Nick Harkaway - The Gone-Away World

Annie the Ox is the first one I pick out of the crowd, her face serious and measured. She is actually holding a puppet head (I think it’s the elephant), which she does only on the most significant occasions. Seeing my gaze on the thing, she glances down and goes to hide it, then straightens and puts it firmly on the table in front of her. Make what you will, she says with her eyes, and I reply with mine very much the same.

Tobemory Trent, speaking of eyes, is watching from a bar stool. Long spider legs and rootish hands around a tankard, Trent looks more like himself than he ever has before. Or maybe I am just seeing him with my own eyes for the first time. And then the Free Company gives way to newer, stranger friends. Next to Trent is K (the shepherd, not the sarong-wearing original), who despite his tweeds might have been raised in the same house; he’s wearing an identical expression of patience and hanging thunder. Beyond K are several other Ks, well known and less so, and beyond them, a sea of mimish faces, expressionless beneath matching white make-up.

What the hell do you say? I ought to be getting better at it. “Hi, I’m . . . oh, bugger . . .” (Note to self: must get a name.) “And it’s really good to see you all here this evening, because . . .”

Lynch me now. It’ll be kinder. I clear my throat. Everyone looks at me. Whatever I was going to say sticks and then goes right out of my head. These people are going to risk everything for me, but I can’t give them as much as a greeting. I could weep, if I could make any sound at all.

The noise which saves me is quite possibly the most awful noise I have ever heard. It is a high scream of porcine affront, a vast, earsplitting yowl of shock and alarm which vibrates the glasses and rattles the windows. It sounds for all the world like murder in one of those old black-and-white mystery movies where the heroine’s chest was all covered up but could at least be brought to the viewer’s attention by some serious heaving, and many a career was made by impressive lungs.

Flynn the Barman leaps up and charges for the back door, which slams open to reveal a figure in a raincoat and a fanciful pirate’s hat.

“Sorry!” cries the apparition cheerfully. “K’s strong-eye dog has just terrorised your pigs and they seem to be running around in circles. The dogs are being hosed down; they got stuck in the wallow, which apparently upset the pigs even more. Still, no harm done, medals all round, not that pigs really care.”

Ike Thermite waves at everyone, even the mimes, who look back at him and think whatever thoughts mimes do think when considering the one of their number who is permitted speech. And behind Ike there is a small, disenchanted old man with leather skin and a fighter’s frame, weathered but undefeated, and possessed of a deep well of vile temper.

“Those are not pigs,” this person says firmly, “those are the gatekeepers of the Hell of Flying Shite. It is not enough that I have been dragged from acts of considerable obscenity in a place we shall not name with women whose sole object in life was to make my final years a great celebration of my dwindling sexual resources; I must also be showered in pig poo. Thus, we shall not discuss the charmingness of the day or the cool night breezes any more than we absolutely have to, Mr. Ike Thermite of the Matahuxee Mime Combine; we shall proceed to the main event, eftsoons and right speedily, with all due dispatch, lest I become bad-tempered and profane. Now,” he says, “where is this bumhole we’re so excited about?”

I step forward through the crowd, pushing people out of the way, and I hug him. His chest, beneath his flannel shirt, feels like metal plate covered in uncooked veal. Ronnie Cheung has aged well, but he has aged fully, and even stone is eroded by time and water. After a moment, he speaks.

“Bumhole,” he says, “you are standing on my corn.”

I HAVE made up my own five-step plan for public speaking, loosely adapted from Hellen Fust’s let’s-have-an-atrocity speech. It is intended to be brief, but as I start speaking I find that I have quite a lot to say and that all of it is relevant, so the story grows in the telling and the speech in the making, and Elisabeth spirits a glass of something sharp and wet from the bar to moisten my tongue.

I tell them who I am and where I come from; I tell them about Marcus Maximus Lubitsch and the foreign field, and Gonzo’s game and his sorrow, and about how he made a new friend. I tell them about getting shot. I do not look at Leah as I talk about the hard surface of the road. This is who I am, what I am. That’s all there is.

Then I go back in time and tell them things they already know about the Go Away War and the Reification, and how Zaher Bey gave shelter to a small group of desperate people, and fed them, and how we’d have died without him and his people, or maybe drowned in a sea of Stuff. We have a debt.

And because I cannot hold it in any longer, I tell them the last of Humbert Pestle’s awful secrets, the worm in the apple of the world. It goes like this:

Once upon a time there was a boy named Bobby Shank. Bobby was near-sighted and not too bright, but he had good intentions and an empty bank account, so it came to him that he might do worse than sign up for a tour with the forces. He was a lousy shot, but he had a strong back and a willing heart, and he was good-natured and maybe a bit too stupid to be scared. He dug earthworks in Addeh Katir and toiled and tramped and carried things back and forth until Riley Tench assigned him permanently to the medical corps. And finally he happened to be in a certain street in a combat zone mostly by accident when his own side started shelling the place and a big, improbable window shattered, and the fragments flew about like rainbow insects with scalpel wings.

One of those fragments hit Bobby Shank in the head. It was not thick, but it was long and very sharp, and because it struck dead on, the force of the blow was transmitted along the length of it and it behaved much as if it had been a spear. It penetrated Bobby’s skull and went into his brain, where it broke into several pieces which each performed distinct and unlikely surgery. The first one deflected upward and partially severed Bobby Shank’s higher functions from the rest of his brain. Bobby couldn’t actually see anything any more, not in real time. He could look at something and remember having seen it, tell you all about it. But he was not, for example, going to be playing any football anytime soon. Similarly, he couldn’t smell either, but he could recall smells from about a minute ago, and at the moment what he could mostly smell was blood, which he rightly deduced was his own. He tried to scream, but this proved impossible because the second piece had deflected off the skull and gone sort of up-left, arriving at Broca’s area, which deals with speech, and turning it instantly into porridge. Bobby’s mouth began making sounds, long strings of word-like noises. The third piece was either the cruellest or the kindest, depending on how bleak you take your mercy. It went into his brainstem, occasionally dropping Bobby Shank into total unconsciousness, and was working slowly inward so that he would eventually die. Bobby was a stretcherman. Tobemory Trent should probably have declared him dead-at-scene, but he didn’t because stretchermen didn’t get left behind, not ever.

After a few days they shipped Bobby Shank back home and he lay in a hospital, drifting in and out of the world. They tried using ultrasound on the third piece of glass, because otherwise he was going to die anyway, and they broke it up real good, along with the other pieces they’d sort of hoped to leave well alone. That turned out to be a mixed blessing, because the shards went into the part of him which had long term memories and took a lot of them away. Bobby Shank forgot that he had a name, he just lived in the last five minutes. In a way it was a success, because now he’d never been anything other than what he was, a kind of dream of white walls and nice smells, slowly decohering and fading away, until Bobby was a short circuit, just a brain registering what was in front of him, and not really being aware of itself at all. He smiled more and swore less, which was nice.