Shand is politely waiting for her to come back to the physical discussion. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Witness business. Rude of me.’
‘Not at all,’ Shand replies. ‘But Inspector, I wonder if you are aware that The Mad Cartographer’s Garden – all of her writings, I think – they are not merely “hard to find” in the commercial sense. They are impossible to find. They are ghost books.’
That seeming is an illusion, a false pattern emerging from the spinning of a wheel. The Scroll is a ghost book, a summoner of phantasms and dreams.
Is that coincidence, cul-de-sac, or clue? Assume nothing is random, she tells herself. But also assume any connection is illusory until you can substantiate it. ‘Ghost books?’
‘In the trade, something between an irritation and a great curiosity. There are not many – perhaps a hundred in all. They are books that are only catalogued, never actually sold. They seem to appear in auction lots and collections, but if you should buy that lot, the book will be missing, and when you complain you will find no mention of it in the detail. A photograph for illustration purposes only will include Mr Murder Investigates third in the pile, but it is from an old sale. Do you see? Like today. I should have a copy of The Mad Cartographer’s Garden. By every measure I know it is in this shop, and yet I also know that it is not. It is not in this shop, if we were to turn it upside down into the street and check every title on the pavement. In a month from now, someone will offer me a lot containing Five Cardinals of Z, but I won’t be able to secure the collection. Later, I will get in touch with the lucky purchaser to see if they will sell, and find that they have already done so. They will gladly tell me that they enjoyed the story while they possessed it: a brash adventure in which the holy Afric Saint, Augustine’ – Neith closes her eyes for a moment. A random example or one drawn from life? Shand doesn’t notice – ‘takes on a sort of Tarzan role, fighting with his sorceress lover against a magical invasion from the Visigothic west. When I track the next purchaser down with my offer, they will tell me the book is about something quite different. They may be quite irate. In any case, they will have sold it on.
‘Perhaps there are multiple forgeries in circulation, but I cannot obtain any of those, either. If I suggest to the publisher that they might wish to reprint, they will agree that it would be a very good idea, what with demand being so high, but nothing will come of it. These books exist, one sometimes thinks, only in the rumour and desire they excite. And in some cases, that does indeed turn out to be the case. There is a book by a South American author that is endlessly listed on rare edition inventories, but I know for a fact that it was never made available in the first place. The publisher commissioned it, the author wrote it, but there was an irretrievable breakdown in their relationship and he refused to deliver and burned the manuscript. It is in all the catalogues for that year – they were printed in advance, of course – but it cannot be had. Warehouses listed it knowing they would receive it, and do not list it as sold out because they’ve never actually despatched a single copy. Where there should be text on paper, there is none, only the whisper of it in our accounting, the spectre of a story that was never actually shown to anyone. Thus: a ghost book.’
‘But these ones, Hunter’s books …’
‘Are not the same. No.’
‘So what are they?’
Shand looks cautious. ‘I can speculate, if you wish. Some ghost books, I have always assumed, are created or adopted by criminal organisations for their traffic. In a global context, what travels in the boxes marked to that title is something quite different, something illegal and perhaps even terrible. That would be much more difficult with transactions in this country, of course.
‘Others fall prey to human cupidity. There are literary properties fancied by film stars and directors for production. Such people will buy entire print runs to prevent any competitor from reading them, and then when the film is made and the value of an early edition is high, they will release copies slowly at a great markup, profiting once again by their wealth and power. Sometimes, in those situations, production of the envisaged project is held up or even completely blocked, and the book vanishes into the open mouth of Hollywood.
‘Then there are books which are so despised by, for example, the Loving Covenant of Baptist Libraries that they will seek to acquire copies and destroy them. In some few cases they are quite successful. There was a children’s story rumoured to contain an actual magic spell that they have entirely obliterated in its English language edition. Very sad: the illustrations were full plate by Jackie Morris.’ Shand shakes his head. This, evidently, is cultural vandalism.
‘Which leaves a very small group of books, including Diana Hunter’s, that are reputed to exist in fact, but which are never seen. At least, not by me. There are wonderful rumours about them, the occult ramblings of the foolish and the mad: Hunter’s books contain an encrypted message that reveals the underlying nature of God’s creation. Or perhaps they are the physical body of an angel expressed as text, something so strange and splendid that it cannot exist here except as a collection of beautiful words, and that is why no two accounts of the books are ever the same. Perhaps the books contain Hunter herself, written down and endlessly replicated in some form of literal literary immortality. Now that she is dead, perhaps that is the best thing to believe. Although of course if that were the case, one would imagine they would be everywhere, so that the words would be read, and she would live in firework flashes of minds across the world. Stasis, after all, is a poor form of longevity. One would look for iteration, yes? For engagement and enlivening.
‘Maybe that’s the point. The publication plan required her death. Maybe now they will all become available again. Who knows? Perhaps that’s even why she’s dead. Maybe it’s what she intended.
‘If the books do all surface, of course, you may be sure I will stock them. Would you like me to call you, if that should happen? Or if I should suddenly come across one, quite ordinary but very valuable, and prove myself a foolish old man?’
The Inspector contemplates an outcome of her investigation in which she is compelled to place under arrest for sedition a pile of limited edition magical realist novels allegedly containing a human mind, and devoutly hopes Mr Shand’s construction of the situation is not the right one. She feels confident in believing that it is not, on the basis that such an idea is plainly poppycock – Shand’s gallant version of English must be rubbing off on her – but does not entirely dismiss the possibility of some secret hidden in Hunter’s books. That is always the position one occupies in the Witness: that something is taking place that needs to be observed and understood. This of course makes for a vulnerability to recursive investigations: the acknowledged danger of assuming that an absence of evidence is itself evidence of obfuscation.
Except that this is not, precisely, an absence of evidence. If there’s anything happening at all, the evidence is bounteous.
Perhaps Hunter’s books really do not exist, and she somehow hornswoggled the world into believing that they did in some weird art prank. It might just about have been doable, a couple of decades ago. The Inspector would prefer this not be the case. The idea that the books might be themselves mythical alarms her: the intrusion of Hunter’s unreal histories into a world that should be more tangible. The notion that they might all be blank and contain no information, or maybe exist only as description, while Hunter’s mind apparently contains far more information than it should, raises the hairs on her neck.
Something. Something. ‘Did she ever write about fire, specifically? A fire motif? Firespine? Fire Judges?’
‘Oh. Dear me, no, I don’t think I’ve heard of that one. Is it juvenilia? Or a special edition? If the former, perhaps it can be found; after all, very often it’s the first efforts that escape their creator’s hands, you know, and make their way in the world. Although sometimes it’s the last instead …’ Shand shrugs: the mysteries of art.
Neith explains that it’s not a title,
just a phrase, and Shand regrets that no, in that case he does not know what it may mean. He looks at her nervously, and the Inspector realises he is waiting for her reaction to the business of the ghost books and his personal theory. She smiles, the informal smile of release from an official discussion. She is not small-minded enough to chide a romantic for a tall tale. She tells him instead that Shand & Co. is as charming and elegant as its proprietor, and thanks him for his time.
*
She finds the rickshaw hovering outside as if pining. As she steps through the door it rolls towards her so eagerly that she flinches. The wheels brake, and the Witness apologises for startling her.
The velour is heated, and the ride is very smooth. She decides to leave the Hunter recording and sleep properly, get some real rest. Climbing the stairs seems endless and taxing. Her whole body aches. Definitely, no work tonight. Just sleep.
The story begins again as soon as she sits down on the bed, and she dives in as if she has been thirsty all day and only now found water to drink.
another set of colours
OUTSIDE THE HOUSE, something flashes firework bright. My ears hurt, in the burning way they did long ago when I was twenty and contracted an infection from a midnight swim. The window ripples and bows inward like a soap bubble. I watch it stretch: a long, endless second as it bulges towards some plastic limit. Then it screams. I have never heard glass scream before. I discover in this moment that the sound is beautiful even as it is appallingly painful. Screaming glass is transcendent, the lamentation of lovers frozen in different fragments and now tumbling apart. The shriek barges so deeply into my ears that I can feel it in my stomach, and then I stop hearing at all and the window goes white as one layer of the laminate is pulverised, absorbing the force of the explosion as it should – as it is designed to do. Laying itself down.
In fact, we’re all lying down, lying on the floor: me, my granddaughter Annie, and Colson the magic fabricator elf who may or may not be her lover. I’m laughing because we’re alive, and because the blastproof glass was a caprice, a moment of absurd housekeeping. I got it spare when we supplied a chemical plant in Royston and they changed the design at the last minute. I said: ‘I’ll have it.’ I installed it myself through the whole house, with the help of a friendly builder, and when he asked me why, I said: ‘You never know when you might be grateful for a second chance.’
Well, now I do know. It can’t have been a very large bomb, but it certainly would have killed all of us without that glass.
I’m calling the police, which is what old men do. Landline, analogue phone. I don’t know if it’s working, because I can’t hear anything. I wonder if I’m deaf forever now. I wonder if the enemy – and however in all the world do I have enemies like that? – is trying to come into the house. It’ll take some doing to get in, if so. The door is no softer than the walls.
I’m not dead. Not dead and go to hell, you bastards. What are you going to do now, eh? Eh?
Even in here, I feel the flash of heat, and smell the accelerant. (That’s petroleum, to you. The other thing old men do is watch a great deal of bad procedural drama on satellite television.) Flames outside the window. The flicker of the same from other rooms, and a stark choice: go out and suffer whatever those faceless shits intend, or stay inside a burning house. Their backup plan: glass bottles with rags in them, no doubt, making of my castle an oven in which to cook me. Me, and my granddaughter and her maybe-lover.
Once, in Addis Ababa long ago, I walked through the walls of my prison and escaped.
I wish I could remember how.
*
I had no idea, when I began, that my desire to learn about the modern world I had somehow lived my way into – about the Internet and all its marvels – would cause this ruckus. And, in truth, ‘desire’ is far too strong a word. It was a pretext for me: I was making peace.
Annie’s father – my son – is named Michael. Ethiopians, even in London, still hold to our own pattern of names, but back when he was born I was determined that my nation had thrown me out, and even tried to end my life, and so, very well: I would be a Britisher. My son would not be Mulugeta Berihun or Messay Berihun; he would be Michael Bekele, and there was an end to all that, and a new beginning. It was the first of many ways in which I have given him cause to find me an irritating old man. The first, but not the last, and we have turned our backs on one another and inevitably reunited a dozen times over the years. We argue because Michael cannot understand that in some small reserved areas of the world I still know better than he does; and I cannot get my fuddled head around the possibility that I should accord him the same respect I would to a man of his accomplishments and standing who was not my son. I do try, but somewhere in me is the shape of him, standing naked astride a pile of Lego bricks with his face covered in baked beans, declaiming ‘Frain frain frain!’ – his childhood word for ‘train’. It’s hard, when that is one of your most treasured memories, to mind your Ps and Qs.
So to this present moment: we had had a row. I don’t even remember what was our notional reason for the fight. Almost all of them are echoes, anyway, of the huge one we had when he was twenty. This one was minor, just a snappish exchange about who we were: a seasonal reminder of difference, and harmless, if awkward.
I called on Michael at his house and carefully did not – or did not quite – ask for his permission for my scheme. At the same time, I did not want to appear to step between him and his daughter even in this small way. Instead, I came as chairman emeritus of the family company he now controls, and asked for a leave of absence to teach myself the mysteries of computing: a properly businesslike and inevitable first encounter after our dispute. It was something he had been plaguing me to do, though I think he had despaired of it ever actually happening. He played along, and asked if I should like him to arrange tuition. I said yes, in the fullness of time I should like that very much, but for my first steps I had hoped for a familial introduction in case the whole thing was too embarrassing and impossible for me to continue. Spare my blushes, I said: do you think Annabel would give me some time?
Michael laughed. He saw immediately, of course, that I was playing on his pride as well as offering my sacrifice as an olive branch, and was pleased by both. It is our pattern to grumble and itch at one another, and then to make amends in openly devious ways. Recently he has become almost artistic, going so far as to seat me, at a corporate charity dinner, next to a mildly notorious actress of decades gone with whom I once had a brief and passionate romance. I think he hoped we might find a late love, and in the event we giggled smuttily at shared recollections and discovered a mutual fondness for Bach, but nothing more.
‘Of course she would,’ Michael said. ‘Of course. She complains that she doesn’t see you any more. But you do realise that it’s a little like asking Astatke to teach you to play “Happy Birthday”?’
‘Astatke plays the conga drums,’ I objected.
‘And the vibraphone,’ Michael said, and I let it slide. I do not tangle with Michael on the subject of Ethio-jazz, or much of anything about Ethiopia, the homeland to which he has never been. My Ethiopia is not accessible, anyway: washed away in the river of time, and the new one just another hot country run by angry men.
‘She wouldn’t mind, though?’
‘Oh, no,’ Michael said – just as I would have, in his place, and with the same utterly unmerited confidence that he could pledge his daughter’s word. ‘But it’s Annie. It won’t be simple.’
I bridled a little. I sensed some anticipation of my imminent generational shaming. I was so busy drawing myself up to my full height and saying that I was sure I could master a few things that were not simple that I didn’t stop to consider exactly what he might mean. I took it that Annabel was good at what she did, though I had only the vaguest notion of what that might be. In any case, Michael said I should call her and gave me her direct number at work. ‘Knock yourself out,’ he said. ‘It’ll be great.’
I said tha
t I would, and privately resolved to be more fluent in digital matters than he was within a few months. We are not competitive, my son and I. There is no point. I am an old man and he is middle-aged. What could he possibly do better than me?
*
Annie’s voice was very warm when I called. I had been a co-conspirator for her in younger days, encouraging small moments of revolution, of counter-conventional thinking, and I had as is appropriate in a good grandfather been a source of forbidden sweets. I had drawn pictures for her – the last residue of my old life, cartoon dachshunds and sometimes, in extremis, images from her more threatening nightmares made kindly by the light of day, and by my conviction that any beast from the realm of sleep can be made a guardian if one works hard enough at the task. Then she had been away at university and in her first jobs, then working terribly hard to set up her company, so that for six years we had been nodding acquaintances only, however warm.
‘Annabel, it’s Berihun. Berihun Bekele. Your grandfather.’ In case she knew more than one Berihun Bekele, and in case my voice was not familiar. Love makes some people bullish, but it makes me diffident.
She laughed. I could picture it. She has a wide face, made for delight, and high eyebrows that seem always to be startled. If she were not so warm, she might seem supercilious, but there is nothing in her that is not genuinely interested in people. I told her, haltingly, what I wanted, and asked whether it might be possible, at her convenience. She had not been present for the row, but she would know of it by family osmosis, and she would recognise the game she was being asked to play. I relayed my conversation with her father, and his optimism – and my determination to exceed him, at which she laughed once more. I imagined her rolling her eyes, and asked if she would help me.