Down in the hall he turns to face the door of the room where they eat every night. He steps towards it, stands in front of it. He raises his chin off his chest. All right. He opens the door.
There’s his mother. She doesn’t know anything. She is saying something. Magnus nods. He picks up the plate from a place at the table with no one sitting at it. His sister takes the plate from him. She doesn’t know either. She is putting something on the plate out of a dish on the table. It smells of fish in the room. Michael is saying something. He doesn’t know anything. He is pointing at something. Magnus nods. He hopes that this nodding is what they need. He nods several times, as if he is very sure of what he is nodding about. Yes. Yes, definitely. No worries. He takes the knife then the fork from the place setting. He slides them against himself where his back pocket should be. They must have gone in. There is no sound of them hitting the floor. He can feel the cold of them against his back. The cold is astonishing. It is astonishing to feel anything. The feeling won’t last.
If you don’t mind, I’m going to take this up to my room, Magnus says. Please excuse me. Thank you very much.
He is polite. He is like her. She was polite, bright. Les pneus. His mother says something. It sounds like an exclamation mark. His sister hands him his plate. He takes it in both hands so as not to drop it. The fish on it is dead. It is headless.
The door swings shut behind him. Ahead of him are the stairs. They are deep in shadow. The door with the word Bathroom on it is at the top of them.
Magnus walks to the front door. He puts the plate down on the carpet. He opens the door, picks up the plate again. It is so bright outside. It is unbelievably bright. He hunches his shoulders. Any minute now it will darken. That noise is just wind in leaves, the noise of birds. The birds are like a nightmare. They are making the same noises, again, then again, then again. The leaves are hissing. Birds are pointless. They make a noise to reproduce for their own genetic ends. Leaves are pointless. Trees are pointless. They sustain the lives of insects which die almost as soon as they’re born. The leaves help to produce oxygen that keeps people breathing, then people stop breathing. Insects pollinate a third of the food that people who are horrible to other people, people who are going to die because of it, eat. Hologram Boy: a purpose-bred silkworm moth in caterpillar form can transform the mulberry leaves it eats into half a mile of unbroken silk thread stronger than a steel thread of the same thickness would be. Information is a joke. It is laughable. It is so meaningful it is meaningless. The other noise is the crunch of his own feet on gravel. It doesn’t hurt enough. He looks down at the ground moving under him. It doesn’t hurt now because he is walking on grass.
He is on a little bridge. Under it is a clogged river. He leans over, scrapes the fish off the plate with his hand. Most of it lands in the water. Part of the tail-end breaks off, lands in a bush on the bank. He drops the plate in after the fish. Then he gets the knife out of his back pocket, then the fork. He drops them over too.
The bush is a scratchy one. He leans right into it to reach the bit of fish that got away. When he has it, he goes to the river’s edge. He wades in, then he cups the broken pieces in the water. He lets them float out of his hands. They waver then sink, flaking apart, settling round his feet.
Magnus sits down on the bank in the litter, the weeds. His jeans are wet up to the thighs from the river. Once last year two girls from school came round looking for him. It was a Wednesday. He was at Chess Club. Astrid told him afterwards. She had been in the garden. Two girls had put their heads over the gate. Was this where Magnus Smart lived. Was she his sister. What girls? he asked her. He couldn’t believe it. It was unbelievable. What did they look like? Don’t ask me, Astrid said. I didn’t recognize them. They were a lot older than me. They were like your age, sixteen at least. One had her belly button done. But what did they want? he said. Hologram Boy. He was all shiny with amazement. They wanted you, Astrid said, but you were out. Why would they want me? (Hologram Boy. He was so brightly shining.) Well duh, Astrid said. She was throwing her powerball at the wall by the Egyptian prints, an illegal thing to do if Eve ever knew, catching it, throwing it again, catching it, throwing it again. The prints shook as the ball hit the wall. No, really, what? he said. I told them you didn’t live here, she said. I told them you have a body odour problem you have to go to the doctor about. I said you were at a special clinic taking medication. I told them your nickname was Wankstain. I told them you were gay. They were both really ugly. The one with the belly button was infected. One of them had a scar like this all down her face. They both smelt disgusting of dead fish.
He caught her powerball in mid air. He ran up all the stairs to the second floor with her screaming give it back all the way up past the bedrooms, grabbing at his arm when he went up the ladder to the loft. He threw it out of the velux, it fell deep into the shrubbery where she’d never find it. She said she didn’t care about a powerball so he went to her room to get her old Gameboy. He threw it out of the window down into the bushes too. For nights he tried to work out who those girls had been. He made lists inside his head of the ones who had pierced belly buttons, at least the ones he knew about. It was amazing that a girl with a piercing would want to come to his house. He had lain in bed doing it with a sock, imagining one of those girls was Anna Leto. A girl like Anna Leto would never have come to his house looking for him, would she? She definitely had a piercing. It was legendary. She ran the hundred metres. Athletes aren’t supposed to have them. They tried to give her a hard time about it but because she kept winning things for the school they couldn’t. After the soldiers went into Iraq Anna Leto was still anti-war. This made a lot of other people be it. Hologram Boy believed in order vs chaos. Obviously some countries knew more about good order than others. But if Anna Leto was anti-war then it wasn’t all wasters desperate to get off classes on protests who were it. Even Hologram Boy was nearly persuaded. Magnus thinks of the moment when Anna Leto stood up in class to tell them to be anti-war.
But he daren’t remember properly. He doesn’t dare let it into his head in case. Because there they all are by his garden gate. They’re waiting for him, the girls. All the girls he will ever know. Every girl he is ever going to look at. Every girl who is ever going to look at him. They all have it, her face, the school photograph face.
He glances up at the sky, then down again. Bright means dark. At his first Assembly on the first day of the school year Hologram Boy read out the reading about how the earth was a formless void. There was deep darkness. God said let there be light. There was light. God used the light to divide the day from the night. Anton had a new phone. It lit up. It played a dimensional tone. He was using it to take photos of bits of girls at Registration. He lined it up on passing girls, pressed the button. All the girls look the same this year, Anton said in his ear. He was pleased someone like Anton had singled him out to tell him something like that in his ear. Look, Anton said. They all look like they’re off porn sites. It was true. After you’ve looked at sites, all girls start to look like it. Commercials on tv begin to look like it. Singers on the music channels all look like it, well, the girls anyway.
He could ask Eve when he gets back if he could borrow her laptop. He could ask Michael, if she is busy on hers or doesn’t want anyone to touch it. He can work out the email, it is people’s names plus sp for school pupil dot deans dot co dot uk. Dear Catherine Masson. I am. I hope you don’t mind me. Please don’t mind me emailing you but. You don’t know me but. You have no idea how. I wanted to say I’m really. I’m so. Magnus is sick on to the grass by his hand. Nothing much comes up. For a moment he feels much much better. Then the good feeling goes. She walks into a classroom but all the faces are strange to her. She can’t make them out. They used to be her friends. Now she doesn’t know any more. There’s no knowing. For all she knew it could have been any one of them. She walks down a street she knows or into a shop she’s been in a thousand times. It’s strange to her, it’s changed. She sits at ho
me. Her family, sitting in the same room, is in a different world, one where things haven’t changed. She sits on her bed. Catherine Masson. Doesn’t matter. Here it comes, the darkening, it comes down on him, the grass he’s sitting on turns grey. He shakes his head, closes then opens his eyes. The leaves above him are black. The river is black water. It ends in a massive smashed black ocean. It doesn’t matter any more what numbers add up to. All the billions of electrical impulses, billions of messages sent in miraculous nanoseconds at the flick of a button or a key or a switch across grey miles, countries, continents, the whole wide world: this is all it adds up to. He did it. They did it. She got the message. She killed herself.
He gets up. He walks back over the bridge, retches again. He holds on to the wall of an old white building. He has the slightly better feeling again. He thinks he could stay like this for a while, head down, shoulders against the wall, looking at the rubble, the weeds pushing out of the place where the building meets the ground. But a man comes out. He shouts at Magnus until he gets up. All right, Magnus says. He nods sorry to the people through the big window in the front of the building. They are looking at him in amazement. There is a vase of flowers on the table between them. Magnus crosses a road. He walks past a chip shop. Some boys are standing outside it. They shout something after him. He wonders how it would feel, to be kicked to death by them. He tries to remember a prayer, but the only thing that will come is the words for now I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my soul to keep if I should die before I wake I pray the Lord for them to come after me, knock me down then kick me until I’m dead. But they don’t, because there is no God. They shout something else but they don’t come after him. Never mind. Magnus feels better. He knows what to do. He has known all along, really.
He walks back to the house. It is the correct house, the house he left, because its front door is still open. He can see Eve, his mother, sitting in the front window. She is holding a wine glass. He can see the colour of the wine in it. It is dark. Winedark! Hologram Boy squeaks. It makes Magnus laugh. His stomach hurts. His family is laughing at something too, something else, in the front room of this strange house. He can hear Astrid, his sister, laugh. She has no idea. After all, Hologram Boy is saying, why get three yobs outside a chip shop to do it when nobody’s better at doing things than you yourself are? Absolutely, Magnus agrees. Absolutely. He says it every time his foot hits a step all the way up the stairs. BATHROOM. It is on there for the benefit of all the people who temporarily pass through this rented holiday house. He is level with the picture of the watering can. He puts his forehead against it. He pushes open the door with his head.
It is a very plain bathroom. It is so meek, mild. There’s the white bath with the rough-rubber grips in the shape of a large foot with toes, stuck to the bottom of the bath’s insides so people won’t slip getting in or out. There’s the power-shower. There’s the pink bathmat folded on the edge. There’s the shelf of towels, the spare pink soaps. There’s the sink. He has only come in here when he hasn’t been able not to. He has urinated in the sink in his room. He has kept his eyes shut when he absolutely had to come in here, when he needed to
Excrete, Hologram Boy says brightly.
He sees himself in the mirror. He looks remarkably like himself. It is a joke. The towels on the shelf are folded so neatly. The walls have more of the little plaque-pictures of garden things on them, flowers, wordless pictures. A cheap amelioration of a room which we like to pretend is nothing to do with the cloacal. Hologram Boy says the words amelioration then cloacal in his unbroken voice. He waits, head cocked, for Magnus to say absolutely back.
Fuck off out of here you fake little shit, Magnus says to Hologram Boy.
Hologram Boy fizzes a little, as if overloading. Then he snaps into nothing in an instant like someone unplugged him.
Magnus breathes out hard. He looks at the ceiling above the bath, at the fake beam. He wonders if all the rooms in the house have them. He stands on the edges of the bath. He tests the beam with his weight by hanging off it by his arms. It holds, firm enough. He takes off his shirt, ties one arm of it to the beam with a slipknot. He tugs on the other arm to tighten it.
The girl in the magazine had breasts that were angled as if coming at you out of the picture. There was no escape from them. They were like two stupefied eyes looking at you. They were quite big, with lighter-darker tan marks over their nipples. She had dark hair. He can’t remember what kind of eyes. Her nipples were large, hard. Her mouth was red, open. Her wet tongue was there, her teeth. Her body was arched so you could see into all her holes.
Catherine Masson was wearing her dark blue school pullover. It had the shield embroidered into it on the left side of her chest, with its words in it, Endeavour With Concord, the Deans motto. She was wearing a tie with a full-looking, soft-looking knot. She was wearing a white school shirt with its lapels tucked neatly into the pullover. She was smiling a friendly smile. Her mouth was closed. Her skin was clean-looking. Her brown hair was shoulder-length. Her fringe was quite far down over her eyes. You could still see her eyes quite clearly. They were deep brown.
He used one of the new scanners with a Mac. First he scanned both using Photoshop. Then he clicked on the marquee tool. He showed them how to select the head, copy then make a new layer with the body. Then he showed them how to cut round her with the lasso. He showed them the background eraser. He explained pasting the head, dissolving the edges, blending it normal. He showed them save, then how to send it as a jpeg, then finally how to delete.
Magnus puts his arms around himself. He is shivering. He is freezing cold. He stands in the bath on the rubber grip. Reaching up, he ties a slipknot in the other arm of the shirt. He stands up on the edges of the bath again. He loosens the knot until it is big enough. He pushes his head through it. It hangs loose all the way round his neck. Its cuff juts into his ear. He is at the angle of depression. Conduct an experiment to discover how a beam will progressively sag with a loading upon it where m = the load in tonnes, where n = the sag in mm. He takes one foot off the edge of the bath. He holds it in the air. He should say a prayer. Now I lay me down to sleep. He is shaking. He puts the foot carefully back on the edge again. He can see the dust on the top of the beam, the places whoever painted it black missed with the brush. He is level with the lampshade. He can see the cobwebs on its upper rim, the dust on the top of the lightbulb. He can’t work out why the lampshade isn’t shaking too, why the whole room isn’t shaking.
Meanwhile someone has come into the bathroom. It is his own fault. He should have locked the door. He didn’t remember to lock it. He is such a failure. He can’t even do this properly.
It is an angel. She stares up at him.
It was just a joke, he says.
I see, she says. Is this a joke too?
She leans on the towel rail, watching him. She has yellow angelic hair.
It’s my fault, he says. Because first I showed them how to. Then they sent it round the list. Then she. I have to.
He starts to cry. He holds on to the beam.
I understand, the angel says.
It was an accident, he says.
Okay, the angel says.
The wrong thing happened, he says.
I get the picture, she says.
She is nodding. She is very beautiful, a little rough-looking, like a beautiful used girl off an internet site. She is all lit up against the wipe-clean wallpaper.
Do you need some help? she is saying. When you’re ready I can knock myself against you here so you lose your balance.
She has him by the leg; she is holding very tightly round it with both her arms. Her arms are bare. The leg she is holding is shaking against her chest, her face.
Just say when, she says into his jeans.
He swallows. He is crying. His face is all snot or sweat. Sweat or snot is all up the cuff of the shirt by his nose.
Come on then, she says. Ready when you are. You want to?
He nods. He tries
to say the word yes. He can’t. Sweat or crying, he doesn’t know which, falls from somewhere, hits his chest.
Are you sure now? the angel who’s holding him says
the beginning again! Extraordinary. Life never stopped being glorious, a glorious surprise, a glorious renewal all over again. Like new. No, not just like new but really new, actually new. Metaphor not simile. No like between him and the word new. Who’d have believed it? That woman, Amber, had just pushed her plate away, pushed her chair back, long-limbed and insouciant and insolent as a girl, and had stood up and left the table, left the room, and Michael, now that all that was opposite him was her empty chair, could stop, breathe out, wonder whether Eve, who was scraping at breadcrumbs with her napkin, if she looked up, say she looked up and looked him straight in the face, would see the surprise of it written all over him. His face would have that astonished look more usually found on the face of a soprano hitting a high perfected oh.
Eve was looking up at him now. He straightened his mouth in case. The perfect pitch of her, in his ears and his head and jangling all through his blood, so that he leaned forward at the table then sat back again then couldn’t think how to sit. What Apollinaire called ‘that most modern source of energy–surprise!’, words he wrote on the whiteboard at the start of every academic year, modernist literature being full of the energy of surprise, as Dr Michael Smart told the new third-years every first term. But Dr Michael Smart God bless him and all who sail in him had never before hit a note quite like this one for this startling a quality, this piercing a newness, this jolt of an oh.