The PowerBook Read online

  I went closer, standing on tiptoe, muttering the symbols to myself.

  At the end of a row of jars coloured like dreams was an opaque jar with a heart drawn on it and a dagger through the heart. I put up my hand to touch it, and in that second my hand was grabbed from behind.

  It was my father. He put his face close to mine, and I could smell the sulphur on him.

  ‘Never touch that jar. Never. If that ever gets loose we’re finished.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Love,’ said my father. ‘There’s love in that jar.’

  And so I discovered that love is a hazardous liquid.

  One day I asked my mother.

  ‘Is there a world beyond here?’

  She shook her head and stretched out her arms end to end.

  ‘Nothing but waste and scrap. The earth itself is nothing but a collection of belched rocks and burning gases. We live in a cosmic dustbin.’

  ‘Is the lid on or off?’

  ‘On. Nobody gets beyond the dustbin.’

  ‘Well, where’s the buried treasure then?’

  Her eyes lit up like a couple of sodium street lamps. ‘That’s for you to find.’

  At night, my father blazed up the fire with a can of petrol and my mother told stories from her youth. Her youth was like a far-off city where she had lived for a time and been happy. She had all the longing of an exile for a place where she could never return.

  Like other exiles, her longing grew a narrative of its own. Her desire told itself as memory. Her past was a place that none of us could visit without her. It was the only kingdom she could control.

  ‘I used to live on a river,’ she said. ‘A river stocked so full with fish so fat that anyone who wanted to cross to the other bank just walked over the fishes’ backs as though they were stones.

  ‘In those days no one went fishing. No one had ever heard of fishing. If a housewife wanted a few brown trout for supper, she would take her skillet down to the river, and shout, “YOU, YOU AND YOU,” and the fish would jump into the pan, tame as fleas.’

  ‘Are fleas tame?’ I said.

  ‘They were in those days,’ she said, and continued …

  ‘In those days, everyone carried a little handbell in their pockets, and if you wanted to speak to someone, you stood outside their door and rang your bell. The person inside would say, “Is that my bell I hear ringing?” and you would reply, “No, it’s not your bell, it’s mine.” Then they would say, “Well, if it’s not my bell, I won’t answer it,” and you would know you were not wanted, but if they said, “Well, well, since it’s your bell, I’ll answer it for you,” you would know you would be welcome.’

  ‘Where’s your bell?’ I said.

  ‘You’ll get it when I die,’ she said, and continued …

  ‘In those days, anyone hunting in the woods found buried treasure—only it wasn’t really buried—it was lying on the surface and there was such a lot of it.

  ‘I remember once walking out hand in hand with a boy I knew, and it was summer, and suddenly before us was a field of gold. Gold as far as you could see. We knew we’d be rich for ever. We filled our pockets and our hair. We were rolled in gold. We ran through the field laughing and our legs and feet were coated in yellow dust, so that we were like golden statues or a golden god. He kissed my feet, the boy I was with, and when he smiled, he had a gold tooth.

  ‘It was only a field of buttercups, but we were young.’

  ‘Will I ever be young?’ I asked my mother.

  It was bedtime and my father was winding the clock.

  ‘You are young,’ said my father. ‘You won’t get any younger even if you clean your teeth twice a day.’

  ‘You’ll get older,’ said my mother, ‘that’s what happens.’

  ‘Then what happens?’

  ‘You won’t be able to find the treasure.’

  ‘Will I be too old to look for it?’

  ‘No, but you’ll be looking in the wrong place.’

  ‘Why doesn’t everyone find the treasure?’

  ‘Some people say there’s no such thing.’

  ‘That’s because they’ve never found it.’

  ‘And other people don’t know where to look.’

  My mother and father both wore spectacles. I took my mother’s off her nose and tried to see through them. The world was blurred and strange.

  ‘I can’t see anything through these. Can you?’

  My mother looked away, my father looked into the clock. There was a little beetle under the coalscuttle. There were three ebony elephants with ivory tusks on the mantelpiece. There was a brass cone for holding tapers. The bevelled mirror on its chain had come out of a better house than ours; its scrollwork was angel and streamers. By the fire was a tin bucket overflowing with old money and foreign coins—the kind of loot that fell out of dismantled seat webbing, or was tipped up from the backs of house-clearance drawers. None of it was worth anything, but we collected it anyway, and when my parents were brooding, one or the other would scoop up a handful of coins and throw them onto the fire, shouting, ‘Money to burn!’

  I watched it burn. I watched the monarch’s heads bleed out their alloy, the cheap pre-war French francs bend and twist like silver foil. The best coins were the true copper pennies that burned from orange to blue—an Aladdin’s lamp blue, or the underside of dragon’s wings, or the green you get from goblins.

  I loved the fire. The coals were my books. Heated to story temperature, they burst into flame and I read in them the stories that no one would read to me.

  ‘What can you see?’

  It was my mother’s voice roaring from miles away. I shook out of my trance by the fire.

  ‘Another world.’

  ‘There isn’t one.’

  I pointed to the road winding through the flames. She was angry with me.

  ‘The fire will be out soon enough. There’s nothing in the ashes but ash.’

  She went to bed. My father went to bed too. They left me alone as they usually did, to sleep and half-wake by the dying fire. When the novelty of myself had worn off, they had given up tucking me into my galvanised bed and I either went there or not, as I felt.

  The fire was grey. The road was gone. I had to stay young. I had to look in the right place. I had to keep the fire going. I had to believe in the treasure. I had to find the treasure too.

  SPECIAL

  In 1999 mountaineers on Everest found a body.

  There was nothing unusual about that—Everest is grave to many. What was unusual is that the body had been missing since 1924 and had lain preserved and unnoticed, keeping its blank vigil for seventy-five years.

  The body was George Mallory.

  On the morning of 6 June 1924 Mallory and his climbing partner, Andrew Irvine, made a breakfast of sardines, took their oxygen cylinders and began to climb Everest one last time.

  It was Mallory’s third expedition. Always the men were beaten back. No matter how high they climbed, Everest was higher.

  By now, the rest of their party were unfit, frostbitten, snow-blind and altitude sick. Irvine’s skin was peeling off his face due to freezing air temperatures contrasted with 120°F in the sun. The camp was ready to break up. Mallory argued for a final attempt. His colleagues thought he was in poor condition and mentally unstable.

  After two days and nights climbing the mountain, Mallory, Irvine and the team of sherpas had moved up from the North Col to Camp VI. It had been Mallory’s brainwave, as he called it, to set up a series of camps on the ascent route. Camp VI was just a two-man tent perched on a ridge. The climbers arrived. The sherpas set off back to the North Col. Tomorrow was everything. Tomorrow was nothing. Curled up, breathing oxygen, the men slept.

  Day came. Mallory climbed. He had never climbed so well. His fingers and feet made a way across the ridges and rotten limestone so that he seemed to be an evolving part of the mountain itself. The mountain is endlessly moving, shifting, changing itself. Mallory was moving with it
, using its undetectable flow as a rhythm for his own body. He sang the mountain, and the mountain, sharp, high, outside of human range, heard and sang back.

  Irvine followed. Young, inexperienced, faithful, he would have followed Mallory anywhere. His fingers and toes went trustingly into the openings that Mallory noted. Every note took them higher up the octave of the mountain. They scaled impossible flats, vertical sharps. Mallory’s body was natural to the mountain.

  The two men were last sighted at 12.50 p.m. on 8 June 1924.

  One of the team, Odell, had climbed behind them, up to Camp VI, and as he scanned the summit for a sign, he suddenly saw first one dark shape, then a second, moving rapidly towards the final peak. Then the clouds hid them from view.

  It began to snow. Mallory hardly noticed. He was light, clean, with a crystal music in his head of the kind he had heard the Tibetan monks play in the monastery at Rongbuk. There was nothing to fear. There was only the forward movement of the ascent, and his heart beating time.

  Why could he hear his heart? The thought came and went.

  He was thirsty. They had lost their stove and hadn’t been able to thaw any ice. The oxygen had run out. He was very cold, but his fingers and toes went without fault into the bands of the rock. Irvine was struggling now, but there was nothing to worry about. Mallory would pull him up on a rope. He would pull him up now because they were there.

  The top of Everest, which is the top of the world, is about the size of a billiard table. Mallory had played the game and won. Only it didn’t feel like a game, it felt like music. The mountain was one vast living vibration. Again he heard the piercing sounds in his head, and underneath them his pulse.

  He pulled Irvine towards him on the thin rope. He banged his watch and the glass broke. He started to laugh and then he couldn’t stop laughing, because it was so silly really, his watch going tick, tick, tick, when time had stopped long since and there was no time. Not here. They were outside time, he knew that.

  They were quiet, the two men, and the mountain was quiet too. She wasn’t used to visitors. Not here.

  Irvine was shaking uncontrollably, though Mallory was still. As seeming-still as the mountain he was becoming.

  They began their descent.

  Irvine’s body has never been found, though some claim it has been sighted.

  Mallory was lying face down, his back and shoulders naked and white and changed into a part of the mountain. He was identified from the label in his clothes—

  W.F. Paine. High St. Godalming. G. Mallory.

  He had climbed Everest in his old tweed jacket.

  In his inside pocket, frozen against his heart, was his last letter from his wife.

  Unfold it. Read it. She loves him. She wants him to come home. His children miss him. The garden is lovely.

  Her eyes are dark. His are pale.

  Mallory fell. We don’t know how. He was found in the self-arrest position with a broken body and closed eyes. His broken watch was in his pocket. There was no more time.

  own hero

  In this life you have to be your own hero.

  By that I mean you have to win whatever it is that matters to you by your own strength and in your own way.

  Like it or not, you are alone in the forest, just like all those fairy tales that begin with a hero who’s usually stupid but somehow brave, or who might be clever, but weak as straw, and away he goes (don’t worry about the gender), cheered on by nobody, via the castles and the bears, and the old witch and the enchanted stream, and by and by (we hope) he’ll find the treasure.

  On the day I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map.

  I was not born to wealth. I was born to mind the machine. My parents and grandparents were weavers. They worked in the shuttering sheds that broke the line of the valley with their tall chimneys. They worked twelve-hour days and went deaf in their forties. They bred their own kind, as sheep and pigs do, but humankind is not sheep and pigs. They bred me, unexpected, unwanted. They bred me, and whether it was desperation, or a sixth sense for trouble, they gave me away. They didn’t give away any of the others, before or after, but me they did, and quickly too.

  They gave me away to my fate without even a card in the Post Office window saying ‘Good Home Wanted’. Good home, bad home, no home, it was all the same to them, and they left no bundle beside me for the journey.

  Life was a journey I would have to make by myself.

  Myself. If they gave me nothing, that was the one thing they could not take away.

  I think of myself sometimes, unable to walk, unable to crawl, lying in my cot and listening to the sound of the trams on their metal rails. At night, outside the window, there was a room opposite with a big globe pendant light made of white china. It looked like the moon. It looked like another world.

  I used to watch it until the image of it became sleep, and until the last tram whooshed past, the bend in the road made audible by the air concer-tina’d in the rubber pleats that joined the cars.

  The globe and the tram were my companions and the certainty of them, their unfailingness, made bearable the smell of sour milk and the high bars of the cot and the sound of feet on the polished oilcloth—feet always walking away.

  My mother, they say, was a little red thing out of the Manchester mills, who at seventeen gave birth to me, easy as a cat.

  Her voice was soft—like the river over the chalk pan of the riverbed. You will say I never heard it, but I heard it every day in the nine months that I was her captive or she was mine.

  I knew her voice and I must have seen her face once, mustn’t I?

  Voice and face are homed somewhere in me as I was homed in her. It was a brief eternity waiting for time to begin. Then time tumbled me out, cut me loose, and set the clock—RUN! RUN! Put as much distance as you can between you and then.

  To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself I stay on the run.

  meatspace

  Night. I’m sitting at my screen, wondering how this story might develop. An envelope flies in front of my face. I open it. What else can you do?

  ‘Ali. I’m coming to London.’

  (I’d better reply. What else can you do?) ‘Business or pleasure?’

  ‘I want to see you.’

  ‘I thought we weren’t seeing each other.’

  ‘We’re not.’

  ‘Are you going to keep your eyes closed then?’

  ‘I’d always know you in the dark.’

  ‘Cut it out.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘You’ve got my Website.’

  ‘Meatspace not cyberspace.’

  ‘Spitalfields.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I live in Spitalfields.’

  ‘Sounds revolting.’

  ‘It’s right in the City. Roman London, Falstaff London, Dickens London.’

  ‘What’s the name and number?’

  ‘VERDE’S. Ask for the old market.’

  ‘Verde? Like Italian? Like green?’

  ‘You’ll see it. It’s an old house …’

  spitalfields

  This part of the city is an Emperor’s maze of streets that darken into alleys, and alleys that blank into walls. The noise of the river is nearby, but the water itself is unseen. It is as though the water is everywhere and nowhere, perhaps under the streets, perhaps inside the houses, with their watery windows where the old glass reflects the light.

  This part of the city has always been a place for refugees. Exile or sanctuary, they come here and have done since the Huguenots with their bales of cloth, since the Bengalis with their sweatshops, and since the quiet people from Hong Kong with their money.

  Beside all of this has always been the life of the traders—English, Spanish, Dutch, selling gassed oranges and arsenals of lemons the size of hand grenades.

  The yellow faces of the Chinamen were once downriver where the opium boats came in. Now the yen trades with the euro and alongside the old
est profession, which has always thrived here and still does—the short skirts by the hot-dog stand in front of the church.

  In an old part of the city like this, time collapses the picture.

  Here I am, tightrope walking the twenty-first century, slim as a year, and the old tall houses are two hundred years old and set on streets that wind back four hundred years, set on cart tracks that served medieval monks. Or Shakespeare. Or Dr Johnson and his friend Boswell the Scot. They all walked here. Put any of them here now and they would still recognise the place.

  Put me here now and that single year’s rope, stretched towards the future, is all I have to balance me from the drop on either side.

  There’s an Indian grocer’s here. Bundles of coriander make a hedge between shop and pavement, and behind are the trays of chillies and stacked-up cartons of long-life milk.

  Every week the frozen fish van arrives, and two Bengalis drag out something the size of Moby Dick. Two more stagger out to the pavement with a steel workbench and a circular saw. Moby Dick is slabbed onto the steel. The saw screams. The unnameable grey-coloured fish is neatly bagged into curry-sized portions.

  Next door, the Halal butcher gently drains the blood of a sheep into a plastic bath.

  ‘When I first came here as a boy,’ an old cab driver tells me, ‘the first morning I woke up, I looked out of the window and there was a street market going on in Petticoat Lane and a bloke selling a lion cub—sitting like a cat it was, washing its paws—just like a cat of yours or mine.

  ‘Over there was a strong man in chains, freeing hisself, and then a Black Shirt got up, you know, one of Mosley’s Fascists, and he made a speech and then a fight broke out, and there was a whistle, and the police came running down from Brick Lane, only nobody got caught because the gutter was thick with offal from the meat stall, and half of the coppers slipped on it and the other half fell over them.’