The World Was All Before Them Read online

  For Kate

  They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,

  Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

  Milton

  Contents

  Twenty-five Hours in October

  Sixteen Hours in February

  Forty-Seven Hours in April

  Twenty-Nine Hours in July

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  Also available by Matthew Reynolds

  Twenty-five Hours in October

  Brakelights flared and 0.47 of a second later young Dr Philip Newell too pressed the brake pedal of his VW Golf 1.6 Tdi Bluemotion, built 26 months and 13 days before, in Wolfsburg, on the river Aller, the arrow-straight Aller, where perch dart and poplars flutter, though Philip had bought it only the other week. The precision-engineered silver machine slowed slightly from 80mph to 74 and then, as Philip saw more red lights reddening ahead of him in a long, quadruple array curving right to follow the road uphill, slowed again when he pressed the pedal further down, feeling the metal of it push back against his foot, against the skin and muscle and metatarsals and proximal phalanges: 60, 42, 35, 30, then a judder down to 20 – at which Sue, sitting next to him, pulled her eyes back from the misty distant late afternoon sky, and looked forward, and glanced across towards him, and looked forward again at these things that were stacking together ahead of them, agglomerations of metal and rubber and plastic, slowing and settling, nosing each other’s rear ends – they were bullocks, snorting mist, glaring with red eyes: yes, a herd being pushed backwards, pawing at the ground with heavy black hooves as, in a slow glide, the engine disengaged now, Philip and Sue, in their own metal and plastic box (with fabric trim), slackened to 10, 5, 0, perked up to 10 again for a moment, then dropped to a more definitive halt.

  There was silence.

  Then: ‘Phhhhu,’ said Philip.

  ‘Mmgn,’ said Sue.

  All around, there was the air, chilling and thickening as it was rotated out of reach of the sun. There was the land which, leftwards, fell away and mapped itself out into fields, hedgerows, copses, lanes and roads, lines of telegraph poles and sequences of pylons, a farmhouse with corrugated iron barns held close around it, a slab of cottages, and, in the soft fawn blur of the horizon, a scattering of sparkles as the daylight drained. On the right, beyond the other carriageway, where other cars speed irritatingly along the channel of the road, each one swelling as it approaches, its headlights dazzling, until, snap, in a moment, it has passed, and is receding and is gone; beyond this intensely frustrating, flowing carriageway rises an embankment strengthened with honeycomb-pattern slabs of concrete through which plants grow, thistle and dandelion, rye grass and meadow grass, wall barley, common couch and cock’s foot, buttercups and poppies, though they are not flowering any longer, they have gone to seed: only the occasional red clover raises its fingers to the sky. On the crest of the embankment, a fence of metal posts and barbed wire holds back a mass of nettles, their leaves blackened and shrivelling in the cold. Behind them are the cathedral shadows of a wood where beeches loom, where fallen leaves of dun-colour and taupe and sulphur and skin-pink are changing, becoming slimy, fragrant, soft, returning to the ground where worms contract and surge, sucking their way through the earth, where ants and mites and beetles thrive, where cylindrocarpon and penicillium extend their filaments, where azotobacter and acromobacter flourish; and where, under a tipped-up, rotting trunk of maple, woodlice scurry and earwigs writhe. An early fox pads by, ears up, head a-twitch. A late mosquito drifts staggeringly towards its burrow. A pipistrelle flits. High up, a sparrow fluffs its feathers for the night, rolls its head this way and that, and lodges its hard, tender beak within the warmth. Further off, at the end of a slender branch, dangles a single stubborn apple, already gleaming in a glint of moonlight, even though it has been hollowed and part-ingested by a maggot housed within.

  Yet none of this is seen by Philip and Sue, for they are sealed within their own particular micro-environment where: bang! the ball of Philip’s right thumb hits the steering wheel which judders while the reactive energy of the impact makes his hand bounce back towards him. Because he really wanted to get home. He needs to rest. Because although the first two weeks had gone OK it was still really demanding. Because the reason they had gone OK was that he’d been fully awake, and alert, and wholly focused. Adrenalin prickling in him non-stop through the day. Now that he was at last a proper doctor. Now that it was finally at last just him being put face to face with a patient and being allowed to, no, obliged to do the utterly weird things that doctors do. Like for instance stick your fingers up their arse. Or listen to the clank-thud of their heart. Or inject alien liquid into their blood vessels – if that was the right path to take, of course, only if it was right. Because there’s the rub. You can misdiagnose by missing something. Or you can misdiagnose by seeing something that isn’t there. Or also you can simply have a brain-out and put the wrong word in the prescription, depomedrone not depoprovera (!) Or you can miss a contra-indication. Or you can . . . or actually you can just not feel up to slowly and carefully unpicking and thoroughly considering those many cases which are a tangle of body and mind. In which doctoring is as much about talking as handing out medicine. Or more. He sees a mother and a little boy sitting side by side in two orange plastic bucket chairs in the consulting room. He sees himself, listening, nodding, answering: he is projecting receptiveness and wisdom and concern. The little boy is bored, his eyes are sleepy, he is rocking back and forth on his hands which are squeezed beneath his thighs. The mother is speaking, she is fluting anxiety and self-blame. She drags a hand across her eyes, over the pink, hawk nose and the high forehead. She pushes her hand up into the clump of blonde hair, grabbing it, pulling it back. The eyes that look up at him are blurred and narrow, pouched in sagging blueish skin. She wants the treatment to be reconsidered. She doesn’t want to criticise Dr Adam Hibbert, of course not; but she thinks that now she is in a calmer place. And now she, Janet Stone is in a calmer place, she has more time to give to Albert. And now she has more time to give to Albert she can do a better job. Because – suddenly her scratchy voice breaks through and Philip hears it in his head as he shifts his foot from brake to accelerator and nudges the car forward, letting it roll a little before resignedly rotating his foot back to touch the brake once more: ‘What I can’t get over is I can’t stop thinking that because I wasn’t there for him, because I was so crap, he is being stuffed full of chemicals. And doctor’ – she says, staring at Philip pleadingly – ‘they’ve turned him, those pills have, into a different person.’ She sniffs. She hangs her head. Now she is looking at the chessboard of brown and mushroom-coloured carpet tiles. She says, resolutely, woefully, one word at a time: ‘He’s getting medicine instead of a mum.’

  Which was great. It was really great that she had come to that perception and was showing that resolve. But that didn’t mean it was necessarily true. And whether it was or wasn’t it was going to take a lot of time, a lot of careful management. Which meant he really needed to get home and rest. Because OK, Janet and Albert Stone would probably not be back in the orange bucket chairs already next week. But someone would be. Someone equally problematic starting at 9 tomorrow. And all he asked was a moment of calm by himself at the end of the weekend, just to sit, and turn the pages of the paper, and check something or other on his phone; just to relax, and breathe, so as later to have some chance of going to sleep. Which was something that presumably never troubled Dr Adam Hibbert. Dr Adam Hibbert who felt no anxiety, slept the sleep of the innocent and the worthy every night. No, actually, the fact is Dr Adam Hibbert doesn’t need to sleep at all; he is always on the go. Far away, on
his completely exciting and worthy sabbatical somewhere up the Khyber, Dr Adam Hibbert is even now conducting amputations as the bullets whizz around him.

  Philip breathes in decidedly through his nose. He lays his hand upon Sue’s hand which, he now notices, is resting elf-like upon the jean fabric over his thigh. He realises that Sue’s elfin hand is sending little sonar-blips of tranquillity across his hip towards his spine and up it to his mind. She in her turn feels, ever so slightly, his touch; but she doesn’t really notice it because she too is thinking, she is thinking of the gallery, of the big last room where Al Ahmed’s sun will be, that amazing, sumptuous, profligate idea of a haze of threads created from the shredded fabric of a whole wardrobe of Fortuny gowns. For the big last room of the gallery would be darkened, gloomy like the sky around her here. So the shattered fabric would emerge glimmeringly from the atmosphere, not trashily shine out. So it would seem diss-, no, what was the word: immanent. Although actually, here, now, you can’t really properly see the blackening air since their car is illuminated by the headlights of the car behind. And that one must be illuminated by the headlights of the car behind it, etc; and it will be the same for the cars in front, so that they are all enclosed in a sort of tube of myopic brightness. But never mind because still, peering through that circumambient gleam, you can just about imagine Al Ahmed’s sun floating there high up and distant and sublime. Which was, she supposed, with a sudden slide of disappointment, how it was going to figure in the gallery, winched up out of reach. Whereas what she would like, what she personally would like, would be if you were allowed to touch it. If you could miraculously, outrageously reach out and grab and hold some of the precious filaments in your fist. Or if you could push your face into them so that, not only so they stroked your cheeks but so you caught the smell of them whatever that would be. Or if – get this – how about if also you were allowed to stick out your tongue and touch with that, or taste with that. Because how many people have ever actually felt a piece of fabric with their tongue? She was standing on a box, she was at – where was that place in London where the loonys stood? – well anyway she was standing there with a megaphone holding forth. Try it! Taste a shirt today! And what was kind of sad but also kind of brilliant was that if people did, if anyone actually did that tiny thing, or if you could put on a show where people were allowed to, encouraged to, and then to think about it – then they would be surprised. It would make a difference to them.

  Because there is so much to notice that we usually do not. So much to nourish us! Even now, even here in this stretch of what was officially a waste of time, what was officially deeply, horribly frustrating. What was there, well, for instance, there was Philip sitting there beside her. She lifted her hand away from his knee and moved it across, and down, and folded it into her other hand which was lying on her lap. She let herself sense his presence on the far side of the air between them, his condensed energy, his twitchiness – the way his head would settle rigid . . . and then jerk, the change of mind, the shift of gear, the altering angle of his arm. His fingers fluttered against the steering wheel. He pushed himself back into the seat. He scrunched his shoulders and let them fall. Always the same, even in bed at night, the tossing and turning. Whereas, with her, all that moved in her were her lungs, breathing, and the air through her nostrils and her pipeways. No: that couldn’t be completely right. There was the heart, and the blood. There were doubtless all sorts of chemical reactions too. Actually . . . actually maybe this could be the thing! This could be something to offer up to Omar next week. If you could catch it in a piece . . . this unceasing activity that went on in people even when they were still. Marc Quinn’s head of blood. No – the thing to do would be . . . how could you . . . what was wanted was some way of capturing, no, registering the fleetingness, the inside movement, the movement that was always going on inside. Such as for instance maybe an ECG.

  ‘Do people’s heads’ – she asked – ‘use different amounts of energy, depending on who you are? If you record people’s brainwaves can you get an electronic signature?’

  Philip smiled a familiar smile. Such a Sue question. ‘Don’t think so,’ he replied. ‘Maybe someday but I don’t think we can at the moment. It varies. When you think more, that’s activity, you can pick that up – there are jagged peaks. It’s more intense when you’re concentrating, trying to solve a problem. When you relax the waves stretch out.’

  ‘Did Einstein’s brain,’ – she continued her enquiry – ‘use more energy than everyone else’s?’

  ‘I think only if he used it more.’ Philip moved his feet, set the car going forward a little, let it freewheel. ‘But with him he probably didn’t. Things just occurred to him. Popped up.’

  ‘If you could measure a great physicist’s brain, do an ECG just when he was about to have a really great idea . . .’

  ‘It really wouldn’t show any different. I doubt it would. It couldn’t. It’d be like any old idea, like thinking, um, like thinking what to get someone for their birthday.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Or what to have for breakfast.’ He made the car slow, stop. ‘Basically your brain uses the same as a lightbulb. It doesn’t vary much. If you spend all day thinking really hard it’s not going to make you thin.’

  ‘So that’s true, lightbulbs in comic books. Sort of.’

  The car nudged forward a little bit then settled to a halt yet again.

  ‘You know actually it’s E-E-G,’ Philip couldn’t stop himself adding: ‘Not ECG. ECG is the heart, cardio. EEG is Electro-encephalo-gram.’

  Sue let her mind be filled with the sounds that the stereo was sending out to bounce around them, a beat and some kind of electronic interference making a sort of tune, swelling and spiralling and soaring and falling. What instruments were they? You couldn’t tell, no instruments, electricity. You could hook a machine up to a brain, amplify it. Which would give you the music of thinking. Which must be a bit like whalesong. Pathways of flashing lights as the ideas travel down them; and the sound to go with it. Fill the whole gallery so people are inside the pathways and the sound, inside the experience of experience. Or get these cars to hoot one after another: that would be like a message passing along. Or flash their lights. Morse. The train was like that too. Every morning travelling in and every evening coming back she was like an idea. The rattle of its arrival; the shrieking of brakes. You could have a track running round the gallery, interlocking, an enormous endless spaghetti junction of trains. Not in a landscape but in some body-like environment, curvy and enveloping. And the trains tiny, much smaller than usual, specially manufactured, nipping here and there like mice, unstoppable. That would surprise the punters, wake them up. That would be a change from Al Ahmed. It was definitely worth developing. Take a bit of time on Mon and Tue. Frame the concept properly. Because Omar had said he wanted something fresh. Because she had definitely got the impression that now, now that she had settled in, learned the ropes, he wanted to see what she could offer. And here it was. Come Wednesday, she would pitch it. Yay! She smiled. She became aware of herself once more, that she had a body, that she was sitting in the car.

  They seemed now to be moving more persistently. She raised her head and looked out, around. Still high darkness to the right: trees. Still to the left a sweep of land, fields, a scattering of lights in the distance. Still couldn’t really see.

  ‘It’s a crash,’ Philip announced.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘On the other side. This was all just people slowing down to look. All this just because of people slowing down to look. It’s bananas.’

  ‘It must have been bad.’

  She gazes across his hands on the steering wheel and sees on the other side a fire engine and two police cars each lit up by the others’ lights. They are framed by the slender arch of a footbridge. From the warmth with Philip inside his car Sue looks out into the cold and sees, beyond the central reservation, someone standing, in a luminous jacket, signalling cars past in the other direc
tion, one by one. There is an ambulance with its back doors open. Now Philip is accelerating: Sue’s head swivels correspondingly, peering to see, in the darkness, with cars easing past in front of it on the other carriageway, a wheeled stretcher being pushed along, its steel frame glinting, and beyond it, lodged under the far corner of the footbridge, a big stopped lump, a conglomeration of shadows, something compacted, its tyres in the air.

  So they sped past, on the other side, not having witnessed the crash, the panicked shrill screech as the car slid on its roof over the coarse asphalt, still going at 50, heading towards the . . . no – before that, the bang of its hitting the springy steel barrier on the central reservation which sent it bouncing in a cartwheel, once, twice, as, inside, for the solitary driver, only 19 years old, the world had gone slow and quiet, giving him leisure almost to enjoy the unusual visual experience, the horizon rotating, trees turning like the hands of a clock, until bang! – he was upside-down and the roof had crunched into the top of his head and he was sliding sideways at insane speed with this terrible noise all around him until . . . no, before that, the first hint of a wobble as he, Toby Knight, heading back to uni after a cool weekend away, moved out into the fast lane, not really going that fast, only 85, or so it seemed until the steering wheel jerked to the left and he pulled it back but now he is veering too far the other way so he straightens and the car drags left again so he pulls again and it is too, too fast, it is zigzagging, it is like slithering on ice and, bang! – he hits the springy steel barrier on the central reservation which sends him cartwheeling until . . . no, even before that, six weeks before, the intrusion of a two-inch, flat-headed nail which had somehow sneaked in between the treads and been pushed in through the vulcanised rubber, through the layers of textiles and steel ply, penetrating the whole carcass. There it had lodged, solid and secret, until the particular combination of pressures, heading downhill, at 85, on a slight curve, stressed the vicious sleeper-cell, and angled it, and tweaked it, until, pfuff, there was a sudden rush of air and the tyre sags and bells and wobbles and the steel rim of the wheel jars into the road surface and the tyre rips and there is no grip now and the car is heaving to and fro as the driver struggles until, bang! – he has hit the springy barrier on the central reservation and is cartwheeling and sliding and collides side-on with the edge of the concrete pier of the pedestrian bridge at which Toby’s upside-down head is jerked sideways and hits the door pillar next to it and bounces back and his neck muscles tear and his vertebrae are dislodged and the delicate brain tissue crashes against the hard internal wall of the skull, so that membranes are compressed and blood vessels perforated and the grey matter begins to bruise and throughout the whole beautiful, intricate brain the shock-waves spread a microscopic anti-net of broken connections, a spray of less-than-hairline cracks. There he is, his head against the roof again, his consciousness glad that it has all come to an end, that it is quiet, this black and white world he is in now, even if there is a sensation of wrongness coming from his neck, even if he seems to be having to try very hard to keep seeing, seems to be having to make an effort to continue even being. There are sounds in the distance, what are they? People calling, footsteps running? Or the song of morning birds?