The Unhappy Medium, page 7
Piers dropped the shopping bags onto the table. Wisely, he kept his distance from his wife as she flashed a wicked looking knife in his direction, a little too close to his bow tie for comfort.
‘Pour me a glass of Pinot will you darling,’ she said, sniffing, trying to avoid tainting her pointy nose with her flour-covered hands. ‘The kids went off OK – Beckie says they’re not playing up this time so, so far so good.’
‘That’s excellent darling,’ replied Piers distractedly, enjoying the lack of the children. ‘You OK here for a bit? I need to contact the office.’ With her nodded approval, he climbed the neat white staircase up to his study.
Piers Layhard was a collector of sorts; they both were. They liked their house to be a blank canvas with pockets of interest, lit beautifully – classical sculpture, carvings from Africa and old Chinese chests, spotlit above utilitarian carpets. The only thing that spoiled the effect was the children, of course, who didn’t share their parents’ taste for retro wooden toys and antique train sets. Piers shuddered as he remembered when Toby had run riot with a marker pen and his own waste products, and wrote ‘poo potty bum poo’ all over the dining room, missing an expensive abstract by mere millimetres. Tonight, though, their muddy bikes had been neatly stowed on the patio. Juliet had erased all evidence of their scruffiness by 8.30 that morning, when her sister had taken the kids away to the suburbs.
Piers checked his emails and upped a bid for a period statue of Josephine Baker on eBay. His study was scrupulously Scandinavian, with smart angled lamps and an over-complicated chair he’d bought in an exclusive showroom in Shoreditch. On his odd 1970s office desk, there was little out of place, the Mac laptop at perfect right angles, a framed picture of Piers accepting an award at the design museum and a die-cast model of a Saab 96 convertible in white. He poured himself a cold mineral water from the miniature fridge and made a few business calls, playing with the thick black hair of the Oriental wooden figurine on the mantelpiece as he did so, its exaggerated bottom and wide staring eyes a source of some amusement to the children on those rare occasions when Piers had let them through the door.
At 7pm, Juliet asked Piers to lay the table. The guests arrived and by 8.30 sharp, dinner had been served. Sarah and Daniel had popped up from Hoxton and the other two were singles, set up awkwardly by Juliet. They tried frantically to break the ice in the embarrassing spotlight of Juliet’s clumsy matchmaking. Lulu was not quite as ready to move on from her divorce as Juliet thought she was, especially as it had only been finalised a day earlier, and Edward, the new junior partner from Piers’s architectural practice, was not exactly in the mood for a long-term commitment either, given his studiously concealed fixation for men in leather hats.
Juliet served the food as Piers uncorked the wine and eventually they adjourned to the sitting room with cheese and biscuits. Piers, stressed, had refilled himself a little liberally and was fighting an urge to release a loud, manly ‘who gives a shit’ fart when they heard the restored Victorian doorbell. ‘Who’s that at this time?’ he asked Juliet.
‘Well I don’t know, do I! You might find out if you answer the door,’ she said sarcastically. Piers rolled his eyes, put down his goblet and ambled off down the long hallway, his cotton socks slipping slightly on the varnished floor.
He opened the door.
The Bonetaker, immobile and literally breathtaking in the blue of the twilight, was staring back at him. ‘Oh crap,’ said Piers, quickly trying to shut the old door, but the Bonetaker’s vast shoe had jammed it wide open.
Piers made to cry out, but as the pungent odour from the giant steamed over him, he instantly lost track of his instinct.
‘Hewoooo, clam I hurp you?’ he burbled, opening the door and leaning back against an antique map of Anatolia.
‘Innnnn,’ said the Bonetaker’s deep resonating voice, and with that he lurched heavily into the hallway past the architect, scattering the children’s spotless wellington boots lined up beneath the coat rack. ‘In nah. Idul, guv me idul.’
In the sitting room, the polite conversation carried on oblivious, Juliet retelling the mind-numbing story of how they’d all been stranded in Umbria by the Icelandic ash cloud, unaware that an eight-foot nightmare had just gained entry to her house and was ascending the staircase.
Piers was a trifle confused. He’d had a lot of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon over the years and it had never done this to him before. His legs had all the strength of rolled towels and his manicured hands hung useless at his sides. He stumbled in the vast shadow of the stranger as they climbed the neat stairs to the study, trying vaguely to work out how long they’d been friends. The guy was huge, and that smell – somewhere between strong Italian cheese and smoked mackerel. They entered the study, a daft smile flicking on and off Piers’s face as he struggled to regain control. A damp patch had appeared on his linen trousers.
‘Idul,’ boomed the stranger, his giant fist rising up like a leg of ham to point at the mantelpiece. ‘I wull huv.’
Robotically, Piers handed the figure over then flopped down heavily on his £5,000 chair, watching as the Bonetaker held the curious little carving up to his massive face, tilting his head as he scrutinised it in the light of the Anglepoise. The big hands grabbed the figurine’s hair and he let the ten-inch body hang beneath it for a moment, sniffing and watching as a faint glow flushed upon the dark wood. Piers, struggling to focus, watched as the figure began, subtly, to emit an indistinct purple brightness. The Bonetaker, confident he had successfully tracked down his quarry, opened his long filthy coat and placed the long-haired idol in his tired leather bag, fragments of dead moss and ivy falling away onto the spotless laminate flooring. Piers closed his heavy eyelids, a wave of extreme fatigue engulfing him as if he’d taken three of his sleeping tablets in one go, and by the time the Bonetaker had unlocked the large French windows and stepped out onto the roof of the kitchen extension, he was out for the count.
His target in his possession, the Bonetaker dropped silently into the immaculate paved garden and lurched away. Unnoticed, he passed through gardens and alleyways until he broke out suddenly into a modern estate, and finding some graffiti-ridden garages behind a block of flats, he crouched unseen and began to assess the small figurine.
The Bonetaker’s tired yellow eyes stared into the face of the idol. Its pearl and bead eyes glared back at him in mute defiance as far away, in some other place, its connected spirit sensed in horror that the moment of oblivion was imminent.
The tribal leader that the idol represented meant nothing to recorded Western history. He’d wreaked terror beneath distant tree canopies in Indonesia and Sumatra long before white men had passed that way, but the horror of his reign had ranked as wantonly evil as that of Hitler or Stalin. He’d visited much suffering upon many peaceful peoples, inflicting a terrifying wave of expansionist attacks across the islands of Oceania. In doing so, this all-destroying raider had proclaimed himself a God, a deity beyond the control of mortal men, free to pursue his cruelties and rank sadism unbound by humane considerations or common decency.
Here in this peculiar Purgatory, he never aged and never died, kept alive in one world and the next by the folk memory of his savagery and a slowly diminishing collection of vile little idols. Or at least he never seemed to die as he had died before, hunted and killed by tribes keen for revenge and peace. Now he floated, held firm in a cell by arms he could not see or understand, spitting and hissing at the bright white beings that hovered beyond his secure perimeter. Their benign faces looked concerned and puzzled as the intense purple light began its mad swirl about him. He raged at their taming of him, he bellowed and spat, but he remained tightly held in place.
In the light of a vandalised streetlamp, the Bonetaker cursed a cat that had foolishly come to investigate, its tabby hackles raised high as it sniffed his foul scent. It scurried hysterically away into the estate and the Bonetaker began once again to chant his incantations, his big fist yanking away the ancient black hair from the idol, which he flung into the mortar. It flared suddenly as it caught the flame then sizzled and spat as the big hands bled into the mixture.
In Purgatory, the confused angelic figures hovered close to the edge of the tribesman’s room, watching intensely as he writhed spasmodically in a torment of fear and despair. His evil force flowing away, he began to chant in an ancient tongue, calling for the assistance of the same forest spirits who had failed to help his own victims in their torments. Now they equally would fail to assist the God King as he died his second death. The bright figures could only look on in bewilderment as the ghastly gyrating wraith dissipated and faded before them.
‘Here we go again!’ one of the white beings shouted above the screams, and then, suddenly, it was over. The Bonetaker had finished his work and was carefully folding away his paraphernalia beneath the streetlights. The holding cell was silent now. Cautiously, the white beings entered the empty chamber, its glowing restraints floating free.
‘Excellent,’ said one of the councillors, hovering majestically at a 45 degree angle. ‘There goes another one.’
CHAPTER 7 – Burs t
Back in Dr Newton Barlow’s lab in Cambridge, things were going from strength to strength. Using impressive new equipment, Newton and his team were able to strengthen the evidence of nuclear fusion within their enigmatic bubbles, and despite the secrecy in which the team was forced to operate, rumours of a breakthrough had begun to circulate amongst the universities. The rumours may have been hugely exaggerated, but nonetheless they were starting to receive credence in some of the more sensationalist chat rooms. The more sensitive antennae in the investment market had also started to twitch; pretty soon Havotech’s share price was on the up. Peter Carnatt told Newton the good news in the canteen, almost as an aside, but rather than sharing his corporate excitement, Newton was uneasy. He sensed the need to calm things down and proposed a well-written report on the project, something that spelled out the facts and the limitations to dampen any ill-founded speculation. Carnatt, with a notable absence of charm, shot this down almost before it was airborne, making his excuses before leaving Newton and his frustration at the table.
Newton felt his unease slipping towards alarm. It didn’t help when the following weekend, he was unpacking shopping from the car with Rowena when a persistent reporter appeared out of the rhododendrons and started pressing Newton for an inside story. He gave no comment to the irritating little man, but was wearily conscious that his evasion was more likely to fuel speculation than to end it. Newton phoned Carnatt straight away, but he seemed annoyingly unconcerned, merely pacifying Newton with some glib comments about ‘show business’ before cutting the call short. Newton knew he had to act. He would distribute a lay-reader report whether Carnatt sanctioned it or not, a summary of their findings so far, something that could and would quash all the hype. That would work ... surely?
So, over a bank holiday weekend, Dr Newton Barlow locked himself away in his study and hammered the bloody thing out. He flagged the limitations, lit up the pitfalls, highlighted the dead ends and studiously tempered the causes for optimism, choosing the most universal, non-technical language he could muster, almost as if he were writing a script for one of his TV shows. When it was finally finished, he stared out the window at the rambling garden and as the dawn cast its warm light on the high hedges, he was suddenly struck by how cut-off and isolated he had become.
The next morning he sought out Carnatt and presented his material to the bemused manager as he stepped defensively from his black BMW in the car park.
‘Look,’ said Newton, breathless and wide-eyed, ‘this, this ... report ... it explains the real, the actual real, state of play. Please Peter, I’m asking you, you’ve got to make sure that people know. I need you to help calm things down. Science isn’t like a pizza delivery; you can’t just order whatever you want whenever you want it.’ Carnatt, alarmed, backed away.
‘Woahhhhhh, steady Dr Barlow, let’s keep things professional here,’ he countered, moving away like a banker from a harmonica-playing junkie. ‘Look, there’s a lot of cash swimming around in this thing right now. This is no time to go all mushy on everyone.’
‘Mushy?’ Newton snapped back. ‘Mushy ? This isn’t a question of what I think, or what you think, or what all the investors out there may want to think. We’re not even sure yet ourselves that this experiment is right, logical, hell I don’t know – we can’t say anything till we get independent confirmation, please!’ Carnatt tried to interject but Newton wasn’t to be stopped. ‘When we started here you told me this was going to be a pure research programme. Now I’m getting the distinct impression that the opposite is the case. Dammit, why is no one talking to me! Well, that report you have there in your hand is the basic, simple truth about what we’ve been doing. No spin, no marketing, no wishful thinking, just the hard facts. For God’s sake Peter, get the bloody thing circulated, please!’ Far from being noticeably moved by Newton’s uncharacteristic outburst, Carnatt merely rolled his robotic eyes dismissively, snatched the report and stormed inside.
Newton, queasy from his toes to his quiff, could feel the ground moving beneath him like an escalator.
That evening, seriously unnerved, he made the mistake of confiding his concerns to his wife. Far from offering any support, Rowena accused Newton of being a purist who cared more about his ego than he did about his family. Newton, weary of stress and confrontation, recoiled ineffectually across the kitchen as his wife railed against him. Young Gabby screamed hysterically at the two of them and ran sobbing to her bedroom. With Newton’s alarm climbing hourly like a bikini alert, he even considered calling Dr Sixsmith and pouring his confused heart out. He could now see, only too clearly, that he was in danger of fulfilling every single one of the concerns the old family friend and mentor had raised a few years earlier.
Newton’s supersized pride stopped him lifting the receiver.
Suddenly, as if life wasn’t complicated enough, along came the global financial meltdown. Havotech, like so many other companies, woke up to a new era of low confidence. Several other programmes in the Havotech scientific complex were axed overnight and Newton found himself even more under pressure to bring his bubbles to the boil. No amount of backtracking and alarm calling from Newton seemed to slow the mounting pressure and so, when ordered to deliver a series of press releases about the project, Newton’s already substantial unease grew to epic proportions.
On paper, the bubble fusion experiments had shown a glimmer of promise. Newton’s detectors had registered telltale patterns of neutrons emerging from sonoluminescent bubbles – hinting at fusion – but he couldn’t rule out some other effect at work. The results needed confirmation by another team in another lab. Wishful thinking was no substitute for thorough good science. What Newton was being pressured towards lay not in science but in business, and a panicked desperate business at that. Havotech’s stock was dropping like a broken elevator as the investors started ducking out – it was going to take something sensational to make them stay.
The meeting with the public relations department would haunt Newton all his life. It flowed back and forth for eight long hours, the two parties almost speaking in two different languages. The frustration directed at Newton bordered frequently on ridicule, with Carnatt making a show of mediation but failing to hide his own preference for the company line. Newton was worn relentlessly down. He was dog-tired, tired of the company, tired of his isolation and tired of the entire issue. Late in the day, they reached something laughingly called a compromise in the form of an embargoed press release to be dispatched ahead of a media conference the following Tuesday. Like a condemned French aristocrat, Newton stepped up to the guillotine.
The press conference drew an unnervingly large crowd of suited journalists to a hired meeting room on the Strand. Seeing the hacks massed before him, Newton’s guts lurched. He opened with a five-minute talk that he hoped would counteract at least some of the hyperbole, whilst still appeasing his masters at Havotech itself. Following up, a PR assistant guided a microphone round the assembled reporters.
‘Jonathan Redmond, The London Post . Dr Barlow, could you clarify how long you think it will take for bubble fusion to become a working technology for clean energy?’
‘We don’t know that it ever will be,’ Newton quickly countered. ‘We’re really just at the early stages here, so I’m not going to predict a timescale. It could go nowhere, but it’s important to explore every possible lead that might, just might , get us out of our looming energy problems.’
‘But thinking optimistically,’ Redmond persisted, ‘if your wildest dreams came true, when’s the earliest this could happen?’ Newton shuffled uneasily.
‘Well, if the results are confirmed and if the technology scales up easily, well, then it could be within a decade – although that really would be in the wildest of my wildest dreams. The likelihood is that it will go nowhere within the next 20 or even 30 years. And even that’s a maybe ...’
At that point, Carnatt urgently stood up from the front row to address the audience. ‘On behalf of Havotech,’ he blurted, working to bypass Newton’s pragmatism, ‘I’d just like to emphasise that we’ll be aiming to push this research ahead as fast as possible. All being well, we’re hoping to get the loose ends tied up and seek substantial cash injection later this year.’ A wave of surprised murmurs washed through the room. ‘Dr Barlow and his team are very modest,’ Carnatt continued. ‘Yes, there are uncertainties, but these dedicated, skilled scientists are doing some truly revolutionary stuff, absolutely first class. We can’t disclose the exact details, of course, for commercial reasons, but let’s just say, watch this space!’
