Wolves Read online

  ‘All his life.’

  Which shows how much I know. ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He handled drones. Haven’t I told you all this?’

  Disposable drones for mine clearance – lumbering, sand-ballasted, pressed-paper robots on all-weather tracks. Cardboard kamikazes. Not a front-line man at all. Just another code monkey who strayed too far, too confidently or carelessly down the wrong alley, not five hundred yards from the edge of the diplomatic zone.

  ‘Do you think about him much?’

  ‘What? No,’ he says. ‘No, not much.’

  ‘Do you remember him?’

  ‘Of course I remember him.’

  ‘It’s just—How old were you when—?’

  ‘Can you move it up? The photograph.’

  I open the lid and nudge the photograph back into alignment on the glass.

  ‘No. Up. Up.’

  I open the lid and turn the photograph around on the glass.

  ‘Now what are you doing?’

  ‘Up was down.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look, it’s no good just going “Up, up” – my up is not your up.’

  ‘For God’s sake.’

  ‘I’m sorting it out. Look, is that better?’

  Michel grunts.

  What captured Poppy’s gaze to make her frame her shots so badly? I imagine her always over-thinking things, turning every task into a problem. I must get his feet in. I must get that tree in. I mustn’t let the sun in. Let’s not have that stranger in the frame. And – oops.

  ‘Mum asked me if you were seeing anyone.’

  I have to think about this. ‘That was nice of her.’

  ‘Okay, let’s have the next one.’

  Strange that Louis should ever have sported a uniform, or even joined the service at all, with a job like that. You’d expect that kind of role to be outsourced, given to some tiger-economy whizz-kid earning two dollars an hour off some privatised military consultancy.

  ‘Did your Dad—?’

  ‘She spotted it straight away,’ says Michel, cutting across me.

  ‘Spotted what?’

  ‘The likeness. What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I tell him, fussing the originals back into their wallet.

  Michel’s machine is not up to copying subtle gradations of gray. The pictures aren’t coming out well. All you can see of Louis’s face is his glasses.

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘No. I don’t.’

  ‘You don’t have to play games, Conrad. Agnes is all water under the bridge as far as I’m concerned.’

  I keep my head down. ‘Well, that’s good to know. Any time you want to tell me what you’re on about . . .’

  ‘Come on, Conrad.’

  ‘You’re as bad as your mother.’

  The printer churns and churns.

  It’s well into the next day before I get the chance to speak to Hanna. After the midday meal we drag a complaining Agnes out of the house for a walk, past the riding school and down and up a wooded dip to a churchyard with a view of the mountains. The landscape is spectacular, but my attention is drawn more to the gravestones. The stones are white with frost, but the china photographs pinned to them have absorbed the heat of the day. The photographs are clear of snow, and gelid water clings to them like tears. The faces of the dead peer from their pockets with a certain truculence, as though to say that they cannot be so easily effaced.

  We stand around while Mick takes photographs with this bulky antique camera Hanna bought him for Christmas. Films for the thing are made by this tiny, specialist company you have to hunt for on the internet. Hanna is cold and wants to go home, but Michel wants to stay and try again to engage Agnes’s enthusiasm for snow. The girl shows no interest in the stuff. She just sits there, crouched in her fun-fur on her plastic toboggan while Michel, bent-backed and drip-nosed like something out of a Hogarth painting, weaves round the gravestones, rolling up a snowball for a snowman’s head.

  Hanna takes a picture of them with her phone. ‘Bless.’

  ‘Poppy said something to Michel yesterday.’

  ‘Yes?’

  It is my chance. It may not come again. ‘Something about us.’

  Hanna’s face locks down. ‘Us?’

  ‘You and me and Agnes. Michel’s pissed at me today.’

  ‘Really? I wonder what that’s about,’ she says, already moving away from me.

  I follow her, wracking my head for something to say. Stupid, to have begun so obtusely. Stupid, to have begun with Poppy, and her random, gnomic pronouncements. What could Poppy possibly know? What could she have picked up? Whatever else she is, Poppy is not and never has been stupid, and she has mistrusted me from the first, ever since I went to stay with her and her son in Sand Lane. It doesn’t in the least surprise me that she’s been keeping an eye on me. But what can she have seen? That I am in love, always in love, and hopelessly, resignedly, above all, pointlessly, with Hanna? Perhaps.

  A couple of weeks go by.

  I’ve an afternoon of investment meetings today, so I’m on a train bound for the Forum, the city’s business centre, where all young entrepreneurs go to die. The rail line rises on brick arches above football fields and allotments, creeks and disused embankments. This was the old Middle, its leavings torn down after the last war. The gap was left as a memorial. Today it has its own value: an extra lung for the ever-expanding city. Over sheds and shacks, prefabs and mobile homes, half a dozen angels hover in the clean and cloudless air. They’re motion-capture figments – real-time feeds that Ralf has pasted on the sky for me. If I took my spectacles off, they would vanish.

  Imagine them: jobbing actors, they have turned up to work in hastily constructed motion capture studios. They have pulled on black Lycra bodysuits stitched over with ping-pong balls, and they are spending the day performing simple, iconic actions in front of a green screen – walking, running, sitting, falling. Their movements, abstracted into three-dimensional vectors, will be used in our first big field demonstration, where we will animate whole avatar armies.

  Creatures made purely of light and movement, our strange angels hover above the weedy lots, limbering up for some apocalyptic event. Over the earpiece, Ralf asks, ‘Well? How are they coming through?’

  I crane and twist my neck, fretting under unfamiliar gear. They are made of points of light; only in motion do they make sense as bodies. They walk, run, sit, fall and dance in mid-air. ‘Are you trying to skin them? I’m getting only data-points here.’

  ‘Hang on,’ he says, ‘I’ll come see you.’

  A minute later, here he is, inside the carriage, grinning, in his usual T-shirt-and-baggy-jeans combo. He looks out the window, following my line of sight. He frowns. ‘They’re skinned for me.’

  Were I not so conscious of the amount of gear I’m lugging around, it would be easy for me to forget that Ralf – the Ralf sat here, opposite me – is an illusion. Ralf is leaning towards me, eager, earnest, his foot an inch away from mine in the packed and airless carriage. And if I kicked him, my foot would go straight through.

  As it is, I’m feeling hot and self-conscious and eager to be done. Even by the chromed, futuristic standards of the financial district, this equipment of mine is absurdly conspicuous. Item: wraparound shades. Item: an electrode stickered not so subtly to my throat, to pick up speech I no longer need to utter. (In a year or two, everyone will subvocalise their calls by choice. This, anyway, is what the pundits are saying.) Item: a headset cradles my head with transparent silicone fingers. (Phoned sounds are crude intrusions – we bypass the ear entirely, and excite the auditory nerve, creating synthetic soundscapes that merge seamlessly with context and environment.)

  Ralf tilts his head at me. ‘You don’t seem happy with this.’ His voice comes alive in my head, subtly smoothed and delocalised by the software. The link is not very good – Ralf’s lips move but his voice seems to be coming at me from the back of my head.


  ‘The thing is,’ (I say, speaking in perfect silence – electrodes parse the throat’s intention tremors into speech) ‘we create phantoms.’ I nod out the window. ‘That’s all they are. That’s all they can ever be. They’re completely ephemeral.’

  ‘You can interact—’

  ‘Only according to the narrow rules of a game. You have an object made of light. You manipulate it, scroll through it, open and close it, shrink and expand it. God help you should you ever try to lean on it, or sit on it, or make your home in it, or, well,’ and I nod out the window at our angels, ‘take it out on a date.’

  We are leaving them behind now. Illusory Ralf has to turn in his seat to see a processed point-of-view of them as they flex in the sky, invisible to the gardeners, dog-walkers and six-a-side football teams toiling on the ground below. The view vanishes behind the blue glass wall of an office-block.

  ‘So you interact. Okay. What does that mean?’

  Ralf turns back and makes a face. For him, this is an irrelevance. Everything is a game to him. He lives inside the game, and when he is outside the game, he pretends himself inside, for fear of what he might find Out There. The unmediated real. The world. Chaos.

  ‘Don’t you see? The stuff we make is doomed to a life in inverted commas. We’re not even building in light. We’re building in irony. Everything we make is steeped in the stuff.’

  The train makes bathetic, burst-bladder sounds as it slides over the river towards the north shore.

  ‘You know,’ Ralf says, ‘you worry too much.’ Around him, bleeding away from his stolid outline and misproportioned goatee, I begin to catch glimpses of the wiry, physical man who actually occupies the seat opposite me. He is preparing to stand. His head emerges from out of Ralf’s head, a crocodile cracking through an egg. His arms emerge, Shiva-like, from out of Ralf’s arms. They wave about, collecting newspaper, satchel, umbrella. For a second the men, virtual Ralf and flesh-and-blood stranger, coexist in mythic form. ‘We’re bringing something new to life here. It’s got integrity. You just have to trust it. You just have to look.’

  Ralf fractures, winks, and vanishes. The stranger, oblivious, shrugs his coat on.

  Leaving the station, I cross the Canal by a footbridge, heading towards the Forum and the quiet, stone-clad purlieus of the Ministry of Trade. As I walk, the bridge’s functional iron latticework clads itself in statuary, dust, and a kinder, more southern light. So far, so unreal. I glance twice towards a newspaper icon, blinking tantalisingly close to my focus-point, and it swims into centre-view, unfurling translucent headlines. Another military adventure going sour.

  I near the end of the bridge and enter a world of solid hazards, reading as I go. The platform makes an executive decision about the amount of hallucination a body can cope with, and wraps its architectural dreams back into the struts and braces of the actual bridge. I get back the sound of my leather-soled shoes on the walkway’s iron grillework.

  Still the real eludes me. I enter my meeting in the grips of an awful dream where every solid thing, every brick and kerbstone, has come adrift and floats before me, contingent, weightless and untrustworthy.

  AR, like most technology, has bathos at its heart. To survive, it must never quite unveil itself. It must always fall some way short of its promise.

  Technology is, in the end, just another species of pornography.

  THIRTEEN

  A couple of days after I found and hid her corpse, Dad began to worry after Mum. Why hadn’t she phoned from the camp?

  We knew one other camp regular. Gabby was the daughter of Frankie, the hotel’s long-serving day manager. Frankie visited her daughter every weekend, bringing her freshly laundered clothes and a car boot full of fist-sized bottles of supermarket beer. A veteran of the civil protest movement, she spent Saturday afternoons teaching her daughter and her friends rappelling techniques and how to tie figure-eights. Gabby and her friends were building tree houses and walkways. The forest floor was damp and dirty and vulnerable; come winter, they were planning to take to the canopy.

  Every few weeks Gabby came home. ‘Delousing leave’, Frankie called it, and not without reason, since after a month or so ‘embracing the base’ Gabby’s head was a mass of rat’s tails, as though strips of horsehair stuffing from an old armchair had been woven through her hair.

  The speed with which Gabby had changed from child to angry young woman was startling. She seemed in one season to have swapped frilly party dresses for fatigues and a webby, moth-holed jumper. She had always been a big girl and after months outdoors her weight had acquired a shape, a purposefulness.

  Gabby and Frankie, Dad and I sat in the hotel dining room, around the big table near the fireplace. The mood was sour and frayed. At some point Gabby had decided to meet all Dad’s enquiries with a small, confident smile and, under the pressure of Dad’s unrelenting questioning, it had become a rictus, a sneer of defiance.

  Dad was insistent. ‘There has to be some central – some central thing – some centre.’

  If the protest movement had had a centre, the gates of the airbase would have been cleared long ago. As it was, the movement pulsed its way around obstacles. When assaulted, it retreated into itself then swelled again, like some science-fiction blob.

  ‘But there are young girls there,’ Dad fretted. ‘There has to be some protection.’

  No one felt they had to point out that Mum had long since ceased to be a young girl.

  Gabby was returning at the end of the week and said she would do what she could. All she could really do was pass on our fears. The camp was tenuous and scattered – we were going to have to rely on the gossips to carry the word around the base.

  Every day after school I went exploring down by the river. I moved about cautiously, on guard against strangers, soldiers, and above all, Michel. I could not be sure that Michel had abandoned his own fascination with the river. It was Michel, after all, who had invested ‘our river’ with its meaning. It was Michel who had run it, explored it, who tore his skin on its thorns, and imagined its future, and, for all I knew, still wove millennial dreams round its withered, tilting trees and rusting white goods.

  I stayed away from the ring of fridges, afraid I might run into him, though what he’d have found to do here, other than fantasize, I could not imagine. Anyway, I didn’t see him.

  Four days after she returned to the camp, Gabby phoned Dad. I was making us pasta when the call came through. A tension came over him, hunched there, a reed too brittle to bend. I thought at first it must be the police.

  But no. The farce I had made of everything just rolled on and on, a wave too powerful to check.

  ‘Sara never even turned up at the camp.’ He came forward and embraced me. I put my arms round him. I felt him shake. I held him, keeping him together. This again. This again, and always – keeping Dad whole against the wrack thrown up by Mum.

  The river ran slow and deep along sunken cuttings. The banks were sand, and the river had cut itself a deep bed, but nowhere did it run particularly fast. There were bathing pools, or what would have made bathing pools, but they were very deep. The banks had the consistency of damp sugar, and the water ran milky brown, always.

  Something the size and shape of a human corpse could not have floated far downstream. This whole stretch of river was one complex muddy snare. There was too much growth. There were too many pools, and too many reed beds, too many soft, estuarine places, almost-channels, forks. There were too many trees. She must have fetched up somewhere, bloated and bleached, with the plastic bag still wrapped round her head. Once she was found (someone was going to have to find her, eventually) it was going to be obvious to everyone that Mum’s was no simple suicide. Suicides do not asphyxiate themselves then leap into millraces. She had had assistance. She had had company. She had had someone get rid of her body. When they found her – and someone was bound to find her – their first thought was not going to be suicide. It was going to be murder.

  I had to get th
e bag off. I had to find her and take the bag from off her head.

  The nights were drawing in. When I got home from school, the conservatory was so cold I could see my own breath in the light of the porch lamp. I stepped inside and reached for the wall switch—

  No. I drew my hand back, breathing clouds of light into the dark.

  I passed through our rooms and out among the halls and landings of the hotel. The empty rooms nagged at me. The place was virtually mothballed now. Wounded servicemen were no longer being billeted with us, and Dad, with all his worries, had neither the time nor the will to spirit up yet another clientele.

  Mum’s presence had held together, by the weight of its demands, a home that made very little sense now that she was gone. Relieved of the pressure she exerted, the place was flying apart – drawing room and dining room and bar and check-in desk. Our own apartments, too, were getting bigger and colder.

  No one vanishes like that. A splash and gone. Not there. Not without help.

  Help, then. Since she was not found. Not then. Not later. Helped to die. A fear bred in the dark. Who really has the nerve to tape a bag around their own throat? Who really pulls a boot lid down on themselves. More to the point, how?

  I answered the last question myself, while Dad was out. The boot lid was double-hulled. There was a cut-out in the plastic, strong enough to haul the lid down, if you lay inside. I lay there in the boot, fingering the hole, horrified at the strength of the temptation that gripped me then, to pull the lid down over me, as she had done.

  As for the rest, I had no answers. At night I lay awake, haunted by scraps of memory. A haloed figure. Hair as white as mist. His zipper coming down. Insane. Absurd. But in this season of mists and shadows I could not help remembering that I had left her on the platform with him. His erection white and hard and as long as a dagger. His loamy hands.