Slow Birds: And Other Stories Read online

  ‘I suppose we’d better do without toast, Silver. How about cornflakes?’

  ‘For goodness’ sake!’

  ‘Well, we have to eat.’

  ‘Don’t you realize anything, Alan? What about fuel? Oil! Raw materials. Imported food. What price New Zealand lamb, coming from a million miles away? The ship would have to carry nothing but fuel. The crew would be old men by the time they docked.’

  I worked it out in my head. ‘No, actually it would take the ship about ten years. But I see what you mean.’

  ‘I’m glad you do. Oh, we’ll still be able to hear the news, from a hundred thousand miles away. As Japan grinds to a halt. As people die in famines that no one can reach with food aid. People like us, Alan dear.’

  ‘God, we’ll never see a banana again …’ Curiously, it was this which popped into my head, rather than the wholesale demise of civilization. Or perhaps as an example of it.

  ‘It’ll be like living on Mars. And dying on Mars.’

  The radio advised commuters with journeys of less than thirty miles to proceed to work normally, but allowing extra time and fuel.

  ‘That’s stupid,’ said Silver. ‘How long is there going to be any fuel in the filling stations?’

  ‘Do you suggest we walk? I suppose it’s possible. Twelve miles to Launchester? In the old days, some kids used to walk twelve miles to school.’

  ‘Just what would you be going to Launchester for? Instead of, say, digging up the back lawn quickly – to plant vegetables tout de suite? And getting hold of some good egg-laying hens, before everyone realizes?’

  ‘Well, for one thing Dan MacNamara’s due at GeoGraphics today.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘The Mappamundi – what did you think?’

  ‘And you’re going to be able to export this TV toy a hundred thousand miles to the Land of the Free, in time for Christmas?’

  ‘Look, we shouldn’t assume this distance effect is going to continue. It sprang up in a few hours yesterday. It stabilized overnight. It could fade away just as fast. Still, I’d better phone Dave to check that Big Mac made it. Let’s have orange juice rather than coffee, hmm? And it isn’t a TV toy, Silver.’

  Though, come to think of it, with my proposed extras it could come to resemble one … Maybe Maggie’s taunt was on target.

  Heading for the phone in my pyjamas, I lit a stick of my favourite Algerian camel dung, alias Disque Bleu; and I wondered how far away the factories of the Régie Française de Tabac were today.

  Big Mac had indeed reached Dave’s house – about three hours late – and Dave agreed with me about the sense of coming in to GeoGraphics. So after a rather fraught, cold breakfast I departed, Volvo-borne, towards Launchester, leaving Silver vowing that she was going to dig up the lawn all by herself and sow carrot or cabbage seed or something, if she could get hold of seed packets at the village shop in Hornton, down the road.

  We had all got in to work, but it was a somewhat chastened team which met Big Mac in Dave’s office. Redheaded Dan MacNamara was acting in a bluffly amiable way, though I couldn’t help noticing a persistent line of sweat along his upper lip, which he wiped away frequently.

  After a while, the sales conference ran out of steam.

  ‘Oh, hell,’ said Big Mac. ‘Lets stop pretending. It’s okay for you guys. You live here.’

  ‘And here we may very well starve, too,’ said I. ‘Britain isn’t self-sufficient. So my wife’s busy digging up the lawn right now, to plant cabbages … We’ve got to assume that this business is going to reverse itself. And soon.’

  Maggie drummed her fingers on a brochure.

  ‘Or find some way out. Some way round the phenomenon. We’re supposed to be the hotshot cartographers. So how about thinking our way out of this, Alan, instead of ignoring it?’

  A challenge. Even with the whole world inflating exponentially, she had managed to sharpen her teeth – as other ladies might find time to powder their noses during an earthquake.

  ‘Think our way out of it? Maybe it is in the mind? Maybe it’s an illusion?’ I was just talking off the top of my head.

  ‘If that’s so,’ objected Big Mac, ‘and we’re just imagining it, you’d get planes stalling in mid-air and cars in the wrong gear, and all.’

  ‘True. We’ve got to be covering extra space – but the space has no content. It doesn’t contain anything. Because …’ – and I searched around – ‘because we can only see the world that’s here.’

  We couldn’t see the Wide World of childhood: the world of El Dorado and King Solomon’s Mines. Because the map of the world was full up with roads and railways, oil rigs and megalopoli. There was no room left for ‘Here Be Dragons’ or sea serpents. So … what if the map of the world had mysteriously expanded to include all of these other things – at precisely the moment when every last geographical detail had at last been calibrated and computerized, including even prehistoric geography? But no one saw anything new. People were just grossly delayed in their travels. Was it possible to see something extra, something new, in the interstices of the world? Was it not space which had betrayed us – but vision?

  No, it wasn’t quite that …

  The world was overfilled with people: people who all shared a collective unconscious, a dream mind.

  When a hive becomes too crowded with bees, the bees know instinctively when to swarm; and away fly half of them to find another hive. But we only had one single hive, one world. So when the urge to swarm came, there was no other space to fly off into …

  ‘Penny for them,’ demanded Maggie. ‘Penny for your thoughts.’

  ‘Oh, I was just wondering how many disappearances have been reported to the police. Missing persons. Dave, you play golf with the chief constable, don’t you?’

  ‘Once in a blue moon, lad. What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Just a hunch. Would you do me a big favour, and phone him to ask? Please. It’ll only take a moment.’

  In fact, it took many moments to get through, but that was Dorothy’s department. Shortly after Dave did finally get to pose the question, he covered the mouthpiece, giving me a peculiar look.

  ‘There are quite a lot of people reported missing. He wants to know how we knew. At first they thought it was just a case of people not reaching their destinations.’

  ‘Oh, they’re reaching those, all right!’

  ‘Getting delayed. Running out of petrol, that kind of thing. But a lot of people have promised to phone home, and haven’t. There’s no sign of them. Here, you’d better talk to him.’

  I took the handset.

  ‘One thing I can tell you,’ I was saying to the chief constable a little later, ‘is that you’re going to be snowed under with missing person calls by tonight.’

  ‘I’ll bear this in mind, Mr –?’

  ‘Roxbury. Alan Roxbury.’

  ‘I’ll definitely bear you in mind.’ He rang off unceremoniously, and I could see that Dave was embarrased by the episode.

  ‘Would you mind going through that again, for us dummies?’ asked Big Mac angrily.

  ‘It’s like this,’ I said to him. ‘Mind constructs reality. Our thoughts make the world – ’

  ‘Oh, in a sense!’ protested Sally-Ann, with a toss of her brown curls. ‘In a sort of philosophical sense. But’ – and she thumped her hand down hard on Dave’s desk – ’thus I refute you. Flesh and wood. Solid stuff.’

  ‘But what if the mind really does construct reality? And the world has got too small for us. Breakfast in London, second breakfast in New York. We put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes. And every square inch is filled up solid with detail. The world has been shrinking for the last hundred years, faster and faster. Now here comes the bounce-back at last. Or rather, here’s where we swarm. As soon as enough people have found the way out, distances should return to normal.’

  ‘The way out?’ echoed Maggie, incredulous.

  ‘Into the extra spaces.’

  �
�Obviously you’re under a lot of strain, Alan. Why don’t you go home and have a rest?’

  ‘Why don’t we all go – and look for the way out ourselves? And try to come back again? Of course, there’ll be millions of exit points – and by tonight millions of people will have found these, of their own accord. The invisible boundaries. Well, we’ll pinpoint one of these. We’ll map it. That was your bright idea, wasn’t it Maggie? Use our minds. Market the thing.’

  I hadn’t really expected that Dave would want to do anything other than feast Big Mac royally at Launchester’s only Good Food Guide restaurant, the Sorrento, and sink a few bottles to take all our minds off the collapse (or, rather, the expansion) of the world which we had been so sure of yesterday. Well, he did – and he didn’t. Or else he drank more than I noticed. For halfway through the tagliatelle al prosciutto he suddenly said, ‘Okay, lad, we’ll give it a try. Nothing ventured, eh?’

  And outside, afterwards, he handed me the keys to his Jag.

  ‘You drive, lad. Seeing as you know the way.’

  ‘Which way?’ demanded Maggie.

  ‘Just let him drive. Spontaneously.’ And Dave jammed his pipe into his mouth.

  Pragmatic Sally-Ann would have nothing to do with this charade, and insisted on being dropped back at GeoGraphics; but Maggie was determined to enjoy this proof of my insanity, while Big Mac was filled with sudden wanderlust, since he was now effectively a prisoner in the Launchester area. (I suppose, similarly, one’s immediate response to the threat of starvation could well be a bout of gluttony!) So off we went, and I took the most spontaneous, unconscious route I knew – which happened to be the road home to Ferrier Malvis. We kept our eyes peeled.

  Some fifty minutes later I swung the Jaguar into our driveway. Silver’s Renault was absent, so she must have driven the two miles (or four miles) to Hornton to buy cabbage seed. If indeed one does grow cabbages from seed …

  And nothing at all happened. Except that the journey had taken twice as long as usual.

  ‘You’d better all come in for a drink,’ I said. ‘I want to see what Sarah’s done to the lawn.’

  ‘Good job someone in the family’s got their head screwed on.’ Maggie couldn’t resist it. ‘Oh, by the way, Alan, you do realize that you’ll have to drive all the way back with us?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘To pick up your own car.’

  God help me …! ‘So maybe something’ll happen on the way back!’ I snapped.

  Maggie simply laughed.

  We went inside, where I told them to help themselves to drinks, while I went through to the kitchen.

  Out on the lawn a patch ten yards long by a yard wide had been stripped of its turf – the same turf which we had brought in so expensively a couple of years earlier. Sods were piled in a dirty mass on the patio. The spade was stuck in the uncovered soil, upright.

  How long would this have taken her? Half an hour? Less than an hour, anyway. Whereupon Silver had decided that I could damn well finish the job. Alternatively, she had panicked about a possible rush on cabbage seed, and driven off to Hornton.

  Hours ago. Well before lunch. Now it was three-thirty.

  I hurried back to the lounge, where gin was glugging into glasses.

  ‘Got any ice, Alan?’

  ‘Fridge. I have to make a phone call.’

  I found the number of the Hornton shop in Silver’s own neat hand in the red book by the phone.

  And Mrs What’s-her-name told me that Silver had indeed been in, buying packets of seed – about ten o’clock in the morning. Then she had driven straight back in the direction of Ferrier Malvis.

  A distance of two miles. (Or four.) Five hours ago.

  I turned to the others. ‘My wife’s gone missing. Sarah’s disappeared. She found one of the ways out.’

  But, of course, as I realized when I returned the Jag and passengers to Dave’s personal parking space outside GeoGraphics, the reason why we couldn’t find any of these exit points was that we were looking for them. We were searching for one in full consciousness of what they were. We knew. But it was the unconscious of the world which was at work …

  Recovering the Volvo, I drove homeward recklessly, pushing my registered speed higher and higher so that (as I imagined) I might take all the longer over the journey. All too soon, it seemed to me, I arrived home.

  Fixing myself a stiff shot of the bird – as a gesture towards unconsciousness – I switched on the TV and watched for an hour.

  There were missing-persons reports galore by now. An epidemic of them. A veritable Hamelin – with hundreds of thousands of people in these British Isles alone somehow following this Pied Piper of the extra spaces, away into somewhere else. A lot of people had only needed to go for a walk around the corner. Or potter down to the bottom of the garden …

  Drunk, I took the Volvo out several times that evening to race towards Hornton and back again. But, drunk as I was, I still knew exactly what I was doing.

  Finally I slept alone, crying maudlin tears into the pillow for a little while, before the bird put me soddenly to sleep …

  * * *

  … to wake at dawn, sweaty with the alcohol, to the bright carillon of other birds; finches, blackbirds, thrushes; and to thumb the radio on.

  ‘… clear signs that the distance effect has been growing steadily less during the past few hours,’ was what I heard.

  ‘Silver!’ I cried – though there was no one to hear me.

  Hauling my clothes and shoes on, I raced downstairs unwashed and uncombed. A couple of minutes later, and I was on the road driving hell for leather towards the sharp bends leading up on to the moors.

  For the next three hours I drove back and forth between Ferrier Malvis and Launchester, hearing the car radio tell me with increasing optimism that the space anomaly (for such it was being renamed) really was receding as rapidly and inexplicably as it had first arisen.

  Silver! Silver! Where?

  I sped with all the mad possession of the last old rat out of Hamelin – and it was I who was left behind while the anomaly closed up seamlessly.

  Eventually the Volvo ran out of fuel, by the same tumbled drystone barn. I started to walk home. Then I began to run as fast as I could, hoping that by exhausting my body I might entrance myself, and so gain entrance still. Soon, with a terrible stitch in my side, I had to drop back to walking pace. The pain felt rather like a broken heart.

  We are decimated, at the very least. Perhaps one tenth of the human race disappeared during the anomaly, overall. The effect was more severe in highly populated areas. Such as Britain.

  Now, six months later, a sort of emotional anaesthesia seems to affect our memories of that time – an inability, in retrospect, to focus clearly on what happened, as great as that of the Australian aborigines who reputedly paid no attention whatever to Captain Cook’s proud sailing ship when it first anchored off their shores, for the simple reason that there was nothing in their previous experience as huge as it. Like animals we mourned our losses: lowing piteously for a few days, then walking on and forgetting. And at the same time, we’re all rather glad to see each other – we who remain. We greet each other joyfully.

  Not I, though. Because I failed – by knowing.

  The jets fly from Heathrow to New York in exactly the same time as ever they did before. Yet when I drive back from Launchester over the moors, I know that Silver is somewhere out there – except that I can’t see her or reach her. She’s somewhere in the extra spaces.

  Oh, Silver!

  Maybe in another ten years’ time – or twenty – when the population again reaches swarming density, the seams will open up again, and there’ll be a second exodus …

  Today I resigned from GeoGraphics. A foolish mistake, said Dave – just at the moment when Mappamundi is really taking off, worldwide, selling in the millions beyond our wildest hopes. It seems that something has triggered, deeply, people’s interest in cartography … Hearing of my decision, Maggie brought her
teeth together in a satisfied, crocodilian snap. I didn’t care.

  Tomorrow I shall burn all my old copies of Wide World Magazine, out on the strip of soil which Silver cleared. The stainless steel spade still stands upright there, just as she left it – a good test of the manufacturer’s boast about weather resistance. I couldn’t bear to touch the spade till now. But tomorrow I will, once all the tales of El Dorado and the poison darts of pygmies in the Belgian Congo have been burned. However hard the ground is this winter, I’ll dig the ashes in.

  I’m going to take over Silver’s old job at the craft shop in Forby. I’ll forget about running a Volvo and smoking Disque Bleu and drinking the juice of the bird. In the evenings, come the spring, I’ll dig up the rest of the lawn and turn the whole garden over to vegetables, to feed myself cheaply. The hens I’ll buy should be good enough company for me.

  And I’ll wait, till the world widens out again. Then I’ll be the first person to walk around the corner. Or to stroll down to the bottom of the garden.

  White Socks

  Harry and Helen Sharp had been married for a year; this African nation had been independent for two years. Back home Harry would have been an ordinary accountant, whereas here he was an expert, for the Ministry of Finance. Both he and Helen were liberal-minded, which was why they had come to work in black Africa; and Harry would have been the first to admit that their present conditions – house in the Oyster Bay area, interest-free loan for a Volkswagen beetle – were artificially exalted. No expert he, except by contrast with the locals.

  One thing which they were expert on after twelve months, however, was marriage; which was why the Ismaili wedding reception they’d attended the other day had filled them with amusement and wry sympathy; and still did, as they drove up country.

  The bride, Gulzar, had been a secretary at the Ministry; Harry had been kind to her, friendly, interested. The lives of these Asians in a black African country struck him as poignant, like those of an endangered species; and almost mysterious. So the invitation to the reception had given them both fascinating insights. Which they still mulled over, as Harry drove along.