Nick Harkaway - The Gone-Away World

ELISABETH SOAMES coughs. She has been speaking for a long time. I pass her some water from the plastic bucket in the corner. She has wrapped the bucket in blankets because it is a dreadful colour, a sort of chartreuse. The result looks a lot like something you would find in a Bedouin hut if the Bedu shopped at Ikea. She sips at the water and presses closer to me.

“What did he see?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

It is the heart of all of this. It is the engine in Humbert’s machine, his enemy plan. Jorgmund. FOX. Gonzo. All of a piece. Find the connections. Find out why. What does Jorgmund want with Gonzo? Old questions: What is this thing called Jorgmund? What does it want? What is my place in the pattern?

“I need to see the Core,” I tell Elisabeth Soames. She does not say “Are you up to it?” or “If they catch you . . .” (which would be another rhetorical ellipsis, of course, and thus far, far beneath her). She seems to review everything which has happened, and herself and me, and weigh it all, and in that light she opens her eyes again, and she nods once, sharply.

“Okay.”

UNTIL RECENTLY, the great Empire of Sartoria—the continent of style whence come all manner of dinner suits, morning coats, Edwards, Ascots, Lichfields, smokings and casuals—was marked on my personal map as a small island just to windward of the Useless Archipelago. It was populated with skilled but pointless individuals disconnected from the ebb and flow of living. An hour spent with Royce Allen has disabused me of that notion. Tailors are vital. Royce Allen is a receiving and transmitting station for news and storm warnings of various kinds, and a voice of stark truth to those whose importance is such that they generally hear none. Men of his profession have been quietly saving the world for years.

“No, sir, the chartreuse is a disaster. It makes you look like the Wampyr. As in the Undead. Yes. A cartoonist’s dream, sir. No, not pale and aristocratic, I fear, though one can see how you might imagine that, but more on the deliquescent side of things. On the whole, sir, the pink. If you absolutely must, sir, then the russet, but it has to my mind a hint of the dung heap about it. Yes. Oh, and regarding the economy, sir? Parlous. Yes, I am aware of your new proposals, sir. They are, if you will forgive me, worse than that burlap sack your missus was wearing on the telly last night. Yes. Mass unemployment in days, I should imagine. Well, might I propose that you just leave bloody well alone, sir—let the housing market settle and the banks get over their alarm, and pop in in a week for another fitting? Very good. Now, as to footwear—might I venture that you’ve been taking advice on this topic from the defence secretary, sir? Only these would appear to be Cuban heels.”

The items I am currently wearing come from a different stable. The same expertise has been applied to their making, the same exacting standards, but the intent behind their construction is less benign. The trousers are double lined: the inner layer is a sheer silk which instantly clings to the leg; the outer one is coarser, and slides over the silk without catching or making a noise. The final layer of fabric is not strictly black, but mottled midnight-on-anthracite—night-time camouflage. The jacket is the same. It tugs a little over the shoulders because I am an inch or so larger about the torso than the previous occupant. This is a suit intended to facilitate mayhem and violence in silence.

I’m wearing a ninja outfit. When I put it on there was a single, enormous bee corpse in the crotch. I didn’t scream because I am a man of action and a serious person engaged in serious business. Also because Elisabeth Soames was watching. I did, however, pick it up by one huge wing and drop it with a sardonic smile into the wastepaper basket in pigeon coop number one. And my whole nether region went cold as ice. This was probably a good thing. Until then I had been watching Elisabeth Soames wriggle into her own ninja gear (at some point one of them has run afoul of her and been denuded; I don’t know whether this was post-mortem and I don’t necessarily want to) and thinking that maybe this could wait until I’d taken her back to bed. It’s time to concentrate. I long to contemplate her in a vastly more tactile and rewarding fashion, and this would be a bad idea. Bad, bad, bad. I growl out loud. She turns round.

I drag my eyes upward, and find her face. She is looking patient. It does not look like the kind of patience which comes naturally, but the kind you adopt by choice. I mumble something. She kisses me chastely on each cheek, looks into my eyes.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

And we go out into the early dark.

Elisabeth’s rooftop is only a few storeys high, and there’s an iron fire escape hanging down from the building above. She has at some point tied a rope to the bottom; she drags it down, and we climb. It’s a long way—this place has fifteen or more floors. We climb past windows and kitchens and feuding families; we eavesdrop on lovers and catch fragments of television shows. We climb. I begin to realise how she maintains that greyhound physique. When we get to the top, she leads me over an obstacle course, made all the more exciting by the fact that it is ever ascending, until we are at least twenty storeys up. And then her movements change, she grows cautious and I know that we are close.

This new roof is slippery, canted slightly towards a distant drop. The ninja shoes had little crampons for this kind of thing, but my donor had small feet. Girly feet. I hope he was a man. I don’t want to be wearing a dead girl’s clothes. At the far end of the rooftop there is another wall, and this one is vast. It goes up and up, maybe seventy floors above us. Fortunately, there is a lift, like a window cleaner’s hoist. We take it all the way. The little electric motors whine and complain, and the wind blows us all over the place. In movies people have fights on these things. You just wouldn’t. You’d sit there politely, talk about your favourite place to eat in the city below, maybe exchange names. You’d wait until you got to the top or the bottom and get off, then either fight in the knowledge that you had the ground under you and you’d die of violence rather than gravity, or reckon to resolve your differences over a coffee and a sandwich in the fortieth-floor bar. That model City of Lights down there is only a few seconds away by the direct route. These planks are strong enough to stand on, to sit on. But they flex when you walk. There are cracks. The planks are screwed into the frame, but one of the screws has worked loose and another is broken. Window cleaners have nerves of steel.

The roof of the Jorgmund Company, their neon logo shuddering in the wind above us. It’s freezing up here. Elisabeth puts on Dr. Andromas’s goggles to protect her eyes. I don’t have any goggles so I put up the ninja’s hood and squint. It doesn’t help very much. The wind is a kind of localised hurricane, a circling snarl created by all the buildings. In daytime it would be scary. In the dark it is disorientating, misleading. You could press against it to get away from the edge, and walk clear off the other lip thinking you were still right up against the first one. Elisabeth knows the way; if you traced it on a graph, it would be a curve or part of a spiral. Up here, right now, it’s a straight line across the roof to the other side. We pass under the signage and I can hear it creak. The torsion on the bolts must be tremendous. I wonder how often they have to come up here and change them, or check them for sheering. And then she clips a couple of bits of nylon around my chest and hooks us together, and we jump off.