Саймон Ингс - The Smoke

I sat on the floor cross-legged before him. ‘I suppose.’

‘An earnest of their good faith.’

‘Their good faith. The people who destroyed the Victory .’

‘ If they destroyed it. It could have been an accident. Maybe they saved us. Isn’t that what they’re saying?’

‘It’s what some of them are saying. The whole business is unclear.’

‘And if they’ve done this–’ he rapped on his hollow chest ‘–then I must still be alive. Yes? In any number of ways. In several editions!’

I had no answer for him. The destruction of the Victory had brought the unaccommodated world into a belligerent unity. Across Europe, our spaceships were proceeding ahead of schedule. But with the Bund it was a very different story. At the very moment when clarity might have been considered essential, for everyone’s peace and security, the Bund had proved incapable of explaining itself.

The Victory had been attacked!

The Victory had suffered a fatal malfunction and been, so far as possible, saved.

The crew were dead.

The crew were alive!

The crew had been killed to serve as an example to others.

The crew had been restored using the latest medicine and would be returned home shortly.

The Bund welcomed guests to its new bases on the Moon’s far side!

Any attempted incursion of lunar facilities would be met with overwhelming force.

There were no Bundist bases on the far side.

On and on like this. Was it possible the Bund itself was splitting – even speciating? Might that explain those two TV news anchors we had seen, swinging back and forth, clipboards pressed to their groins, on the night of the Victory ’s destruction? Their glass skulls? Their finned and spiny brains? I’d not seen the likes of them before, and no one had reported seeing them since.

‘Fuck it,’ said Jim, ‘I’m going out.’

‘Wait. Jim. I still don’t understand.’

‘Stu.’ He sighed and ran plastic hands down his glue-spoiled front. ‘You expect me to have answers? How do you think I feel? I don’t even know what I am, let alone what I’m for.’ He hefted up a sixpence and used it to turn the screw holding the wall vent in place.

Jim had been coming and going through the vent ever since I had managed to loosen it from the plaster partition at the back of my room. There was no way I could keep him sealed up in my bedroom all day. Jim, for his part, promised to conduct all his adventures well away from my landlady’s house. How far afield he went, I am not sure. His stories were so highly coloured, it was obvious he was trying to get a rise out of me. Whatever the force animating him, modelling plastic has a tensile strength no magic can alter or improve. Were Jim ever to engage in hand-to-hand combat with one of the local mousers, as he claimed he did, I knew where I would put my money.

‘Right through the eye , Stu!’

‘Settle down.’

‘It sneezed and some of its brains shot out through its nose. I took cover behind a cocktail umbrella.’

‘Jim. Shut up.’

In retrospect, and with matters having reached such a head, it is easy to see all the things I should have done; easy to identify all my moments of funk and denial. But though I seem to have a talent for second-guessing myself, I cannot honestly say that I blame myself for the way I hid Jim in my bedroom.

What else could I have done? What authority was qualified to consider this grey plastic miracle that had been pressed into my hands? Jim wasn’t some emissary. He wasn’t asking to speak to my leader. He wasn’t the scout of some alien army, poised to invade the Earth. He was my brother. Within the limitations set by his size and his simplicity, he was my family, returned to me. Of course I kept him safe with me.

Nor did I show him to my father. Bob had demons enough to contend with. His wife had been restored to him in a form he could not countenance; what would he have made of a son turned into a toy? I had it in mind to spare him, and even now, I think this was the right decision.

One thing I might have done differently: I might have taken Jim to London, to Stella’s house in Islington, and showed him to Betty. Jim and I had even talked about it, or tried to, the pair of us hunting for vocabulary with which to discuss this bizarre eventuality: a resurrected child mother presented with a resurrected doll son. I have no doubt we would have visited eventually. But then, one day in early June, Betty was knocked down and killed by a hit-and-run driver on the road outside Stella’s house.

The circumstances of the accident are still not clear. What was Betty doing, playing in the street? If she was playing. Perhaps she had seen something, heard something. Perhaps she had gone out to confront whoever was spraying threatening graffiti on Stella’s garden wall. A strange sight that would have been: an old Yorkshirewoman’s tirade spilling from the mouth of a child done up in this season’s florals.

Perhaps they had been expecting her. Perhaps they had been baiting her. Whoever ‘they’ were. Perhaps they had been lying in wait. But what is the point of speculations like these? They don’t do anyone any good. No one even saw the car. It was evening, and half-light, the time for stupid accidents. The doctors said Betty’s injuries were total, that she wouldn’t have felt anything, but I don’t believe that. She died in hospital three hours after she was found, flung all haywire over the iron railings into Myddelton Square Gardens.

Because it was a police case, there was a delay releasing the body. This gave my father and Stella an opportunity to fall out over the funeral arrangements. Stella wanted her sister buried near her. Betty had been living with her for years. Stella had seen her through her first biopsy and every round of chemotherapy. It was Stella who had persuaded Betty to undergo the Process, and persuaded Georgy to offer her the Process in the first place. She’d brought her older sister up from birth, as though she were her own child. Whatever difficulties she and Georgy had experienced in their relationship, chances were they’d been started by Stella’s preoccupation with little Betty. (Not every man wants a second family hot on the heels of the last, and for sure Georgy wasn’t the type.)

None of which made a blind bit of difference to Bob. He was adamant. The plot in Hebden was paid for, and there the pair of them would be buried, husband and wife, with a view of chimneys and rain sweeping down the valley from Blackshaw Head. On the stone: ‘Elizabeth Lanyon. Bob Lanyon.’ Dates. A simple stone over a grave dug extra deep: when his time came, he’d be laid on top of her. ‘It’s all arranged.’

‘You never even saw her!’ The stage had given Stella lungs. I could hear her through the earpiece of the public telephone. She was so loud, Bob had to hold the receiver away from his ear, which made following the conversation even easier, though it was the last thing I wanted. ‘You never even acknowledged that child was her!’

I could understand Stella being annoyed at Bob assuming responsibility for Betty’s funeral arrangements. The sheer level of her rage was something else. I think it was a battle she needed, so that her grief had some way to express itself. Bob was tongue-tied but for once he did not cave in. He asked me to arrange transport for the coffin.

No one in my new job ever breathed down my neck, telling me who I could and could not speak to. From my boss’s desk, I phoned Stella myself. ‘I want to invite Fel to the funeral,’ I said.

‘That’s a sweet idea.’

‘She and Mum were so close.’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you seen her?’