Nick Harkaway - The Gone-Away World

“Yes,” she says at last, “it really is you.” And she begins her story.

Elisabeth Soames was born to Assumption and Evander John Soames in the Chinese Year of the Rat (I already knew this, but before I can object, some small part of me realises that much of what I have believed I knew turned out to be untrue, and that if I start complaining I may not get the story in full and indeed may not get hugged any more, and the hugging is very nice, in part because it seems to be as important to her as it is to me) and was an only child. She enjoyed skipping and making sandcastles, but rarely visited the sandpit in the children’s enclosure of her local park as Evander Soames was very much against violence of any kind, and one of the other children played an involved war game in the sandpit, a strange, sprawling, constantly evolving fantasy instigated by his older brother. Evander Soames petitioned the local authorities to have this practice banned in the code of conduct for the playground, but was outvoted, and therefore directed his energies inward. A total ban on the playground was enforced on his daughter until he died. His lady wife found ways to give Elisabeth access to other sands (at the beach and at friends’ houses) and social interaction (which would in any case have been somewhat tempered by her position as headmistress at the Soames School for the Children of Townsfolk, a burden for her daughter roughly equivalent to being the offspring of a plague carrier).

In consequence of her father’s diktat against the sandpit, Elisabeth came to question his wisdom as it emerged from his mouth and concluded that, although Evander Soames was a very intelligent man, he was not always forthcoming with balanced argument, but rather preferred to deploy his intellect in pursuit of his own goals (she expressed this at the time as “Daddy makes things up which are true but not how he says they are,” which is as accurate a summation of academic hairsplitting as you could wish for). When he expired in his own bed from a variant brain disease most usually associated with unconventional cuisine, Elisabeth mourned him as young children mourn: deeply, sporadically and without the awful sense of her own mortality which such death implies to adults. She also took herself straightaway to a nearby house inhabited by an elderly gentleman of Chinese extraction and demanded that he instruct her in the full range of violences and counter-violences which his extensive experience could offer. Wu Shenyang initially refused this request, but Elisabeth had considerably more experience with getting around old men than Wu Shenyang did of denying small girls, and she shortly ensconced herself in his living room and was immersed in the Way of the Voiceless Dragon. Her studies were facilitated by her mother’s grief, which took the form of community service (however backhanded) and which found the sight of her only child a powerful reminder of the infuriating, beloved dead. Mutual loss and mutual affection kept them orbiting one another at a precise distance which only great upset could overcome, and if this seems like a small madness drawing fuel from pain, it kept them from far larger ones and allowed them to be together for short periods of comfort and reflection without becoming maudlin, vengeful, jealous or any of the other irrational things which sorrow can enforce quite unfairly on those who love one another very much.

One great upset was the young man who was her first love, a bewildering muddle of brashness and familiar grief who stole her heart without ever bothering to check his pockets, used her wisdom but not—to her enduring fury—her body and then ran away to war and fell in love with a nurse. (Here Elisabeth pauses to look at me sharply. Her face is set in the expression I used to associate with a dressing-down, but which, looking at it with twenty years’ worth of human experience, I recognise as fear. I squeeze her lightly. This was apparently the right thing to do, at least as far as she is concerned, although it is, like everything else, painful. Humbert Pestle’s fingerprints are on my bones. I squeak. Elisabeth stares for a second, and then wordlessly draws back, and demands that I remove my shirt. From coop number two she retrieves a small package filled with ointments and cotton wool, and she begins to dab at me.)

On hearing of the engagement, Elisabeth Soames, from a grim hotel room, sobbed vile words and gut-wrenching envies to her mother, and Assumption averred that things might yet turn out well, and in any case the boy was simply too mixed-up to be worth the full measure of regret. With this observation Elisabeth was reluctantly forced to agree: he never finished anything, never concentrated on anything, he wanted everything and the introspective aspect of him she admired contrasted unfavourably with a brassiness, even an arrogance, which she found deeply unattractive. (She pours something on my ribs which is very cold and smells dreadful. If there are any pigeons in here, they’re getting treated to a very fine selection of noises of alarm and discomfort. Her hands smooth this stuff into my skin, and my aches start to go away. I feel warm and prickly. I try not to; it’s producing moderately inappropriate physical reactions. I haven’t been hugged or touched in this way for some time—or perhaps ever, depending on how you look at it—and I’ve just escaped death. These things cause untold amounts of what can only be described as horn. Elisabeth either doesn’t notice or doesn’t mind. Her fingers slide around my side, where it hurts most. They are very gentle, so I don’t faint.)

In any case, she has more important things on her mind. Shortly after she went away to study, Wu Shenyang—never a surrogate father, but a person whose suppleness of mind made a true friendship possible across decades of impossibly different experience—was killed by fire and treachery. He had as much as warned her such a thing was possible. Elisabeth, knowing better but steeped in the culture of feuding schools which is the cinematic heritage of gong fu, expected his senior students to leap from the woodwork and snatch her up to join the cause of rooting out his enemies. Nothing happened. Offended, she determined to do the job herself, or at the very least locate the missing seniors and ask them why they weren’t pursuing due revenges. She realigned her studies towards this goal, and obtained qualifications as a journalist to allow her to travel and investigate. The moderate support available to her from Evander Soames’s estate allowed her a certain leeway in filing stories. She roamed, and searched, and heard whispers: there was a man called Smith. He had asked about Wu Shenyang. He had enquired in many places. The tone of his enquiry had left most people eager to forget him. Smith was sinister. He frightened you, and he allowed you to know that this pleased him. He had a way of seeing where to apply pressure, how to bring you to heel. Smith could be friendly, but never nice. Smith was a hard man, and he had chosen his alias because he didn’t care if people knew it wasn’t his real name; he just wanted to be sure he left no trace. If anyone knew anything about the death of Wu Shenyang, it was this wicked, terrible Smith. Elisabeth set out to find him.

Smith was elusive for such a big man. She would find his tracks, follow him to a hotel or a bar, to a private house or a shop, and she would hurry there to find him gone. Smith could walk into a lobster pot and leave by the back door. He knew the back alleys of the worst part of every country on Earth. Elisabeth got to know them, too. She drank pale beers in a cellar in Phuket and sipped fermented mare’s milk in a town in Mongolia. She paid small amounts to border guards— for your son’s schooling, mon Capitaine, because I hear he is a most excellent boy, no, please, I will wait in line . . . well, but if you insist . . . no, no, let there be no debts between us, we are family, your wife taught me to shop for melon —and smiled with cherry lips at gullible men. She went to baby showers in Idaho and played darts with working men in working men’s clubs, and she asked questions in quiet corners and pauses in conversation, and most often she had to claim she’d been misheard. Most often, no one had heard of the Voiceless Dragon, or believed in ninjas (which is a word which can be confused with: ginger, injured, fringes, hinges and many others which might crop up in a casual conversation) and so Elisabeth went on her way smiling, and was not seen again. But every now and again, in quite unlikely places, she would be drawn aside or shushed— I don’t talk about that; I know him; what would a girl like you . . . promise me you won’t say I said.