David Mitchell: Slade House

“The explosion didn’t smash the Aperture,” says the black woman, “but it did make a crack. Across the middle, there. See?” She crouches next to me and runs her finger along ia thick line. “There. The world’s leaking in, Miss Grayer. I’m sorry. You’re aging at, perhaps, a decade every fifteen seconds.”

She’s speaking English, but what’s she talking about? “Who are you?”

The woman stares at me. Which is very rude. Don’t Africans teach their children manners? “I am mercy, Miss Grayer.”

“Well then, Mercy — get me … Get me …” I know his name, I know I know his name, but his name doesn’t know me. “My brother. This instant. He’ll sort it all out.”

“I’m sorry,” says Mercy. “Your mind’s decaying.” She rises to her feet and picks up our … what’s it called? The thing the candle sits in? She’s going to steal it! “Put that back!” I try to stop her, but my feet just twitch in a pile of dirt. This place is filthy! Where’s the housekeeper? Why is this African, holding up our candlestick? That’s the word: a candlestick! We’ve had it in the family for generations. It’s three thousand years old. It’s older than Jesus. It’s from Nineveh. I call out, “Get me Jonah!”

The African lifts it up, like a, like a, you know, like a thing … and swings its heavy base into the mirror.

Daylight floods and snowflakes swarm through the splintered plane of the Aperture, covering the floorboards, scurrying round the darkest recesses of the attic, like many inquisitive schoolchildren. My body has shrivelled up around me like a punctured balloon. Untied, unzipped, unstrapped from its senility-riddled brain, my soul floats free. Marinus, without a backwards glance, steps through the Aperture even as the attic fades away into a wintry sky, above an anonymous town. It’s over. Without its birth-body anchoring it to the world, the soul of Norah Grayer is dissolving; it hovers for a moment in the space once occupied by the attic of Slade House. Was that my life? Was that all? There was supposed to be more. Many, many decades more. Look below: roofs, cars, other lives, and a woman putting on a green beret, leaving the scene via an alley, still with a candlestick in her hand. There is no farewell in the busy air, no hymn, no message. Only snow, snow, snow and the inexorable pull of the Dusk.

Not yet. Not yet. Dusk pulls, but damn the Dusk, damn Marinus, I’ll pull harder. She killed my brother and now she’s walking free. Let grief pull with me; let hatred strengthen our sinews. My stock of seconds may be meager but if there’s a way to avenge hot-headed Jonah, my precious twin, my truest other half, I’ll find it, however faint the traces. Brick chimneys; slate roofs; thin, narrow gardens with sheds, kennels and compost heaps. Where might a vengeful soul find refuge? A new birth-body? Who can I see? A brother and sister, at play in the snow … They”re old, they’re too interwoven with their own souls. Another boy jumps on a trampoline … he’s even older, of no use. A magpie lands on a garden shed with a crawk and a tinny thump; a garden away, a back door opens, and a woman in a woolen hat steps out holding a bowl of peelings. “No snowballing your sister, Adib! Build a snowman! Something gentle!” She’s pregnant — it shows, from thirty feet, and now I see it. I see the beauty of the pattern. The woman is not here by chance: her appearance is Scripted. Dusk hauls me to itself, but now I see the means, I resist. My mission makes me strong, and my mission is this: one day, however distant, I will whisper into Marinus’s ear, “You killed my brother Jonah Grayer — and now I kill you.” I transverse down with the ponderous snow, the living snow, the eternal snow; undetected, I pass through the mother’s coat, her underclothes, her skin, her uterus wall; and now I’m home, my new, warm home, my anchorage; immune to the Dusk and safe in the brain of a foetal boy, this miniature, drowsing, curled-up, dreaming, thumb-sucking astronaut.

TK

DAVID MITCHELL is the award-winning and bestselling author of Slade House, The Bone Clocks, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Black Swan Green, Cloud Atlas, Number9Dream, and Ghostwritten . Twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Mitchell was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2007. With KA Yoshida, Mitchell co-translated from the Japanese the international bestselling memoir, The Reason I Jump . He lives in Ireland with his wife and two children.

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