Waxwings Read online

  For this piece, he had Pope’s Collected Poems (in a battered green Nonesuch edition) and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels open face-down on the floor beside him. For he meant to get, somehow, from Seattle in 1999 to London in the 1720s, and back again, in his four minutes; taking a whirlwind tour of Swift’s fantastic schemes (extracting sunbeams from cucumbers) and Pope on share-mania (“Instead of Scandal, How goes Stock’s the Tone/Ev’n Wit and Beauty are quite useless grown”) in order to say something about start-ups and stock options. At 108 words (Word Count was his new best friend), the Beth-stuff was already out of control and would have to be fiercely cut down.

  Although both Tunnels and The Few had been published as novels, Tom didn’t instinctively think of himself as a “novelist,” exactly. “Bookworm” would be closer to the mark. For him, writing had always been a continuation of reading by other means. Tunnels had begun life as a winning entry in one of the New Statesman’s weekly literary competitions. Competitors were invited to submit accounts of imaginary meetings between well-known characters in works of nineteenth-century English fiction. Tom sent in a prickly exchange between Dorothea Brooke of Middlemarch and Becky Sharp of Vanity Fair. After that, he found himself compulsively inventing more encounters, which came to him unbidden when he was riding on the Tube or trying to get to sleep. He scribbled some of the funnier ones into a notebook, and soon he was writing a book, of sorts, about Victorian London, or it was writing him.

  The tunnels of the title were the London sewers, described with voluptuous relish by Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor; they were also the tunnels that the bookworm-author excavated from book to book, so that General William Booth of In Darkest England and the Way Out could make his way into Dickens’s Little Dorrit and attempt to enlist Amy in his Salvation Army, or Sergeant Cuff, retired from his job in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, could delve into the unsavory past of Trollope’s magnate-from-nowhere, Augustus Melmotte of The Way We Live Now. Tom had no conscious style of his own, but found that he could slip into the style of Charles Kingsley one day, George Gissing the next, with a feeling of release and discovery, like a character actor losing himself in a part. Reviewers were wrong to call him a parodist. He knew what he was: a fan, a mimic, a pasticheur.

  The success of Tunnels took him by surprise. Space was made for it on the syllabus of “postmodernism,” though Tom’s self-diagnosis was that he was incurably premodern. The American advance on the book more than paid off the mortgage on his flat, and between answering letters from graduate students, he busied himself, in a lazy sort of way, with another antique enthusiasm—stories of the Second World War.

  As a student in Brighton, he was a secret devotee of television reruns of 1950s films about the war, especially those that starred the young, or youngish, Kenneth More. Other people liked Antonioni. He liked Reach for the Sky. From the 10p boxes outside secondhand booksellers’ shops, he fished up books to match the films, most of them in dog-eared yellow Pan paperback editions: One of Our Submarines, Two Eggs on My Plate, The Last Enemy, Ill Met by Moonlight, Doctor at War, Safety Last, Anything But a Soldier, and tales of escape from POW camps (plenty more tunnels there) like The Colditz Story, The Wooden Horse, The Great Escape, Escape or Die.

  In 1988, Tom reread all of these over a long and happy summer. He collected more books, printed on browning war-issue paper and cheaply illustrated with woodcuts, designed to foster a sense of patriotism among men serving overseas. They were about English churches, the English countryside, English canals, and English counties, written in a prose that was indigestibly rich—as near as words could come to a farmhouse tea of scones, clotted cream, and lumpy strawberry jam. He also bought every book he could find about Bletchley Park and the Cambridge dons who cracked the Enigma code.

  The code that Tom tried to crack in The Few was the enigma of England, as it was refracted through these films and books. At the center of The Show, as the war was known in Tom’s book, he placed a debonair young officer-type named (too obviously, he worried) Kenneth. One of the last chaps left on the beach at Dunkirk, Kenneth flew Lancasters and Spitfires, broke out of Colditz, donned frogman’s gear to plant limpet-mines on enemy warships, sailed in a corvette on convoy duty, served with Montgomery at El Alamein, landed at Anzio, was in France for the liberation of Paris and in Germany for the fall of Berlin. Clean-cut Ken, a paragon of decency, modesty, and niceness, was not very bright. The question was: What did he think he was fighting for? And why was he the star of The Show?

  The Few was a best-seller in Britain, though the letters from graduate students gave way to an even larger mailbag from colonels and brigadiers (Retd.), who sniped at Tom from assorted foxholes in Wilt-shire, Kent, and Hampshire. In the U.S., the reviews were generally strong but sales flat: America had its own war stories, and none of them starred Kenneth More. Going coast to coast on his eight-city tour, Tom met no one who remembered seeing Reach for the Sky.

  But he did meet Beth.

  An arts reporter for the Post-Intelligencer, she came to interview him, somewhat at a loss, in his room at the Alexis Hotel. She’d never heard of Douglas Bader or “Bomber” Harris, but she had read Daniel Deronda at Smith, and Tunnels had been a set book in her Victorians course. So mostly they talked about Dickens and George Eliot. After his reading at Elliott Bay, he—or his publisher, rather—bought Beth dinner at the Painted Table, and one thing led to another. Auden said that poetry makes nothing happen. But The Few made something happen. Eventually, it made Finn happen.

  It was Beth who learned of the job at UW, and Beth who talked Tom out of his sense of fraudulence in applying for it. Making the short list was as much as he could hope for—ten sweet days with Beth in Seattle, when he was summoned across the Atlantic for the interview. Because the Writing Program was a colonial dominion of the English Department, Tom was grilled by a bevy of English profs about his knowledge of, and willingness to teach, Victorian Lit. He was, in effect, two for the price of one. Besides, as Beth heard later, the committee was split rancorously down the middle between supporters of the novelist Jed Wing, whose eloquent black comedies had been tarred with the phrase “coarse misogyny,” and those of the poet Camilla Taruk Sanchez, whose work was denounced by the contrarians as artless agitprop. So Tom rose to the top as the only candidate about whom no-one was in violent disagreement. From the start, he knew, via Beth’s Filofax of contacts, that he’d got the job because he was thought to be relatively harmless—a reputation he’d tried to live up to ever since. He never stuck his neck out, never got embroiled, was always on time for his classes and punctilious about office-hours. Enjoying the sociable back-and-forth of teaching, he encouraged, criticized without causing hurt, and had the knack of finding unexplored possibilities, if not merit, in every piece of writing that he read; so the few courses that he taught were always oversubscribed.

  The Hell’s Canyon Chardonnay box was brimming, now, with writing all about the present—or at least it had been about the present when Tom put it there. The box was his America, as the Victorian stuff had been his London, and the Kenneth More stuff had been his War. Sometime soon, he thought, he’d read carefully through everything that was in the box, and see if the next book was ready to hatch from that eight-year accumulation of paper. But not quite yet. What he really needed was a second box.

  A late yellowjacket buzzed against the windowpane, and Tom raised the sash to set it free. Beyond the window, city, water, and sky were the same frog-spawn gray. Until a couple of weeks ago, Tom had enjoyed an unhindered view of the Klondike building, but it had disappeared behind a rising office tower, still sheathed in what looked like bubble-wrap. He’d always been able to see where Beth worked, first under the big green globe of the P-I, then at the Klondike. When lost for words, he’d look across the bay to her for help—a trick that nearly always worked. Now the new construction returned his gaze with a loutish wink of polythene and steel.

  He touched the Backspace key, wiped what he’d writt
en from the screen, and began again:

  Every morning, first thing, my wife reads her fortune in the paper . . .

  “Arf !” Finn said. “Arf ! Arf ! Arf !”

  He and Spencer were in the boys bathroom being dogs, Finn a large woolly black poodle, Spencer an Alaskan malamute like his family dog, Balto.

  “Roof ! Roof !” Spencer said. “I seen Balto drink water from the toilet once.”

  Finn, on all fours, reared up and planted his paws on the rim of the bowl. “Wurra, wurra, wurra!” The water inside was still swirling, since Spencer had just flushed it.

  “I seed him do it,” Spencer said, as if expecting contradiction.

  Finn took a deep breath and dunked his head in the toilet. Then he tilted his face ceilingward and yodeled.

  “You didn’t have done!” Spencer said admiringly.

  “Arf !” Finn shook himself, spraying Spencer’s sky-blue corduroys and Pooh Bear T-shirt with toilet water.

  Spencer was laughing so hard he was sliding down the wall. “You wet me! Bad doggie! No, doggie!”

  “Arf!” Panting, tongue hanging out, he sprayed Spencer some more.

  “Don’t!”

  “Spencer? Finn?” Teacher Sally put her head around the open door, “Bathrooms aren’t for—”

  “Finn drank water out the toilet! Finn drank out the toilet!”

  “I didn’t drink. I—” Then Finn remembered that he was a dog. “Arf !” he barked at Teacher Sally. “Arf ! Arf !”

  “Your hair, Finn! And, look, it’s all over your face—”

  “It’s just water,” Spencer said.

  “Grrrr!” Bottom up, forearms on the floor, Finn snapped at Teacher Sally’s feet.

  “There’s fecal coliform in there! The germs! You’ll get E. coli! Oh, shit—”

  “You said a bad word. That’s a bad word.” Spencer stage-whispered to Finn, “She said ‘shit.’ ”

  “I’m sorry, Spencer—I didn’t mean to, and I’m really sorry. Now, Finn, will you please stand up? Surely you’re old enough now to—”

  “Arf !”

  “Stop that! Come over here!” She wrenched at the loop of towel hanging from the machine, but it locked solid on her.

  “You’re making me feel sad,” Finn warned her. “You’re making me feel really sad.”

  “We’re going to have to call your parents. Right now. You’ll have to see a doctor—both of you. I’m serious, Finn.”

  “I’m serious, Finn,” Finn said, holding his ground. He wasn’t afraid of Teacher Sally. She was stupid, the stupidest teacher in the whole school, and she was being super-mean.

  “Finn!”

  “Woof,” he said, but it was more sob than bark, and he began to blubber, silently, his cheeks running with toilet-water and tears.

  Later, after the boys were carted away by their respective parents, after the forced smiles and just-to-be-on-the-safe-sides, Midge, the principal, said wearily: “This can’t go on. That child needs treatment.”

  It was like a city, but with no windows or doors. Containers, stacked three-high, formed the blocks, with a grid of bare-earth streets between them, all of it harshly lit by floodlights on towers. Choosing his route carefully, finding shadows just wide enough to hide him from the glare, he stole cautiously from corner to corner, getting as far away as possible from the illuminated checkpoint, where uniformed guards were positioned in tall glass booths. Anticipating the crackle of gunfire, he watched for each next sheltering wall. Once, he flattened in terror at a sudden movement on the ground, but it was the shadow of his own hand, caught for a second by the floodlights.

  After letting himself out of the Land Cruiser, he’d found a clump of weeds and munched his way through two big mouthfuls of leaves, washed down with water that had collected in an abandoned hubcap. He was doing okay. No problem.

  He reached a street-end and saw the real city, only a few kilometers off: skyscrapers, like New York—a dozen glittering sticks of light packed close as sheaves of wheat. The sight roused a sudden swell of excitement that left him fearless and elated. It was like the videos. It was like he was in a video. The rush of it made him grin. Heh, not bad, huh? No shit!

  Twenty yards of open ground separated him from the perimeter fence, which was tall, with a barbed-wire overhang, but was meant to keep people from getting in, not getting out. Baulks of concrete, chained together, had been placed between the posts, so no one could drive a car out through a hole in the fence. He’d get his start from one of these. The fencing was attached to the posts with wire ties, forty or fifty centimeters apart: skimpy things, but they’d work as toe-holds. The big problem was the lights. Clinging to the shadows, he moved toward the next corner, searching for the right patch of fence to make his break.

  Several corners later, he found it: a shady juncture between the pools of white light, well screened from the guards by the container-city, with a useful pile of builders’ sand on the far side of the fencepost. Crouched on his haunches, he went through his moves, then, quick and bony as a squirrel, sprinted for the fence, his muscles thinking for him. His fingers clawed at the chain-linking, and his right foot got a purchase on the first of the wire ties. Yes! There was no weight to him as he squirmed his way up. Yes! He grabbed the iron flange of the overhang, got his left foot out on to the second strand of barbed wire, and pitched himself forward.

  Ouf ! The wet sand knocked all the breath out of him, and he was in America.

  The terminal lights showed what looked like a Special Economic Zone—same wilderness of construction, same mud, same dirt-mountains, same yellow diggers, same flappy red plastic temporary fencing pegged out with metal stakes. Good cover. Keeping low, he crossed an unfinished road to the shelter of a digger. His ankle hurt, and he’d torn the sleeve of his windbreaker on the barbed wire. Squatting underneath the cab, shivering with cold, he peered out at the tall and incandescent city, where cars sped like shooting stars on an aerial highway and every light meant money.

  The air smelled empty—not like a city, more like soap, with its faint tang of woods and sea. That’s how money is, he thought: it smells of nothingness. It smells like America.

  He waited patiently in the darkness below the digger. It wouldn’t be long now, he thought, before the workers came and he could melt into the crowd. When he sensed the approach of dawn, he left his shelter and sidled along a line of plastic fencing to where the construction site ended, at a paved road under the massive concrete pillars of an overhead highway.

  He’d been watching the spot intently for some time. This was the approach to the terminal, and the traffic on it had been thickening steadily. He’d hoped to see people walking on the roadside, but nobody came. He was alone with the trucks, frighteningly conspicuous in his solitude. Hands thrust deep into his jeans pockets, staring fixedly at the ground, he tried to look as if he knew his own business and destination. He didn’t dare to look over his shoulder, and with each step he expected to be seized from behind, slapped, cuffed, and tumbled into a van.

  He was rocked on his feet by the windy gusts thrown off by the passing trucks. Their brakes hissed, their motors snarled and throbbed, but he was spooked by the absence of something. Then it hit him: No horns! In America, he had not heard a single horn.

  No horns, no people. Where were the workers? Already the sky had paled to gray, and he was still the only person out on foot. How was it possible to be in a city and yet feel so baldly exposed? He had to keep walking—there was nowhere to hide—but now he knew how the walk would end, with policemen, a beating, and jail. This knowledge steadied him. He was not afraid of jails.

  Limping a little from his fall, he hurried across a too-wide street, turned left towards the tall buildings in the distance, and felt suddenly at ease. He was no longer responsible for what would happen. He’d made the attempt and done his best. Now things were out of his hands.

  There were fewer trucks on the street, where cars swam past him silently like giant fish. A single bicyclist we
nt by—he heard the tick-tick-tick of the chain on the machine’s sprockets—but it was an athlete, not a worker, in a helmet and a skin-tight, many-coloured costume.

  In the eerie quiet, he found himself listening to the noise of his own body—the creaking of his jeans and windbreaker, the spongy smack of his sneakers on wet concrete. He was used to being a trick of the light, a whisper, a presence so attenuated that it was hardly there at all, but America had made him suddenly loud, obtrusively visible, like a fat man with a drum. Bang! Bang! Bang! Here I am! He would never have guessed this from the videos.

  He had walked two kilometers at least before he saw them—people, on the street, going nowhere in particular. The first thing he noticed was how far apart they stood from one another. Each had his own space, like so many statues on a square. Then he saw they were as poorly dressed as he was. Poor? In America? He slowed his step. They were gweilos, certainly . . . but Americans? Perhaps they were villagers—if they had villages in America, which was something he’d never thought of before.

  He hung back, watching. The street had led him to a sudden frontier, where concrete and wire gave way to dusky brick, to flights of steps, fire-escapes, dark corners, and parked cars, to all the sheltering nooks and crannies of a real city, just as he had imagined New York, long ago, in another life. The villagers stood right on the edge of a world—now so nearly within his grasp—that he might yet make his own.