Читать книгу Maxwell's Demon - Steven Hall - Страница 12

4

Analogue

You have no new messages.

You have no new messages.

You have no new m—

You have no—

You have. One. Saved message. From. 11 May . . .

‘Hey, it’s me . . . Me, Imogen . . . your wife. Are you there? . . . Are you there? . . . No? All right, fine. I hope you haven’t forgotten to eat and died. Love you. Call you later. Love—’

Message saved.

1 4 7 1

You were called yesterday at. Fourteen. Thirty—

1 0 0

‘Hello. Operator.’

‘Hi, yeah. Could you tell me the last time someone called this number, please?’

‘Yes – the last call made to this line was at 2.36, yesterday afternoon. Would you like the caller’s number?’

‘No, that’s all right. It was, er, a PPI bot or something. And there’s been nothing else after that?’

‘That’s correct, sir.’

‘Only, the phone was just ringing.’

‘Oh. Well, there’s nothing showing up on the system.’

‘Okay. So—’

‘You probably had a crossed line.’

‘A crossed line?’

‘That’s right, sir. You do still get them from time to time. Would you like me to put you through to the BT helpdesk? They can test the—’

‘No, it’s okay. Thanks.’

‘All right sir, thank you.’

[Clunk]

You have no new messages.

You have no new messages.

o

The whisky rolled around the tumbler, and I stared out of the window at the old church spire rising from the oranges and yellows of the tree canopy on the far side of the park.

It’s strange to get an honest peek inside yourself, to have some event come along and – for the briefest of moments – knock the lid off and allow the light to shine down inside. A few hours ago, I’d heard a muffled voice coming from the answerphone in the other room, and not only was I instantly convinced that this voice was my dead father’s, but also, that he’d been trying to tell me something. It only took a single word for me to jump to this impossible conclusion. Tom. A word that, in the cold light of day, was probably another word altogether – something half-heard and through two walls, a hallway and a living-room door. Nevertheless, I’d been so certain in the heat of the moment that I’d gone racing across the flat, chasing after that voice with my trousers around my ankles.

When you get right down to it, what do we really know about ourselves? All those years apart from my father, the resentment, the distance, the funeral in Spain that I didn’t attend and the graveside I’ve never seen, even though I kept telling myself I’d visit one day, even though I’d always known that I wouldn’t. All of that water rolling on under the bridge, water that only rolls down and past and away and never, never comes back and yet, despite all of it, some dark part of my brain had been biding its time, waiting for him to pull off that old magic trick – to reassemble himself from a scattering of words and old recordings and come back home to me, just like he did when I was a child.

Google confirmed what the operator said about crossed lines – they do happen from time to time. It’s something to do with all the old analogue cable still out there in the network. Old wires wear thin during the long years in ragged winds, or go brittle in the sun, or rot away in leaky junction boxes. This means you can be minding your own business and the phone will ring – you’ll pick it up, and there’ll be two strangers talking about a garage door, or booking the car in for a service, or about someone called Alison’s new boyfriend. These calls are not really calls, they’re pseudo calls, un-calls, and they do all sorts of weird things to answerphones and caller data records. It’s odd, it’s unusual, but it’s nothing more dramatic than that. Bugs in the system are inevitable, because all systems are corrupting systems to a greater or lesser degree. As Max Cleaver, the detective hero of Cupid’s Engine, puts it: The only thing necessary for the triumph of chaos is for the repairmen to do nothing.

It seemed poetic to me that an analogue fault would be at the heart of things though, my father being such a resolutely analogue creature himself. An analogue ghost down an analogue wire. Except, of course, there was no ghost. Dr Stanley Quinn had no time for zeros and ones. He trusted in ink and he trusted in paper. He always carried a pen and he never traded his typewriter for a computer, not even when lightweight laptops became something that everybody just had. I remember him telling the Paris Review that he’d ‘never liked the damn things and wasn’t about to start at his age’ (I would read interviews with my father from time to time; they’d sneak into the house amongst the papers and magazine subscriptions, another inky aspect of a man who was never, ever in just the one place).

I rubbed my eyes, drained my glass, and I headed to the kitchen to fix myself another drink.

o

By the time I went to bed that night, I felt altogether better about things.

If there’d been anyone around to tell the story of the phone call to, I probably would have done it with a can-you-believe-it smile and a slightly red face. That is, if I’d said anything at all. I definitely wouldn’t be telling Imogen, I decided, not least because I had no interest in a rousing rendition of ‘Cabin Fever’ every time I picked up the phone.

And this is how it is sometimes, isn’t it? When the pendulum swings especially high in one direction, its momentum carries it back to swing high the other way. Love becomes hate, shame becomes anger, shocked disbelief becomes – some sort of embarrassed, comic incredulity.

I decided, on the whole, not to worry about it.

Tomorrow’s another day.

I heaved the duvet up to my chin and went back to reading Cupid’s Engine, and soon enough, the novel’s current began pulling and tugging at me, demanding my full attention. I was only too happy to let go of things and be carried away by it, racing off downstream, disappearing into the distance like a small boat on the rapids.

o

Cupid’s Engine begins with a tall, scruffy man in a white fedora and crumpled linen suit. He’s propping himself up in a doorway, covered in blood. Although we don’t know it yet, this man’s name is Maurice Umber. He has a bloody knife in his right hand, and a telephone receiver pressed to his left ear.

‘Police,’ he mumbles into the phone. ‘You’re going to have to send somebody.’

As my eyes tracked towards the end of that first paragraph, a wholly unexpected wave of emotion rose up inside me: a sudden, overpowering force of words and worlds revisited, a return to another time. The depth and strength of it – it felt like a tight hug with someone you never thought you’d see again, or like throwing on your old self like a faded old hoody; not lost after all, only misplaced for a few years in the bottom of the wardrobe. This is one of the great powers of books, isn’t it? And one that’s easy to forget these days, with everything else that’s going on.

So anyway, I was lying in bed, still feeling a little strange but mostly just silly about the phone call, and allowing myself to relax into this deep, nostalgic haze, when an idea came to me for a script I’d been struggling with for months.

That’s how I made my living, you see. I wrote stories and scripts. I know what you’re thinking, but no, we’re not talking movies and we’re not talking novels. The manuscripts for my last two novels were neatly stored in manila envelopes at the bottom of the linen box at the end of the bed. My agent hadn’t been able to convince anyone to publish either one of them after the lukewarm performance of The Qwerty Machinegun, and so – after years of plodding on regardless – I got up from my desk one ordinary afternoon and in the midst of a long struggle with a particularly tricky passage, I just turned the computer off.

Click – and that was that.

When I say I made my living writing stories and scripts, what I mean is that I made a pretty poor living, and that I wrote digital, downloadable short stories and audio scripts for existing intellectual properties. I created what the industry calls auxiliaries, or officially licensed story products, or, in language an actual, real person might use, tie-in material.

For some admirers of Dr Stanley Quinn, this was an unthinkable, abhorrent thing. It made me the tone-deaf kid who’d jump on stage and belt out ‘Ten Green Bottles’ at the end of a virtuoso piano recital. These people always got the same look in their eyes when they heard what I did for a living. For the love of God, it said, if you can’t do it properly, don’t do it at all. Don’t you know who your father was? It hurt me, of course. It hurt me every time. It still does, though mostly in a dull, itchy-scar-tissue sort of a way, as the years have rolled on by. Truth is, I’m not so bothered any more. These people are not the gatekeepers, judges and tastemakers I once saw them as. They’re refugees from my father’s time, a bunch of ageing Bruce Willises from The Sixth Sense, who can’t see that their whole world has ended, and who don’t have the first clue about the world we’re living in now.

Here’s a question: how many writers do you think spend their days working with new stories, with new characters and new plots? My guess is: a tiny number, compared to how many are working with the old ones. And that’s not just the case at the bottom of the food chain where I make my living; it’s the same at the very top – think about those big brand writers creating big brand book sequels – more James Bond, more Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And it’s the same story times a million in the film industry – a whole generation of filmmakers working on Star Wars, Captain America and Batman. A whole raft of us – at every level you can imagine – are investing our writing lives into the continuation of stories that were new when we were kids, or when our parents were kids, instead of creating new worlds of our own. And these stories tend to be children’s stories; you’ve noticed that, right? Now don’t get me wrong; I’m no snob. I might love Herman Melville and B.S. Johnson, but I also love Star Wars and Harry Potter. Of course I do, we all do, so we roll up our sleeves and we service the IPs. I’m certainly not complaining, and even if I was complaining, there’s really no point burying your head in the sand and hoping that any of it will go away, because – let me tell you – it absolutely won’t. It’s a hard rule of late-stage capitalism – big, established brands dominate, and start-ups find it harder and harder to get a foothold in the market. There’s no changing it. This is our world, and it’s a world of sequels, prequels, remakes, remakquels. This is our age, and it’s the age of the hyperlink and the shared universe, where all the stories are interconnected and everyone takes a turn at being the author of everything.

I don’t let it keep me awake at night.

Not that anyone has ever asked me to write Star Wars.

On the night of the answerphone message, I was thirty-three years old, married but temporarily living alone in our small flat in East London, and in dire need of a shave and some natural sunlight. I’d published one book seven years earlier, written two more that nobody wanted, and thereby managed to pull off the impressive feat of having a failed literary career in my mid-twenties.

And, you know, that is what it is.

I had written new adventures for Thunderbirds, Stingray, Doctor Who, Sapphire and Steel, He-Man, The Tripods, Thundercats. . . I took these projects seriously, and though I wasn’t the best writer in the field, and I certainly wasn’t the quickest, I was quietly proud of several of the audio plays I’d helped to create. By and large, I enjoyed the work, and the fans of the old shows generally liked my stories more than they hated them – which is a bigger deal than you might perhaps imagine.

And now I had an idea for the Captain Scarlett script that’d stumped me for months, a genuinely good idea, the first good idea, in fact, in God knew how long. I jumped up, jotted down an enthusiastic page of notes, then climbed back into bed and turned off the light.

I lay there for a while, listening to the distant traffic and the hum of the city.

‘Why knocks an angel in Bethlehem?’

What does that even mean? I thought. Why knocks an angel? It’s nonsense. It’s nonsense and that’s probably because it isn’t what the voice was even saying.

Alone in the dark, I shuffled across to Imogen’s side of the bed.

Don’t worry about it. Just let it go. Tomorrow’s another day.

Imogen’s pillow felt icy cold and had stopped smelling of her a long time ago, but I pressed my face against it anyway, eyes shut tight, waiting for unconsciousness to rise up like dark water.