PART ELEVEN
SHELLS
AUTUMN 2206
Between the retina and the higher centres of the cortex the innocence of vision is irretrievably lost – it has succumbed to the suggestion of a whole series of hidden persuaders.
—Arthur Koestler, The Act Of Creation
That which we experience in dreams, if we experience it often, is in the end just as much a part of the total economy of our soul as is anything we ‘really’ experience: we are by virtue of it richer or poorer.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil
Chapter 47
THE INNOCENCE OF VISION
Ben came upon the cottage from the bay path, climbing the steep slope. At the lower gate he turned, looking back across the bay. New growth crowded the distant foreshore, masking where the fire had raged five years earlier. Only at the hill’s crest, where the old house had stood, did the new vegetation end. There the land was fused a glassy black.
The tall seventeen-year-old shook his head, then turned to face the cottage. Landscott was a long, low shape against the hill, its old stone walls freshly whitewashed, its roof thatched. A flower garden stretched up to it, its blooms a brilliant splash of colour beside the smooth greenness of the lawn. Behind and beside it other cottages dotted the hillside, untenanted yet perfectly maintained. Shells, they were. Part of the great illusion. His eyes passed over them quickly, used to the sight.
He looked down at his left hand where it rested on the gatepost, conscious of a deep, unsatisfied itch at the join between the wrist and the new hand. The kind of itch you couldn’t scratch, because it was inside, beneath the flesh. The join was no longer sore, the hand no longer an unaccustomed weight at the end of his arm, as it had been for the first year. Even so, something of his initial sense of awkwardness remained.
The scar had healed, leaving what looked like a machined ridge between what was his and what had been given. The hand itself looked natural enough, but that was only illusion. He had seen what lay beneath the fibrous dermal layer. It was much stronger than his right hand and, in subtle ways, much better – far quicker in its responses. He turned it, moving it like the machine it was rather than the hand it pretended to be, then smiled to himself. If he wished he could have it strengthened and augmented: could transform it into any kind of tool he needed.
He let it fall, then began to climb again, crossing the gradual slope of the upper garden. Halfway across the lawn he slowed then stopped, surprised, hearing music from inside the cottage. Piano music. He tilted his head, listening, wondering who it was. The phrase was faltering at first, the chords uncertain. Then, a moment later, the same chords were repeated, confidently this time, all sense of hesitation gone.
Curious, he crossed the lawn and went inside. The music was coming from the living-room. He went to the doorway and looked in. At the far side of the room his mother was sitting at a piano, her back to him, her hands resting lightly on the keys.
‘Mother?’ Ben frowned, not understanding. The repetition of the phrase had been assured, almost professional, and his mother did not play.
She turned, surprised to see him there, a slight colour at her cheeks. ‘I…’ Then she laughed and shook her head. ‘Yes, it was me. Come. I’ll show you.’
He went across and sat beside her on the long, bench-like piano seat. ‘This is new,’ he said, looking down at the piano. Then, matter-of-factly, he added, ‘Besides, you don’t play.’
‘No,’ she said, but began anyway: a long, introductory passage, more complex than the phrase she had been playing – a fast, passionate piece played with a confidence and skill the earlier attempt had lacked. He watched her hands moving over the keys, surprised and delighted.
‘That’s beautiful,’ he said when she had finished. ‘What was it?’
‘Chopin. From the Preludes.’ She laughed, then turned and glanced at him, her eyes bright with enjoyment.
‘I still don’t understand. That was excellent.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that.’ She leaned back, staring down at the keyboard. ‘I’m rather rusty. It’s a long while since I played.’
‘Why didn’t you play before now?’
‘Because it’s an obsession.’
She had said it without looking at him, as if it explained everything. He looked down at her hands again, saw how they formed shapes above the keys.
‘I had to think of you and Meg. I couldn’t do both, you understand. Couldn’t play and look after you. And I wanted to bring you up. I didn’t trust anyone else to do the job.’
‘So you gave up this?’
If anything, he understood it less. To have such a gift and not use it… it was not possible.
‘Oh, there were plenty of times when I felt like playing. I ached to do it. It was like coming off a drug. A strong, addictive drug. And in denying that part of me I genuinely felt less human. But there was no choice. I wanted to be a mother to you, not simply a presence flitting through your lives.’
He frowned, not following her. It made him realize how little he knew about her. She had always been too close, too familiar. He had never thought to ask her about herself, about her life before she had met his father.
‘My own mother and father were never there, you see.’ Her hands formed a major chord, then two quick minors. It sounded familiar, yet, like the Chopin, he couldn’t place it.
‘I was determined not to do to you what they did to me. I remember how isolated I felt. How unloved.’ She smiled, reaching across to take his right hand – his human hand – and squeeze it.
‘I see.’
It awed him to think she had done that for them. He ran the piece she had played through his memory, seeing where she placed emphasis, where she slowed. He could almost feel the music. Almost.
‘How does it feel to be able to do that?’
She drew in a long breath, looking through him, suddenly distant, her eyes and mouth lit with the vaguest of smiles, then shook her head. ‘No. I can’t say. There aren’t the words for it. Raised up, I guess. Changed. Different somehow. But I can’t say what, exactly.’
For the first time in his life Ben felt something like envy, watching her face. Not a jealous, denying envy, but a strong desire to emulate.
‘But why now?’
‘Haven’t you guessed?’ She laughed and placed his right hand on the keyboard. ‘You’re usually so quick.’
‘You’re going to teach me.’
‘Both of you,’ she answered, getting up and coming behind him so that she could move his arms and manipulate his hands. ‘Meg asked me to. And she wouldn’t learn unless you could too.’
He thought about it a moment, then nodded.
‘What was that piece you were playing when I came in? It sounded as if you were learning it for the first time, yet at the same time knew it perfectly.’
She leaned closer, her warmth pressed against his shoulder, her long, dark hair brushing against his cheek. ‘It wasn’t originally a piece for piano, that’s why. It was scored for the string and woodwind sections of an orchestra. It’s by Grieg. “Wedding Day at Troldhaugen”.’ She placed her hands either side of his own and repeated the phrase he had heard, then played a second, similar one.
‘That’s nice,’ he said. Its simplicity appealed to him.
‘You came back early,’ she said. ‘What’s up? Didn’t you want to go into town?’
He turned, meeting her eyes. ‘Father called. The T’ang has asked him to stay on a few days.’
There was a brief movement of disappointment in her face. It had been three months since she had seen Hal.
‘A few more days,’ she said quietly. ‘Ah, well, it’ll soon pass.’ Then, smiling, she put her hand on his arm. ‘Perhaps we’ll have a picnic. You, me and Meg. Like old times. What do you think?’
Ben looked back at her, seeing her anew, the faintest smile playing on his lips and in his eyes. ‘It would be nice,’ he said. But already his thoughts were moving on, his mind toying with the possibilities of the keyboard. Pushing things further. ‘Yes,’ he said, getting up and going over to her. ‘Like old times.’
The next morning found Ben in the shadowed living-room, crouched on his haunches, staring intently at the screen that filled half the facing wall. He was watching one of the special Security reports that had been prepared for his father some months before, after the T’ang of Africa’s assassination. It was an interesting document, not least because it showed things that were thought too controversial – too inflammatory – for general screening.
The Seven had acted swiftly after Wang Hsien’s death, arresting the last few remnants of opposition at First Level – thus preventing a further outbreak of the War between the factions in the Above – but even they had been surprised by the extent of the rioting lower down the City. There had been riots before, of course, but never on such a widespread scale, nor with such appalling consequences. Officials of the Seven, Deck Magistrates amongst them, had been beaten and killed. Security posts had been destroyed and Security troops forced to pull out of some stacks in fear of their lives. Slowly, very slowly, things had settled, the fires burning themselves out, and in some parts of the City – in East Asia and North America, particularly – Security had moved back within days to quell the last few pockets of resistance. Order had been restored. But for how long?
He knew it was a warning. A sign of things to come. But would the Seven heed it? Or would they continue to ignore the problems that beset those who lived in the lowest levels of the City, blaming the unrest on groups like the Ping Tiao?
Ben rubbed at his chin thoughtfully. To the respectable Mid-Level citizenry, the Ping Tiao were bogeymen – the very type and symbol of those destructive forces the War had unleashed – and MidText, their media channel, played heavily upon their fears. But the truth was otherwise.
The Ping Tiao had first come into the news eighteen months back, when three members of their faction had kidnapped and murdered a Mid-Level Administrator. They had issued pamphlets claiming that the Administrator was a corrupt and brutal man who had abused his position and deserved his fate. It was the truth, but the authorities had countered at once, depicting the dead official as a well-respected family man who had been the victim of a group of madmen. Madmen who wanted only one thing – to level the City and destroy Chung Kuo itself.
As the weeks passed and further Ping Tiao ‘outrages’ occurred, the media had launched a no-holds-barred campaign against the group, linking their name with any outbreak of violence or civil unrest. There was a degree of truth behind official claims, for the tactics of the Ping Tiao were certainly of the crudest kind, the seemingly random nature of their targets aiming at maximum disruption. However, the extent of Ping Tiao activities was greatly exaggerated, creating the impression that if only the Ping Tiao could be destroyed, the problems they represented would vanish with them.
The campaign had worked. Or at least in the Mid-Levels it had worked. Further down, however, in the cramped and crowded levels at the bottom of the City, the Ping Tiao were thought of differently. There they were seen as heroes, their cause as a powerful and genuine expression of long-standing grievances. Support for the terrorists grew and grew. And would have continued growing but for a tragic accident in a Mid-Level creche.
Confidential high-level sources later made it quite clear that the Ping Tiao had had nothing to do with what was termed ‘The Lyon’s Canton Massacre’, but the media had a field day, attacking the Ping Tiao for what they called its ‘cowardly barbarism and inhumanity’.
The effect was immediate. The tide of opinion turned against the Ping Tiao overnight, and a subsequent Security operation against the terrorists resulted in the capture and execution of over eight hundred members of the faction – most of them identified by previously sympathetic friends and neighbours.
For the Ping Tiao those few weeks had been disastrous. They had sunk into obscurity. Yet in the past few days they seemed to have put that behind them. Fish emblems – the symbol of the Ping Tiao – had been seen everywhere throughout the levels, painted on walls or drawn in blood on the faces of their victims.
But the authorities had hit back hard. MidText, for instance, had played heavily on old fears. The present troubles, they asserted, were mainly the result of a conspiracy between the Ping Tiao and a small faction in the Above who financed their atrocities.
Ben froze the tape momentarily, thinking back to what Li Shai Tung had said – on that evening five years earlier – about knowing his enemy. It was on this level, accepting at face value the self-deluding half-truths of the MidText images, that Li Shai Tung had been speaking then. But these men – terrorist and Company men alike – were merely cyphers: the scum on the surface of the well. And the well was deep. Far deeper than the Seven dared imagine.
He let the tape run. At once the babble began again, the screen filling once more with images of riot and despoliation.
Vast crowds surged through the lower levels, destroying guard posts and barriers, wrecking storefronts and carrying off whatever they could lay their hands on. Unfortunate officials were beaten to death before the camera, or bound and doused in petrochemicals before being set on fire. Ben saw how the crowd pressed in tightly about one such victim, roaring their approval as a frail, grey-bearded magistrate was hacked to death. He noted the ugly brutality in every face, and nodded to himself. Then the image changed, switching to another crowd, this one more orderly. Hastily made banners were raised on every side, demanding increased food rations, a resumption of state aid to the jobless and an end to travel restrictions. ‘Pien hua!’ they chanted in their hundred thousands, ‘Pien hua!’
Change!
There was a burning indignation in many of the faces; in others a fierce, unbridled need that had no outlet. Some waved long knives or clubs in the air and bared their teeth in ferocious animal smiles, a gleam of sheer delight in their eyes at having thrown off all restraints. For many this was their first taste of such freedom and they danced frenziedly in time with the great chant, intoxicated by the madness that raged on every side.
‘PIEN HUA! PIEN HUA! PIEN HUA! PIEN HUA!’
Ben watched the images flash up one after another, conscious of the tremendous power, the dark potency that emanated from them. It was primordial. Like some vast movement of the earth itself. And yet it was all so loosely reined, so undirected. Change, they demanded. But to what?
No one knew. No one seemed capable of imagining what Change might bring. In time, perhaps, someone would find an answer to that question – would draw the masses to him and channel that dark tide of discontent. But until then, the Seven had been right to let the storm rage, the flood waters rise unchecked; for they knew the waters would recede, the storm blow itself out. To have attempted to control that vast upsurge of feeling or repress it could only have made things worse.
Ben blanked the screen, then stood, considering what he had seen. Wang Hsien’s death may have been the catalyst, but the real causes of the mass violence were rooted much deeper. Were, in fact, as old as Man himself. For this was how Man really was beneath his fragile shell of culture. And not just those he had seen on the screen, the madness dancing in their eyes, but all of Mankind. For a long time they had tried to fool themselves, pretending they were something else – something more refined and spiritual, something more god-like and less animal than they really were. But now the lid was off the well, the darkness bubbling to the surface once again.
‘Ben?’
He turned. Meg was watching him from the doorway, the morning sunlight behind her throwing her face and figure into shadow, making her look so like his mother that, momentarily, he mistook her. Then, realizing his error, he laughed.
‘What is it?’ she asked, her voice rich and low.
‘Nothing,’ he answered. ‘Is it ready?’
She nodded, then came into the room. ‘What were you watching?’
He glanced at the empty screen, then back at her. ‘I was looking at Father’s tapes. About the riots.’
She looked past him. ‘I thought you weren’t interested.’
‘I’m not. At least, not in the events themselves. But the underlying meaning of it all… that fascinates me. The faces – they’re like windows to their souls. All their fears and aspirations show nakedly. But it takes something like this to do it. Something big and frightening. And then the mask slips and the animal stares out through the eyes.’
And the Ping Tiao, he thought. I’m interested in them, too. Because they’re something new. Something the City has been missing until now. A carp to fill an empty pool.
‘Well… shall we go out?’
She smiled. ‘Okay. You first.’
On the lawn beside the flower-beds, their mother had spread out a picnic on a big red and white checked tablecloth. As Ben came out into the open she looked across at him and smiled. In the sunlight she seemed much younger than she really was, more Meg’s older sister than her mother. He went across and sat beside her, conscious of the drowsy hum of bees, the rich scent of the blooms masking the sharp salt tang of the bay. It was a perfect day, the blue above them broken here and there by big, slow-drifting cumuli.
Ben looked down at the picnic spread before them. It all looked newly created. A wide basket filled with apples lay at the centre of the feast, their perfect, rounded greenness suggesting the crispness of the inner fruit. To the left the eye was drawn to the bright yellow of the butter in its circular, white china dish and, beside it, the richer, almost honeyed yellow of the big wedge of cheddar. There was a big plate of thick-cut ham, the meat a soft pink, the rind a perfect snowy white, and next to that a fresh-baked loaf, three slices cut from it and folded forward, exposing the fluffy whiteness of the bread. Bright red tomatoes beaded with moisture shared a bowl with the softer green of a freshly washed lettuce, while other, smaller bowls held tiny radishes and onions, peeled carrots, grapes and celery, redcurrants and watercress.
‘It’s nice,’ he said, looking to his mother.
Pleased, she handed him a plate. A moment later Meg reappeared, carrying a tray on which were three tall glasses and a jug of freshly made iced lemonade. He laughed.
‘What is it?’ Meg asked, setting the tray down.
‘This,’ he said, indicating the spread laid out before them.
Meg’s smile faded slowly. ‘What’s wrong? Don’t you like it?’
‘No,’ he said softly, reassuringly. ‘It’s marvellous.’ He smiled, then leaned forward, beginning to transfer things to his plate.
Meg hesitated, then poured from the jug, handing him the cold, beaded glass. ‘Here.’
He set his plate down, then took the glass and sipped. ‘Hmm,’ he said, his eyes smiling back at her. ‘Perfect.’
Beside him his mother was busy, filling a plate for Meg. She spoke without looking at him.
‘Meg tells me you’ve been reading Nietzsche.’
He glanced across at Meg. She was looking down, a faint colour in her cheeks.
‘That’s right.’ He sipped again, then stared at the side of his glass intently.
His mother turned her head, looking at him. ‘I thought you’d read Nietzsche.’
‘I did. When I was eight.’
‘Then I don’t understand. I thought you said you could never read a thing twice.’
He met her eyes. ‘So I thought. But it seems I was wrong.’
She was silent a while, considering, then looked back at him again. ‘Then you can forget things, after all?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s not a question of forgetting. It’s just that things get embedded.’
‘Embedded?’
He paused, then set his glass down, realizing he would have to explain.
‘I realized it months ago, when Father quoted something from Nietzsche to me. Two lines from Ecce Homo. The memory should have come back clearly, but it didn’t. Oh, it was clear enough in one sense – I could remember the words plain enough. I could even see them on the page and recall where I was when I read them. But that was it, you see. That’s what I mean by things getting embedded. When Father triggered that specific memory, it came back to me in context, surrounded by all the other ragbag preoccupations of my eight-year-old self.’
Ben reached out and took a tomato from the bowl and polished it on his sleeve, then looked up at his mother again, his face earnest, almost frowning.
‘You see, those lines of Nietzsche were interlaced with all kinds of other things. With snatches of music – Mahler and Schoenberg and Shostakovich – with the abstract paintings of Kandinsky and Klee, the poetry of Rilke and Donne and Basho, and god knows what else. A thousand intricate strands. Too many to grasp at a single go. But it wasn’t just a case of association by juxtaposition – I found that my reading, my very understanding of Nietzsche, was coloured by those things. And try as I might, I couldn’t shake those impressions loose and see his words fresh. I had to separate it physically.’
‘What do you mean?’ Beth asked, leaning forward to take a grape from the bunch.
‘I mean that I had to return to the text. To read the words fresh from the page again. Free from all those old associations.’
‘And?’ It was Meg who asked the question. She was leaning forward, watching him, fascinated.
He looked down, then bit into the tomato. He chewed for a moment, then swallowed and looked up again. ‘And it worked. I liberated the words from their old context.’
He popped the rest of the tomato into his mouth and for a while was silent, thoughtful. The two women watched him, indulging him, as always placing him at the very centre of things. The tomato finished, he took a long sip of his lemonade. Only then did he begin again.
‘It’s as if my mind is made up of different strata. It’s all there – fossilized, if you like, and available if I want to chip away at it – but my memory, while perfect, is nonetheless selective.’
Ben laughed and looked at his sister again. ‘Do you remember that Borges story, Meg? “Funes The Memorious” about the boy with perfect recall, confined to his bed, entrapped by the perfection – the overwhelming detail – of past moments. Well, it isn’t like that. It could never be like that, amusing as the concept is. You see, the mind accords certain things far greater significance than others. And there’s a good reason for that. The undermind recognizes what the conscious intelligence too often overlooks – that there is a hierarchy of experience. Some things matter more to our deeper self than others. And the mind returns them to us strongly. It thrusts them at us, you might say – in dreams, and at quiet moments when we least suspect their presence.’
‘Why should it do that?’
Ben gave a tiny shrug. He took an apple from the basket and lifted it to his mouth. ‘Maybe it has to do with something programmed into us at the genetic level. A code. A key to why we’re here, like the cyphers in Augustus’s journal.’
As Ben bit deeply into the apple, Meg looked across at her mother and saw how she had looked away at the mention of Augustus and the journal.
‘But why Nietzsche?’ Meg asked, after a moment. She could not understand his fascination with the nineteenth-century German philosopher. To her the man was simply an extremist, a fanatic. He understood nothing of those purely human things that held a society together – nothing of love, desire or sacrifice. To her mind his thinking was fatally flawed. It was the thinking of a hermit, a misanthrope. But Man was a social animal; he did not exist in separation from his fellows, nor could he for longer than one human lifetime. And any human culture was the product of countless generations. In secret she had struggled with the man’s difficult, spiky prose, trying to understand what it was Ben saw in him, but it had served only to confirm her own distaste.
Ben chewed the piece of apple, then smiled. ‘There’s an almost hallucinatory clarity about his thinking that I like. And there’s a fearlessness, too. He’s not afraid to offend. There’s nothing he’s afraid to look at and investigate at depth, and that’s rare in our culture. Very rare.’
‘So?’ Meg prompted, noting how her mother was watching Ben again, a fierce curiosity in her eyes.
He looked at the apple, then shrugged and bit again.
Beth broke her long silence. ‘Are you working on something new?’
Ben looked away. Then it was true. He had begun something new. Yes, she should have known. He was always like this when he began something new – fervent, secretive, subject to great swings of mood.
The two women sat there, watching him as he finished the apple, core and all, leaving nothing.
He wiped his fingers on the edge of the cloth, then looked up again, meeting Meg’s eyes. ‘I was thinking we might go along to the cove later on and look for shells.’
She looked away, concealing her surprise. It had been some while since they had been down to the cove, so why had he suggested it just now? Perhaps it was simply to indulge her love of shells, but she thought not. There was always more to it than that with Ben. It would be fun, and Ben would make the occasion into a kind of game, but he would have a reason for the game. He always had a reason.
Ben laughed and reached out to take one of the tiny radishes from the bowl. ‘And then, tomorrow, I’ll show you what I’ve been up to.’
Warfleet Cove was a small bay near the mouth of the river. A road led towards it from the old town, ending abruptly in a jumble of rocks, the shadow of the Wall throwing a sharp but jagged line over the rocks and the hill beyond. To the left the land fell away to the river, bathed in brilliant sunlight. A path led down through the thick overgrowth – blackberry and bramble, wildflowers and tall grasses – and came out at the head of the cove.
Ben stepped out on to the flattened ledge of rock, easing the strap of his shoulder bag. Below him the land fell away steeply to either side, forming a tiny, ragged flint-head of a bay. A shallow spill of shingle edged the sandy cove. At present the tide was out, though a number of small rockpools reflected back the sun’s brilliance. Low rocks lay to either side of the cove’s mouth, narrowing the channel. It was an ancient, primitive place, unchanged throughout the centuries, and it was easy to imagine Henry Plantagenet’s tiny fleet anchored here in 1147, waiting to sail to Jerusalem to fight the Infidel in the Second Crusade. Further round the headland stood the castle, built by Henry Tudor, Henry VII, whose son had broken with the papacy. Ben breathed deeply and smiled to himself. This was a place of history. From the town itself the Pilgrim Fathers had sailed in August 1620 to the new lands of America, and in June 1944 part of the great invasion fleet had sailed from here – five hundred ships, bound for Normandy and the liberation of Europe from Hitler and the Nazis.
All gone, he thought wryly, turning to look at his sister. All of that rich past gone, forgotten – buried beneath the ice of the Han City.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘The tide’s low. We’ll go by the rocks on the north lip. We should find something there.’
Meg nodded and followed him, taking his hand where the path was steepest, letting him help her down.
At the far edge of the shingle they stopped and took off their shoes, setting them down on the stones. Halfway across the sand, Ben stopped and turned, pointing down and back, tracing a line. ‘Look!’
She looked. The sun had warmed the sand, but where they had stepped, their feet had left wet imprints, dark against the almost white, compacted sand. They faded even as she watched, the most distant first, the nearest last.
‘Like history,’ he said, turning away from her and walking on towards the water’s edge.
Or memory, Meg thought, looking down at her feet. She took a step then stopped, watching how the sharp clarity of the imprint slowly decayed, like an image sent over some vast distance, first at the edges, then – in a sudden rush -at the very centre, breaking into two tiny, separate circles before it vanished. It was as if the whole had sunk down into the depths beneath the sand and was now stored in the rock itself.
‘Here!’ he called triumphantly. She hurried over to where he was crouched near the water’s edge and bent down at his side.
The shell was two-thirds embedded in the sand. Even so, its shape and colouring were unmistakable. It was a pink-mouthed murex. She clapped her hands, delighted, and looked at him.
‘Careful when you dig it out, Ben. You mustn’t damage the spines.’
He knew, of course, but said nothing, merely nodded and pulled his bag round to the front, opening up the flap.
She watched him remove the sand in a circle about the shell, then set the tiny trowel down and begin to remove the wet, hard-packed sand with his fingers. When he had freed it, he lifted it carefully between his fingers and took it across to one of the rockpools to clean.
She waited. When he came back, he knelt in front of her and, opening out the fingers of her right palm, set the pale, white-pink shell down on her palm. Cleaned, it looked even more beautiful. A perfect specimen, curved and elegant, like some strange, fossil fish.
‘The hedgehog of the seas,’ he said, staring at the shell. ‘How many points can you count?’
It was an old game. She lifted the shell and, staring at its tip – its ‘nose’ – began to count the tiny little nodes that marked each new stage on the spiral of growth.
‘Sixteen,’ she said, handing the shell back.
He studied it. ‘More like thirty-four,’ he said, looking up at her. He touched the tip of the shell gently. ‘There are at least eighteen in that first quarter of an inch.’
‘But they don’t count!’ she protested. ‘They’re too small!’
‘Small they may be, but they do count. Each marks a stage in the mollusc’s growth, from the infinitesimally tiny up. If you X-rayed this you’d see it. The same form repeated and repeated, larger and larger each time, each section sealed off behind the shellfish – outgrown, if you like. Still growing even at the creature’s death. Never finished. The spiral uncompleted.’
‘As spirals are.’
He laughed and handed her back the shell. ‘Yes. I suppose by its nature it’s incomplete. Unless twinned.’
Meg stared at him a moment. ‘Ben? What are we doing here?’
His dark green eyes twinkled mischievously. ‘Collecting shells. That’s all.’
He stood and walked past her, scanning the sand for new specimens. Meg turned, watching him intently, knowing it was far more complex than he claimed, then got up and joined him in the search.
Two hours later they took a break. The sun had moved behind them and the far end of the cove was now in shadow. The tide had turned an hour back and the sea had already encroached upon the sands between the rocks at the cove’s mouth. Ben had brought sandwiches in his bag and they shared them now, stretched out on the low rocks, enjoying the late afternoon sunlight, the shells spread out on a cloth to one side.
There were more than a dozen different specimens on the bright green cloth – batswing and turitella, orchid spider and flamingo tongue, goldmouth helmet and striped bonnet, pelican’s foot, mother of pearl, snakeshead cowrie and several others – all washed and gleaming in the sun. A whole variety of shapes and sizes and colours, and not one of them native to the cold grey waters of the English south coast.
But Meg knew nothing of that.
It had begun when Meg was only four. There had been a glass display case on the wall in the hallway, and, noting what pleasure Meg derived from the form and colour of the shells, Hal Shepherd had bought new specimens in the City and brought them back to the Domain. He had scattered them by hand in the cove at low tide and taken Meg back the next day to ‘find’ them. Ben, seven at the time, had understood at once, but had gone along with the deception, not wishing to spoil Meg’s obvious enjoyment of the game. And when his father had suggested he rewrite his great-grandfather’s book on shells to serve the deception, Ben had leaped at the opportunity. That volume now rested on the shelves in place of the original, a clever, subtle parody. Now he, in his turn, carried on his father’s game. These shells that now lay on the cloth he had scattered only two days ago.
Seagulls called lazily, high overhead. He looked up, shielding his eyes, then looked back at Meg. Her eyes were closed, her body sprawled out on the rock, like a young lioness. Her limbs and face were heavily tanned, almost brown against the pure white of her shorts and vest. Her dark hair lay in thick long curls against the sun-bleached rock. His eyes, however, were drawn continually to the fullness of her breasts beneath the cloth, to the suggestive curve of leg and hip and groin, the rounded perfection of her shoulders, the silken smoothness of her neck, the strange nakedness of her toes. He shivered and looked away, disturbed by the sudden turn of his thoughts.
So familiar she was, and yet, suddenly, so strange.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked, softly, almost somnolently.
The wind blew gently, mild, warm against his cheek and arm, then subsided. For a while he listened to the gentle slosh of the waves as they broke on the far side of the great mound of rock.
Meg pulled herself up on to one elbow and looked across at him. As ever, she was smiling. ‘Well? Cat got your tongue?’
He returned her smile. ‘You forget. There are no cats.’
She shook her head. ‘You’re wrong. Daddy promised me he’d bring one back this time.’
‘Ah.’ He nodded, but said nothing of what he was thinking. Another game. Extending the illusion. If their father brought a cat back with him, it too would be a copy – GenSyn, most like – because the Han had killed all the real cats long ago.
‘What are you going to call him?’
She met his eyes teasingly. ‘Zarathustra, I thought.’
He did not rise to her bait. Zarathustra had been Nietzsche’s poet-philosopher, the scathingly bitter loner who had come down from his mountain hermitage to tell the world that God was dead.
‘A good name. Especially for a cat. They’re said to be highly independent.’
She was watching him expectantly. Seeing it, he laughed. ‘You’ll have to wait, Meg. Tomorrow, I promise you. I’ll reveal everything then.’
Even the tiny pout she made – so much a part of the young girl he had known all his life – was somehow different today. Transformed and strangely, surprisingly erotic.
‘Shells…’ he said, trying to take his mind from her. ‘Have you ever thought how like memory they are?’
‘Never,’ she said, laughing, making him think for a moment she had noticed something in his face.
He met her eyes challengingly. ‘No. Think about it, Meg. Don’t most people seal off their pasts behind them stage by stage, just as a mollusc outgrows its shell, sealing the old compartment off behind it?’
She smiled at him, then lay down again, closing her eyes. ‘Not you. You’ve said it yourself. It’s all still there. Accessible. All you have to do is chip away the rock and there it is, preserved.’
‘Yes, but there’s a likeness even so. That sense of things being embedded that I was talking of. You see, parts of my past are compartmentalized. I can remember what’s in them, but I can’t somehow return to them. I can’t feel what it was like to be myself back then.’
She opened one eye lazily. ‘And you want to?’
He stared back at her fiercely. ‘More than anything. I want to capture what it felt like. To save it, somehow.’
‘Hmm… ’ Her eye was closed again.
‘That’s it, you see. I want to get inside the shell. To feel what it was like to be there before it was all sealed off to me. Do you understand that?’
‘It sounds like pure nostalgia.’
He laughed, only his laughter was just a little too sharp. ‘Maybe… but I don’t think so.’
She seemed wholly relaxed now, as if asleep, her breasts rising and falling slowly. He watched her for a while, disturbed once more by the strength of what he felt. Then he lay down and, following her example, closed his eyes, dozing in the warm sun.
When he woke the sun had moved further down the sky. The shadow of the Wall had stretched to the foot of the rocks beneath them and the tide had almost filled the tiny cove, cutting them off. They would have to wade back. The heavy crash of a wave against the rocks behind him made him twist about sharply. As he turned a seagull cried out harshly close by, startling him. Then he realized. Meg was gone.
He got to his feet anxiously. ‘Meg! Where are you?’
She answered him at once, her voice coming from beyond the huge tumble of rock, contesting with the crash of another wave. ‘I’m here!’
He climbed the rocks until he was at their summit. Meg was below him, to his left, crouched on a rock only a foot or so above the water, leaning forward, doing something.
‘Meg! Come away! It’s dangerous!’
He began to climb down. As he did so she turned and stood up straight. ‘It’s okay. I was just…’
He saw her foot slip beneath her on the wet rock. Saw her reach out and steady herself, recovering her footing. And then the wave struck.
It was bigger than all the waves that had preceded it and broke much higher up the rocks, foaming and boiling, sending up a fine spray, like glass splintering before some mighty hammer. It hit the big, tooth-shaped rock to his right first, then surged along the line, roaring, buffeting the rocks in a frenzy of white water.
One moment Meg was there, the next she was gone. Ben saw her thrust against the rocks by the huge wave, then disappear beneath the surface. As the water surged back there was no sign of her.
‘Meg!!!’
Ben pressed the emergency stud at his neck, then scrambled down the rocks and stood there at the edge, ignoring the lesser wave that broke about his feet, peering down into the water, his face a mask of anguish, looking for some sign of her.
At first nothing. Nothing at all. Then… there! He threw himself forward into the water, thrusting his body down through the chill darkness towards her. Then he was kicking for the surface, one arm gripping her tightly.
Gasping, Ben broke surface some twenty feet out from the rocks and turned on to his back, cradling Meg against him, face up, her head against his neck.
At first the waves helped him, carrying him in towards the rocks, but then he realized what danger he was in. He turned his head and looked. As the wave ebbed, it revealed a sharp, uneven shelf of rock. If he let the waves carry them in, they might be dashed against that shelf. But what other option was there? If he tried to swim around the rocks and into the cove he would be swimming against the current and it would take too long. And he had little time if he was to save Meg. He would have to risk it.
He slowed himself in the water, trying to judge the rise and fall of the waves, then kicked out. The first wave took him halfway to the rocks. The second lifted them violently and carried them almost there.
Almost. The wave was beginning to ebb as he reached out with his left hand and gripped the ledge. As the water surged back a spear of pain jolted through his arm, making him cry out. Then he was falling, his body twisting round, his side banging painfully against the rock.
For a moment it felt as if his hand were being torn from his arm, but he held on, waiting for the water to return, his artificial fingers biting into the rock, Meg gripped tightly against him. And when it came he kicked out fiercely, forcing himself up on to the land, then scrambled backwards, pushing desperately with his feet against the rock, away from the water, Meg a dead weight against him.
Ignoring the pain in his hand, he carried Meg up on to a ledge above the water and set her down, fear making his movements urgent. Her lips and the lobes of her ears were tinged with blue.
He tilted her head back, forcing her chin up, then pinched her nose shut with the finger and thumb of his left hand. Leaning over her, he sealed his lips about her open mouth and gave four quick, full breaths.
Ben moved his head back and checked the pulse at her neck. Her heart was still beating. He watched her chest fall, then, leaning forward again, breathed into her mouth, then, three seconds later, once more.
Meg shuddered then began to gag. Quickly he turned her head to the side, allowing her to bring up seawater and the part-digested sandwich she had eaten only an hour before. Clearing her mouth with his fingers, he tilted her head back again and blew another breath into her, then turned her head again as she gagged a second time. But she was breathing now. Her chest rose and fell, then rose again. Her eyelids fluttered.
Carefully, he turned her over, on to her front, bending her arm and leg to support the lower body, then tilted her chin back to keep the airway open. Her breathing was more normal now, the colour returning to her lips.
Ben sat back on his heels, taking a deep breath. She had almost died. His darling Meg had almost died. He shuddered, then felt a faint tremor pass through him like an aftershock. Gods! For a moment he closed his eyes, feeling a strange giddiness, then opened them again and put his hand down to steady himself.
Below him another wave broke heavily against the rocks, throwing up a fine spray. The tide was still rising. Soon they would be cut off completely. Ben looked about him, noting from the length of the shadows how late it was. They had slept too long. He would have to carry her across, and he would have to do it now.
He took a deep breath, preparing himself, then put his arms beneath her and picked her up, turning her over and cradling her, tilting her head back against his upper arm. Then he began to climb, picking his way carefully across the mound of rocks and down, into shadow.
The water was almost waist deep and, for the first twenty or thirty feet he lifted Meg up above it, afraid to let the chill get at her again. Then he was carrying her through horseheads of spume little more than knee deep and up on to the shingle.
He set her down on the shingle close to where they had left their sandals. She was still unconscious, but there was colour in her cheeks now and a reassuring regularity to her breathing. He looked about him but there was nothing warm to lay over her, nothing to give her to help her body counter the shock it would be feeling.
He hesitated a moment, then, knowing there was nothing else to be done before help arrived, he lay down beside her on the shingle and held her close to him, letting the warmth of his body comfort her.
Meg woke before the dawn, her whole body tensed, shivering, remembering what had happened. She lay there, breathing deeply, calming herself, staring through the darkness at the far wall where her collection of shells lay in its glass case. She could see nothing, but she knew it was there, conch and cowrie, murex and auger, chambered nautilus and spotted babylon, red mitre and giant chiragra – each treasured and familiar, yet different now; no longer so important to her. She recalled what Ben had said of shells and memory, of sealed chambers and growth, and knew she had missed something. He had been trying to say something to her, to seed an idea in her mind. But what?
She reached up, touching the lump on the side of her head gingerly, examining it with her fingers. It was still tender, but it no longer ached. The cut had been superficial and the wound had already dried. She had been lucky. Very lucky.
She sat up, yawning, then went still. There was a vague rustling, then the noise of a window being raised in Ben’s room. For a moment she sat there, listening. Then she got up, pulled on her robe and went softly down the passage to his room. Ben was standing at the window, naked, leaning across the sill, staring out into the darkness.
Meg went to him and stood at his side, her hand on the small of his back, looking with him, trying to see what he was seeing. But to her it was only darkness. Her vision was undirected, uninformed.
She felt him shiver and turned her head to look into his face. He was smiling, his eyes bright with some knowledge she had been denied.
‘It has something to do with this,’ he said softly, looking back at her. ‘With dark and light and their simple interaction. With the sunlight and its absence. So simple that we’ve nearly always overlooked it. It’s there in the Tao, of course, but it’s more than a philosophy – more than simply a way of looking at things – it’s the very fabric of reality.’
He shivered, then smiled at her. ‘Anyway… how are you?’
‘I’m fine,’ she answered in a whisper.
She had a sudden sense of him. Not of his words, of the all-too-simple thing he’d said, but of his presence there beside her. Her hand still lay there on the firm, warm flesh of his back, pressing softly, almost unnoticed against his skin. She could feel his living pulse.
He was still looking at her, his eyes puzzling at something in her face. She looked down at the place where her hand rested against his back, feeling a strange connective flow, stronger than touch, aware of him standing there, watching her; of the tautness, the lean muscularity of his body.
She had never felt this before. Never felt so strange, so conscious of her own physical being, there, in proximity to his own. His nakedness disturbed her and fascinated her, making her take a long, slow breath, as if breathing were suddenly hard.
As he turned towards her, her hand slipped across the flesh of his back until it rested against his hip. She shivered, watching his face, his eyes, surprised by the need she found in them.
She closed her eyes, feeling his fingers on her neck, moving down to gently stroke her shoulders. For a moment she felt consciousness slipping, then caught herself, steadying herself against him. Her fingers rested against the smooth channels of his groin, the coarse pubic hair tickling the knuckles of her thumbs.
She looked down at him and saw how fierce and proud he stood for her. Without thinking, she let her right hand move down and brush against his sex.
‘Meg…’ It was a low, desirous sound. His hands moved down her body, lifting her nightgown at the waist until his hands held her naked hips, his fingers gently caressing the soft smoothness of her flesh. She closed her eyes again, wanting him to go further, to push down and touch her, there where she ached for him.
‘Meg…?’
She opened her eyes, seeing at once the strange mixture of fear and hurt, confusion and desire in his eyes.
‘It’s all right… ’ she whispered, drawing him to her, reassuring him. She led him to the bed and lay there, letting him take the gown from her.
It hurt. For all his gentleness, his care, it hurt to take him inside her. And then the pain eased and she found she was crying, saying his name over and over, softly, breathlessly, as he moved against her. She responded eagerly, pressing up against him again and again until his movements told her he was coming. Trembling, she held him tighter, pulling him down into her, her hands gripping his buttocks, wanting him to spill his seed inside her. Then, as his whole body convulsed, she gasped, a wave of pure, almost painful pleasure washing over her. For a time she lapsed from consciousness, then, with a tiny shudder, she opened her eyes again.
They lay there, brother and sister, naked on the bloodied bed, their arms about each other. Ben slept, his chest rising and falling slowly while she watched its movement closely. She looked at his face, at his long dark lashes, his fine, straight nose and firm, full lips. A face the mirror of her own. Narcissistically, she traced the shape of his lips with her fingers, then let her hand rest on his neck, feeling the pulse there.
The look of him reminded her of something in Nietzsche, from the section in the Zarathustra called ‘The Dance Song’. She said the words softly, tenderly, her voice almost a whisper.
‘“To be sure, I am a forest and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness will find rosebowers too under my cypresses.
‘“And he will surely find too the little god whom girls love best: he lies beside the fountain, still, with his eyes closed.”’
She shivered and looked down the length of their bodies, studying the differences that gender made between them. The fullness of her breasts and hips, the slenderness of his. The strangeness of his penis, so very different in rest; so sweet and harmless now, all the brutality, the lovely strength of it dissipated.
She felt a warmth, an achingly sweet tenderness rise up in her, looking at him, seeing how vulnerable he was in sleep. Unguarded and open. A different creature from his waking self. She wanted to kiss him there and wake that tiny bud, making it flower splendidly once more.
Meg closed her eyes and shivered. She knew what they had done. But there was no shame in her, no regret.
She loved him. It was quite simple. Sisters should love their brothers. But her love for him was different in kind. She loved him with more than a simple, sisterly devotion. For a long time she had loved him like this: wholly, without barriers.
And now he knew.
She got up, careful not to disturb him, and put on her gown. For a moment longer she stood there, looking down at his sleeping, perfect form, then left him, returning to her room.
And as she lay there, her eyes closed, drifting into sleep, her left hand pressed softly against her sex, as if it were his.