The PowerBook Read online

  Ask anyone round here for a story and you’ll get one.

  The archaeologists were digging here yesterday. They uncovered a stone sarcophagus shielding a decorated lead coffin.

  It had been there for one thousand eight hundred years.

  The guess is that inside the coffin will be the Roman Governor of London, his body basted in a plaster and chalk mix used as a disinfectant.

  They dug him up when they were excavating the foundations of a new bank—the kind of Temple to Mammon that the Governor would have approved of. Maybe that’s why they chose the site. Maybe he was what attracted them, although they could never admit it. Maybe through all the talk of land value and client access and transport links and investment opportunity, maybe behind the glassy eyes of the Chief Accountant, maybe in the dreams of the Chairman of the Board, maybe floating under the skin of a thousand cups of coffee at a hundred planning meetings, maybe between the lines of the shiny facts and figures sent out to the shareholders, maybe in the tremble of the blood inside the hand that held the pen that signed the cheque that bought the site, was the will of a dead man waiting for his final tribute.

  Far-fetched?

  The past is magnetic. It draws us in. We cannot help ourselves and, as with other things that we cannot help in ourselves, we make up elaborate explanations, reasonable rational explanations, to chant away the powerful things that don’t belong to us.

  There he is, coming slowly up the Thames in his rowed barge. That’s him, the one with the cropped hair and the clean fingernails.

  On either side of the broad river are marshes and dull sand, and deeper in are forests as tight-grown as a cash crop. But these forests are wild and the unseen eyes that watch him are as far from civilisation as he is from home.

  His men have lit a brazier in the prow of the boat. They use it to keep warm. They use it as a light. The olive stones they use as fuel burn down to a powder, and when a man rakes it he smells his homesickness in the sharp salty greenness of the fire.

  So the boat slips on, and to the eyes watching in the forest it is the fire itself coming upriver. The fire moving steadily through the dark and the mist. The impossibility of fire and water. The fire that will spread into the trees, into the settlements, into the huts of the Britons themselves, until all resistance has been burned away.

  Or has it?

  The forests can be levelled and the roads made straight, but the wild things go deeper, beyond detection, and wait.

  ‘Open it …’

  ‘Everybody ready?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, open it!’

  The sarcophagus is surrounded by men in green masks, as though this site were an operating theatre. Outside the TV crews and the journalists are waiting for the most significant discovery yet unearthed in Roman London.

  ‘When we see his body, it will tell us everything.’

  ‘The kind of man he was, his power …’

  ‘OK. Everybody ready? Here we go.’

  With infinite care, the side of the tomb is being opened. A trickle of brown water seeps out.

  ‘Oh Christ How did that get in there?’

  ‘This thing should be airtight, waterproof.’

  ‘It was bombproof. It has survived eighteen hundred years.’

  ‘Bombproof but not waterproof, huh?’

  ‘Shut up and open it.’

  Cloth of gold, leaves, mud, a skeleton. Serious water damage … And …

  ‘Look at the pelvis.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a woman.’

  HELP

  You had come to London.

  We were in bed together, watching the sun stream through the window. I was happy in a sad sort of way, because I knew this was never going to work.

  Work. Not work. What do I mean?

  If someone had told Mallory that he would climb Everest but die in the attempt, still he would have climbed it.

  What does the end matter?

  Here, now, is enough, isn’t it?

  You had once asked me if I was afraid of death.

  I said I was afraid of not living.

  I don’t want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.

  Here’s my life—I have to mine it, farm it, trade it, tenant it, and when the lease is up it cannot be renewed.

  This is my chance. Take it.

  You rolled over so that I could stroke your back.

  Sex between women is mirror geography. The subtlety of its secret—utterly the same, utterly different. You are a looking-glass world. You are the hidden place that opens to me on the other side of the glass. I touch your smooth surface and then my fingers sink through to the other side. You are what the mirror reflects and invents. I see myself, I see you, two, one, none. I don’t know. Maybe I don’t need to know. Kiss me.

  You kiss me and the glass grows cloudy. I stop thinking. Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl.

  Dear love—with your hair like a bonfire that somebody kicked over—red, spread out, sparks flying. I don’t want to conquer you; I just want to climb you. I want to climb through the fire until I am the fire.

  Love has got complicated, tied up with promises, bruised with plans, dogged with an ending that nobody wants—when all love is, is what it always is—that you look at me and want me and I don’t turn away.

  If I want to say no, I will, but for the right reasons. If I want to say yes, I will, but for the right reasons. Leave the consequences. Leave the finale. Leave the grand statements. The simplicity of feeling should not be taxed. I can’t work out what this will cost or what either of us owe. The admission charge is never on the door, but you are open and I want to enter.

  Let me in.

  You do.

  In this space which is inside you and inside me I ask for no rights or territories. There are no frontiers or controls. The usual channels do not exist. This is the orderly anarchic space that no one can dictate, though everyone tries. This is a country without a ruler. I am free to come and go as I please. This is Utopia. It could never happen beyond bed. This is the model of government for the world. No one will vote for it, but everyone comes back here. This is the one place where everybody comes.

  Most of us try to turn this into power. We’re too scared to do anything else.

  But it isn’t power—it’s sex.

  Sex. How did it start?

  In the strange dark history of our evolution, there was a shift, inevitability, away from self-reproducing organisms—like bacteria—towards organisms which must fuse with one another to survive.

  You see, bacteria know the secret of eternal life. They do not die unless something kills them. They don’t change, they don’t age, all they do is multiply.

  Fusion allows complexity and diversity, but with it, we don’t know why, hand in hand, came death in the first of her many disguises. Death disguised as life.

  It was our only chance. We took it.

  So those morbid medievals and those burning Romantic poets weren’t wrong. Sex and death belong together, joined in our imaginations as they are in our DNA.

  Sex and death are our original parents. For some of us, the only family we’ll ever have.

  Sex. How did it start?

  That hotel room in Paris. Dinner at Paul’s. The walk over the bridge. Champagne in the afternoon. The rain. Your face.

  And before that? Before I saw you?

  I’m looking for something, it’s true. Looking for you, looking for me, believing that the treasure is really there. I knew from the moment I saw you (as the saying goes) how it was going to begin.

  I don’t know how this will end.

  ‘It’s never enough for you is it?’ you said.

  That was odd, because it was enough, just then. I pulled you down towards me, feeling your hair on my throat.

  I said, ‘If it’s nev
er enough, it’s my fault not yours.’

  She looked at me like I’m crazy. Most of my lovers do, and that’s partly why they love me, and partly why they leave. I’m not being completely honest here because I do the leaving myself sometimes.

  She said—

  ‘We both want life. That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘You want risk.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘And you want safety.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Don’t you read the financial papers?’

  ‘Never. I’m married to a banker.’

  ‘You can’t have safety and risk in the same investment.’

  ‘You’re not safe.’

  ‘No, but your marriage is.’

  ‘Listen, if I left my husband for you …’

  ‘You think I’d leave you within the year.’

  ‘Well, yes I do, if you really want to know.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘You’re not a sticker.’

  ‘I’m not a quitter.’

  ‘You want me because you can’t have me.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  Heavy sighs. Bedclothes in a mess. Drink of water. Stare at ceiling.

  ‘I had to have you that night in Paris.’

  ‘Well done.’

  ‘I never thought I’d see you again.’

  ‘Did you want to see me again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you went to Capri when you knew I would be there.’

  ‘I wondered what would happen.’

  ‘This is all a game, isn’t it?’

  ‘I wondered if you really could love me.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I thought that if you could things might be different, things might change.’

  ‘And have they changed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I started to love you. I didn’t expect that. My fault not yours.’

  ‘And now?’

  She ran her hands over me and there was something like surprise in her voice. She was telling the truth and that was hard. She looked away and said to me, ‘It seems as though I’ve been caught in my own net.’

  I turned and held her as close as I could.

  ‘I never want to be your trap or snare.’

  Then, because she was crying, I told her the Story of the Red Fox.

  A hunter loved a Princess. Simple as that.

  Every morning he brought her the treasures of the forest. He brought her deer and boar. He brought her wolf skin and buffalo hide. He fought a lion with his bare hands and caught the old black bear that everyone feared. He took nothing for himself. There was nothing he wanted except that she should love him, which she didn’t.

  One day, riding with her ladies, the Princess saw in front of them a red fox. Never was a fox so red. She watched it as it ran, stretching out its legs so that it seemed to be lying flat on the surface of the air. All day the fox stayed with the party and the Princess was troubled.

  That night the Princess looked in the mirror and it seemed to her that the red of the fox would be perfect against the white of her skin. She stroked her neck and throat, imagining the feel of fox fur. Winter was coming.

  When the hunter came to her the next morning, she said, ‘If you love me, bring me the coat of the red fox.’

  The hunter said, ‘Ask me anything, but not that.’

  ‘Then you do not love me,’ said the Princess.

  ‘I will hunt through the stars and shoot down the Lion and the Bull, but do not ask me for the red fox.’

  The Princess was angry and turned away.

  After many days and nights, when the snow had begun to fall, light as a promise, the hunter came to the Princess and promised to bring her the red fox. He had one condition.

  ‘Say it.’

  ‘The fox must be brought to you alive.’

  ‘I accept the condition.’

  The hunter left the palace and was not seen for three weeks. The weather became colder and the snow was as heavy as sorrow. When the Princess looked out she saw only white.

  Or did she?

  On the last morning of the third week the Princess looked out from her tower as usual and saw a streak of fire burning the snow. A quick red line made a way through the snow, melting it on either side, as if spring had come. Without pause or stop, moving from side to side and leaving no print, the red fox ran through the wastes of the snow until he came to the palace.

  The Princess herself had begun to run too, down from her high tower, down the winding stairs, and out into the white courtyard, where the fox, panting in red steam, lay down at her feet.

  The Princess put our her hand and the fox licked it as she bent down, and his eyes pleaded with her. She touched him and her white hand was buried in the thick warm fur, soft as blood.

  Then she stood up and signalled to one of her men. Her face was clear and cold. She had the servant draw his knife, take the fox by the scruff, and then there was a second, only a second, when she hesitated, and looked for the last time at the brave pleading eyes and the strong head that offered no resistance.

  The servant cut the throat out of the fox, and as the blood ran in a warm fountain across the icy cobbles of the courtyard, the servant staggered and fell under the weight of what he was holding. The fox was gone and the hunter lay dead in the yard.

  You lay in my arms.

  ‘I don’t want to ask you for more than you can give,’ you said.

  ‘I’m the one who’s asking.’

  ‘We’re both asking.’

  ‘So what’s the answer?’

  ‘Not this.’

  ‘It feels like an answer, when we’re here, together.’

  ‘There’s a world outside.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Don’t start that stuff.’

  ‘World or no world, I want you with me.’

  ‘It’s too intense. We’d wear each other out in six months.’

  ‘Fire doesn’t burn itself.’

  ‘It burns out.’

  ‘Listen, I don’t want you to leave your marriage for me.’

  ‘Getting tired already?’

  ‘I want you to leave it for yourself.’

  She got up. She hates this conversation and so do I. Why do we keep coming back to it like a crime we’ve committed?

  I went after her, touched her shoulder, gently, sorry.

  ‘I’ll make us some lunch.’

  I went into the kitchen. I love food. The clarity of it, the direct pleasure. I love it simple, absolutely fresh and freshly cooked. At my worst, like now, when nothing makes sense to myself, I’ll cook something as a way of forcing order back into chaos. As a way of re-establishing myself, at least in this one thing. It steadies my hands.

  Take a dozen plum tomatoes and slice them lengthways as though they were your enemy. Fasten them into a lidded pot and heat for ten minutes.

  Chop an onion without tears.

  Dice a carrot without regret.

  Shard a celery stick as though its flutes and grooves were the indentations of your past.

  Add to the tomatoes and cook unlidded for as long as it takes them to yield.

  Throw in salt, pepper and a twist of sugar.

  Pound the lot through a sieve or a mouli or a blender. Remember—they are the vegetables, you are the cook.

  Return to a soft flame and lubricate with olive oil. Add a spoonful at a time, stirring like an old witch, until you achieve the right balance of slippery firmness.

  Serve on top of fresh spaghetti. Cover with rough new parmesan and cut basil. Raw emotion can be added now.

  Serve. Eat. Reflect.

  I put the steaming plate in front of her. She took a mouthful, then another.

  ‘This is fantastic.’

  ‘Food tastes better in Italian.’

  Thickly, through a mouthful of spaghetti, she said, ‘My husband is in Oxfo
rd.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I have to go there today.’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘I’ve told him about you. Well, not everything about you.’

  ‘What exactly?’

  ‘How we met in Paris.’

  ‘I thought he didn’t know you were in Paris?’

  ‘I always tell him where I am, but not always who I’m with.’

  ‘Does he put up with that?’

  ‘We have an understanding.’

  ‘I wish I did.’

  ‘Look, a marriage has to survive in its own way.’

  ‘What about the people inside the marriage?’

  ‘It works for us.’

  ‘OK. What about the people outside the marriage?’

  ‘Nobody need get involved unless they want to.’

  ‘Sounds simple on paper.’

  ‘You’re the writer.’

  ‘Yes, and if I was writing this, I’d say …’

  ‘Well, what would you say?’

  I was silent. I have no superior wisdom and I want to avoid the self-righteousness that hides ignorance and fear. I’ve made so many mistakes myself that I’m not in a position to say, ‘This is how it should be done.’ Anyway, life is not a formula and love is not a recipe. The same ingredients cook up differently every time.

  Take two people. Slice lengthways. Boil with the lid on. Add a marriage, a past, another woman. Sugar to taste. Pass through a chance meeting. Lubricate sparingly. Serve on a bed of—or is it in a bed of—? Use fresh and top with raw emotion.

  ‘I’d say that love slices lengthways.’

  She was silent. We were both exposed. The truth is that you can divide your heart in all sorts of interesting ways—a little here, a little there, most banked at home, some of it coined out for a flutter. But love cleaves through the mind’s mathematics. Love’s lengthways splits the heart in two—the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be. How will you heal your heart when love has split it in two?’