Ian McDonald - River of Gods

She cried with joy all the way home in the train. A young French tourist couple sat across the table, nervously touching every time Lisa shuddered to a new attack of bliss. Joy bursts would send her wandering out of her room and through Oxford in the week she wrote up her insights. Every building, every street, every shop and person filled her with fierce delight at life and humanity. She was in love with every last thing. Carl Walker had flicked through the draft, grin growing wider with every page. Finally he said, “You’ve got them. Fuckers.”

Sitting in Thomas Lull’s over-air-conditioned office, Lisa Durnau could still catch the emotional afterglow of that outburst, like the microwave echo of the fires of the big bang. Thomas Lull swivelled his chair, leaned towards her.

“Okay,” he said. “Well, two things you should know about this place. It’s got a fucking awful climate, but the people are mighty friendly. Be polite to them. You may need them.”

For Thomas Lull’s amusement today, Dr. Darius Ghotse has a set of recordings of the English comedy classic “It’s That Man Again” in the boot of the tricycle that he labours along the sand tracks of Thekkady. He is anticipating slipping the file into Professor Lull’s machine and the plummy voice blaring out the signature tune. “One hundred and five years old!” he will say. “When the bombs were falling on London, this was what they were listening to in their underground railway tunnels!”

Dr. Ghotse collects antique radio programmes. Most days he calls around for breakfast with Thomas Lull on his boat and they sit under the palm-thatch awning to sip chai and listen to the alien humour of the Goons or the hyperreal comedy of Chris Morris’s Blue Jam. Dr. Ghotse has a particular fondness for BBC Radio. He is a widower and former paediatrician but in his heart of hearts, he is an Englishman. He wishes Thomas Lull could understand cricket. He could then share his classic Aggers and Johnners Test commentaries with him.

He rattles down the rutted lane that runs beside the backwater, kicking at chickens and insolent dogs. Without braking, he swerves the aged red trike off the track, up the gangplank, and on to a long, mat-roofed kettuvallam. It is a manoeuvre he has performed many times. It has never yet ended him in the water.

Thomas Lull has Tantric symbols painted on his coconut thatch and a name on the hull in white: Salve Vagina. They offend local Christians mightily. The priest has informed him thus. Thomas Lull counterinformed him that he (priest) could criticise him (Lull) when he could do so in as good Latin as his boat title. A small high-power satellite dish is gaffer-taped to the highest point of the sloped roof-mats. An alcohol generator purrs in the stern.

“Professor Lull, Professor Lull.” Dr. Ghotse ducks under the low eave, fileplayer held high. As usual, the houseboat smells of incense, alcohol, and stale cooking. A Schubert quintet plays, mid-volume. “Professor Lull?”

Dr. Ghotse finds Thomas Lull in his small, neat bedroom that is like a wooden shell. His shirts and shorts and socks are laid our on pristine cotton. He folds his T-shirts the proper way, sides to the middle, then triple-crease. A lifetime spent among suitcases has made this second nature.

“What has happened?” Dr. Ghotse asks. “Time to move on,” Thomas Lull says.

“A woman, then?” Dr. Ghotse asks. Thomas Lull’s appetite for, and success with, the girlis from the beach circuit has always baffled him. Men should be self-contained in later life, without attachments.

“You could say. I met her last night at the club. She had an asthma attack. I saved her. There’s always someone frying their coronary arteries on salbutamol. I offered to teach her some Bureyko tricks and she turned round and said, I will see you tomorrow, Professor Lull. She knew my name, Darius. Time to go.”

When Dr. Ghotse met Thomas Lull, Lull had been working in an old record shop, a beach bum among the ancient compact discs and vinyls. Dr. Ghotse had been a recently bereaved pensioner, chipping away at his grief laugh by antique laugh. He found a kindred soul in this sardonic American. Afternoons passed in conversation, recordings shared. But it was still three months before Dr. Ghotse invited the man from the record shop for afternoon tea. Five visits later, when the afternoon tea turned into evening gin watching the astonishing sunsets behind the palms, Thomas Lull confided his true identity. At first Dr. Ghotse felt sullied, that the man at the record shop he had got to know was an effigy of lies. Then he felt burdened: he did not wish to be the receptor of this man’s loss and rage. Then he felt privileged; owner of a world-class secret that could have netted him a fortune from the news channels. He had been entrusted. In the end, he realised that he had approached Thomas Lull with the same agenda, for someone to entrust and listen.

Dr. Ghotse slips the file player into his jacket pocket. No ITMA today. Or any other day, it seems. Thomas Lull picks up the hardback copy of Blake that has sat beside every bed he has ever made home. He weighs it in his hands, then puts it into the case.

“Come on, I’ve coffee on the go.”

The rear of the boat opens in an impromptu veranda, sheltered by the ubiquitous coir matting. Dr. Ghotse lets Thomas Lull pour two coffees, which he does not much like, and follows him out to the two accustomed seats. Swimming kids splash in water two degrees lighter and cooler than the coffee.

“So,” Dr. Ghotse says. “Where you will go?”

“South,” Thomas Lull says. Until he said it he hadn’t an idea of a destination. From the day he had moored the old rice-kettuvallam to the backwater shore, Thomas Lull has made it clear he was only here until the wind blew him on. The wind blew, the palms beat, the clouds passed and dropped no rain, and Thomas Lull remained. He had come to love the boat, the sense of beachcombing rootlessness that would never have to prove itself. But she knew his name. “Lanka, maybe.”

“Island of demons,” Dr. Ghotse says.

“Island of beach bars,” Thomas Lull says. Schubert reaches his allotted end. The waterkids dive and splash, drops clinging to their dark grinning faces. But the idea is in his head now and will not leave. “Maybe even get a boat over to Malaysia or Indonesia. There’re islands there where no one will ever know your face. I could open a nice little dive school. Yeah. I could do that. Hell, I don’t know.”

He turns. Dr. Ghotse feels it too. Living on water makes you as sensitive to vibrations as a shark. Salve Vagina rocks subtly to a tread on the gangplank. Someone has come aboard. The kettuvallam shifts as a body moves through it.

“Hello? It is very dark in here.” Aj ducks our from under the coir awning on to the rear deck. She is dressed in the same loose, flowing grey of the night before. Her tilak is even more prominent in the daylight. “I’m sorry, Dr. Ghotse is with you, I can come back later.”

Say it, Thomas Lull thinks. Her gods have given you this one chance, send her away and disappear and never look back. But she knew his name without meeting him, and she knows Dr. Ghotse’s name and Thomas Lull has never been able to walk away from a mystery.

“No no, you stay, there’s coffee.”

She is one of those people whose smile transforms their entire face. She claps her hands in small delight.

“I’d love to, thank you.”

He’s lost now.

The hour clicks over to thirty and Lisa Durnau bubbles up from deep memory. Space, she decides, is the dimension of the stoned.

“Hey,” she croaks. “Any chance of some water?” Her muscles are beginning to twist and wither.

“Tube to your right,” Pilot Captain Beth says without looking up from her board. Lisa cranes round to suck warm, stale distilled water. The woman pilot’s men friends back on the station are chattering and flirting. They’re never done talking and flirting. Lisa wonders if they ever get round to anything, or are they so frail and attenuated that anything approaching a fuck would snap them in two? New memory steals up on Lisa.