Tom McCarthy - C

“Why didn’t you turn up this time?” he asks as Tania presses her balled palms into his abdomen the next morning.

“I have thing to do,” she answers.

“I met a man who gave me wine,” he tells her.

“Cystenwine?” she asks him.

“That’s what he called it, more or less.”

“Is very good.”

“We could drink it together,” he says, “if you come this evening.”

“Okay,” she says, “I come.”

To his surprise, she does. They meet on the weir and stroll over to the far bank, past the generating station. Serge can see figures moving around inside, but can’t tell if his vine-limbed benefactor is among them. He and Tania pass the substation and head into the fields. The soldiers are all gone; the whole landscape seems empty-even the train pulled up beside the earth-mounds a quarter of a mile or so away has been abandoned, its driver probably drinking with the shovellers and soldiers, the bandstand-painters and dining-hall decorators in one of the town’s inns. Serge has the Kystenwein on him; he also has a corkscrew borrowed from the hotel’s kitchen. He looks at Tania, wondering if he should break the bottle out right now. She doesn’t seem impatient for it. Her eyes, dimmer than usual in the dusk, stare vaguely ahead, towards the woods. A path leads into these; they follow it. After a while the woods end temporarily and a strip, too narrow for a field, runs between them and the next block of woods.

“Against fire,” Tania tells him-the first words she’s spoken since they started walking.

“What’s one disaster more or less, in this town?” Serge murmurs.

She doesn’t respond. To their right, in the fire-break’s middle, there’s an indentation: a kind of mini-quarry where the ground’s been hollowed out. Its black-soiled surfaces curve in a way suggestive of soft chairs.

“Why don’t we sit there?” Serge asks.

Tania shrugs. They enter the indentation and sit down, leaning back against its edges. Serge pulls the corkscrew from his pocket and opens the bottle.

“I didn’t bring any glasses, I’m afraid,” he tells her.

Tania takes the bottle from his hands and drinks from it, throwing her head back. The liquid casts a deep-red glow across her neck. She hands it back to him. He brings it to his lips-and tastes on its rim the warm, bitter residue of Tania’s spit. The wine itself he doesn’t taste till further back, down in his throat: it’s bitter too, in a rich, dirty way.

“It’s different from the one I had on my first evening here,” he says. “My tutor said that it was good for my digestion, but Dr. Filip’s only letting me drink-”

“Why you come alone with teacher?” Tania interrupts him. “Why not parents too?”

“They have things to do, like you.”

“Take care of brothers and sisters?”

“No,” Serge replies. “I don’t have those. I had a sister, but no more.”

“She died?” asks Tania. Serge nods. “How?”

Serge ponders the question for a while, then answers:

“She fell from a height and hit the ground.”

Tania reaches for the bottle and drinks again. When she’s done, he drinks too. The wine’s making him warm; he feels the silky hotness moving outwards from his stomach, to his arms, his legs, his head. Tania takes the bottle again and drinks once more, this time taking long, deep gulps. He does the same. Some of the wine’s escaped from the side of Tania’s mouth; it runs down her chin and dribbles onto her blouse. Serge reaches out his hand and spreads the wet film from her chin around her cheek. She doesn’t stop him, or react in any way. Her eyes, glazed as always, stare through him at the black earth. He brings his mouth up to her face and licks the wine from it. Her neck, beside his ear, emits a low, guttural sound, of the same character and pitch as low-frequency radio waves. He can smell the musty odour rising from her body-from its corners, enclaves, holes. He tugs at her blouse and, meeting no resistance, pulls it off completely, then does the same to her skirt and underclothes.

“Turn around,” he says. “I want to see your back.”

She turns. There it is, right under his face: the crook, rising beneath her shoulder like a ridge with valleys running down its side, flesh-rills held up by bones under the skin. He touches it, then runs his fingers up and down the rills. Still kneeling behind her, he pulls his own clothes off and, holding his penis in his right hand, feeds it under and inside her from behind while clasping her back’s crook in his left hand. The guttural sounds in her neck increase in volume; the musty smell grows stronger, sharper. Serge shuts his eyes and, for some reason, sees the ruddy, marble eyes of the stuffed Spitalfield, the corrugated surface of his hairy skin. He opens them again and, looking straight down, sees the earth rising between Tania’s fingers where her hands push into it. He runs his own hand down her back, so hard the nails puncture its surface, and moves inside her violently, like he’s seen animals and insects do it. Her thighs push back at him, pulling him further in. He closes his eyes again and feels a burning growing in his stomach.

“Poisonberry,” he says, barely audibly.

The word hovers in a small gas-cloud of breath over Tania’s skin before spreading outwards, dissipating. The burning’s spreading outwards too, just like the wine; it’s spreading beyond his body, moving out to fill the hollow, and beyond that too, across the fire-break to the woods on either side. A scream, or the echo of a scream, erupts from neither him nor Tania but, it seems, the night itself; and with it comes a tearing sound, as though a fabric were being ripped. Serge opens his eyes now, and finds that the gauzy crêpe that’s furred his vision for so long is gone-completely gone, like a burst bubble or disintegrated membrane. The surfaces of ground and woods and clouds are gone too, fallen away like screens, encumbrances that blocked his vision, leaving the hollow-not of the indentation but of space itself: an endless space in which he can now see with piercing clarity. What he sees is darkness, but he sees it.

Circumferenced by first brass and then mahogany, the steel minute hand of the large wall clock jumps forwards, its point lodging in the gap between the X and the first I of XII. The invigilator announces:

“You may now begin.”

Like so many extensions of spring, fusee and escapement, thirty-eight left forearms and two rights reach across desktops and turn back the covering page of the School of Military Aeronautics ’ General Knowledge Paper. Serge, seated four desks from the front of the row nearest the window, reads:

1. What causes an eclipse of (a) the sun (b) the moon? What will be the state of the moon in the latter case?

He smiles and, without hesitation, picks his pencil up and writes:

Eclipses occur when two celestial bodies arrange themselves in linear formation with a star, such that one crosses the plane between

He pauses, turns his pencil on its head and erases the last seven words, then resumes:

such that the body closest to the star casts a shadow over the one furthest. This is also known as syzygy.

He writes each letter of “syzygy” separately, relishing its vowel-less repetition.

Thus,

he continues scribbling,

in a solar eclipse the moon casts a shadow on the earth; in a lunar eclipse, vice versa. This shadow can be divided into umbra (area of total occultation), penumbra (partial) and antumbra (in which the shadow nestles in the sun like a dark pupil in a bright eye).

He sits back, sets his pencil down and looks out of the window. Turreted stone walls and wrought-iron weathercocks shape the Oxford skyline. Below them, out of view, a bicycle squeaks and tinkles over cobblestones. Serge turns back to his paper and re-reads the question’s second part. He closes his eyes, thinks for a while, then, leaving a space beneath his previous paragraph, writes: