Tom McCarthy - C

Kennscht mi noch?

Serge murmurs the words himself this time, letting them echo from him as though he were some kind of sounding box, hollow and resonant. As he does this, their meaning becomes clear; he knows exactly what he’s saying. The question of who “me” is, or what time the “still” refers to, is no longer irksome: the dispersed, exterior mi previously held captive by the air, carried within its grain and texture, has joined with the interior one, their union then expanding to become a general condition, until “me” is every name in history; all times have fused into a now. It all makes sense. He’s been skirting this conjunction, edging his way towards it along a set of detours that have curved and meandered like the relays of a complex chart, for years-for his whole life, perhaps-and now the conjunction, its consummation, tired of waiting, has found its way to him: it’s hurtling back towards him on the line along which the bullets will come any second now. As he waits for the sergeant to give the command to shoot, Serge feels ecstatic.

The soldiers await the order too, with a perfect immobility, as though time had stopped, or run into itself so fully that it’s breached and flooded its own borders, overflowed. They could have shot already; Serge could be already dead, his consciousness held back within some kind of intermission that’s been opened up by the intricate physics of it all, or held suspended while time loops: it’s just a matter of waiting for its rim to reappear and slide back down his vision; then he’ll be gathered up by the overlap, disappear into its soft accretion. It’s not until he notices some motion behind the soldiers that he realises there’s a reason for the pause: a man, some other kind of sergeant, captain or subaltern, has appeared and called the first sergeant over to him. They’re talking together. They talk for a while-and while they do, time seems to fall back into its old shape, the accretion to withdraw. It’s not a pleasant feeling. Now the sergeant’s talking to the firing squad: he mutters something to them and they drop their guns.

“Was passiert?” Serge asks, indignant.

It’s the subaltern who answers him, in English:

“Finished. It’s over…” He starts to walk away.

“What do you mean it’s over?” Serge calls after him. “It hasn’t even started yet!”

“War over,” the subaltern shouts back across his shoulder.

Hodge drops to his knees and starts to cry. The soldiers begin walking away too, withdrawing. Superimposed across the clearing, as though projected there, Serge sees the image of a boat pulling off from a jetty at a point where several canals intersect: as the boat draws away, it takes the intersection with it, leaving him behind. For the first time in the whole course of the war, he feels scared.

“Hey!” he calls after the soldiers. “You can’t do that. Wait!”

Versoie seems smaller. Its proportions are the same: the surface area of the house’s side-wall in relation to that of the Maze Garden above which it rises, or the width of the maze’s paved path in relation to the garden’s lawn; the height of the Crypt Park’s obelisk-topped columns, or the sightline above these into the park itself afforded by the attic window-all these are correct. But, taken as a whole, they seem to have shrunk. The left-swerving passage from the house’s front door to the Low Lawn, then through the Lime Garden with its beehives and, beyond these, past the green slime-topped trough-pond towards the long, conker-tree-lined avenue that skirts the Apple Orchard as it heads towards the spinning sheds and Bodner’s garden-a passage each of whose sections used to comprise a world, expansive beyond comprehension, filled with organic density and volume, with the possibilities of what might take place in it, riven with enclaves and proclivities every one of which itself comprised a world within the world, on to infinity-now seems like a small, inconsequential circuit: a transceiver loop or well-worn route round a familiar parade ground. It’s as though, in Serge’s absence, the whole estate had, by some sleight of hand, been substituted by a model, one into which he’s now been reinserted, oversize, cumbersome and gauche…

Versoie seems smaller, and the world seems smaller, seems like a model of the world. It’s not just that the distance between, say, here and Lydium has shrunk (and done so almost exponentially thanks to the motor car his father’s purchased and now lets him drive whenever he feels like an outing), but, beyond that, that the inventory of potential experiences-situations in which he might find himself, conversations and interactions he might undergo-has dwindled so low that they could be itemised on a single sheet of paper. The exchanges he has in shops or in the post office, the movements and gestures these involve, seem so limited, so mapped out in advance, as to be predetermined-as though they’d already happened and were simply being re-enacted by two or more people who’d agreed to maintain the farcical pretence that this was something new and exciting. He’s taken to walking out on the charade halfway through: stepping into, for example, the cheese shop, responding to the usual questions about how his parents or the Day School pupils are, agreeing how nice it is to be back after serving his country so bravely, admitting that the weather isn’t quite doing what might be expected of it at this time of year, and so on-then, just as the shopkeeper shifts his stance above the rows of Lancashires and Stiltons and asks him what he’ll have, turning round and pushing the door open, leaving its ting! hanging in the air behind him with the ruptured conversation. He once did this on three premises in a row-neighbouring ones: newsagent, baker, fishmonger-not out of maliciousness but simply to identify and breach the boundary of each situation, one after the other, to let it form a box around him which he could then step out of…

The same restless impulse sees him whipping up and down between Versoie and London. He enrols at the Architectural Association, then gets it into his head that he should study engineering instead; visiting Imperial College to sign up for this, he changes his mind and decides to follow in his sister’s footsteps and join the natural science department; but, realising after a week that he has no aptitude for this discipline, he cools on the idea of being at Imperial at all and re-enrols at the AA. The restlessness, he comes to realise, is in truth an attempt to achieve its opposite: stasis. It’s as though if he moves about enough, the world will fall into place around him. He experiences this most viscerally when driving across Salisbury Plain. Summoning up with his right foot a roar of snarling teeth and whirring cylinders, feeling beneath his hips the force of however many horses surging forwards, he watches the hedgerows run together till they blur into a tunnel of green speed. As this streaks by and the horizon accelerates towards him, it seems that he himself has become still-and, in these moments, he feels the same sense of satisfaction that he used to in the nacelle of the Rumpitee or the cabin of the RE8: the sense of being a fixed point in a world of motion. Holding this point against the landscape with the wheel, he pushes back into the air that screeches along his cheeks the word fassen, although this modulates amidst the noise sometimes to become fast or faster. The air carries a smell of lime-not the fruit but quicklime: the plain’s been used as a giant burial ground for victims of the recent flu pandemic. The calcium oxide penetrates his nostrils and sinks deep into his lungs, making him feel alive and good.

It’s not just Masedown’s humans who’ve been struck down by disease: the mulberry trees at Versoie have caught an infection-something called Dieback. It takes the form of a fuzzy white mould, like the mould you get on stale bread, growing around the leaves and branches and extending out from these in wispy strands from tree to tree-as though the vegetation had, as Clair’s heroes advocated, taken control of the means of production and, cutting out the parasites both insectoid and human who exploited its resources, started weaving for itself. The effects of this insurrection are quite tangible: most of the silk-making staff have been laid off; the spinning sheds are empty. Only Bodner can be seen from day to day: a small, lone figure trudging around the Mulberry Lawn with a bucket into which he dips a brush, painting the trees with disinfectant.