories are like that."

  "Episodic. No neat narrative structure."

  "That makes you uncomfortable."

  It was a perceptive remark I wouldn't have expected from the Peter I'd known. "I suppose it does. It's all kind of a tangle. Like a spider's web. I felt as if I got myself out of it, by building a life in London. Now I have to get tangled up again." And I resented it, I realized, even as I tried to finish these few last chores for my father.

  Peter asked, "Do you have kids of your own?"

  I shook my head. It occurred to me I hadn't asked Peter a single question about himself, his life since school, his circumstances now. "How about you?"

  "I never married," he said simply. "I was a policeman — did you know that?"

  I grinned; I couldn't help it. Peter the school dork, a copper?

  Evidently he was used to the reaction. "I did well. Became a detective constable. I retired early..."

  "Why?"

  He shrugged. "Other things to do." I would find out later what those "other things" were. "Look, let me help. Go see to the rest of the house. I'll sort this out — I can fill a bin liner for you."

  "You don't have to."

  "It's okay. I'd like to do it for Jack. If I find anything personal I'll just leave it."

  "You're very thoughtful."

  He shrugged. "You'd do the same for me."

  I wasn't sure if that was remotely true, and I felt another layer of guilt pile up on already complicated strata. But I didn't say any more.

  I started upstairs. Behind me I heard a dim bleeping, the baby-bird sound of Peter's cell phone calling for attention.

  • • •

  My father's bedroom.

  The bed was unmade, the sheets crumpled, a dent in the pillow where his head had lain. There was a waist-high basket nearly full of dirty clothes. On the small bedside cupboard, where an electric lamp was alight, a paperback book lay facedown. It was a biography of Churchill. It was all as if my father had left it a moment ago, but that moment had somehow been frozen, and was now receding relentlessly into the past, a fading still image on a broken video.

  I turned off the lamp, closed the book. I poked about the room listlessly, unsure what to do.

  The dressing table before the window had always been my mother's domain. Even now the rows of family photographs — my graduation, smiling American grandkids — looked just as when I'd last seen them, perhaps as she'd left them. The dust was thicker behind the photographs, as if Dad had barely touched this corner since she'd gone. There was some mail scattered on the surface, a few bills, a postcard from Rome.

  Cancer had taken my mother. She had always been a young mother, just nineteen when I was born. She still seemed young when she died, right to the end of her life.

  On his last night my father had emptied his pockets here, never to fill them again. I threw a grimy handkerchief into the laundry bag. I found a little change and some bills, which I absently pocketed — the coins felt heavy and cold through the fabric of my pocket — and his wallet, slim and containing a single credit card, which I also took.

  The dresser had two small drawers. In one was a bundle of mail in opened envelopes, from my sister, my mother, my younger self. I pushed the letters back into the drawer, a task for later. In the other drawer were a few checkbook stubs, a couple of bank account passbooks, and bank statements and credit card bills, held neatly together with treasury tags. I swept all this stuff up and crammed it into my jacket pocket. I knew I was being a coward in my priorities: closing down his financial affairs was something I could do on remote control, easily, without leaving my comfort zone.

  Suits hung in the wardrobe. I riffled through them, evoking a smell of dust and camphor. They were cut to Dad's barrel-shaped frame and would never have fit me, even if they hadn't been old, worn at cuffs and shoulders, and indefinably old-mannish in their style. He had always folded his shirts and set them one on top of another in the shallow drawers of the wardrobe, and there they were now. Shoes, of patent leather and suede, lay jumbled up on top of each other in the bottom of the wardrobe: he had been wearing his slippers when they took him to the hospital. There were more drawers full of underwear, sweaters, ties, tiepins and cufflinks, even a few elastic armbands.

  I explored all this, touching it hesitantly. There was little I would want to keep: a few cufflinks, maybe, something I would associate with him. I knew I should just sweep up all this stuff, cram it into bin bags, and take it to an Oxfam shop. But not today, not today.

  Gina had already said she didn't want any of this old stuff. I resented her not being here, for running back to the Miami Beach sun and leaving me to this shit. But she always had kept herself out of the family fray. Peter McLachlan was a better son than she was a daughter, I thought bitterly.

  I was far from finished, but enough for now. I got out of there.

  On the landing walls were more Catholic ornaments, more Marys — even a Sacred Heart, a statue of Jesus with His chest exposed to show His burning heart, the realization of a particularly gruesome medieval "miracle." I wondered what I should do with all the Catholic tokens. It would seem disrespectful, if not sacrilegious, to just dump them. Perhaps I could take them to the parish church. I realized with a start that I had no idea who the priest was; no doubt he was decades younger than me.

  I glanced up at the hatchway to the access to the attic space. It was just a little square panel cut out of the ceiling. If I wanted to go up there I ought to find a ladder.

  The hell with that. Bracing against the wall of the stairwell, I managed to get one foot on top of the banister rail and lifted myself up. This was how I used to climb into the attic as a kid. I could see spiderwebs, and bits of unevenness in the ceiling paintwork that cast fine shadows from the landing window light. I pushed at the hatch. It was heavier than I remembered, and, evidently a long time undisturbed, had glued itself into place. But it came loose with a soft ripping noise.

  I poked my head up into the attic. It smelled
dusty but dry. I reached up to a switch mounted on a cross beam; the light, from a bulb dangling from a rafter, was bright but reluctant to spread far.

  I set my hands on the edge of the frame. When I tried the last step — kicking off the banister rail and pushing up with my arms — I was suddenly aware of my greater bulk, and feebler muscles; I wasn't a kid anymore. Just for a second it felt as if I wouldn't make it. But then my biceps took the strain. I hauled my belly up through the hatch, and sat heavily on a joist that ran across the roof, breathing hard.

  Boxes and trunks receded into the shadows like the buildings of a gloomy miniature city. There was a sharp smell of burning, as the dust on the bulb was incinerated. Looking down into the brightness of the house was like a vision of an inverted heaven. I was rarely allowed up here when I was small, and even as a teenager never allowed to fulfill my ambitions of turning it into some kind of den. But I had always loved the sense of remoteness I got when I passed out through the skin of the house into this other world.

  I swung up my legs. The roof was low; I had to crawl over the boards I had nailed down over the ceiling insulation in my twenties, when it had emerged that fiberglass insulation wasn't good for you. Soon my hands were filthy and my knees were starting to ache.

  Most of the boxes contained Dad's stuff — he had been an accountant, his last few years working independently, and there were files from his various employers, even a few musty old accountancy training manuals. I doubted I would need to keep any of this stuff; it was more than eight years since he had retired. In one box I found a small red clothbound book, an ancient, battered, and much-used set of log tables: Knott's Mathematical Tables (Four-Figured). The binding of the little volume was actually fraying. And here, too, was a slim cardboard box that contained a slide rule, wooden, with scales marked in pasted-on paper. I could barely see the tiny numerals, but the plastic of the slider was yellow and cracked. I put the rule back in the box and set it aside with the log tables, meaning to take them down later.

  I moved deeper into the loft. I found one box marked XMAS DECORATIONS — WILMSLOW, 1958 — WILMSLOW, 1959 — MANCHESTER, 1960... and so on, down through the years, right up until, I saw, the year of my mother's death. In a box of assorted junk I found a couple of stamp albums and a half-filled box of first-day covers, plastic board games in ugly seventies-era boxes — and a scrapbook of pictures, original sketches, photographs patiently clipped out of magazines and comics, all pasted onto thick gray paper. My sister's, from her own childhood years. It was a cobbled-together depiction of a family legend, a tale told by grandfathers and great-aunts: the story of a girl called Regina, who had supposedly grown up in Britain in the time of the Romans, and when Britain had fallen she had fled to Rome itself. And we were Regina's remote descendants, so the story went. I'd grown up believing it, until maybe the age of ten. I put the book aside; perhaps Gina would like to see it again.

  Then I came to a box that caught my eye: TV21S, read the label. (GEORGE). With some eagerness I hauled the box back to the light and opened it up. Inside I found a pile of comics — "TV Century 21, Adventures in the 21st Century — Every Wednesday — 7d." They were neatly stacked, from a very grubby and fragile issue number 1 downward. This was, of course, the comic that had been spun out of the Gerry Anderson science fiction puppet shows during the sixties, and a monumental part of my young life. I had thought my parents had burned this stack when I got to around twelve, with my uncertain adolescent acquiescence.

  I opened one at random. The comic was a broadsheet. The much-thumbed paper was thin, delicate, and all but rubbed away along its spine. But the full-color strips within were as bright as they had been in 1965. I found myself in issue 19, in which the Kaplan, the leader of the Astrans — aliens oddly like huge jelly beans — is assassinated, JFK-style, and Colonel Steve Zodiac, commander of the mighty spacecraft Fireball XL5, is assigned to find the killers and avert a space war.

  "Mike Noble." It was Peter; he had stuck his head through the hatch.

  "Sorry, I was lost again."

  He handed me a mug of tea. "My mug, my tea, my milk. I guessed you don't take sugar."

  "Right. Mike who?"

  "Noble. The artist who drew Fireball for TV Twenty-one — and later Zero X, and Captain Scarlet. Always our favorite."

  Our?... But, yes, I remembered that a shared interest in the Anderson shows, and later all things science-fictional and space-related, had been an early hook-up between me and Peter, links that had overcome my reluctance to be associated with the school weirdo. "I thought my parents burned this lot."

  Peter shrugged. "If they'd told you they were up here they'd never have gotten you out of the attic. Anyhow, maybe they meant to give them back to you someday, and just forgot."

  That sounded like Dad, I thought sourly.

  "Do you have a complete run in there?"

  "I think so," I said dubiously. "I think I kept buying it right until the end."

  "Which end?"

  "Huh?"

  He clambered a little higher — I saw he had brought a stepladder — and perched on the rim of the open hatch, legs dangling. "TV Twenty-one went through a few changes as sales began to fall. In nineteen sixty-eight — issue one ninety-two — it merged with another title called TV Tornado, and began to run more non-Anderson material. Then, after issue two forty-two, it merged with a Joe Ninety comic and began a second series from number one..."

  "The last issue I remember buying had George Best on the cover. How do you know all this?"

  "I researched it." He shrugged. "You can reclaim the past, you know. Colonize it. There's always more you can find out. Structure your memories." He sighed. "But for TV Twenty-one it has gotten harder with time. There was a surge of interest in the eighties—"

  "When our generation reached our thirties."

  Peter grinned. "Old enough to be nostalgic, young enough to form irrational enthusiasms, rich enough to do something about it. But now we're passing through our forties, and..."

  "And we're becoming decayed old fucks and nobody cares anymore." And, I thought, we are being picked off one by one by the demographics, as if by a relentless sniper. I flicked through the comics, looking at the brightly colored panels, the futuristic vehicles and shining uniforms. "The twenty-first century isn't turning out the way I expected, that's for sure."

  Peter said hesitantly, "But there's still time. Have you seen this?" He held up his cell phone. It was a complex new toy from Nokia or Sony or Casio. I didn't recognize it; I've no interest in such gadgets. But the screen was glowing with a bright image, a kind of triangle. "Just came in. The latest on the Kuiper Belt. The Anomaly."

  Two days after the discovery, everybody on Earth within reach of a TV probably knew that the Kuiper Belt is a loose cloud of comets and ice worlds that surrounds the solar system, stretching all the way from Pluto halfway out to the nearest star. And a bunch of astronomers, probing that chill region with radars or some such, had found something unusual.

  Peter was explaining earnestly that the image on his screen wasn't a true image but had been reconstructed from complicated radar echoes. "It's the way you can reconstruct the structure of DNA from X-ray diffraction echoes—"

  The little screen gleamed brightly in the dark of the loft. "It's a triangle."

  "No, it's three-dimensional." He tapped a key and the image turned.

  "A pyramid," I said. "No — four sides, all of them triangles. What do you call it?"

  "A tetrahedron," Peter said. "But it's the size of a small moon."

  I shivered in the cold gloom, feeling oddly superstitious. It was an awful enough time for me already, and now there were strange lights in the sky... "Something artificial?"

  "What else could it be? The astronomers got excited just from their detection of straight-line edges. Now they're seeing this." His pale eyes were bright, reflecting the blue glow of the little screen. "Of course not everybody agrees; some say this is just an artifact of the signal processing, and ther
e's nothing there but echoes... There's talk of sending a probe. Like the Pluto Express. But it might take decades to get there."

  I looked down at the comics. "They should send Fireball," I said. "Steve Zodiac would be there in a couple of hours." Suddenly my vision misted, and a big heavy drop of liquid splashed from my nose onto a colored panel. I wiped it off hastily. "Shit. Sorry." But now my shoulders were shaking.

  "It's okay," Peter said evenly.

  I fought for control. "I hadn't expected to fucking cry. Not over a fucking comic."

  He took my mug, still full, and headed down the stairs. "Take as long as you want."

  "Oh, fuck off," I said, and so he did.

  • • •

  When I got over my spasm I clambered down out of the loft, bringing only the slide rule and log tables with me. I'd intended to head back to my city-center hotel, comforted that at least I'd pushed through the barrier, at least I'd been inside the house, and whatever else I turned up couldn't distress me as much as today.

  But Peter had one more surprise for me. As I came down the stairs I saw he was hurrying out of the door carrying what looked like a cookie tin, a deep one.

  "Hey," I snapped.

  He stopped, looking comically guilty, and actually tried to hide the damn tin behind his back.

  "Where are you going with that?"

  "George, I'm sorry. I just—"

  Instantly my innate suspicion of Peter the school weirdo was revived. Or maybe I just wanted to act tough after crying in front of him. "You said you wouldn't touch anything personal. What's this, theft?"

  He seemed to be trembling. "George, for Christ's sake—"

  I pushed past him and snatched the box out of his hands. He just watched as I pulled the lid off.

  Inside was a stash of porn magazines. They were yellowed, and of the jolly skin-and-sunshine Health and Efficiency variety. I leafed through them quickly; some were twenty years old, but most of them postdated my mother's death.