Cloud Atlas

  I looked at my watch. “Three o’clock this afternoon.”

  “Forget it.” Denholme put down his net. “File for bankruptcy. Reynard’ll do the papers for you, he’s a good man. A hard bullet to bite, I should know, but it’ll get your creditors off your back. The law is clear—”

  “Law? The only experience my creditors have of the law is squatting over a can in an overcrowded cell.”

  “Then go to ground.”

  “These people are very, very well connected with the ground.”

  “Not beyond the M25 they aren’t, I bet. Stay with friends.”

  Friends? I crossed off those to whom I owed money, the dead, the disappeared-down-time’s-rabbit-hole, and I was left with …

  Denholme made his final offer. “I can’t lend you money. I don’t have any. But I’m owed a favor or two by a comfortable place where you could possibly lie low for a while.”

  Temple of the Rat King. Ark of the Soot God. Sphincter of Hades. Yes, King’s Cross Station, where, according to Knuckle Sandwich, a blow job costs only five quid—any of the furthest-left three cubicles in the men’s lavvy downstairs, twenty-four hours a day. I called Mrs. Latham to explain I would be in Prague for a three-week meeting with Václav Havel, a lie whose consequences stuck with me like herpes. Mrs. Latham wished me bon voyage. She could handle the Hogginses. Mrs. Latham could handle the Ten Plagues of Egypt. I don’t deserve her, I know it. I often wonder why she’s stayed at Cavendish Publishing. It isn’t for what I pay her.

  I navigated the array of ticket types on the ticket machine: Day Return with Railcard Off Peak, Cheap Day Single Without Railcard on Peak, and on, and on, but which, oh, which do I need? A menacing finger tapped my shoulder and I jumped a mile—it was only a little old lady advising me that returns are cheaper than singles. I assumed she was doolally but, stone the ruddy crows, ’twas so. I slid in a banknote with our monarch’s head up, then down, then front first, then back first, but each time the machine spat it out.

  So I joined the queue for a human ticket seller. Thirty-one people were ahead of me, yes, I counted every one. The ticket sellers drifted in and out from their counters much as the fancy took them. A looped advertisement on a screen urged me to invest in a stair-lift. Finally, finally, my turn was up: “Hello, I need a ticket to Hull.”

  The ticket woman toyed with her chunky ethnic rings. “Leaving when?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “As in ‘today’?”

  “ ‘Today’ usually means ‘as soon as possible,’ yes.”

  “I ain’t sellin’ you a ticket for today. That’s them winders over there. This winder is advance tickets only.”

  “But the red flashing sign told me to come to your counter.”

  “Couldn’t have done. Move along, now. You’re holding up the queue.”

  “No, that sign ruddy well did send me to this counter! I’ve been queuing for twenty minutes!”

  She looked interested for the first time. “You want me to change the rules for your benefit?”

  Anger sparked in Timothy Cavendish like forks in microwaves. “I want you to evolve problem-solving intelligence and sell me a ticket to Hull!”

  “I ain’t standing for being addressed in that tone.”

  “I’m the ruddy customer! I won’t be addressed like that! Get me your ruddy supervisor!”

  “I am my supervisor.”

  Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue.

  “Oy!” yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. “There’s a fackin’ queue!”

  Never apologize, advises Lloyd George. Say it again, only this time, ruder. “I know there’s a ‘fackin’ queue’! I already queued in it once and I am not going to queue again just because Nina Simone over there won’t sell me a ruddy ticket!”

  A colored yeti in a clip-on uniform swooped. “Wassa bovver?”

  “This old man here reckons his colostomy bag entitles him to jump the queue,” said the skinhead, “and make racist slurs about the lady of Afro-Caribbean extraction in the advance-travel window.”

  I couldn’t believe I was hearing this.

  “Look, matey”—the yeti addressed me with condescension reserved for the handicapped or elderly—”we got queues in this country to keep things fair, see, and if you don’t like it you should go back to where you come from, getit?”

  “Do I look like a ruddy Egyptian? Do I? I know there’s a queue! How? Because I already queued in this queue, so—”

  “This gentleman claims you ain’t.”

  “Him? Will he still be a ‘gentleman’ when he daubs ‘Asylum Scrounger’ on your housing-association flat?”

  His eyeballs swelled, they really did. “The Transport Police can boot you off the premises, or you can join this queue like a member of a civilized society. Whichever is fine by me. Jumping queues is not fine by me.”

  “But if I queue all over again I’ll miss my connections!”

  “Tough,” he enunciated, “titty!”

  I appealed to the people behind that Sid Rotten look-alike. Maybe they had seen me in the queue, maybe they hadn’t, but nobody met my eye. England has gone to the dogs, oh, the dogs, the ruddy dogs.

  Over an hour later London shunted itself southward, taking the Curse of the Brothers Hoggins with it. Commuters, these hapless souls who enter a lottery of death twice daily on Britain’s decrepit railways, packed the dirty train. Airplanes circled in holding patterns over Heathrow, densely as gnats over a summer puddle. Too much matter in this ruddy city.

  Still. I felt the exhilaration of a journey begun, and I let my guard drop. A volume I once published, True Recollections of a Northern Territories Magistrate, claims that shark victims experience an anesthetic vision of floating away, all danger gone, into the Pacific blue, at the very moment they are being minced in that funnel of teeth. I, Timothy Cavendish, was that swimmer, watching London roll away, yes, you, you sly, toupeed quizmaster of a city, you and your tenements of Somalians; viaducts of Kingdom Brunel; malls of casualized labor; strata of soot-blitzed bricks and muddy bones of Doctors Dee, Crippen et al.; hot glass office buildings where the blooms of youth harden into aged cacti like my penny-pinching brother.

  Essex raised its ugly head. When I was a scholarship boy at the local grammar, son of a city-hall toiler on the make, this county was synonymous with liberty, success, and Cambridge. Now look at it. Shopping malls and housing estates pursue their creeping invasion of our ancient land. A North Sea wind snatched frilly clouds in its teeth and scarpered off to the Midlands. The countryside proper began at last. My mother had a cousin out here, her family had a big house, I think they moved to Winnipeg for a better life. There! There, in the shadow of that DIY warehouse, once stood a row of walnut trees where me and Pip Oakes—a childhood chum who died aged thirteen under the wheels of an oil tanker—varnished a canoe one summer and sailed it along the Say. Sticklebacks in jars. There, right there, around that bend we lit a fire and cooked beans and potatoes wrapped in silver foil! Come back, oh, come back! Is one glimpse all I get? Hedgeless, featureless fields. Essex is Winnipeg, now. Stubble was burnt, and the air tasted of crisp bacon sarnies. My thoughts flew off with other fairies, and we were past Saffron Walden when the train juddered to a halt. “Um …,” said the intercom. “John, is this on? John, what button do I press?” Cough. “SouthNet Trains regrets that this service will make an unscheduled stop at the next station due to … a missing driver. This unscheduled stop will continue for the duration that it takes to locate an appropriate driver. SouthNet Trains assures you we are striving hard”—I clearly discerned a background snigger!—”to restore our normal excellent standard of service.” Rail rage chain-reactioned down the compartments, though in our age crimes are not committed by criminals conveniently at hand but by executive pens far beyond the mob’s reach, back in London’s postmodern HQs of glass and steel. Half the mob owns shares in what it would pound to atoms, anyway.

 
; So there we sat. I wished I had brought something to read. At least I had a seat, and I wouldn’t have given it up for Helen Keller. The evening was lemon blue. Trackside shadows grew monolithic. Commuters sent calls to families on mobile phones. I wondered how that dodgy Australian magistrate knew what flashed through the minds of the shark-eaten. Lucky express trains with nonmissing drivers shot past. I needed the loo, but it didn’t bear imagining. I opened my briefcase for a bag of Werner’s toffees but came up with Half-Lives—The First Luisa Rey Mystery. I leafed through its first few pages. It would be a better book if Hilary V. Hush weren’t so artsily-fartsily Clever. She had written it in neat little chapteroids, doubtless with one eye on the Hollywood screenplay. Static squealed in the speakers. “This is a passenger announcement. SouthNet Trains regrets that as a suitable driver for this train cannot be located we will proceed to Little Chesterford station, where a complimentary coach will transport passengers on to Cambridge. Those able to are recommended to make alternative travel arrangements, as the coach will not reach Little Chesterford station [how that name chimed in my memory!] for … an unknown duration. Further details can be found on our website.” The train crawled a mile of twilight. Bats and wind-borne rubbish overtook us. Who was driving now if there wasn’t a driver?

  Stop, shudder, doors open. The abler-bodied streamed off the train, over the footbridge, leaving me and a couple of taxidermist’s castoffs to limp in their wake at quarter speed. I heaved myself up the steps and paused for breath. There I was. Standing on the footbridge of Little Chesterford station. Ye gods, of all the rural stations for a marooning. The bridle path to Ursula’s old house still skirted the cornfield. Not much else did I recognize. The Sacred Barn of the Longest Snog was now Essex’s Premier Fitness Club. Ursula had met me in her froggy Citroën that night during reading week in our first term, right … on this triangle of gravel, here. How bohemian, Young Tim had thought, to be met by a woman in a car. I was Tutankhamen in my royal barge, rowed by Nubian slaves to the Temple of Sacrifice. Ursula drove me the few hundred yards to Dockery House, commissioned in Art Nouveau times by a Scandiwegian consul. We had the place to ourselves, while Mater and Pater were in Greece holidaying with Lawrence Durrell, if memory serves. (“Memory Serves.” Duplicitous couplet.)

  Four decades later the beams of headlights from executive cars in the station car park lit up a freak plague of daddy longlegs, and one fugitive publishing gentleman in a flapping raincoat striding around a field now lying fallow for EU subsidies. You would think a place the size of England could easily hold all the happenings in one humble lifetime without much overlap—I mean, it’s not ruddy Luxembourg we live in—but no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters. Dockery House was still standing, isolated from its neighbors by a privet fence. How opulent the building had felt after my own parents’ bland box of suburbia—One day, I promised, I’m going to live in a house like this. Another promise I’ve broken; at least that one was only to myself.

  I skirted the edge of the property, down an access road to a building site. A sign read: HAZLE CLOSE—HIGHLY PRIZED EXECUTIVE HOMES IN THE HEART OF ENGLAND. Upstairs at Dockery, lights were on. I imagined a childless couple listening to a wireless. The old stained-glass door had been replaced by something more burglarproof. That reading week I’d entered Dockery ready to peel off my shameful virginity, but I’d been so in awe of my Divine Cleopatra, so nervous, so eyeballed up on her father’s whiskey, so floppy with green sap that, well, I’d rather draw a veil over the embarrassment of that night, even at forty years’ remove. Very well, forty-seven years’ remove. That same white-leafed oak had scratted at Ursula’s window as I attempted to perform, long after I could decently pretend I was still warming up. Ursula had a gramophone record of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto in her bedroom, that room there, where the electric candle glows in the window.

  To this day I cannot hear Rachmaninoff without flinching.

  The odds of Ursula still living at Dockery House were zilch, I knew. Last I heard she was running a PR office in Los Angeles. Nonetheless, I squeezed myself through the evergreen hedge and pressed my nose up against the unlit, uncurtained dining room window, trying to peer in. That autumn night long ago Ursula had served a blob of grilled cheese on a slice of ham on a breast of chicken. Right there—right here. I could still taste it. I can still taste it as I write these words.

  Flash!

  The room was lit electric marigold, and in waltzed—backwards, luckily for me—a little witch with red corkscrew curls. “Mummy!” I half-heard, half-lip-read through the glass. “Mummy!” and in came Mummy, with the same corkscrew curls. This being proof enough for me that Ursula’s family had long vacated the house, I backtracked into the shrubbery—but I turned once more and resumed my spying because … well, because, ahem, je suis un homme solitaire. Mummy was repairing a broken broomstick while the girl sat on the table swinging her legs. An adult werewolf came in and removed his mask, and oddly, though not so oddly I suppose, I recognized him—that current-affairs TV presenter, one of Felix Finch’s tribe. Jeremy Someone, Heathcliff eyebrows, terrier manners, you know the chap. He took some insulation tape from the Welsh dresser drawer and muscled in on the broomstick repair job. Then Grandma entered this domestic frieze, and damn me once, damn me twice, damn me always make it nice, ’twas Ursula. The Ursula. My Ursula.

  Behold that spry, elderly lady! In my memory she hadn’t aged a day—what makeup artist had savaged her dewy youth? (The same one who savaged yours, Timbo.) She spoke, and her daughter and granddaughter giggled, yes, giggled, and I giggled too … What? What did she say? Tell me the joke! She stuffed a red stocking with newspaper balls. A devil’s tail. She attached it to her posterior with a safety pin, and a memory from a university Halloween Ball cracked on the hard rim of my heart and the yolk dribbled out—she’d dressed like a devilette then, too, she’d put on red face paint, we’d kissed all night, just kissed, and in the morning we found a builders’ café that sold dirty mugs of strong, milky tea and enough eggs to fill, to kill, the Swiss Army. Toast and hot canned tomatoes. HP Sauce. Be honest, Cavendish, was any other breakfast in your life ever so delectable?

  So drunk was I on nostalgia, I ordered myself to leave before I did anything stupid. A nasty voice just a few feet away said this—”Don’t move a muscle or I’ll mackasser you and put you in a stew!”

  Shocked? Jet-assisted Vertical Ruddy Takeoff! Luckily my would-be butcherer was not a day older than ten, and his chain saw’s teeth were cardboard, but his bloodied bandages were rather effective. In a low voice, I told him so. He wrinkled his face at me. “Are you Grandma Ursula’s friend?”

  “Once upon a time, yes, I was.”

  “What have you come to the party as? Where’s your costume?”

  Time to leave. I edged back into the evergreen. “This is my costume.”

  He picked his nose. “A dead man digged up from the churchyard?”

  “Charmed, but no. I’ve come as the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

  “But it’s Halloween, not Christmas.”

  “No!” I slapped my forehead. “Really?”

  “Yeah …”

  “Then I’m ten months late! This is terrible! I’d better get back before my absence is noticed—and remarked upon!”

  The boy did a cartoon kung-fu pose and waved his chain saw at me. “Not so fast, Green Goblin! You’re a trespasser! I’m telling the police of you!”

  War. “Tell-tale-tit, are you? Two can play at that game. If you tell on me, I’ll tell my friend the Ghost of Christmas Future where your house is, and do you know what he’ll do to you?”

  The wide-eyed shitletto shook his head, shaken and stirred.

  “When your family is all tucked up asleep in your snug little beds, he’ll slide into your house through the crack under the door and eat—your—puppy!” The venom in my bile duct pumped fast. “He’ll leave its curly tail under your pillow and you’ll get blamed. Your little friends wi
ll all scream, ‘Puppy slayer!’ whenever they see you coming. You’ll grow old and friendless and die, alone, miserably, on Christmas morning half a century from now. So if I were you, I wouldn’t breathe a word to anyone about seeing me.”

  I pushed myself through the hedge before he could take it all in. As I was heading back to the station along the pavement, the wind carried his sob: “But I don’t even have a puppy …”

  I hid behind Private Eye in the health center’s Wellness Café, which was doing a fine trade with us maroonees. I half-expected a furious Ursula to turn up with her grandchild and a local bobby. Private lifeboats came to rescue the stockbrokers. Old Father Timothy offers this advice to his younger readers, included for free in the price of this memoir: conduct your life in such a way that, when your train breaks down in the eve of your years, you have a warm, dry car driven by a loved one—or a hired one, it matters not—to take you home.

  A venerable coach arrived three Scotches later. Venerable? Ruddy Edwardian. I had to endure chatty students all the way to Cambridge. Boyfriend worries, sadistic lecturers, demonic housemates, reality TV, strewth, I had no idea children of their age were so hyperactive. When I finally reached Cambridge station, I looked for a telephone box to tell Aurora House not to expect me until the following day, but the first two telephones were vandalized (in Cambridge, I ask you!), and only when I got to the third did I look at the address and see that Denholme had neglected to write the number. I found a hotel for commercial travelers next to a launderette. I forget its name, but I knew from its reception that the place was a crock of cat crap, and as usual my first impression was spot on. I was too ruddy whacked to shop around for something nicer, however, and my wallet was too starved. My room had high windows with blinds I couldn’t lower because I am not twelve feet tall. The khaki pellets in the bathtub were indeed mouse droppings, the shower knob came off in my hand, and the hot water was tepid. I fumigated the room with cigar smoke and lay on my bed trying to recall the bedrooms of all my lovers, in order, looking down the mucky telescope of time. Prince Rupert and the Boys failed to stir. I felt strangely unconcerned with the idea of the Hoggins Bros. plundering my flat back in Putney. Must be lean pickings compared to most of their heists, if Knuckle Sandwich is anything to go by. A few nice first editions, but little else of value. My television died the night George Bush II snatched the throne and I haven’t dared replace it. Madame X took back her antiques and heirlooms. I ordered a triple Scotch from room service—damn me if I’d share a bar with a cabal of salesmen boasting about boobs and bonuses. When my treble whiskey finally came it was actually a stingy double, so I said so. The ferrety adolescent just shrugged. No apology, just a shrug. I asked him to lower my blind, but he took one look and huffed, “Can’t reach that!” I gave him a frosty “That will be all, then,” instead of a tip. He broke wind as he left, poisonously. I read more of Half-Lives but fell asleep just after Rufus Sixsmith was found murdered. In a lucid dream I was looking after a little asylum-seeker boy who begged for a go in one of those rides in the corners of supermarkets you put fifty p into. I said, “Oh, all right,” but when the child climbed out he had turned into Nancy Reagan. How could I explain that to his mother?