Michel sits at his screen. ‘Can you go round and sort the scanner out?’
The scanner/printer sits on top of a small drawer unit behind the desk, out of his reach. There’s nowhere for me to sit so I sit on the carpet, slipping the photographs out of their plastic wallet while the scanner clunks and whines. It is warming itself up, checking itself over with a painful attention to detail, like a geriatric man recovering from a fall. ‘It says it has low ink.’
‘It always says that.’
There are only three pictures that are any good, and even these are misframed. Either the top of Louis’s head is missing, or an ear, or his feet, as though some malign supernatural force had sought to presage the ugly manner of his death. He doesn’t look like a soldier, any more than Poppy ever came across as an army wife.
He looks worried in these photos – the very picture of introversion. As for Poppy, you would expect her to exhibit, if not a certain stiffness, at least a sense of make-do-and-mend, a resourcefulness that, even if it had not been there to begin with, would have been forced on her by years of relocation, loneliness, and the narrow social confines of the army life. Many years have gone by. It could all have been worn away by now, but the thing is, I have no memory of her being any tougher than she is now, or any more straightforward. ‘How long was Louis in the army?’
‘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.’