Ian R. Macleod - The Summer Isles.pdf - Ian R. Macleod - margozap

Ian R. MacLeod

THE SUMMER ISLES

World Fantasy Award 1999

One

On this as on almost every Sunday evening, I find a message from my acquaintance on

the wall of the third cubicle of the Gents beside Christ Church Meadow. It's two thumbnails

dug into the sleek green paint this week, which means the abandoned shed by the

allotments past the rugby grounds in half an hour's time. A trail of other such marks run

across the cubicle wall; what amounts nowadays to my entire sexual life. Here-Oh, happy,

dangerous days!-is the special triple-mark that meant a back room in the hotel of a

sympathetic but understandably wary proprietor. He's gone now, of course, has Larry

Black, like so many others. Quietly taken one night for the shocks and needles of the

treatment centers in the Isle of Man.

I pull the chain, clunk back the lock, and step out into the sweet Jeyes Fluid air. Placed

above me on the wall as I wash my hands, with what, if you didn't know this country, you

would surely imagine to be ironic intent, hangs a photograph of John Arthur. He gazes

warmly across his desk, looking younger than his forty-nine years despite his grey hair. The

photograph is brass-framed, well-polished. Of course, no one has dared to deface it.

Outside along St. Giles, twilight has descended, yet the warmth of this early summer

day remains. A convoy of trucks lumbers around the cobbles, filled with bewildered-

looking conscripts on their way to the sprawling camps in the southeast of England. A few

of the newer or expensively refurbished pubs already boom with patriotic songs. I pause to

relight my pipe as I pass St. John's, then lean spluttering against a wall and cough up out a

surprising quantity of stringy phlegm, watched over by a small but disapproving gargoyle.

Odd, disgusting, habit-hawking and spitting. Something that, until recently, I'd only

associated with old men.

There's still some life out on the playing fields. Undergrads are wandering. There are

groups. Couples. Limbs entwine. Soft laughter flowers. The occasional cigarette flares.

Glancing back at the towers of this city laid in shadows of hazy gold against the last flush

of the sun, it's all so impossibly beautiful. It looks, in fact, exactly like an Empire Alliance

poster. Greater Britain Awake! I smile at the thought, and wonder for a moment if there

isn't some trace of reality still left in the strange dream that we in this country now seem to

be living. Turning, sliding my hand into my pocket to nurse the encouraging firmness of

my anticipatory erection, I cross the bridge over the Cherwell as Old Tom begins his long

nightly chime.

Despite all the back-to-nature and eat-your-own greens propaganda that Home

Secretary Mosley has been peddling, the shed at the far end of the allotments and the plots

it once served remain abandoned, cupped as they are in a secret hollow, lost by the men

who went to the War and never came back again. I lever open the door and duck inside.

Tools and seeds and sweet dry manure. But no sign yet of my acquaintance as the

floorboards creak beneath my feet. The darkness, even as my eyes grow accustomed to the

gloom, becomes near-absolute as night settles outside. A distant bell ripples a muffled

shipwreck clang. The late train to London rattles by in the distance, dead on time.

My acquaintance is late. In fact, he should have been here first. As I pushed back the

door, his younger arms should already have been around me. He trembles often as not when

we first lock together, does my acquaintance. After all, he has so much more to lose. For,

despite the darkness and the secrecy with which we pretend to cloak our meetings, I know

exactly who my acquaintance is. I have studied the lights of his house shining through the

privet that he trims so neatly each fortnight, and I have watched the welcoming faces of his

wife and two daughters as they greet him at his door.

Checking, occasionally, the radium glow of my watch, I let a whole hour slide by as the

residues of early hope and fear sour into disappointment, and then frank anxiety. But what,

after all, do I know of the demands of being a father, a husband? Of working in some grim

dead-end section of the Censor's Department of the Oxford City Post Office? At ten, I lever

the shed door open and step back out into the summer night, leaving my long-forgotten

libido far behind me. The stars shine down implacably through the rugby H's as I make my

way past lovers and drunks and dog walkers into the old alleys. I turn for a moment as I

hear the whisper of footsteps. Could that be a figure, outlined against the mist of light that

seeps from a doorway? But by the time I've blinked, it becomes nothing-an aging man's

fancy: the paranoias of love and fear.

Then quickly along Holywell where an owl calls, and onward under the plane trees to

my college and my quad, to the cool waiting sheets of my room deep in the serene heart of

this ancient city.

I open my eyes next morning to the sight of my scout Christlow bearing a tray

containing a steaming pot of Assam, a rack of toast, my own special jar of marmalade.

Even as the disappointments of the previous evening and the cold aches that have suddenly

started to assail my body wash over me, I still have to smile to find myself here.

"Lovely morning, sir." Christlow drifts through diamonds of sunlight to place the tray

astride my lap. The circled cross of the EA badge on his lapel winks knowingly at me. "Oh,

by the way, sir. You asked me to remind you of your appointment today."

"Appointment?"

"At ten o'clock, you were seeing your doctor. Unless, of course, you've-"

"-No. Yes." I nod in my pajamas, what's left of my hair sticking up in a grey halo, a

dribble of spilt tea warming my chin-all in all, a good approximation of an absent-minded

don. "Thank you, Christlow, for reminding me."

In that scarily deferential way of his, Christlow almost bows, then retreats and closes

the door. With a sound like distant thunder, his trolley trundles off down the oak-floored

corridor. And yes, I truly had forgotten my appointment. The dust-spangled sunlight that

threads my room now seems paler and my throat begins to ache as whispers of pain and

uncertainty come into my head.

Walking along High Street an hour later, I have to squeeze my way through the queue

outside the Regal for the day's first showing of Olivier's Henry V. Many, like Christlow,

wear EA badges. But all ages, all types, both sexes, every age and disability, are gathered.

A mixture, most bizarrely of all, of town and gown-undergrads and workers-the two quite

separate existences that Oxford so grudgingly contains.

Beyond the junction of Alfred Street I push through the little door beside the jewelers

and climb the stairs to the surgery. The receptionist looks up without smiling, then returns

to stabbing a finger at her typewriter. The posters in this poky waiting room are like the

ones you see everywhere nowadays. With Your Help We Can Win. Now Is The Time. Join

the Empire Alliance-Be a Part of the Modernist Revolution. There's a fetching painting of

the towers and spires of this great dreaming city aglow at sunset, much as I saw them

yesterday. And, of course, there's John Arthur.

"Mr. Brook. Doctor Parker will see you."

I push through the doorway, blinking. Doctor Parker is totally new to me. Fresh-faced,

young, and pinkly bald, he looks, in fact, almost totally new to himself. I have no one but

myself to blame for taking my chances with the National Health Service. I could have

availed myself of Doctor Reichard, who comes to our college every Wednesday to see to us

dons, and is available at most other times, since, on the basis of a stipend granted by

George I in 1715, these attendances comprise his sole professional duty. But my

complaints-shortness of breath, this cough, the odd whispering that sometimes comes upon

me, the growing ache in my bones-sound all too much like the simple ravages of age. And I

nurse, also, a superstitious fear that my sexual leanings will be apparent to the trained

medical eye.

"Sorry about this ah... I've only just got... ," he says as he glances down at his page-a-

day calendar. Thursday 13 June 1940. The letters seem to glow, so brightly rainbowed at

their edges that I wonder if this isn't some other new symptom. "You're the ah... The

columnist, aren't you? What was it? 'The Fingers of History'?"

"'Figures of History.'"

"Of course. Daily Sketch, every Saturday. Used to find it handy at school." Then

another thought strikes him. "And you knew him, didn't you? I mean, you knew John

Arthur..."

"That was a long time ago."

"But what's he really like?"

I open my mouth to give my usual noncommittal reply. But it doesn't seem worth it.

"Here we are." He shuffles the X-rays into order, then leans over the file. "Um-Griffin

Brooke. I thought it was Geoffrey, and Brook without the e?"

"It's a sort of pen-name," I say, although in fact the Oxford Calendar, the door to my

rooms-even the name tags Christlow sews into my gowns-also read Geoffrey Brook.

Griffin Brooke, the names I was born with, now resides only in odd corners such as this,

where, despite the potential for confusion, I find myself reluctant to give them up.

As my thoughts drift toward all the odd accidents in life that have brought me here-and

how, indeed, Fingers of History would be a good description of some historical process or

other-another part of me watches Doctor Parker as he then raises the cover of my file a few

inches to peer sideways into it.

Something changes behind his eyes. But when he clears his throat and smoothes back

down the papers and finally makes the effort to meet my gaze, I'm still certain that I'm fully

prepared for the worst. What could be more terrible, after all, than growing old, or

emphysema, bronchitis, tuberculosis...?

"It seems," he begins, "that a tumor has been growing in your lungs... Outwardly, you're

still in good enough health, but I really doubt if there's point in an operation."

Not even any need for an operation! A stupid bubble of joy rises up from my stomach,

then dissolves.

I lick my lips. "How long," I ask, "have I got?"

"You'll need to make plans. I'm so terribly sorry...."

Thrust upon the gleaming linoleum rivers of the new NHS, I am kept so busy at first

that there is little time left for anything resembling worry. There are further X-rays at the

Radcliffe, thin screens behind which I must robe and disrobe for the benefit of cold-

fingered but sympathetic men who wear half-moon glasses. Nurses provide me with over-

sweet tea and McVitie's Digestives. Porters seek my opinion about Arsenal's chances in the

FA Cup.

I feel almost heroic. And for a while I am almost grateful for the new impetus that my

condition gives to a long-planned project of mine. A book not of history, but about history.

One which examines, much as a scientist might examine the growth of a culture, the way

that events unfold, and attempts to grapple with the forces that drive them. The Fingers of

History? The odd way that inspiration sometimes arrives when you're least looking for it, I

may even have stumbled upon a title; serious and relevant to the subject, yet punning at the

same time on my own small moment of popular fame in the Daily Sketch.

After years of grappling with the sense of being an impostor that has pervaded most of

my life, I suddenly find that I am making good progress in writing the pivotal chapter about

Napoleon. Was he a maker of history, or was he its servant? Of course, he was both-and yet

it is often the little incidents, when history is approached from this angle, which stand large.

Questions such as, what would have happened if his parents Carlo and Letizia had never

met?-which normal historians would discount as ridiculous-suddenly become a way of

casting new light.

But one post-hospital afternoon a week or so later, as I huddle over my desk, and the

warm air drifting through my open window brings the chant and the tread of Christlow and

his fellow EA members parading on the ancient grass of our college quad, the whole

process suddenly seems meaningless. Now, I can suddenly see the futility of all the pages I

have written. I can see, too, the insignificant and easily filled space that my whole life will

soon leave. A few clothes hanging in a wardrobe, an old suitcase beneath a bed, some

marks on a toilet cubicle wall. Who, after all, am I, and what possible difference does it

make?

Pulling on my jacket, empty with fear, I head out into Oxford as evening floods in.

I was born in Lichfield-which, then as now, is a town that calls itself a city-in the year

1880. It's middle England, neither flat nor hilly, north or south. Barring Doctor Johnson

being born and a messy siege in the Civil War, nothing much has ever happened there. My

father worked for Lichfield Corporation before he died of a heart attack one evening while

tending his allotment. He'd had a title that changed once or twice amid great glory and talk

of more ambitious holidays, but he'd always been Assistant-this and Deputy-that-one of the

great busy-but-unspecified ("Well, it's quite hard to explain what I do unless you happen to

be in the same line yourself...") who now so dominate this country.

My mother and I were never that stretched; we had his pension and his life insurance,

and she took on a job working at Hindley's cake shop, and brought home bits of icing and

angelica for me when they changed the window display. By this time, I'd already decided I

wanted to be "a teacher." Until I passed into Secondary School from Stowe Street

Elementary, I was always one of the brightest in my class. Even a County Scholarship to

Rugby seemed within reach. And from there, yes, I was already dreaming of the Magdalene

Deer, sleek bodies bathing in the Cherwell at Parson's Pleasure.

My later years in school, though, were a slog. Partly from struggling to keep pace

among cleverer lads, I fell ill with something that may or may not have been scarlet fever.

On my long stay away from school, a boy called Martin Dawes would call in each

afternoon to deliver books and sit with me. Whilst up in my room, he would sometimes slip

his hands beneath the waistband of my pajamas and toss me off, as if that, too, was a

message that needed to be delivered from school. Of course, I was deeply grateful. After I

had recovered, locked in the upstairs toilet with its ever-open window as my mother

shuffled about in the kitchen, I would dutifully try to incorporate women into my pink

imaginings as, in the absence of Martin's attentions, I stimulated myself. But at some vital

moment, their chests would always flatten and their groins would engorge as they stepped

toward me, cropped and clean and shining.

That, in the personal history of what I term my pre-Francis days, is the sole extent of my

sexual development. There was just me, my guilty semi-celibacy, and helping my mother

look after her house, and watching the lads I'd known at school grow up, leave home,

marry, start families. I had, by my early twenties, also come to accept my position as a

Second Class Teacher for the Senior Standard Threes at Burntwood Charity. In the articles

with which I began my short career in the Daily Sketch nearly thirty years later, I gave the

impression that John Arthur was one of my brightest and most ambitious pupils there, a

little comet trail across the pit-dusty Burntwood skies. Thanks to numerous flowery

additions by the Sketch's copy editor, I also stated that he was pale-skinned, quiet, good-

looking, intense, and that he possessed a slight West Country accent, this being the time

before it had changed to the soft Yorkshire that we all know now-all traits that would have

got him a good beating up in the playground-and that, "on summer evenings after school

when the pit whistle had blown and the swallows were wheeling," he and I would walk up

into "the hazy Staffordshire hills" and sit down and gaze down at "the spires of Lichfield,

the pit wheels of Burntwood, and the smokestacks of Rugeley from the flowing purple

heather." Now, after all these years of practice, this has become my party act. So, yes, John

Arthur really is there in that classroom at Burntwood Charity with the smell of chalk dust

and unwashed bodies. His hand is raised from the third row of desks to ask a more than

usually pertinent question before I start to ramble on about one of my many pet subjects.

That is how I recall him.

Too weary to stop, trailing cigarette smoke, memories, abstractions, I wander Oxford's

new suburban streets, passing illuminated porches bearing individual name-plates; Church

House. Dawric. The Willows. It's quiet now, although scarcely past nine and only just

getting fully dark. The houses have a sleepy look. Their curtains are drawn. Faintly, like the

movement of ghosts, I can see the flicker of television screens in many darkened lounges.

A footstep scuffs in the street behind me, and the sound is so furtive and unexpected

that I turn and look back, although there was nothing to see. I walk on more briskly.

Beyond a patch of grass where Ball Games Are Prohibited lies the home of my

acquaintance, with its black-and-white gable, the privet, and the long strip of drive that, in

these days of ever-growing prosperity, will probably soon be graced with a Morris

Ladybird "people's car" instead of his Raleigh bicycle. But the windows of the house are

darkened, uncurtained. And there is something odd about the look of them...

My feet crunch on something sharper than gravel as I walk up the path to my

acquaintance's front door. Many of the windows in the bay are shattered, there is a

pervasive, summery smell of children's urine, and a fat iron padlock has been fitted across

the door's splintered frame. I see, last of all, the sign that the Oxford Constabulary have

pasted across the bricks in the porch. Take Notice Hereby... but this sky is incredibly dark

and deep for summer, and I can't read further than the Crown-embossed heading. I slump

down on the doorstep, scattering empty milk bottles, covering my face with my hands.

Suddenly, it all comes to me. This. Death. Everything.

When I look up some time later, a figure is standing watching me from the suburban

night with her arms folded, head tilted, a steely glint of curlers. "I'm Mrs. Stevens," she tells

me, offering a softly companionable hand to help me up, then leading me past the hedge

and the dustbins into the brightness of her kitchen next door. Slumped at the table, I watch

her as she boils the kettle and warms the pot.

"I know," she says. "This must be a shock to you..."

"They took them all away?"

"All of them. The pity of it really." She stirs her tea and passes me mine. "Them young

girls."

"Nobody did anything to stop it?"

She gazes across at me, and licks the brown line of tea that's gathered on her small

mustache. "I'll tell you what they were like, Mr. Brook. In every way, I'd have said, they

were a decent couple. Only odd thing I remember now is they sometimes used to leave the

light on without drawing the curtains so you could see right in.... The lassies were nice,

though. Fed our cat for us when we went up to Harrogate last year. Knew them well

yourself, did you?"

"He was just an acquaintance. But when they came to the house, was it the KSG or

did-"

"-and you'd never have known, would you, to look at her?"

"Her? You mean... ?"

"Ah..." Mrs. Stevens slaps her hand flat down on the table and leans forward, her brown

eyes gleaming. "So you still don't know the truth of it? Her real name was something

Polish. All Zs and Ks." She hurrumphs. "It's understandable that they want to come, isn't it?

Just as long as they don't make themselves a burden, earn a decent living, talk like we do

and don't bother our children and keep themselves to themselves."

"So what was the problem?"

Ian R. Macleod - The Summer Isles.pdf

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