ASIM issue 55 Page 20

  “I thought maybe I could get a newer Mondeo and pretend I was keeping the old one for parts. Then I could siphon across as much as I needed, whenever I needed it. And that worked, for a while, but it meant a rusty wreck on four flats standing outside the house and me trying to time the transfers for when the neighbours wouldn’t be watching.

  “So my next bright idea was to swap the tanks on the cars. They were similar models, similar sizes. With a bit of adaptation I reckoned it ought to work. The job was too big for me to handle myself, so I had to find a mechanic and give him some story about a leak. I got both cars to him and, of course, the first thing he did was try to drain the tanks before swapping them over.

  “I remember the phone call. He couldn’t work it out. He’d filled every container he had and it was still coming. I asked him if he couldn’t just move the old tank over with the fuel still in it. I won’t tell you what he said to that. When I went to get the cars back, he had jerry cans filled up everywhere. He’d tried to pour the stuff back in and it just wouldn’t go. He was freaking out. It was like I’d brought him Satan’s car to work on. He wouldn’t even stay around to help me get it back onto the low-loader.

  “You’d gone away by this time. Life should have been good but it was kinda shit, let me tell you. I was on my own. Neighbours were complaining about the generator running twenty-four/seven and me using the driveway for a scrap yard. Then I got picked up by the police for selling illegal fuel in pub car parks and the outcome was a big fine and then an estimated bill from HM Customs for unpaid duty. They don’t care if you broke the law, they still want their cut.

  “I borrowed some tools and rented a power hoist and somehow managed to get the tank out of the car and into the shed. I worried that the miracle might stop working, but it didn’t. The tank sat there on the wooden cradle I’d knocked together for it, looking like some kind of a donor organ waiting for transplant. I was able to rig up a hand pump and to run a separate hose to the generator. It was a lash-up, but it worked. I blanked out the windows and put a big lock on the shed and finally had the carcase of the old Mondeo towed away. But you know me, I’m no mechanic. That’s what caused the final problem.

  “I reckon it was a combination of my cack-handed workmanship and the decision to put the tank and the generator together in a shed with no ventilation. I should have seen it coming, because whenever I opened the door I could barely breathe for the vapour. A spark or a misfire must have set if off. I don’t know which. If I’d been close enough to see it happen, I wouldn’t be here telling you about it now.

  “It happened at night. The explosion all but threw me out of bed. The bang must have been deafening but I don’t remember hearing it. I was on my feet before I was even awake, just standing there and wondering why. All my back windows were gone and the shed was like one big Bunsen flame. The neighbours came running and the fire brigade showed up in no time at all.

  “I couldn’t tell them that they were wasting their time. How could I explain it? They started with water and when that turned the entire garden into a burning lake, they switched to foam. The shed went, the debris went, everything was consumed until there was nothing but the naked fire. Nothing would kill it.

  “At first everyone assumed that I was back to my old tricks and had a stockpile of illegal fuel in the shed for selling, but that didn’t explain why the fire was still roaring away over a week later. The first suspicion was a buried gas pipe, but nothing showed up in the survey. They tried various tricks to snuff it out or damp it down. It vaporised water, turned a ton of sand to glass. They even tried explosives to blow it out, and it looked for about a second as if they’d succeeded. Then boom, it was off again, like one of those self-lighting birthday candles. Eventually the fire-fighters backed off and a team of geologists moved in.

  “They put a trailer caravan on my driveway and set up camp in my kitchen. They brought maps of old mine workings and buried landfill in the area. They suspected a methane pocket but their tests wouldn’t confirm it. I kept them supplied with coffee for the first week and when my coffee ran out I drank theirs for the next month. Their conclusion was that something had to be coming up through a fault in the earth, even though there was no evidence of it.

  “The only advice they could offer was to let the fire keep going until whatever was causing it burned off. They thought that plugging the source would just force it up out of the ground somewhere else, maybe in the basement of one of the nearby houses. Meanwhile I’m imagining some oilfield out in the Middle East slowly being run down and no one being able to say why.

  “And that’s how it stands with me now. One or two of the oil and gas companies came sniffing around and went away again. I can’t move house and the land’s worth nothing in this state. I have a maintenance order from my ex and lawsuits from the neighbours. And whenever I need to drive my car, which has the biggest and least economical gas-guzzling engine in its range, for no other reason than because I chose it for those qualities—whenever I go out in it, I have to find the money to fill its stupid, thirsty, wasteful, shit-sucking money pit of a tank.”

  I said, “Why don’t you get rid of it?”

  “I have to have a car,” he said, in a tone that warned me against arguing.

  And that was our conversation. I made some gag about the fire and a missed opportunity to roast some chestnuts, and then I got the hell away from there. I’m not proud of it. I know I told you we’d been friends for years, but here was a test of our friendship that I didn’t pass. I didn’t recognise anything of the person I’d once known in this rambling, raving shambles of a man.

  I promised to call him again, and I didn’t. I know he phoned me once because I was screening calls and didn’t pick up, and he left no message. That was our last contact of any kind.

  I’m no saint. Sometimes I wonder if I can even qualify as a good person. They say you give no help to a mad person by sympathising and going along with his fantasies. That agreeing with him merely helps to bury him deeper, by validating and embedding his broken view of the world. That was all I’d done. But now I could tell everyone the tale of my visit, be this kind person who’d shown up and demonstrated concern, and while feeling sorry for him I could feel good about myself.

  Through it all the backyard flame had burned, an outpouring of white heat from Earth to heaven, as unapproachable and unknowable as madness itself. I’d like to tell you that it ceased the moment he was killed—that would really make this into another kind of story. But much as those geologists predicted, it seems to be burning itself out. It’ll probably be gone by the end of the year.

  He was killed in his car. Despite his financial problems, it seems he kept the tank filled and went out in it every night. Aimlessly, they said at the inquest; though the recording from the motorway cameras showed him accelerating into a bank of fog as if he had a notion of what might be in there.

  What he found was a two-car accident straddling the carriageway, drivers and passengers unhurt and on the hard shoulder waiting for Emergency Services to arrive. Those witnesses said he was still gaining speed as he came out of nowhere and ploughed into the wreckage.

  I’m told it burned and burned until there was nothing left of him.

  Whatever else he thought was in the fog, I hope he found it.

  Ashfield

  …Agatha Christie

  Excerpt from An Autobiography

  Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

  © 1977 Agatha Christie

  ‘I remember, I remember, the house where I was born …’

  I go back to that always in my mind. Ashfield.

  O ma chère maison, mon nid, mon gîte

  Le passé l’habite … O! ma chère maison …

  How much that means. When I dream, I hardly ever dream of Greenway or Winterbrook. It is always Ashfield, the old familiar setting where one’s life first functioned, even though the people in the dream are the people of today. How well I know every detail there: th
e frayed red curtain leading to the kitchen, the sunflower brass fender in the hall grate, the Turkey carpet on the stairs, the big, shabby schoolroom with its dark blue and gold embossed wallpaper.

  I went to see—not Ashfield, but where Ashfield had been, a year or two ago. I knew I would have to go sooner or later. Even if it caused me pain, I had to go.

  Three years ago now someone wrote to me, asking if I knew that the house was to be pulled down, and a new estate developed on the site. They wondered if I couldn’t do something to save it—such a lovely house—as they had heard I had lived there once.

  I went to see my lawyer. I asked if it would be possible for me to buy the house and make a gift of it to an old people’s home, perhaps? But that was not possible. Four or five big villas and gardens had been sold en bloc—all to be demolished, and the new ‘estate’ put up. So there could be no respite for dear Ashfield.

  It was a year and a half before I summoned up the resolution to drive up Barton Road …

  There was nothing that could even stir a memory. They were the meanest, shoddiest little houses I had ever seen. None of the great trees remained. The ash-trees in the wood had gone, the remains of the big beech-tree, the Wellingtonia, the pines, the elms that bordered the kitchen garden, the dark ilex—I could not even determine in my mind where the house had stood. And then I saw the only clue—the defiant remains of what had once been a monkey puzzle, struggling to exist in a cluttered back yard. There was no scrap of garden anywhere. All was asphalt. No blade of grass showed green.

  I said ‘Brave monkey puzzle’ to it, and turned away.

  But I minded less after I had seen what had happened. Ashfield had existed once but its day was over. And because whatever has existed still does exist in eternity, Ashfield is still Ashfield. To think of it causes me no more pain.

  Perhaps some child sucking a plastic toy and banging on a dustbin lid, may one day stare at another child, with pale yellow sausage curls and a solemn face. The solemn child will be standing in a green grass fairy ring by a monkey puzzle, holding a hoop. She will stare at the plastic spaceship that the first child is sucking, and the first child will stare at the hoop. She doesn’t know what a hoop is. And she won’t know that she’s seen a ghost …

  Goodbye, dear Ashfield.

  First They Came …

  …Deborah Kalin

  The trick to passing is the same as any successful lie: stick as close to the truth as possible.

  Which is why I don’t cringe under any of the gazes turning on me as I climb up into the tram for my ride to work, but neither do I actively meet any of them. Shyness earns only suspicion, but busy is acceptable and I’m boarding with phone in hand to support just that impression. The noise onboard is dizzying as a slap: a half dozen conversations are competing with the commercial music blaring from the PA. Thankfully, there are still a handful of empty seats—a benefit of the early tram and my mid-way-out stop—and I slip into one beside the aisle and bend my head over the glowing screen of my phone, the last bastion of socially acceptable privacy in a world gone increasingly to babble.

  It doesn’t shield me this morning, however.

  “Terrible fuss, that was, don’t you think?”

  When I look up (with an expression of polite curiosity because anger’s not my default), the gentleman sitting next to me nods at my phone screen, which he’s been reading over my shoulder, and says, “The protest.”

  “Another one?” I speak quietly, yes, but no more so than can be attributed to consideration of the tram’s other occupants. Like I said, it’s best to stick as close to the truth as possible. I have to fight an urge to turn back to the screen’s silent words, arranged in an orderly fashion complete with narrative flow, and settle instead for my neighbour’s explanation of events, for he’s eager to talk and there’s no shirking from the encounter now.

  “And a dreadful mess it turned into, too. There were nearly a hundred of them—can you believe there are so many still unidentified? I find it boggling.”

  “That is a large crowd.” I’ve found it best, when my tongue itches with betraying words, to find some facet of a conversation with which I can agree. There’s always something, however trifling. “Do you know what they wanted?”

  I pray he doesn’t: it will give me an opportunity to read for myself.

  “Something to do with the scans, but who knows with those types? It’s not like they ever just tell you what they want, is it? The treatments, I suppose, since that’s the latest thing,” he said. “Police rounded the lot of them up—had to use electrobolts, but who can blame them? They parked themselves on the steps of Parliament, and just stood there. Saying nothing!”

  He rolls his eyes and I can’t help but look down, drinking in all the words I can catch in a single glance. The newscast is still waiting, patient and glowing, on the phone’s display. Only disjointed phrases reward my efforts, of course—temperament treatments and previously unknown sect and mouths taped and “silence is power, not poverty”. Forcibly rounded up. Detained under Section 10. Families left stunned.

  My heart breaks at their courage.

  We’d all known the treatments were coming—why scan a person’s disposition, why mandate those scans, unless you’re looking to identify those who test as abnormal? And why identify, unless you’re looking to tend to them?

  Those protesters must have known their lack of power in this. Medical opinion is grinding over all of our heads and there’s no reversing or stopping it now. And yet still they spoke out—or tried to. Now they’ll pay the price, and so will their families, left grieving a sudden absence and with no reputable way of asking for answers, and for what? Is there even a soul left who has the disposition to listen to them, let alone understand what they’re saying?

  The man beside me hasn’t noticed my moment’s abstraction. As I let my ears send through their signals once again he’s still expounding, “Foolishness, really—it’s inherent, isn’t it, that if you’ve a mind to protest the treatments, you have a mind that needs precisely those treatments. But I suppose that’s part of the sickness,” he sighs. “Don’t recognise themselves as sick, most of them, so I hear. Can’t understand it, myself. It isn’t normal, how their minds run. If you ask me it’s like, in their heads, they’ve already ground down towards dying.”

  His disrespect needles at me. “Well, doubtless they’re all receiving treatment by now,” I snap. Couldn’t he at least honour their conviction and commitment, if nothing else?

  He eyes me oddly, unable to process the reason for my peevishness. Prudence gets the better of me. I hurry to smooth the moment over.

  “And hopefully that’ll be the last we see of anything like this, ever again,” I add. “I find it all so very frustrating!”

  Which is at least the god’s honest truth, for all that he’ll misinterpret my reasons for finding it so.

  “Ah.” He pats my knee, and if I hadn’t become so practised at passing I might well have pulled away from the touch. “You’ve a soft heart, eh? Well, rest easy, because they’re in expert care now, in the hands of those who’ll see the lot of them set right and realigned. Their suffering’s all but over. Let’s talk about something more cheery, shall we?”

  * * *

  When I get to work, I share the elevator ride only with strangers, who are happy to chat among themselves without pulling me in. It’s only three floors, but the clanking old beasts aren’t in great shape so there’s enough time to read the newscasts’ official statements.

  Medical Coordinators are confident that the individuals in question will respond positively to treatment. Dr Sean Ayers, credited as a pioneer in the field of disposition management, explains: “Such dramatic displays are, of course, contrary to the very nature the protestors seek to claim as their own, which is evidence enough of the instability of their psyche.” The individuals’ misalignment has been diagnosed as severe and, as such, treatment is expected to take some time.

  It’s all followed by the
obligatory interview with some prominent physician or other, assuring the public such displays are regrettable but inevitable given the human fear of change, which is in itself a result of misalignment and so will soon, as long as we all embrace the scans, be a thing of the past.

  I can’t argue that: after all, we’ve already progressed to the point where saying nothing is provocation enough to earn riot response tactics.

  By the time the elevator doors grate open, there’s a familiar flatness in my heart, a feeling of sinking energy levels. Which is bad, because first thing this morning I have my half-yearly performance review, and I can’t afford to be mediocre.

  The thing’s been scheduled, lurking in my calendar, for a month. I hate them—all that scrutiny over last year’s numbers and locking down next year’s goals is bad enough, but on top of that there are the questions, which must always be met with enthusiasm. My colleagues and I come in for extra inquiry, because the paper shuffling and record collating duties of a Freedom of Information officer involves prolonged periods of autonomous work. Such insular activities apparently not only attract the misaligned, they also have the potential to corrupt the properly aligned.

  I pause at my desk only long enough to grab a pencil and notepad—something to bend my head over, should a mutinous expression threaten my composure—and do my best to stroll into Bold Bill’s office.

  I think of him this way because he isn’t. He keeps his door propped permanently open, always has at least two empty chairs, and positions a bowl of butterscotch toffees next to his in-tray. It’s all a little too textbook, as if he’s read a checklist of what makes up a conformant personality. One day his boss is going to notice that Bold Bill never leaves his office—and not because of the workload, either—and then we’ll be down one more self-effacing soul.