quarry by a slow gravitational inevitability.
Instead of following the lane and risking a beating at the hands of Pete
and Geraint, he took the steep, rocky path that followed one of the streams up
onto the hills and looped around to the top of the quarry.
The quarry itself was a deep bowl-shaped depression scooped from the
hill’s flank. Its sides were steep slopes of scree tangled with brambles, brown,
tinder-dry bracken, and yellow-flowering gorse.
When he reached the edge, he dropped to his stomach and wriggled
forward. From up here, he could see everything, from the old black gates with
their desultory curls of barbed wire, to the rust-red roof of the corrugated iron
shed. Bees droned back and forth on incomprehensible errands. An old,
burned-out car lay swamped in a patch of nettles, the glass long-gone from its
windows, fading layers of graffiti carved into its paintwork and sprayed across
its roof and bonnet. It all lay spread before him, pinned and sweltering beneath
the weight of the hot, still air.
Kerri stood by the door of the shack. She’d taken off the borrowed jacket,
and it lay draped over a rock. Her sunglasses were still in place, and she had a
cigarette dangling from her teeth.
Glyn stood in the doorway. His two lieutenants, having been dismissed
by their leader, were in the process of sauntering back down the lane in search
of fresh mischief. As Lee watched, Glyn circled Kerri’s waist with his slab-like
hands and bent to plant his lips against her throat.
Lee felt that kiss like a rail spike to his chest. His eyes filled with tears,
and he dropped his forehead onto his arms.
He’d thought they were friends and comrades. How could she have gone
over to the enemy and so thoroughly betrayed him?
He lay there for while, immobilised by his dejection. He couldn’t watch,
but neither could he bring himself to leave.
Down in the valley, the village huddled around its ruined castle. He
thought of running for help, but whom in that ill-disposed encampment would
he ask? He had no other friends. His parents were both at their respective jobs,
and Kerri’s father was at work in his fields on the opposite side of the valley. If
he tried to reach any of them, whatever was going to happen in the quarry
would be long over by the time they could get here. There was, he realised for
the first time in his life, nobody who could help him. Never had he felt so
completely and wretchedly alone.
Without wanting to, he looked back down into the quarry. Glyn had his
right hand on Kerri’s t-shirt, cupping her left breast. His other hand gripped
her upper arm. He whispered something in her ear, and then stepped back,
pulling her into the shadowy interior of the corrugated iron hut.
No!
Tears ran down Lee’s face. He clenched his fists and drummed his feet
against the grass. He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles.
12
How could this be happening?
He rolled onto his back and looked up at the blue vault of the sky. The air
seemed to shimmer with the heat. Flies and other insects buzzed back and
forth. Unbidden, his mind filled with obscene imaginings, and he held his fists
to his head and moaned. He felt hot and sick and sweaty, and his guts seemed
to be squirming around with a life of their own. He knew with a clear and
anguished certainty that, after this afternoon, nothing would ever be quite the
same. A threshold had been irrevocably breached and there would be, and
could never be, any turning back.
Lee heard laughter coming from inside the hut. Urgent whispers. The
unzipping of clothes. Without knowing quite how or why, he found himself
standing at the top of the steep scree slope with a rock in his hand.
“Stop it!”
His hand whipped around, sending the rock arcing down into the quarry.
With appalled fascination, he watched it fall towards the hut’s iron roof.
Clang!
The sounds stopped. Lee swallowed but stood his ground. Red-faced,
Glyn came running out into the light. He had his shirt off and his jeans were
hanging open. He held them up with one hand while using the other to shade
his eyes.
up there.”
“Leave her alone!”
“Or what?” The older boy zipped and buckled his jeans. “What are you
going to do, throw stones?”
Behind him, Kerri appeared in the doorway. Her sunglasses were
missing. She held her blouse closed. Her skin looked cold and white in the
sunlight.
Glyn turned to her.
“Get back in there.”
“You leave him alone.”
She tried to push past, but he blocked her way.
“Go on, get back inside.”
Glyn was a good head taller than her. He reached big hands for her
shoulders but with a laugh, Kerri skipped back through the doorway.
“Go home, Lee,” she called. “I’m all right. Everything’s fine.”
Lee felt himself flush with heat. He could hear the laughter in her voice.
His palms prickled. Without thinking, he scooped up another, bigger rock, and
threw it with all his strength.
As soon as it left his fingers, he saw its trajectory, inevitable and
unstoppable. It was a black asteroid tumbling through empty space, moving
with infinite slowness. Lee felt his blood pulse in his ears once.
Twice.
Three times.
13
Intent on following Kerri, Glyn, perhaps warned by some tingling
instinct, glanced up.
The rock caught him across the bridge of the nose. The thump of the
impact seemed to echo off the hills. The force of it snapped his head back on
his neck. For a long, sickening moment, he remained standing, face raised to
the sky, mouth open. Then he fell to his knees, and then onto his front. His jaw
hit the dirt floor with a crack and his head lolled over to the side. His legs shook
once and were still.
Kerri came up the slope. She was fastening her jeans and zipping her jacket.
Straightening her spiky hair.
She put her hands on either side of Lee’s face, and her eyes burrowed into
his. First one, then the other, as if somewhere in the black mirrors of his pupils
she might find an answer that made sense of what had just happened. Her
fingertips were like talons against his scalp. Then, with a cry of exasperation,
she let go and flopped down beside him. He watched her light a cigarette.
“Nobody ever finds out about this,” she said, speaking around the smoke.
Her hands were shaking so hard she could hardly hold her lighter. “Do you
understand? You can’t tell anybody.”
Lee wasn’t really listening. He couldn’t even feel the sun on his skin. In
his head, he was standing on the battlements of the old ruined tower while the
world fell apart beneath him. He felt like a husk, as if his insides had been
scraped and hollowed by a flint axe, and his skin wrapped and sewn around
the resulting void.
Everything was wrong.
He had become one of the barbarians.
14
2.
WHEN LEE TURNED eighteen, he escaped to college. He packed up his comic
collection and keyboard, and went to study computer science at Bristol
University, where his fellow students often mistook his introversion for
aloofness. He lost touch with Kerri, who’d fled to start a new life in Manchester.
He wore a different superhero t-shirt every day, and let his hair grow shaggy
and unkempt.
After graduation, he got a job with a software development company
based in a warehouse redevelopment by the docks. Rather than return home to
his small border town, he’d decided to stay in Bristol. He moved into a
Victorian town house in the Hotwells area of the city, which he shared with
three of his coworkers. Situated halfway up one of the steep terraced streets
behind the Mardyke pub, the house had a patio area at the rear that overlooked
part of the harbour. Lee took the attic room on the fourth floor, which was
linked to the rest of the house by a precipitous and winding wooden staircase.
From the window, he could see into the gardens of the neighbouring houses,
and right across the patchwork rooftops of south Bristol to the sinuous curves
of Dundry Hill and the planes lowering on their approaches to the airport. He
had his bed on one side of the room, his desk and computer on the other. A
fading spider plant stood in a pot on the windowsill. Software manuals and
superhero comics filled the bookshelves beside the desk. Newspapers and
gaming magazines lay stacked on the carpet beside the door in gently
subsiding piles. The Led Zeppelin poster pinned to the back of the door had
been there when he moved in. This was the highest room in the house, and it
was his sanctuary - a tower from which he could look out at night and see the
barbarians going hither and thither about their business.
In August, a couple of months after moving into the house, he found out
that his parents were going through a divorce. His mother phoned one wet and
thundery Sunday afternoon to tell him. His father, always vague and distant
and never really suited to a life beyond the confines of his own research, had
apparently taken up with his assistant, a student from Wyoming.
“Of course, she’s younger than you.” Through the receiver, his mother’s
voice sounded weary and distant, and stripped of its usual bite. “But what
really bothers me is that I welcomed her into my house. Time after time, she sat
at my table and ate my food. Supposedly she was helping your father with his
book. At least, that’s what they said they were doing.”
Lee stood by the window, holding the phone to his ear, watching
raindrops spot and slither on the glass. The weight of the rain seemed to bow
the city, bending over its streetlamps and sagging its roofs.
“Mum, I’m sure-”
“Not that I blame him, of course. Not really. He and I haven’t been
getting along sexually for years. Not since you were born. And now that you’ve
left home, I guess there’s no reason for either of us to keep pretending we’re
happy.”
15
“So, it’s my fault?”
“Not at all, darling. You mustn’t think that. I just wish he’d been open
about it instead of skulking around behind my back like a furtive teenager.”
Lee switched the phone to his other ear. Floorboards creaked and pipes
clanked in the wall as one of his housemates ran the hot tap in the communal
bathroom.
“Where’s Dad now?”
“He’s gone. He packed a suitcase and left. I think he’s staying at her
place.”
“What about his books?”
“He says he doesn’t need them. He left his job at the University and says
he’s going to become an artist, if you can believe that. They both are.”
Lee closed his eyes.
When he reopened them, the sky was dark and the phone dead in his
hand. He had no idea how much time had passed. The window opened onto a
flat section of roof, maybe a metre wide. He climbed out and stood there in the
drifting rain, looking towards the orange lights of the city centre. Lightning
danced on the horizon. At the bottom of the hill, a police armed response van
cruised the main street. Protective metal grilles covered its headlights and
windscreen, and its bodywork looked black and solid against the gaudy reds
and blues of the kebab shops and taxi offices. The rain ran down his cheeks and
dripped from his nose and chin. Four storeys below, the patio’s crazy paving
lay black and slick, and encrusted with weeds like the skin of a mythical sea
kraken.
Thunder grumbled and rolled.
All it would take would be one step…
He raised his face to the sky, imagining the Universe beyond the orange,
glowering clouds. Lightning flashed again, closer this time. All the hairs stood
up on his arms.
His childhood memories were as remote as a picnic scene on the far side
of a wide river, glimpsed through a willow’s tresses: bright, but unreachably
distant.
He felt like a husk, as if his insides had been scraped and hollowed by a
flint axe, and his skin wrapped and sewn around the resulting void.
They say we’re the sum of our memories, he thought. That our
remembrances shape our personalities—but what happens to us when we
forget something?
The thunder boomed again, so boisterously loud that he felt the sound
shake his lungs and diaphragm.
When our memories are lost or taken from us, what remains?
Hail pattered onto the tiles behind him.
Who do we become?
THE NEXT MORNING, he woke fully clothed on his bed. He’d left the window
open. The sill was wet with rain, but the storm itself had passed. From where
16
he lay, he could see a silver vapour trail high in the crisp morning sky. The
summer air smelled of hibiscus and damp earth.
He got up and showered and changed into a fresh t-shirt. Then he set off
on the fifteen-minute walk along the harbourside to his office. Gulls wheeled
in the air. Yellow-painted ferries chugged back and forth, the sun dancing off
the waves pushed up by their bows.
He passed the remains of a beer bottle, which lay smashed in the gutter
by the bus stop. On the wall of the newsagents on the corner next his office, an
unseen hand had spray-painted ‘life goes wrong’ in wobbly pink letters.
The warehouse that accommodated his office had originally been built
for the tea trade in the 1830s. It had lain fallow for some years as the port
declined but had then been reborn in the building boom at the start of the
Millennium. Pushing through the main glass doors into the pine-floored
reception area, he eschewed the open cage-like elevator in favour of a black
wrought-iron spiral stair and pulled himself up to the second floor.
Its founders had named Green Sphinx Enterprises after a breed of moth
and used a stylised rendition of the insect as its logo. GSE, as its staff called it,
was a medium-sized software provider employing somewhere in the region of
fifty people and turning over just under five million pounds per year. Its CEO
&nb
sp; was an accountant-turned-entrepreneur in his early forties named Dave, who
was all smiles and hair products, and whose left ear bore a single platinum
stud.
Each employee had his or her own ergonomically curved pine-coloured
desk. They were arranged in groups of four, all facing inwards so that
everybody was looking at the back of everybody else’s monitors. Cardboard
coffee cups, old pens, cracked rubber stress toys and other detritus
accumulated in the no-man’s land at the centre, around the holes at the back of
each desk into which the phone and power cables vanished.
Lee’s desk was at the back of the room, and his chair was sandwiched
between it and the rear brick wall. While the other employees jostled for
positions closer to the windows at front of the building, he’d staked this one as
his own because it was the only one in the room at which he could be sure no-
one was looking over his shoulder. No one could sneak up on him here, and
nobody could see what it was he was doing.
He’d stacked software manuals and ring binders on either side of his monitor,
and superhero action figures stood guard beside his keyboard. He drank his
coffee from a NASA mug and all his notes were written into a black, hardcover
notebook.
This early in the day, few of his co-workers were in evidence. They
tended to drift in mid-morning and work until nine or ten at night, so he had
the place pretty much to himself, which usually meant he’d spend an hour or
so working on his secret project, the space simulation he’d been dreaming
about since he was fourteen. This morning, however, he couldn’t bring himself
to open the file. All his enthusiasm for the project had gone and the whole idea
seemed suddenly childish and self-indulgent. Instead, he sat there staring into
the middle distance.
17
He was twenty-two years old and he felt like an orphan.