At the Edge of the Game Read online

  ‘I shall enjoy these all the more now.’

  Up to his room he goes. Some sort of industrial sonic gunk starts to boom through the floor, accompanied by his own crashing and banging. I imagine him pogoing, moshing around the dark box room, head pummelling the lightshade like a punchbag.

  He has almost nothing in the room. A coarse blanket and worn sheets on the bed, one drawer with some socks and underwear, another with two pairs of jeans and two white shirts – his uniform – and the third containing a can of tuna. The wardrobe is completely empty. There was on the wall a print of an 18th century painting of a sailship moored outside the Custom House in Cork, but for some reason he’s taken that down and put it under the bed with his stash of pornography and weaponry magazines. The walls are now completely bare.

  ‘I’m not mad at you, George,’ she says.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Really, I’m not.’

  I hope she means it but the look on her is not reassuring.

  ‘I feel terrible.’

  ‘I know. We’ll make do.’

  I do the washing-up. A penance. Time now to retire to the spare room to spend the afternoon working on the graphic novel, which I do freely admit is my refuge.

  Been working on the design for a key plot point in which an emissary from the Neanderthal kingdom rides down the long road through the dry Mediterranean basin to the capital city of the modern humans, which I’ve opted to locate a few miles east of the Straits of Gibraltar. Here the present-day sea-bed slopes downwards from the shallow straits into the depths of the Mediterranean.

  It’s rather interesting, actually. A few million years ago, the Mediterranean dried up, leaving behind a desert of salt. The Atlantic poured over the Straits of Gibraltar as a kind of super-waterfall, but the heat caused the water to evaporate, leaving behind ever-increasing deposits of salt. Far to the east the Nile also poured into the Mediterranean basin.

  Those are scientific facts, and the discovery of them was the genesis of my graphic novel. I thought that it would be a great choice of unknown land in which to set my saga involving the Neanderthals and the Sapient humans.

  Anyway, flanking the Neanderthal emissary is a troop of Neanderthal guards dressed in chain mail, carrying maces and axes. I’m trying to give them a North-African look, with a hint of Celtic. I’ve been working on their outfits for days, but I haven’t come up with a good design yet. I’m getting nowhere with it tonight either, so I turn instead to the least laborious aspect of the project – designing the human capital city. I fritter away a couple of hours adding detail to the city map – a task not strictly necessary to the novel itself, but therapeutic. It makes the whole vision more complete for myself.

  I don’t emerge from my dream world until four in the afternoon, stiff from stooping over the desk. Helen’s gone out somewhere, probably to escape Heathshade’s noise. How many times have we asked him to keep the volume down? He just disregards us, well aware that we can’t afford to evict. His bedroom door opens and he comes down the stairs after me, in search of conversation. He’s one of those types who need always to have something going on, whether they are talking or watching TV or listening to music, or whatever. Can’t abide for even a few minutes the opportunity to think.

  ‘Alright, George?’

  ‘Hi, Marcus.’

  ‘Hey, get your rent cash for you tomorrow. Dole day.’

  ‘That’s great.’ Might as well tell him. ‘I’ll be joining you down there soon. I got laid off today.’

  ‘Yeah, sorry about that, man. Your lady told me this morning. Tough break, that.’

  Heathshade has difficulty understanding why anyone would choose to seek employment when the government is willing to pay out hard cash to you anyway.

  ‘Good lady, she is, George. Needs to be looked after.’

  It’s easiest just to humour him. He’ll get bored and go away, with some luck. I make my cup of tea.

  ‘Yeah, you did well there, but you’ve got to keep ‘em once you have ‘em, know what I mean? Learned that the hard way, I did. I was married once.’

  I didn’t know that. Extremely difficult to imagine this man married.

  ‘Yeah, still am officially, I suppose. It was in my Army days in England. I was on leave. Came home one evening, found my things in the hall in one big pile. See, she had a friend, name of Doris, who I met on the train the first day of leave. You understand, I had hardly seen a woman in months, and so I was looking forward to seeing to my lady wife. Train gets into the station and instead of going home I go to her house. I couldn’t help meself. She was all over me. Didn’t get home until 11 o’clock that night, and had to do some fast talking with the wife. Then more sex with her. Anyway, Doris feels guilty about a week later, tells a friend who tells me wife. I come home after a good night to find that she’s kicking me out. End of me marriage, then and there. Court order stopped me trying to patch things up. Left me a bit depressed, so that I could not properly return to the Army life. Got meself out of that gig by and by, though not without a good deal more strife.’

  I cast the last of my tea into the sink. ‘Sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Water under the bridge now, George. Past history, so to speak. Move on with life. That’s what I say. That’s why I came here originally, you see, to try and get into the Irish Army. Didn’t know that they would find out about what happened in the UK. Bit of bad luck, that. But promise me this, George, cos I say it as a friend - don’t make the mistakes I made. Keep your lady contented to the best of your ability.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘I see things are not… well, you know.’ He’s staring at me with his sly, lashless eyes. ‘She’s a bit down, ain’t she?’

  Time to bail out of this conversation. I go back up to my desk, but I can’t work any more. I’ve lost the thread. And also, I’m massively tired. So I get into bed for a lie-down. Immediately I start to drift. I always know when I’ll be able to sink into deep sleep. If in my half-waked state I see images, I will sleep soundly. If I hear voices, disjointed phrases and names, music, I will sleep only fitfully. Currently my state is of the latter type. When I wake, if I remember any of these manifestations, I will understand, as I always do, what they mean. I will be able to relate them to where I stand in the waking world. I have found, though, that being able to do this makes no difference to anything, is of no help to me at all.

  I can’t find a comfortable position in the bed. I am aware that I am only semi-conscious, but this does not stop me from being irritated at the certainty that I will not be able to sink past this level, that my nap will be unsatisfactory. The one benefit of being unemployed should be having the opportunity to get comprehensive rest, but even this is denied me. I ought really to get up, move around for a few minutes, watch TV, but Heathshade lurks downstairs. That’s not an option. What, then?

  I stand at the door of the bathroom. The living-room curtains are open, and the lights of the city are all that illuminate the dark apartment. Though I know I have lived here all my life, I can't remember the name of the city. I can't even remember what I was doing five minutes ago. I go to the window and look down at the traffic in the street far below. The white headlights and the red tail lights form a long, moving chain that stretches into the shady electric gloam of the middle distance. It strikes me how beautiful is the street, how beautiful this traffic jam. I open the window to let in some air. It opens only a little way. The mingled motor noises of the city are, hushed and caressing, pleasant to the ear. The air is cool and fresh – a sea breeze that, so high up on the thirtieth floor, is untainted by urban fumes.

  Perhaps I am concussed from some minor mishap. My short-term memory extends back only as far as a moment ago, to when I was standing outside the bathroom. I try to recall the test for concussion. I wonder if it is valid to perform such a test on oneself.

  I take a cigarette lighter - not mine, I don't smoke - from the coffee table. I go into the bathroom, switch the light on and look around. No signs
of mishap in here, such as bloodstains on a sharp edge. I look at myself in the mirror. My face is not quite familiar. I seem to recognise it as my own and yet I think it is not mine. I would not wear my hair so long. With a slightly shaking hand I switch off the bathroom light and switch on a lamp in the hallway. The bathroom is now lit dimly. I return to the mirror and stare closely into my own eyes. They are lined quite deeply. I cannot be so old - middle-aged. I feel that I am young. I light the cigarette lighter and bring it up to my face. My pupils dilate. I do it again, and again they dilate. So I am not concussed, then, I think. I wonder if I have remembered the concussion test correctly. Shaking my head I realise that the test, even if it is not an invention of my imagination, tells me nothing.

  I leave the bathroom and sit on the chair by the window, staring out. I study the cigarette lighter for a few moments, turning it over. It is engraved with an elaborate letter C. Some lights are on in the apartment building across the street. People are going about their evening activities - cooking, eating, watching television. I wonder what they are watching. I reason that a television programme might stimulate my mind out of its strange lassitude, but looking around I find that the apartment contains no television, nor a radio, nor a newspaper.

  My eye is drawn to one particular window across the street. A tough-looking man is doing chin-ups, gripping a bar that must be fixed to the wall over the window. He holds a big army-style dagger in his teeth. He wears a vest and shorts, both khaki. I count his chin-ups. He does twenty-five while I watch. Then he drops to the floor, still gripping the knife in his teeth, and begins push-ups. Of these he does a hundred. His face is red with exertion. He seems to have noticed my scrutiny - he is drawing the curtains.

  The sky is full of chaotically shifting lights and bands of colour. The lights of the city are brighter than the evening sky, but only just. I can see two helicopters hover low-down, close to the rooftops. One of them casts a searchlight on the side of a building. Far away, across the narrow tail end of the Terminal Sea, barely visible from here, is a single building much wider and higher than any other in the city. It extends high, so high that its lights become indistinguishable from the lights in the sky. It is known as… why, it is the Dublin City Cylinder. Of course. Thus a segment of my memory is recovered, a neural pathway reactivated, a volume of brain matter revived – I recall now that this city, my native city, is Dublin. Dublin Far City, to be precise.

  The thought occurs to me that perhaps I am dreaming. I look about me. I feel the texture of the material on the arm of my chair and the touch on my face of the evening breeze coming in through the window. No, it's too complete, too real for this to be a dream. Unsettling as it is, this has to be reality. I sink back into the chair and try to relax, waiting for my proper senses to return. As the night-time advances I watch the dancing lights of the sky as they mock the static, orderly lights of the city.

  ALL CHANGE

  George, gave your life for mine. You gave me a chance. I didn’t think you had it in you. I hope you made it back to Waterford. I’m looking at your picture in the locket. You looked happy when this photo was taken. I wish we could go back and do everything differently.

  I know how she felt. How I would like to undo the decision that brought me here.

  I ended up on this strange empty Earth not meant for human beings through folly. In my desire for solitude I made it my fate to end up scrabble in the dirt for traces of the life I had deliberately left behind.

  I set out on a very long voyage to the stars. Relativistic time dilation saw to it that many millennia passed before my return. And when I did return, it was in the realisation that I had made a terrible mistake. It was not solitude I desired after all. There was no freedom out there for me among the stars. The freedom I sought, I now knew, was freedom from inner shackles, not outer ones. I finished in a situation in which those inner bonds became tighter than ever before.

  Upon my fiery arrival on earth in the Nine Hundred and Eighty-third Century, I set up the domed habitat in a natural alcove in the rocky gradient between the beach and the forest. It clamped itself so tightly to the rock, had such structural integrity, that only the most improbably powerful tidal wave or storm could conceivably breach its walls or dislodge it. Within its plastiform hull I was as secure as technology could make me. The potential dangers around my home seemed to be few in any case. There were no predators and the weather was clement for the most part. The seasons were little distinguished from each other. When I considered how hostile this place could have been I knew I had been extremely lucky.

  I got to know my place of exile slowly. I made cautious exploratory forays along the smooth, black-sanded beaches, and penetrated inland as far as the slopes where the trees began to thin out. I had not had an opportunity to view the lie of the land as my spacecraft, the Vicissitudinale, plunged through the atmosphere during its final, disastrous planetary re-entry, and it was on those slopes that I first realised that I was living on an island.

  In the final moments before the ship sank to the floor of the bay, it ejected both myself, enveloped in a buoyant survival suit, and the plastiform sphere, which contained a host of machines and supplies. The sphere later transformed itself into my habitat. Thanks to the machines, I had little concern about keeping myself fed. They synthesised a range of foodstuffs out of the air and the soil. I supplemented my diet with shellfish, as well as with nuts and berries from the forest. In my first weeks in the bay, I sustained myself on plump and gullible sea parrots, an ideal target for an inexperienced hunter such as myself. I soon decided to let them be because of the piteous shrieks they gave out them snared. The flesh of the blue-legged lizards tasted better in any case, and unlike the parrots the lizards showed no emotion on the point of death.

  With a small radar apparatus I was compiling a detailed contour map of the Moon's strange new face. On clear nights I sometimes concerned myself with the identification of the stars in the sky. Nothing in the heavens was quite as it had been. With the aid of my telescope I was able to determine that the nearby system of Centauri now had a dim fourth member, a smouldering brown dwarf with Saturn-like rings. The brightest star in the sky was still Sirius, but it was now as blue as Vega. Vega itself was gone, and there was a nebula that was probably the cold remains of Betelgeuse.

  One clear evening, strolling down the beach just after sunset, I spotted a new, brightening object close to the zenith. It quickly outshone everything else in the twilit sky except the Moon. I went back to the habitat to point the telescope towards it. Expecting to see a close-by asteroid or a nova, I was alarmed to behold a double cylinder twenty kilometres from end to end. The telescope informed me that it was close to the earth, braking, making adjustments to enter a lunar orbit.

  I went into the habitat and shut off the radar antenna, fearing that its signal would attract the attention of the incoming craft. With dismay I realised that the one misfortune I had never thought would befall me in this place now seemed imminent. My solitary refuge was in danger of being breached. It occurred to me that it would be sensible to move away from the habitat for a while, to avail of the cover of the forest, to await further developments from a place of safety. I did not move, however. I decided to stay where I was. The months of ease, I think in retrospect, had dulled my survival instinct.

  For four days I waited for something to happen. The cylinders remained steadfastly brilliant each night, circling the Moon. But I was awoken early on the fifth morning by a deep, intensifying rumble. I went outside, blinking in the glare of the low, orange sun. Little waves broke on the black sand, disturbing the gulls that scoured the beach for early-morning sustenance. As my eyes grew accustomed to the light, I spotted a vapour trail moving eastward across the sky. It was an aircraft, too high up to be seen as anything more than a silver dot. It swooped southwards and disappeared behind the hills.

  A little while after, the massive silver bulk of the aircraft appeared over the trees and banked, roaring like a beast, over the
bay waters. It was quite a conventional looking vessel, about a hundred metres long and fifty wide, with two short delta wings from which its engines hung. Its tail fins formed a distinctive vertical V-shape that gave me the feeling I had seen the craft before. When it drew closer, I recognised its anachronistic rocket exhaust, and the rows of small square windows on each side of the fuselage. The craft's identity was confirmed by the words stencilled in plain Roman script on the fuselage. Hovering over the beach was a spacecraft that belonged to the pages of the history books – a vessel that had left the earth sixty years before I was born. It was the legendary Unquiet Spirit.

  The Unquiet Spirit touched down in a rising cloud of black sand, which blew inland and dispersed over the dense vegetative canopy. The door below the cockpit window swung open slowly. A high metal stairway unfurled and touched the ground. An old man stepped forth. He squinted in the brightness of the daylight. He looked down at me from the top of the stairs.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  ‘Hello,’ I responded. The word came out as a half-cough. My throat was dry. I said it again.

  He seemed to be as much at a loss as I was.

  ‘Are you Dexter Innes?’ I called.

  His surprise was obvious. ‘Yes.’

  He descended the stairs with difficulty. He was far more infirm in those first days than ever after as long as I knew him. He was bent over and so thin that I could clearly see the structure of his skull beneath the sunken flesh of his face. He had long white hair tied back carelessly in a way that very misleadingly made him look bohemian. His eyes were dark and tired. I guessed he was about eighty years old. Weeks later he looked the sixty-five he actually was. The pictures I had seen of him had been taken in his late twenties, just before he left Earth on his great expedition to the stars.

  He stepped onto the sand and bent in an ungainly fashion to touch it with his hands. I resisted an impulse to step forward and support him. It was well that I did. I was to learn later that Dexter would not have taken kindly to such a gesture. He ran the fine grains through his fingers. I noticed how blotched his skin was, how riven with burst capillaries.