Japheth awoke, his strength restored, in the shade of an oak tree with a massive gnarled trunk. The forest floor was dark and carpeted with twigs and dry leaves. The sun only reached it in a few patches of tremulous white. He yawned and rubbed his eyes, then fumbled for his leather helmet. He was travelling light, only leather armour and nothing in his knapsack but a day's rations, a couple of potions and a few magic scrolls. It might be a long way yet.
He uncorked his water bottle and drank the last swig, swilling it first around his mouth. Then he opened his breeches and pissed against the oak tree. As he watched the perfect, gleaming arc, the wisps of steam rising around it, he felt like he was acting out someone else's childish joke.
Once his scabbard was belted on it was only a matter of waiting for his guide. Presently it appeared, hovering out from behind a tree as if his ablutions had embarrassed it. Or should that be, had embarrassed her? In the forest gloom, the floating ball of light that had led him so many leagues from the village of his birth was clearer than it had been outside. There it was like the seething, colourless space above a campfire lit before dusk. Here it was a sharp white sphere, with moving shadows visible inside it. Japheth believed at least one of these to be a female form; but it was impossible to be sure, since the ball was always twenty paces ahead of him.
The ball danced off, flashing through the branches. As Japheth followed it the sound of running water grew steadily louder. Soon he could make out the point where the trickling, burbling sequence broke off and started again. He felt his tongue still dry in his mouth, remembered that his bottle was empty. He often wondered how his guide knew so much about him — when he needed food and water, for example, or craved adventure, or the company of women.
He came to the stream and crouched beside it. He noticed, as he cupped his hands in the glinting water, how the white foam where it crossed the rocks was fringed with cool aquatic green. He raised his hands to his mouth and drank. The water tasted of nothing at all.
He had no idea how long he had been travelling for. The days and nights were only changes of shading — pastel sunsets, sharp shadows in the afternoon, the grainy monochrome of animals hiding in the dark. And the seasons were nothing but a giant and ever changing pattern, shifting imperceptibly from green to russet to white. How different his life would have been if he had never left his village. His apprenticeship as a carpenter would be finished by now; he would be helping his father in the painterly light of the workroom, picking up pieces of wood, sawing or hammering them for a while, wiping his hands on his workclothes, picking up other pieces of wood and doing the same with them. But all that was over now. He had left it one sleepless night, while his family snored and he alone saw the glowing, beckoning orb that hovered into their bedroom.
Across the stream the forest thinned. Shafts of milky light slanted through the canopy to the undergrowth below. Birds called to each other in the cool silence but were never seen. He heard a rustling sound and eyes sharpened by months of foraging saw a movement in one of the bushes. A doe sprang out then froze with its head raised in profile. If only he still had his bow and arrows. If only they hadn't been transformed into venomous snakes, a cobra bulging in his hand, a nest of vipers crawling up his back. One shot was all it would take. One shot, one red teardrop weeping from the dappled flank, tracing the bumps and hollows of the taut ribs. As the doe scrambled into the forest, Japheth saw exactly the death it had eluded: first its legs folding beneath it; then the satisfying thud as it fell to one side; then its pretty head rearing up and flopping back down; then the quick movements of its chest, quicker and shallower until they stopped altogether; then nothing but one round eye, frozen open to the canopy above.
His stomach growled. He noticed that the ball of light was bobbing up and down above a patch of long grass. He was well enough versed in its kinetic language to take a closer look when he got there. Sure enough, mushrooms were sprouting between the stems, bulbous and pale beneath domed caps. Their flesh was certainly nourishing, but as he splashed them clean with water and crammed them into his mouth, he couldn't help imagining the smell of venison roasting on an open fire.
When he finished eating the light led him to a forest path. As soon as he reached it he accelerated to a jog, taking rolling, identical strides. Somewhere in the distance, sinister music began to play. The path led out of the forest and into the afternoon sunshine. At first, the undulations in the green countryside got mixed up with the throbbing in his eyes. He jogged on until the path met a wider road with a twittering hedgerow beside it. At the junction a crude wooden sign indicated that Bludthakh was ten furlongs up the hill.
“What ho sirrah!” said an orange-haired rustic who had appeared too suddenly to be avoided, “What brings you to these parts?”
“I don't know,” Japheth answered. And I don't want to, he thought.
The rustic seemed not to hear him. “If it's gold you're after you'd be better off down the hill, in Meadowvale. I've heard tell of a great champion there who challenges all comers to a trial of strength. They say any man who can trounce him will come away with a chest of bronze, a chest of silver, and as many florins as his britches will hold.”
“Fuck off,” said Japheth.
“Between you and me, it's a bad business up in Bludthakh.” The yokel's face darkened. His features were expressive and his lips moved in almost perfect synchrony with his words. “A lot of knights have travelled that way, looking for adventure, and precious few of them have ever returned. If you want my opinion you'd be better off down the hill, in Meadowvale. I've heard tell of a great champion there who challenges all comers to a trial of strength…”
It wasn't politeness that stopped Japheth from leaving the peasant — whose advice he was plainly meant to disregard. He was frozen into the conversation. As soon as it released him he sidestepped around the bumpkin and raced away.
He squinted at the horizon until he found his guide again, boiling a circle of blue sky. As he began to follow it up the hill, he felt something pitch forwards inside him, a silent but irrevocable collapse, as if a wall that had hemmed him in was gone forever, and the cold stones that had once oppressed him were scattered on the grass, basking on the grass. The music leapt up in tempo. Mixed in with it was the drumming of horses hooves. Three riders crested the hill, sun glinting cruelly on their black armour. Japheth drew his sword and the bright metal sang a note. Three arrows whistled towards him; one stuck through his shield and cut his side; it was nothing, he had plenty of strength. He sprinted towards the galloping horses. At exactly the same time, the riders put their bows away and wielded their weapons: a longsword, a horseman's axe, a spiked ball on a metal chain. Japheth aimed for the one with the ball and chain: that wouldn't be much use on foot. He raced up to the warrior's horse and cut its head off with a single blow. But he forgot to sidestep afterwards: the momentum of the decapitated animal sent him flying backwards, body flipping and spinning in mid-air, as if the laws of physics had been turbocharged. When he scrambled to his feet — unhurt, though spattered with blood — he could see the unhorsed rider rising too, dragging the spiked ball towards him. Japheth spun in a complicated circle with his sword flashing above him. A bolt of blue energy surged from his arm and down the blade as it smashed through the rider's helmet. The rider collapsed lifeless on top of his horse. Their bright red blood was already fading; soon their bodies would disappear.
The other warriors were wheeling their horses round and prepared for a charge. With a movement so fast and smooth it seemed like a glitch, a record skipping, Japheth sheathed his sword and pulled a scroll out of his knapsack. As the horses thundered towards him, he unrolled the parchment at arms length, mumbling in a guttural, ancient sounding language. When he spoke the last word the scroll disintegrated and a ball of fire grew between his hands. He drew his arms towards him and flung them out again. The fireball surged forwards and engulfed one of the riders. For an instant the horse's skeleton was visible through the flames; then it collapsed in a heap of white ashes, with the knight's weapons and his empty armour clattering around it.
The other rider reached him before he could draw his sword again. He was vulnerable for a few moments after casting a spell, crackly and detumescent. He watched in a state of dreamlike immobility as the blade of a long handled axe toppled towards him.
*
White streaks hovered into view, white rain running down a pane of black glass. Then the darkness closed around them. The streaks came back, finer this time, with a kind of grain, like marks made with a piece of chalk. Again the darkness swallowed them; but it was slower coming, and the streaks were quicker to return. Finally they resolved into tiny dots, millions of them, so many that if you looked closely enough they seemed to fill in all the black. In the brightest points Japheth saw the constellations his grandfather had named for him in the thick night of the village: the Wolf with the gleaming eye and the jagged row of teeth; the Harlot whose fingertip eternally beckoned, whose splayed nipples, one tinged faintly red, were galaxies apart; the Automobile that beamed its headlights all summer long into the mesmerised eyes of the Fox.
What were they, these pictures in the sky? Symbols of a lost cosmogony, lost as his own creation, when the world rushed in between his mother's legs. Stories from before the white time, when the cities burned and the trees lay flat, when the air turned to poison and the black sickness killed from within, eating away bones, organs, limbs.
Japheth sat up and wondered where the hell he was. In the pale starlight he could see nothing but a few shrubs and clumps of grass; and a faint silver outline of trees. He rose to his feet, realising that his arm was in a sling and a bandage had been wound around his head.
“Japheth,” said a chorus of female voices, close-pitched and overlapping, “Japheth you must rest now. You are wounded and must stay with us until you are healed.”
As the voices faded, some lingering longer than others, he realised that the speakers were all around him. They were balls of light like his guide. They swam through the air like luminous fish, converging, milling around, flashing apart again.
“Sit down Japheth, sit down and rest.”
With a boyish smirk, Japheth started walking. His leg must have been injured — trampled maybe, by the warrior's horse. There was a drag in his stride, quick, slow, quick, slow, as if a weight had been tied to one of his feet.
“Japheth, you must rest now. You must not walk any more. You are wounded Japheth, badly wounded. Let us heal you.”
He turned and saw the spheres following behind him, still darting here and there, but now drawn by his path as by a strong current. He was amazed by how perfectly the scenery was picked out in the pools of light beneath them: each blade of grass cast several shadows, each bush flared into colour — lilac, yellow, deep green — as they approached and dispelled the silvery gloom. He wanted to start walking again, to provoke another chorus of feminine concern; but he couldn't tear himself away.
The balls closed around him and light and shadows overlapped on his face, in the creases in his clothes. Squinting, he could see bodies inside the spheres. He could see them beating their tiny wings. Glymphs, he realised, remembering his childhood lessons, crosslegged on the floor of the village sage. One of the creatures that arrived in the white time, written on the material of the world like words on an empty page. The creatures arrived — or as some said, the old creatures fused and changed — and the machines disappeared, replaced by a new kind of magic, a new way of giving shape to the void. As the glymphs circled him they emitted warm, buzzing sounds, each at a slightly different pitch and with a slightly different quality. Heard together it was a steady hypnotic drone that — like the trickle of certain streams — seemed to contain more complex sounds inside it: a baby crying, a woman repeating a name, a bottle glugging into an empty cup.
After a while the buzzing stopped and the balls spread out and began to mill around again. He took a few steps and found that the drag was gone; his legs responded to his control as smoothly, as weightlessly, as ever.
“You have travelled a long way Japheth, and will travel much further before your quest is complete. It is good that you are sound of body and limb. But your spirit must be strong as well, for many challenges await you, and the hardest of them will not yield to the strength of your arm.”
Japheth didn't pay much attention to what was said to him. He never did, since the future unfolded of its own accord, and wherever it took him — muddy battlefields, galloping journeys, maidens' beds — was exactly where he had to be. But he felt something, a little shiver, when he realised that only one of the voices was speaking.
“Together, we have healed your body. Now I alone will heal your spirit.”
The other glymphs flew off towards the trees, trailing ribbons of light along the bumpy grass. The one who remained hovered closer, and closer, until he could see through her blinding halo the same winged shape he had first glimpsed, long ago, in the darkness of his bedroom.
“I have guided you so far Japheth — further than you ever thought you could go. Now it is I who must be guided.”
The ball of light began to grow and deform; its surface became more detailed, more textured, as it expanded outwards, as if an ever finer mesh were being stretched across it. It lengthened into a human figure, and seemed to dim and harden in that shape, a few last flashes playing across the matte skin. Then a girl was standing in front of him. She was naked, with golden hair and beautiful, translucent wings.
He took a step forwards and her hazel eyes gazed up at his. He could almost taste the warm skin on her neck, almost smell the scent in her hair, almost feel the softness of her lips. He stepped forwards again and now her face filled up his vision, the blurred, hyper-real face that only exists a moment before a kiss.
A high ugly sound, grinding and whirring; then the screen froze.
“Fuck!” shouted Jay, “Fuck! Not a-fucking-gain!”
For a moment he considered going back to the last save point and starting again; sometimes it was best to grit your teeth and do it straight away, since otherwise the boredom of retreading your steps became a sticking point, and it might be several days before you progressed any further. But he couldn't stomach it now. He flipped the joypad away and its ergonomic shape ricocheted off the carpet, upsetting a can whose thick black discharge was a mixture of ash and beer. Red eyes took in the arc of clutter around the sofa — sprigs of tobacco, rolling papers, dishes, cans — then the rest of the living room, more smeared than lit by the emanation of the round paper lampshade hanging from the ceiling. He looked back at the screen, at the glymph's face frozen in expectant close-up, and slipped one hand under the woollen blanket he had wrapped around himself. Maybe he could delay his return to reality for a few more minutes. Maybe Japheth could have one last, polychrome adventure. But it was no use: reality had crept inside him, the way the cold in the flat had crept inside his clothes.
He realised suddenly how hungry he was. The game had a strange, suppressant effect on him, like that of certain drugs; he often stopped playing with an almost painful urge to eat, or drink, or go to the toilet. He tugged the blanket off and rocked back a little on the sofa before pitching himself forwards, meaning business. A rush of sugary elation; then it went sickly, and a white tide sloshed around his eyeballs. For a while he seemed balanced only by a chance arrangement of his limbs, the way a thrown stick will sometimes land perfectly upright and stand for a moment before falling. Gradually his equilibrium returned, but whooping, acid coloured rings still drifted across his vision. He found himself staring at the floor with a blank expression, imagining what his prone body would look like among the beer cans and dirty plates.
When he reached the hall his head started to clear. But clarity brought something murky with it, a nervous buzz in the eyes and temples, a hum of strangeness around mundane, familiar objects. He was much more stoned than he'd thought.
A telephone sat on the empty cabinet by the wall. His eyes followed its long, jointed cable into a tangled heap on the floor. One of the first things he'd bought after moving in was an extension cord just long enough to reach his room. But he soon got sick of holding conversations squatting by the door and bought another cord that stretched all the way to his bed. This had particular benefits, he thought with a smirk, when he was talking to his girlfriend. His ex-girlfriend. The smirk vanished, and his thoughts moved on. He had asked his flatmate to halve the cost of the second cord with him. A reasonable request, given the high price of electrical goods, the trauma of leaving the flat in the afternoon to find a department store, and the certainty that his flatmate would use it too. But his flatmate would have none of it, and still made his once weekly call to his parents standing bolt upright in the hall: “Hello mum, Charlie here. Just checking in…” Jay could hear his unvarying greeting from wherever he was in the flat. Sometimes it made him laugh, and sometimes it made him violently, inexplicably angry.
The phone was that colour of clammy beige that Jay associated with personal computers and old man's raincoats. No-one ever cleaned it and the build up of fingerprints and dust had formed dark, sticky patches on the pale plastic. The labels on the scalloped buttons — one big number, three small letters — were rubbing off, leaving a grit of black specks behind them. Some kind of cracked plastic screen was clipped on above the dial pad, with a card of scribbled numbers half sticking out below it.
As Jay stared and stared at the phone, names ticked by in his head, entries in his mental directory. He could almost hear the dry little tunes that would play as he typed their numbers, the melodies of different pitched bleeps. He could even hear the voices on the other end, their first words squeaky with surprise: Alright Jay! How are you? Haven't heard from you in ages! That was how the conversations would begin, before they lost their way and began to stumble on his insecurities: yeah I'm still unemployed… and loving it… sponging off honest decent workers like yourself…
He stood there in the hall, breathing with his mouth open, the phone calls in his head becoming steadily more awkward. This is ridiculous, he told himself, ridiculous. I don't want to phone anyone anyway. What's the point? You waste twenty minutes talking to someone you never see any more, pretending to care about what they've been doing for the last six months, when all you really want to hear is Jay, it's me. I need to see you again. I know, it's crazy, but don't say anything or I might see sense and call it all off. Just go to your room and find your least smelly tee-shirt and put it on. Get your jacket, your keys, your wallet, all your armour, call a cab and come round to my flat. And Jay, make sure you bring some condoms…
Jay's lips were moving. He was touching his face. His fantasy ended abruptly and he found himself pedalling above an empty space, like a character from one of the cartoons he watched in the afternoon.
He dropped his hands to his sides. I must phone my mother, he told himself. It's too late now. Tomorrow I'll phone my mum.
He walked down the hall to his bedroom and stepped inside. When he switched the light on he flinched, actually flinched. It was a mess in there — dirty clothes, spreadeagled books, used plates — and it smelled like it looked. But the mess wasn't what shocked him.
Most of one wall was taken up by a rack of oblong black boxes, covered in knobs and dials. On either side were two large speakers and at the end of a snarl of cables a laptop computer sat open on a pine desk. This setup (it was a long time since he'd had the nerve to call it a studio) was his great extravagance, accounting for almost two years of savings from depressing temporary jobs. What he intended to do with it — as he'd once told anyone who would listen, and now winced to hear in the privacy of his own head — was Record the Soundtrack to the Modern World. The same day he'd told the temping agency he didn't want any more work he'd bought a sleek, capacious digital recorder and set out to capture every noise the city could make. He'd walked the streets, ridden the underground, hung around construction sites, fast food restaurants, gambling arcades, cafés. He'd drunk alone in Karaoke bars. He'd followed laughter into parks like a dog sniffing out another dog. He'd eavesdropped on lovers arguing in queues. He'd spent so long listening to traffic that he heard his own voice in it — his own voice repeating his own name. Roaming at night, he'd been accused of both buying and selling sexual favours. Once, on a patch of rubbish-strewn grass in the middle of a roundabout, he'd held the microphone to his chest and recorded the sound of his own beating heart.
The initial pain — the embarrassment — faded, and he looked away from the musical paraphernalia with an expression of disgust. He began to pick his way between the tee-shirts and socks. He was sure there was a packet of biscuits near his bed. And so there was: an empty one, eviscerated in a careful spiral. Its limp wrapping looked like a ribbon on the carpet, blue on one side and silver on the other.
“Fuck,” he muttered, “Fucking starving.”
He left his bedroom and headed for the kitchen.
When he got there he flicked the light switch. Nothing happened so he flicked it again. He remembered the bulb going now, the soft prink just after it flashed on, the little tide of despair washing over him in the dark. At least this way he wasn't confronted by his unwashed dishes. In the gloom, he crossed to the fridge and tried to open it. The rubber seal around the door seemed to get stronger with age; it took both hands to overcome the suction.
When he finally got the door open, the fridge light that — miraculously — still worked, illuminated a tub of margarine, a bundle of dead parsley with a rubber band doubled around it, a tube of tomato puree accordioned to its metal neck, a bottle of mineral water lying on its side. There wasn't any milk but it smelled like there had been, once.
Jay shut the fridge and thought for a moment. Then he reopened it. Nothing had occurred to him; it was just that his hunger had found itself in the same place again, with the same options open to it. He wondered vaguely if there was any sugar on the shelves. If so, he could pour it into the margarine and eat the fatty, crunchy paste straight from the tub. But he doubted it, since he'd finished his own pack weeks ago, and you-know-who never drank tea or coffee — or anything else for that matter, except bottles of still mineral water. The boring little cunt.
In a flash of inspiration he popped open the door of the freezer compartment. Inside, on the floor of the icy little cave, was a box of fish fingers. As he gazed at the aquatic packaging — background shading from turquoise to deep navy, platter of fish fingers in the foreground, bite taken from the end of one of them to reveal the succulent white interior — his heart began to pound. He would fry them with margarine in the pan with the web of scratches in its non-stick coating. He would season them with the last remnants of his ketchup, reluctant to detach itself from the glass bottle, requiring many slaps to the upturned base. White mist seeped from the freezer and touched his face. He could almost smell the bread crumbs going crispy and golden-brown, the hot, fishy pulp oozing out between them.
He closed the freeezer compartment. An unpleasant memory had sliced through him. “Stop drinking my grapefruit juice,” the note under the carton of grapefruit juice had said, in his flatmate's small, almost childishly neat hand. And then, as he replaced the carton and hastily closed the fridge, his flatmate's face appearing at the kitchen door (waiting for me, Jay realised afterwards, listening). When Jay thought about it now, it wasn't his flatmate's trick that enraged him, or even the flicker of triumph on his normally expressionless lips. It was his rightness. His sheer pedantic, implacable rightness. Why was it so important to some people to be right? What did it matter whose juice it was anyway? He wouldn't care if his flatmate drank his juice, or anyone else did for that matter — it was only fruit juice for fuck's sake. Although, grapefruit juice was quite expensive, especially the nice kind his flatmate bought, with the little bits of zest in it. But that wasn't the point. The point was that everyone was so obsessed with being right they forgot to think about what really mattered, like emotions and creativity and… honesty and things like that.
He was pretty sure the fish fingers had been opened. Open, but mostly full: ripe for the picking. Anyway, thought Jay, who cares if he notices? I'll leave him a note and replace them tomorrow. He reopened the freezer compartment. Frozen condensation had formed an intricate pattern on the surface of the box. It reminded him of the icing on his eleventh birthday cake, the one in the shape of white record, complete with grooves and a food-colouring label (Happy Birthday Jay! By The Happy Birthday Band). Surely, thought Jay, he'd forgive me a few fish fingers. His flatmate had never borrowed anything of his; they didn't even use the same rolls of toilet paper. Jay closed the freezer compartment. Edible mirages appeared in front of him, whole sequences of lies and self-justifications unfolded, ready made, in his head. He opened the freezer compartment again.
