Nick Harkaway - The Gone-Away World

My loss of faith is sudden, and it’s not so much a conversion as a reappraisal. Children are still modelling the world, still understanding how it works; their convictions are malleable, like their bones. Thus, I experience no sudden horrible wrench as my belief is uprooted, but rather a feeling like the right pair of glasses being put in front of my face after some time wearing someone else’s. The Evangelist brings me to her study to tell me off for one of Gonzo’s outrages, and I sit waiting for a higher power to intervene and tell her that it isn’t my fault. I look upward, naturally, to the place above my hairline where adults come from, the place where, broadly speaking, heads can be found and persons in authority exert their will in the name of justice. There is no one there. It is unclear in my mind whether I am looking for God in person or a more earthly parent as his instrument, but neither appears. The Evangelist adds a charge of “rolling your eyes at me” to the sheet, and I spend a week in detention after school. Gonzo is mysteriously unwell for the period, with a vile sore throat which is probably infectious but doesn’t stifle his ability to loaf, and which Lydia Copsen also develops. They convalesce a great deal together, feet touching under the blanket as they sit at opposite ends of the sofa and choke abominably.

Spring becomes summer, summer becomes autumn, and Gonzo and his beloved part company over her inability to comprehend the importance of muddy walks and frantic leaf-kicking. She takes the opportunity to inform him that she went with him only to gain access to his parents’ donkeys, to which Gonzo responds that the donkeys loathe her, despise her silly hair and stupid upturned nose, and they have asked him, by means of sign language, to convey to her their deepest and most unalterable disdain for her opinions in all matters of consequence. Thus avenged, the wretched girl departing in a frozen fury, Gonzo retires to the riverbank and we fish in silence, and this time Gonzo catches a decent-sized trout with his new rod, although it is left to me to kill the creature and present it to Ma Lubitsch, who dutifully guts and cooks it for dinner. Though fortunately it is served alongside a more enjoyable dish of meatloaf.

Gonzo is not the only person with relationship issues. At Old Man Lubitsch’s insistence, we sit in Ma Lubitsch’s parlour one night in lone-some October, watching the world have something of a tizzy. Ma Lubitsch’s television is very much a curiosity—a wood-panelled thing with chunky buttons which whines and gutters alarmingly and occasionally overheats and has to have a rest. But on the screen, all the same, are more people than I have ever seen in one place, and half of them appear to be very pleased about something and the other half extremely cross, and neither side has a great deal of patience about it. Old Man Lubitsch explains that this is normal in what is called politics, which is essentially the business of countries and big groups of people trying to make everyone see things their way. Since no one ever does, very little is achieved and practitioners are voted out and others voted in who reverse the process, so government (as Old Man Lubitsch explains it) is not so much a journey as a series of emergency stops and arguments over which way up to hold the map.

What has happened today is therefore something of a shocker. An actual decision has been taken, in the face of all the odds, and it is one which absolutely no one saw coming. It is also, to use a technical term deployed by a chortling analyst, something of a corker. The island of Cuba, which is a long way away, has thrown off its communist rulers (who were in fact not communists but totalitarians —and here Old Man Lubitsch looks as if he may spit, but Ma Lubitsch gives him a totalitarian look of her own and he subsides) and has chosen a somewhat improbable route to enter the modern world. The people of Cuba have petitioned the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (which is not really a kingdom —that would be another form of totalitarianism ) for admittance, and been accepted. The resulting entity is the United Island Kingdoms of Britain, Northern Ireland & Cuba Libré, and is already being referred to by the wits as Cubritannia.

As an introduction to politics, this is pretty much in at the deep end, but Old Man Lubitsch is well-informed and patient, and by the end of the night I understand that I have seen a historic thing and that the people of Cuba have opted to join a nation of shopkeepers because they want infrastructure (roads and sewers), freedom (not being beaten up for pulling faces at politicians) and a decent injection of cash and junk food (this is called standard of living ). The people of Britain have accepted them because they relish the notion of an influx of well-trained, educated people of pleasing physical appearance who have rhythm, and because their national psyche needs somewhere to replace another island called Hong Kong which they apparently lost somehow and are still sulking about. Mostly, however, it seems they have accepted this arrangement because it has put the wind up the rest of the world, and that pleases them greatly. The people who seem most upset are elements of the global business community based in distant places like Johannesburg and New York and Toronto and Paris, who basically assumed that Cuba belonged to them, and was on lease to the communist totalitarians all this time.

This intelligence means very little to me, but Old Man Lubitsch insists that the time will come when I am glad to have seen it, and proud to remember it. And while Gonzo finds this unlikely, and sees in his mother’s eyes a deep patience with her husband’s folly, I believe it. The silent bristling heat of conviction is in Gonzo’s father, and it passes in some small measure to me. I carefully store Cubritannia away in my mind’s attic, and throw a blanket over it for good measure, and the next day is a Wednesday and our first lesson is history and the Evangelist puts her head around the door to tell Mr. Cremmel specifically not to talk about it, and she sits in to make sure. Mr. Cremmel dutifully teaches us about the Industrial Revolution instead, but he makes some kind of innocent error when it comes to homework, and the page references he gives us are for Cuba after all.

SNOW comes to Cricklewood Cove that winter. It is early December, and the temperature rises from below zero to a comfy one or two. There is a strange, crisp smell of pine and woodsmoke and something clear and different. A wide, low cloud settles over the cove and over the Lubitsch house and (thanks be to the God I no longer believe in) over the school. The cloud does not loom, nor does it threaten. It is warmer and deeper than a rain cloud and has a definitely benign feeling, and when it is finally ready it unburdens itself of a vast quantity of white flakes, which fall straight down. They are not the thick wet flakes of spring snow, which are sort of misplaced, like confused geese. They fall in an endless flow, small and dry and floating evenly and covering everything, and when they go down the back of your neck and chill your spine, they are still solid when they reach the waistband of your trousers. This is real, bona fide snow, come down from the high mountains and stabling the sheep and visiting the saloons, and raising a ruckus over a girl in little frilly trousers (the blizzards strand me inside and I discover the Western, and John Wayne is my hero for evermore, although a hero of admiration rather than emulation because he always ends up dead—Gonzo plays at being the Duke and lies dramatically and probably auto-erotically splayed upon the hall carpet, gasping out his last).