Tom McCarthy - C

Serge, mind still wandering, recalls a photo in the latest Wireless World showing the earth’s southernmost Marconi station, in the Chilean archipelago-four giant tethered pylons with row upon row of wires running between their peaks, cutting the air into grid squares which hovered above a tiny operator’s cabin. The operators had to spend up to six months at a time there, waiting for their relief. What truth might they be spreading to the pole? Telegrams, news, weather reports, cricket scores, the day’s closing prices…? A female mourner’s gazing at him, tearful, pitiful eyes trying to tell him that she understands his grief. He looks away. She can’t: he doesn’t feel any. He knows he’s meant to-but it’s not there, and that’s that. What he feels is discomfort: at his priapic condition and, beyond that, at a sense he has of things being unresolved or, more precisely, undivulged. The charts, the lines, the letter-clusters and the fragments Sophie was pronouncing as she wandered round the Mosaic Garden-and, beyond these, or perhaps behind them, the vague, hovering bodies and muffled signals he’s been half-seeing and -hearing at the dial’s far end, among those crashing and erupting discharges of meteoric events, galactic emanations: these, he’s more and more convinced, mean something and are issuing from somewhere, from a place he hasn’t managed to track down before the one person from whom he might have learnt the what, where, and why of it all elected to go incommunicado…

The pupils pause, then launch stumblingly into the final verse:

What though in solemn silence all

Move round the dark terrestrial ball;

What though no real voice or sound

Amid the radiant orbs be found?

In reason’s ear they all rejoice…

The voices run out to their furrows’ end, and trail off into silence. There’s a pause. Serge hears a motor car go by on the far side of Telegraph Hill, then looks again at the beetle, still carrying on its battle with the earth clump. His father issues an instruction to the two workmen, who transfer the draped coffin from its podium onto the platform suspended above the trench, then winch it down onto the rails. One of them steps over to the other winch-handle and starts cranking it; the coffin begins to slide towards the Crypt. Carrefax nips over to the column supporting the curtain-rail and flicks the switch on. As the coffin slides beneath the perpendicular bar above the trench, the drapes jerk into action, their long hems slipping from the higher ground to fall into the trench and, to the sound of an electric whirring, draw closed across the coffin as it passes through their axis. That’s what’s meant to happen, at least: in fact, one of the hems catches on the coffin and gets pulled backwards, sending the electric motor first into whining overdrive and then into suspension.

“Blast the thing!” says Carrefax. He switches the motor off, tugs at the curtain to unsnag the hem, then flicks the switch again. The coffin slides right through the curtain now, which falls back into place behind it.

“She’s gone!” sobs Frieda.

Her girls whimper agreement. Serge, still hard, can’t stop himself from smiling: the coffin’s not two feet from where it was before. If they moved round to the side they’d see it, dumb and wooden and unaltered. It strikes him that this whole event’s more amateurish than the Pageants-more contrived, more sloppy. The curtain’s just a curtain, and a badly designed one at that. His hands still covering his crotch, he runs his eyes beyond it, to the Crypt’s wall. Is that meant to be the edge, the portal to beyond, the vicar’s heaven? And its far wall, then: would “beyond” stop there? He runs his eye on further, to the grass behind the Crypt, moist and stringy and no different from the grass they’re standing on back here-then onwards, to the dung-filled, sloping field beyond the water, the telegraph line on the hill. He pictures the cars beyond that, then the boats, the towers, the stations, archipelagos…

The workmen have moved along the trench’s edge to operate the pump-lever contraption. As they hoist the coffin up into its slot inside the Crypt, Serge feels a heaviness enter his stomach, as though something foreign were being lodged there. It’s a pronounced, visceral sensation-strong enough to make him release one hand from his crotch and rub his midriff, in the manner of a pregnant woman. He closes his eyes in discomfort, and sees dark globes orbiting in seas of light. When he opens them again, the workmen have finished pumping and are standing back, rubbing their own hands. Several mourners are sobbing. Mr. Clair is weeping quietly. Not Serge: for him, this shoddy, whining spectacle has nothing to do with death, nothing to do with Sophie either. Both death and she are elsewhere: like a signal, dispersed.

Kloděbrady is a twenty-three-hour journey from Portsmouth; from Versoie, twenty-eight. Serge and Clair board first a train, then a boat, then another, grand train laid on by the International Sleeping Car Company and, finally, when this pulls up somewhere near Dresden, a series of smaller trains that carry them across borders of countries, time zones, principalities and semi-autonomous regions Serge has never even heard of. If the names sliding across the compartment’s window beside telegraph poles, red-roofed farmhouses and haystacks that seem to float ten feet above the ground seem vaguely familiar to him, this probably owes more to the fairy tales Maureen would tell him as a child than to anything he’s learnt from Clair of geography or history. He’s passed through zones of boredom and exhaustion too, emerged from them and started waking up now for the journey’s last leg. His senses, though out of kilter, are alert; the lethargy that’s hung above him like a pall for months seems to have lifted-not completely, but a little: lifted and lightened.

The train’s come to a stop. It’s not a station: they’re just waiting for a signal to change, or a point to switch, or an instruction to be shouted from the track-side in a foreign language. Serge stands up, pulls the top half of the window down, leans out and looks around. It’s the end of summer: bushes and trees beside the lines are overgrown and faded; dandelions and weeds stand a foot tall between the sleepers. A stone post has been painted black and yellow, in straight stripes. A small electric box clings to one of the rails, short legs clamped around it like the femurs of a tick while a longer, more tentacular protuberance drops from its underbelly to send currents through the earth. The countryside is flat. A mile or two away, a smokestack seems to rise straight from it. Nearer by, an earthworks plant groans as its stilted runways convey ballast before dropping it onto a growing mound. Other, fully grown mounds of the stuff stretch for hundreds of yards beside the railway line, strangely black against the blue sky and golden foliage.

“It’s the cysteine,” Clair says, noticing Serge looking at the mounds.

“Sistine? Like the chapel?”

“No, what makes it black: the chemical. Cysteine and sulphur, chloride, sodium, what have you. That’s what’s going to cure you.”

He tosses Serge a brochure from among the papers lying beside him on the bench-seat. The train’s almost empty; with the compartment to themselves, they’ve spread out. Serge lets the brochure land on his own bench-seat, then sits down again and picks it up. The front cover bears a drawing of an elegant lady strolling with a parasol along a boulevard lined with Greco-Roman buildings, a glass in her hand. Beneath this image’s border and slightly in front of it due to the perspective adopted by the brochure’s illustrator, a large red heart’s held aloft by a jet of water while a cherub, balancing above the heart on one foot, breaks across the border into the main picture to strew roses across the lady’s path. It’s that depth thing again: the technique Serge could never master in his drawing lessons. It’s not right: the cherub, occupying the same plane as the master image, couldn’t simultaneously be several feet in front of it, and therefore couldn’t strew the flowers from outside its frame-unless he’s reaching up from beneath a screen onto which the picture of the strolling lady’s being projected and, holding the flowers in front of the path, performing some clever optical trick. Above the lady’s parasol, shot through with black sunrays, are the words “Kloděbrady Baths.”