‘So I just choose a door and open it?’
He nodded.
How does one choose between objects that appear to be identical? I had entered the realms of the arbitrary, the intuitive, and I didn’t feel entirely comfortable, but I spent a while studying the room and in the end I found what I was looking for. At the foot of the second door from the right the carpet had been worn away, which led me to believe that this particular door was more popular than the others. Now, at least, I had something on which I could base a decision.
I opened the door and stepped through it, closing it carefully behind me as if I were a guest in someone’s house. As I let go of the door-knob I became aware of a faint stinging sensation in my hand. Glancing down, I saw that I had scratched myself. Except they weren’t really scratches. They looked more like pinpricks — four or five neat punctures in the centre of my palm. It must have been the door-knob. Some jaggedness or irregularity in the metal.
‘Did you hurt yourself?’
I looked up quickly. A boy was walking across the room towards me. His fair hair glinted as he passed beneath the light that hung from the ceiling.
‘Jones!’ I couldn’t believe that it was him. ‘What are you doing here?’
He just smiled.
‘Are you all right?’ I said.
‘I’m fine. Just like you said I’d be.’ He took hold of my hand and turned it over. We both gazed down at my palm, the miniature beads of blood. His smile seemed to widen.
‘Are you sure?’ I said.
He was still looking at my hand. ‘You shouldn’t worry so much.’
They were the very words I had used a quarter of a century ago. He had remembered them. I had so many questions, but they all merged, forming a kind of blockage, like leaves in a drain.
I stared at the top of his head. His hair had the gleam of beaten metal.
‘What happens next?’ I said.
And then it was as if I had blinked and missed half the evening. A girl stood in front of me. It was my sister, Marie — or rather it was a girl who looked just like her. Younger, though. Seventeen, eighteen. The age Marie had been when I first saw her.
‘Where’s Jones?’ I said.
‘Jones?’ she murmured, lips slanting a little.
I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t matter. Jones is all right. Jones is fine.’
Her face slowly lifted to mine, as slowly as the sun crossing the sky, as slowly as a flower growing, and her skin glowed as if lit from the inside, and the whites of her eyes were the purest white imaginable. I became aware of a change in the temperature. The air in the room seemed warmer now, and it was scented too, not with perfume, though, and not with incense, no, with something sweeter, more indefinable, more rare — the breath of angels, perhaps …
I don’t know how we reached the street. I simply found myself standing on the kerb, the girl beside me, her eyes as dark as liquorice or mink. My heart seemed to have swollen in my chest. My heart felt like a beacon, a source of light.
‘How do you feel?’ she asked.
‘I’ve never been happier,’ I said.
She took my hand and led me to a car.
‘Is this yours?’ I asked.
She didn’t answer.
Before too long, we were moving along a straight road, our progress fluid, cushioned. She handled the car with great efficiency and deftness. Lights streamed past my window, all different colours.
‘You drive beautifully,’ I said.
She looked across at me and smiled. The space between us glittered.
‘Where are we going?’ And then, before she could reply, I said, ‘I know. I shouldn’t talk so much.’ It didn’t matter where we were going. Our destination didn’t interest me at all. I just wanted everything to remain exactly as it was.
I wanted it to last for ever.
I stared out of the window, secure in the knowledge that she was still beside me. To look away from her felt like sheer extravagance. I was so confident of her presence that I could squander it.
The city faded. A glow in the rear window, a distant phosphorescence. I leaned forwards as the car took a series of long, sweeping curves at high speed. We seemed to be climbing, but I could see nothing through the windscreen, nothing except the headlights pushing into the darkness ahead of us. Every now and then a sign would loom up at the side of the road like a skeleton in a ride through a haunted house, only to fall away, insubstantial, obsolete. There was never a moment when I was frightened or even unnerved.
The girl didn’t speak again. Once in a while she would glance across the magical secluded space inside the car, and the looks she gave me meant more than anything she could have said. Those dark eyes in the dashboard lights, that darker hair, the muted howling of the wind as we rushed on into the unforeseen, the incomparable — and then I was sitting next to a canal, a street lamp hanging over me, and everything plunged deep in a sickly orange solution, everything deformed somehow and yet preserved, as if in formaldehyde. I couldn’t seem to focus properly. My throat contracted, and I coughed so hard that I thought I might vomit. I put my head in my hands and kept quite still. What had happened? I didn’t know. I sat there until I felt the cold air penetrate my clothes.
At last I was able to look up. I was at the top of a flight of stone steps which led down into flat black water. Was it the Great Western Canal? I couldn’t tell. There was no sign of the taxi. Perhaps I had fetched up somewhere else entirely. I risked a glance over my shoulder. No, there behind me was the tall white building. I climbed slowly to my feet, then stood still for a moment. The sweat had cooled on my face, and I felt more awake. My vision was sharper too. I made my way across the towpath to the club. When I tried a door, though, it wouldn’t open. I tried them one by one, methodically. They had all been locked. I peered through the glass, but the lights had been switched off. All I could see was a dim distorted version of my own face. I banged on a door with the flat of my hand. Nobody came. What would I have said anyway? I went back to the bottom of the steps and gazed up at the façade. The white neon strip above the entrance was quite blank; the letters that spelled THE BATHYSPHERE had been taken down. It was only then that I thought to look at my watch. Twenty-past four. I let out a strangled cry and swung round, staring wildly towards the motionless canal, the empty buildings with their broken windows and their barricaded doors. I had to get back to my hotel — but how?
I began to run towards the city centre. A pain started up in my right side, and I slowed to a fast walk. My feet felt only loosely attached to my ankles. My throat burned. The conference would be starting in four hours, and I hadn’t gone to bed yet. I didn’t even know where I was.
A plane went over, tearing the clouds to shreds. I swore at it. The next time I looked up I saw a dimly illuminated sign that said TAXI. I burst through the door. The small office was filled with grey-skinned men smoking cigarettes.
‘I need a cab,’ I said.
Their heads turned in my direction, their lips purple in the drab yellow light. Somebody asked me where I wanted to go. The Sheraton, I told him. He named a price. It seemed expensive, but I agreed to it. In the circumstances, I suppose I would have agreed to almost anything. He consulted a clipboard which lay on the counter in front of him, then pointed at one of the younger men.
Twenty minutes later I was standing in my bathroom, staring into the mirror. It was hard to believe that I was back in the hotel, that I was safe. It had the banality of a true miracle. And the face that was looking at me didn’t appear to have altered. The same wide, slightly furtive brown eyes. The same low forehead, two uneven horizontal lines etched delicately into the skin. I touched my hair where the sweat had darkened it, then I brought my hand down and turned it over so the palm faced upwards. Studying it closely, I could just make out five tiny marks.