Talulla Rising
Page 17
So no bureaucracy. My forger was in New York. His had been the first name on Jake’s list of people I could trust: Rudy Kovatch – DOCUMENTS/IDENTITY. I knew his number by heart and I’d been trying to get cellular reception since we’d left the lodge. So far, nothing.
Twenty-five miles down the highway I pulled over. The road was bordered on both sides by soft-snowed forest. An avenue of fleecy grey sky above. No other traffic. Cloquet looked at me for explanation.
‘Edge of his territory,’ I said. ‘He has to go. Much as I’d like to keep him.’ I opened the back door to let the wolf out. Again the animal and I barely exchanged a glance. It wasn’t that there was no need for thanks, it was that thanks would be meaningless. I’d be thanking myself. As his being morphed back into separateness I felt it as a slight physical bereavement. He shook his coat, sniffed the ground, then made a low-shouldered dart into the shadows under the trees. Gone.
13
‘I can’t eat any more,’ Cloquet said. We were at the Grand Hotel in Anchorage, in a third-floor room overlooking the lights of the rail depot. It was just after midnight. Prussian blue sky with dark patches of cloud over the big cold sentience of the nearby water, the Knik Arm, which as the light faded had gone blue-silver, then slate grey, then black. ‘It’s making me feel sick.’
Staying in Fairbanks would have been asking for trouble, but in any case the thought of sitting still and doing nothing (Jacqueline’s scientists raring to go) was suffocating. So I’d driven three hundred and fifty miles to Anchorage, stopping only to feed the baby, while Cloquet, morphined, dozed on the back seat. I’d spent the journey in shock that made random mundane chunks vivid: a Texaco sign; red cattle in a field of snow; a crow taking four springy steps to get into the air; the giant wheel of a passing truck. I felt what a small detail my whole life was, how the planet had seen so much that now things like this didn’t even register. Only wars and earthquakes were still drowsily noted. When something happened that was everything to you you realised it was nothing to everything else. Meanwhile I kept feeling the younger interior versions of myself full of fascinated disappointment at what they’d amounted to. Me. The modern adult, Jake had written, has really only one thing to say to its inner child: I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry... And the same thing to say to its biological child, too, I thought. I bought disposable diapers and Vaseline from a gas station. Money. Items. Change. Have a good one. You too. It all still went on. Of course it did. Kovatch called. He could get ‘Zoë Demetriou’ and her half-dozen aliases birth certificates in twenty-four hours and overnight them. Fax no good, they’d want the originals, or rather what they took to be the originals. In two days we could fly to London. The number Cloquet had for Vincent Merryn reached an answering machine at V. M. Antiques and Fine Art in Bloomsbury, one of a dozen European dealerships that formed Merryn’s trading front. I rehearsed my message – My name was Lauren Miller; I had several items of significant value and would deal only with Mr Merryn directly – and left it. A plummy English woman, Althea Gordon, called back four hours later. All prospective vendors met with her in the first instance. Subject to her assessment (for which read assuming it could be established you weren’t undercover or a crank) a meeting with Mr Merryn might then be arranged. Was Mr Merryn in London? I was going to be there for forty-eight hours only. Yes, Mr Merryn was in London, but she must repeat, any meeting would be subject to her etc.
‘Drink the water at least,’ I told Cloquet now. ‘You need fluids.’ I’d changed his dressings and ordered him up food (poached salmon, french fries, tomato soup) since he hadn’t eaten in more than twenty-four hours, but he’d barely touched any of it. Bizarrely, I was beginning to feel hungry myself. Or maybe not bizarrely: I hadn’t fed. Was this what happened? Miss a wulf meal and your human appetite returned in a day instead of a week? I tried the corner of a buttered roll from the tray. Not straightforward. For a moment after swallowing I thought I was going to throw up. But a deeper register said, No, keep eating, for the milk to come. I took another bite. The monster’s ghost-teeth objected. Muted wulf outrage from the other dimension.
‘How is she?’
‘Sleeping. You should too.’
‘Her wardrobe’s improved.’
Earlier I’d been out with the baby – with Zoë; using the name gave me a feeling of sickening fraud – swaddled in blankets and my jacket, for essentials. Now she had clothes, more diapers, a bassinet and bedding, a carrier and, pointlessly, a small soft golden teddy bear. The department store had been hot and glittering and smelled of industrial carpet and I’d thought of the money at my disposal, all the things I could give her. And her brother. When I got him back. Except every cell in my body knew I wasn’t going to get him back. I kept remembering him – then feeling my scalp shrink because to remember you must have forgotten, and how could you have forgotten? How could it not be searing your heart every second of every minute of every day?
Total self-disgust is a kind of peace, Jake wrote.
Total self-disgust was available, a sleep I could enter while still awake. Only the baby’s presence in the room kept disturbing it.
‘Did you book the flights?’ Cloquet rasped.
‘Yes.’
‘I wish I could have a flying dream. I used to have them all the time when I was a kid.’
‘Me too.’
‘Did you ever have a dream you were dreaming?’
‘What?’
‘You know. In your dream... In your dream you’re having a dream. Dreams are the nearest univers parallèle. Like the universe next door. So when you dream, you’re really entering the universe next door. But if you dream you’re dreaming, that’s the universe next to the universe next door...’
He fell asleep. His flesh heaved out its odours: stale tobacco, old sweat, greasy hair. A residue of his body’s recent efforts surrounded him like a subsonic hum. I fixed myself a cup of instant coffee and went, feeling slightly nauseated at the first sip, to look at the baby.
She was asleep with her warm face turned to the left and her hands closed. Her cheek was as soft and downy as the skin of a peach. Until you have one of your own, you just can’t understand it. Naturally I’d rolled my eyes at new parents’ fascination with their infants. I’d loathed the helpless shrug, the fatuous surrender. Well, here I was, and here was one of my own, and here, too late and vetoed by my deformed motherhood, was the same appalled fascination. Look at the fingernails, the eyelashes, the nostrils, the mouth. Look at the dark shimmer and winking lights of her future. It was obscene, the love-fee a child could pull down just by existing, just by being there. A fee I couldn’t pay now, late, having failed to pay it on time. Wouldn’t. Mustn’t. Daren’t.
Twenty-five miles down the highway I pulled over. The road was bordered on both sides by soft-snowed forest. An avenue of fleecy grey sky above. No other traffic. Cloquet looked at me for explanation.
‘Edge of his territory,’ I said. ‘He has to go. Much as I’d like to keep him.’ I opened the back door to let the wolf out. Again the animal and I barely exchanged a glance. It wasn’t that there was no need for thanks, it was that thanks would be meaningless. I’d be thanking myself. As his being morphed back into separateness I felt it as a slight physical bereavement. He shook his coat, sniffed the ground, then made a low-shouldered dart into the shadows under the trees. Gone.
13
‘I can’t eat any more,’ Cloquet said. We were at the Grand Hotel in Anchorage, in a third-floor room overlooking the lights of the rail depot. It was just after midnight. Prussian blue sky with dark patches of cloud over the big cold sentience of the nearby water, the Knik Arm, which as the light faded had gone blue-silver, then slate grey, then black. ‘It’s making me feel sick.’
Staying in Fairbanks would have been asking for trouble, but in any case the thought of sitting still and doing nothing (Jacqueline’s scientists raring to go) was suffocating. So I’d driven three hundred and fifty miles to Anchorage, stopping only to feed the baby, while Cloquet, morphined, dozed on the back seat. I’d spent the journey in shock that made random mundane chunks vivid: a Texaco sign; red cattle in a field of snow; a crow taking four springy steps to get into the air; the giant wheel of a passing truck. I felt what a small detail my whole life was, how the planet had seen so much that now things like this didn’t even register. Only wars and earthquakes were still drowsily noted. When something happened that was everything to you you realised it was nothing to everything else. Meanwhile I kept feeling the younger interior versions of myself full of fascinated disappointment at what they’d amounted to. Me. The modern adult, Jake had written, has really only one thing to say to its inner child: I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry... And the same thing to say to its biological child, too, I thought. I bought disposable diapers and Vaseline from a gas station. Money. Items. Change. Have a good one. You too. It all still went on. Of course it did. Kovatch called. He could get ‘Zoë Demetriou’ and her half-dozen aliases birth certificates in twenty-four hours and overnight them. Fax no good, they’d want the originals, or rather what they took to be the originals. In two days we could fly to London. The number Cloquet had for Vincent Merryn reached an answering machine at V. M. Antiques and Fine Art in Bloomsbury, one of a dozen European dealerships that formed Merryn’s trading front. I rehearsed my message – My name was Lauren Miller; I had several items of significant value and would deal only with Mr Merryn directly – and left it. A plummy English woman, Althea Gordon, called back four hours later. All prospective vendors met with her in the first instance. Subject to her assessment (for which read assuming it could be established you weren’t undercover or a crank) a meeting with Mr Merryn might then be arranged. Was Mr Merryn in London? I was going to be there for forty-eight hours only. Yes, Mr Merryn was in London, but she must repeat, any meeting would be subject to her etc.
‘Drink the water at least,’ I told Cloquet now. ‘You need fluids.’ I’d changed his dressings and ordered him up food (poached salmon, french fries, tomato soup) since he hadn’t eaten in more than twenty-four hours, but he’d barely touched any of it. Bizarrely, I was beginning to feel hungry myself. Or maybe not bizarrely: I hadn’t fed. Was this what happened? Miss a wulf meal and your human appetite returned in a day instead of a week? I tried the corner of a buttered roll from the tray. Not straightforward. For a moment after swallowing I thought I was going to throw up. But a deeper register said, No, keep eating, for the milk to come. I took another bite. The monster’s ghost-teeth objected. Muted wulf outrage from the other dimension.
‘How is she?’
‘Sleeping. You should too.’
‘Her wardrobe’s improved.’
Earlier I’d been out with the baby – with Zoë; using the name gave me a feeling of sickening fraud – swaddled in blankets and my jacket, for essentials. Now she had clothes, more diapers, a bassinet and bedding, a carrier and, pointlessly, a small soft golden teddy bear. The department store had been hot and glittering and smelled of industrial carpet and I’d thought of the money at my disposal, all the things I could give her. And her brother. When I got him back. Except every cell in my body knew I wasn’t going to get him back. I kept remembering him – then feeling my scalp shrink because to remember you must have forgotten, and how could you have forgotten? How could it not be searing your heart every second of every minute of every day?
Total self-disgust is a kind of peace, Jake wrote.
Total self-disgust was available, a sleep I could enter while still awake. Only the baby’s presence in the room kept disturbing it.
‘Did you book the flights?’ Cloquet rasped.
‘Yes.’
‘I wish I could have a flying dream. I used to have them all the time when I was a kid.’
‘Me too.’
‘Did you ever have a dream you were dreaming?’
‘What?’
‘You know. In your dream... In your dream you’re having a dream. Dreams are the nearest univers parallèle. Like the universe next door. So when you dream, you’re really entering the universe next door. But if you dream you’re dreaming, that’s the universe next to the universe next door...’
He fell asleep. His flesh heaved out its odours: stale tobacco, old sweat, greasy hair. A residue of his body’s recent efforts surrounded him like a subsonic hum. I fixed myself a cup of instant coffee and went, feeling slightly nauseated at the first sip, to look at the baby.
She was asleep with her warm face turned to the left and her hands closed. Her cheek was as soft and downy as the skin of a peach. Until you have one of your own, you just can’t understand it. Naturally I’d rolled my eyes at new parents’ fascination with their infants. I’d loathed the helpless shrug, the fatuous surrender. Well, here I was, and here was one of my own, and here, too late and vetoed by my deformed motherhood, was the same appalled fascination. Look at the fingernails, the eyelashes, the nostrils, the mouth. Look at the dark shimmer and winking lights of her future. It was obscene, the love-fee a child could pull down just by existing, just by being there. A fee I couldn’t pay now, late, having failed to pay it on time. Wouldn’t. Mustn’t. Daren’t.
