BOOK 1
GENESIS
This story is not strictly mine, although I wrote it.
I sat next to a young lawyer on an aircraft around the middle of 1978 when I was travelling to the Hong Kong Ready-to-wear Festival. I was owner and editor of the Australian fashion industry newspaper, Ragtrader, at the time.
My seating companion didn’t say much at first but after a couple of glasses of business-class wine he began to tell me a story. He first asked me if I thought it was possible that our plane wasn’t moving and that we weren’t really going anywhere. I said of course we we’re moving—at around 600 miles an hour—and we’re going to Hong Kong. Prove it, he said. I couldn’t, but that didn’t stop me thinking he was a bit of a nut case.
When I told him I was a journalist, he said I might like to write his story one day.
He introduced himself as Adam. I didn’t remember his surname but I certainly remembered what he told me.
When we reached Hong Kong we became separated in the crowd and I never saw him again. Even though the next week was taken up with fashion parades and interviewing designers, his story kept playing over in my mind.
When I returned to Sydney, I decided to write a short story loosely based on what Adam had said. I changed some of the facts and wrote it in the first person in the form of a diary. It was called ‘Diary of Adam’ and was published in a now extinct magazine ‘POL’ in the July 1979 edition, a copy of which I still have.
I thought that would be the end of it but for years afterwards Adam’s story simmered at the back my mind. I decided to extend the short story into a book and fill in a few gaps with my imagination. I went back and re-read the POL story which, I realised, had varied considerably from the facts Adam had given me. I made sure this book was much closer to Adam’s original account.
Fraser Beath McEwing
Also by Fraser Beath McEwing
Feel the Width
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Copyright © 2012
All rights reserved—Fraser Beath McEwing
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission, in writing, from the publisher.
Strategic Book Publishing and Rights Co.
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ISBN: 978-1-61897-998-8
Design: Dedicated Book Services, Inc. (www.netdbs.com)
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Epilogue
This book is for you.
If you see somebody else reading it, don’t assume it is for them too. That person may appear to be reading it but not absorbing any of its content.
I’ve never been sure that they would allow my story to reach you. If it has, and you persevere to the end, the way you see the world will change. I must warn you about that. If you’re content with your life, and everything seems normal, or the question of where you came from doesn’t worry you, stop reading this book right now. They know that, if you continue, there is a chance that your view of everything around you could shatter. That wouldn’t suit them but, as I’ve discovered, they can’t do much to prevent it. They’re banking on the fact that you won’t believe what you are about read.
“Who are they?” I feel you asking already. I can’t tell you because I don’t know—in detail anyway. By the end of my story you will know part of it and maybe you’ll go on to find out more.
I would never have suspected what was going on, were it not for their technical mistake and how many times I witnessed it. My curiosity did the rest.
I’m a lawyer, incidentally, and good one, I used to think. I was fairly content working in our city practice until that morning, on my way to work.
Because we lived only about a ten minutes’ walk from Roseville Railway Station, I found it convenient to travel to work most days by train, as many city workers did. My life then was pretty much routine. Typically, I’d wake my two daughters early with glasses of fruit juice, usually from oranges I’d squeeze myself. Then, I’d get the newspaper from where the newsagency van driver tossed it over the fence, spread it out on the familyroom table and read it while my wife Prue made breakfast. Afterwards, I’d take a shower, dress in my lawyer’s navy-blue suit, pack my briefcase, kiss everybody goodbye, including our Labrador dog, Ludwig, and walk to the railway station.
If rain had fallen during night, an evocative fragrance would rise from the gardens I passed—a mixture of flowers and leaves and soil that took me back to a time in my childhood—but not as far back as I would have liked. I could remember Dad being a keen gardener and wanting to help him with my little toy barrow and plastic spade. I suppose I must have been about four-years-old. Remembering before then is like trying to penetrate a fog. I’d raised it with Mum and Dad and they didn’t have an explanation, except to offer to tell me anything I wanted to know about myself as a baby. There should have been photograph albums to prime my memory, but I was told they’d been lost during a house move when I was very young.
The day of that train trip followed the established pattern, maybe too established, when I think about it now. I should, perhaps, have been suspicious at the time, except that it was a routine I’d put into place myself.
The passengers, too, had become a repeating pattern with minor variations. There was the standing group of boisterous schoolboys, always on the verge of receiving a sharp rebuke from one of the older male passengers but having an instinct for just stopping short of a boilover. There were several newspaper-fixated business men, screened behind their copies of The Financial Review or staring vaguely at the passing scenery. They were likely to nod in my direction if our eyes met when they looked up. There were two plump, middle-aged women who always sat close together and talked earnestly all the way to the city. And there was the flawless Indian girl, striking that morning in a yellow dress, her perfectly profiled face inclined towards a book, leaving her legs unguarded for occasional perusal. Together, we made a kind of dance troupe as we rocked and swayed in the unison dictated by the tracks and the train.
My working day really began when I sat down in that train. By the time I reached Wynyard Station, I could read through legal documents more efficiently than I could in my office, where telephones and people continually interrupted.
During the trip, I could choose to pause when I liked. I might look through a window at the fleeing back gardens or the bigger, slower patches of green parks and distant buildings. Occasionally, my gaze would briefly rest on the Indian girl. I never attempted a conversation with her, largely because it would have ruined my illusion of her perfection. In any case, I was happily married. That said, there were occasions when our eyes would meet as she looked up from reading and we’d connect for just a second or two.
I snapped open my leather briefcase and took out a few papers. They were part of the discovery documents from the Thorpe property matter I was working on and I soon became drawn into the details of building regulations.
The seating arrangement in the carriage is important to note here: there were two seats on one side of the aisle and three on the other. I was in a two, my seat next to the window and the Indian girl in the yellow dress was next to me, on the aisle side. As the train stopped to pick up passengers, all the seats were soon taken and the aisle began to fill with people who had to stand. By the time we reached Milsons Point, a station at the north end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the train was quite crowded. Most travellers would be relieved of their close-up discomfort when they escaped at the next three city stations.
We drew away from Milsons Point and started across the bridge. On the other side, the train track plunged underground into the city loop. One minute we were in the sunshine above winking water and the next we were in the darkness of the tunnel, relying on the train’s electric lights for reading. Just as we entered the underground loop and I was shuffling my papers back into my briefcase, the train slowed to a stop. Not only that, but all the lights went out.
I first blamed a power failure. Then I wondered if it was something more serious, like an accident in the underground up ahead or even a gas explosion or a tunnel collapse. The mind becomes so much more inventive in the dark.
As I sat in my seat and waited, my imagination running overtime, I realised that there was something very peculiar about this stop. Along with a total absence of light, there was absolute silence. It was as though I was the only person in the carriage. But that, of course, was impossible. The train had been virtually full at Milsons Point and there had been no station after that to let anybody out, yet I had an overpowering feeling that I was sitting on my own. While that idea alarmed me, the next one pushed me towards panic. Had I suffered a stroke and lost my sense of sight and hearing?
I said, in a normal voice, “is anybody there?”
I received no response. I repeated the question several times, louder and louder. I was now struggling to control my fear, relieved only a little by the sound of my own voice. Could somebody who’d suffered a severe stroke hear his own voice, even if he had lost his hearing? Was the voice inside my head, or was it coming out of my mouth, bouncing around the cabin and coming back into my ears? Then I realised I wasn’t alone at all. I could feel the girl in the yellow dress next to me.
“What do you think is going on?” I asked her, turning my face in the direction of where I judged her ear to be. She ignored me. I repeated the question, but still she didn’t answer.
“Listen to me,” I said, “I know you’re probably scared, but please speak to me. Then at least we’ll know that we’re both alive.” I finished with a silly laugh.
The silence continued. I grew bolder, out of necessity, I convinced myself.
“If you don’t answer me, I’ll have to touch you to make sure you’re okay,” I said. When there was still no reply I had to decide whether to risk carrying out my threat. The cautious lawyer in me hesitated.
“I mean it,” I added, “I have to make sure you’re at least conscious. Please say something. Or cough if you like.”
I waited in the silence. On the face of it, I had lost both sight and hearing, but maybe not touch. After licking the back of my hand and sniffing the deodorant under my armpit I added taste and smell to the senses that were still working.
I reached out and brushed my knuckles against the girl’s thigh. The fabric of the yellow dress was cool and smooth against my skin. I expected her to jump or give me a warning, but still she said nothing. I moved my hand down to where the dress finished and her leg was exposed. Her skin, like the dress, was as smooth as satin and attractively cool. Pretending it wasn’t me who was doing this, I followed her leg up inside her dress and said hoarsely, “I’m now carrying out a safety procedure. I’ll stop immediately if you speak.”
When my hand reached her underwear, my dilemma suddenly deepened. Not only was I beginning a sexual assault, but there was no sign she was even aware of what I was doing. I tried to recall the law about groping people in public. Although I wasn’t sure of the details, I knew that the consequences for me as a lawyer could be disastrous. But something pushed me to continue. Now trembling, I felt around the pleasing curve of her firm bottom. I was becoming aroused, adding to my alarm. I withdrew my hand and abruptly stood up. I had to leave the train.
I struggled forward between the seats and the inert passengers, some of whom I inadvertently pushed over, until I came to the three steps that I knew led up to the carriage entrance doors. That space was packed with more people who, as far as I could tell, were not breathing. Many of them fell down too as I pushed between them. By the heavy thumping sounds that followed, they pushed others over in turn. Although unfortunate for them, at least I knew I could still hear.
In front of me I could feel the glass of the double sliding doors. Normally they would have been shut tight, but a light pressure opened them. I thrust my head out of the train and sniffed the stale air of the tunnel—which was as dark as the inside of the carriage. Perhaps I could walk to Wynyard station by feeling my way along the tunnel wall. I clambered down from the carriage only to discover the near impossibility of finding one’s way in total darkness. I bumped around between the carriage, the wheels and the rails in growing apprehension. If the train began to move in the dark, I could well be in its path. I felt my way back along the side of the carriage to the doorway, luckily still open. Hoisting myself back on board was like a homecoming, but I now had to clamber over bodies in order to descend the three steps, then there was more tripping and treading on fallen people as I searched for my seat.
When I grabbed the arm of the man in the seat across the aisle to steady myself, he too fell to the floor with a soft thud, followed by the noisy rustle of his newspaper. He must be dead, I thought. They must all be dead. I’m the only one alive in a train full of dead people.
I felt for the fabric of the Indian girl’s dress, accidentally touching her breast, and then pushed past her to where I had been sitting. As I manoeuvred myself down into the seat, I realised, with a curse, that I had almost certainly trampled railway dirt all over my papers.
At that moment, the lights flickered back on and the train lurched forward to resume its journey. The people piled on top of each other on the floor looked like a collapsed rugby scrum. If it hadn’t been so frightening, it would have been funny. Each of them returned to the position they had occupied previously, some straightening their clothing and others brushing off dust collected from the floor. Oddly, they didn’t seem to discuss what had just happened to them. It was almost as though they were embarrassed to find themselves in strange positions.
I looked across at the Indian girl and was dismayed to find that her yellow dress was still pushed right up her leg where I’d left it. As I gathered up my soiled papers from the floor, she looked down and quickly pulled the dress back into place. I expected that she would look around at me and maybe cause a scene, but she seemed oblivious to the fact that, a few minutes previously, my hand had been sliding up her leg. I smiled ruefully to myself. I’d probably just fulfilled the fantasy of every man who had ever travelled on a commuter train.
Three minutes later, when we reached Wynyard station, she stood up, placed her book in her embroidered handbag and stepped into the aisle, preparing to leave. This was my stop too, and I found myself closely following her as we pushed past the other passengers and into the sticky, metallic warmth of the platform. She walked briskly to the base of the grinding old wooden escalator and stepped on to it. I followed, standing on the lower step right behind her, breathing in the light citrus waft of her perfume.
The escalator delivered us into the October spring air of York Street, the sulphur yellow of her dress now a moving highlight against the neutrality of buildings and business people. As we stood waiting for the pedestrian lights to change, I cleared my throat to speak, but the red man gave up his power to the green man and she trotted away from me, either because she was running late or was looking for a policeman. I hurried across the small park and down a narrow side-street into George Street, heading for the safety of my office.
Fortunately, there was no shout behind me or a hand on my shoulder before I entered the brightly-lit, polished stone foyer and found a waiting elevator.
Our receptionist, Annette, dressed in dark green trousers and a matching striped sweater, was already seated at the semi-circular granite reception desk as I pushed open one of the frosted glass doors into our foyer on the ninth floor.
“Hi Adam,” she said, looking up from her switchboard and smiling. “You’re nice and early. I want to pop out to get a real coffee. You want one too?”
“Yes, thank you,” I replied absently, “but before you go, did you hear anything about a breakdown on the underground rail loop this morning?”
“What time did you say?”
“I didn’t say a time; probably about half an hour ago.”
“No Adam. I’ve been here for a bit longer than that. I scored a lift to work. What happened, anyway?”
“Nothing earth shattering, really. My train just stopped dead and the lights went out. It must have been for at least ten minutes. I was curious to know if it had made the news and what caused it.”
“I’ll ask in the coffee shop,” she said, as she pushed quickly through the doorway, a ten dollar note in her hand.
That left me standing and wondering who would look after the phones. I certainly didn’t intend to be fill-in receptionist. I was due in court at ten and needed to prepare for it. I walked around behind Annette’s desk to see if she had turned the switchboard over to manual, when I noticed the time on a small clock she kept on her desk. Instead of reading ten minutes to nine, like my watch, it showed 8.37. I looked up at the reception wall clock with its big digital read-out. It displayed 8.38.
That put me earlier at work than I’d thought. At 8.37, I should have been just arriving at Wynyard station, not standing at reception in my office. A cold ripple ran up my neck and into my scalp. When Annette returned, I planned to check the other clocks in the office, but I already knew they would all be about thirteen minutes behind my automatic watch.
I settled in behind the reception desk and fiddled with the keys on Annette’s switchboard, wondering who I could call to find out about a railway problem. I remembered there was a number for news updates. I looked it up on the phone book. The voice at the other end told me that there was plenty happening, but nothing about the rail system.
As I put down the phone I realised that our three other junior partners and their assistants were all due in, according to my watch, but not according to other clocks in the office. I guessed our two senior partners—Eric Boyd and Ferdi Pincus—would probably be already at their desks inside. They were slaves to the firm, maybe because their age had deleted attractive alternatives.
Ifound it difficult to concentrate on my work during the morning. I kept looking down at my watch to see if it was behaving erratically, but it stayed a constant thirteen minutes ahead of every other time piece I could find. It was not until I’d arrived at the Land and Environment Court, arguing my client’s case, that I briefly stopped thinking about the train episode.
By lunchtime, with an adjournment declared by the judge, I found myself drawn towards Wynyard station on the way back to my office. I bought a sandwich and went out to sit in the park opposite the entrance to watch people coming and going, irrationally hoping to see the Indian girl in the yellow dress. I was less afraid now that she might get me into trouble. I just needed to talk to her about the blackout. The memory of her smooth thigh teased at me too.
I finished my lunch, screwed up the brown paper bag and walked to the edge of the park to find a bin. Without thinking, I continued across the road and into the railway station building.
A security guard stood at the top of the escalators evidently watching for people carrying suspicious parcels. He looked uneasy as I approached him, running his eyes over the shape of my jacket.
“Sorry to trouble you,” I said smiling, “but is there an enquiry office for the station?”
“Enquiring about what?” he asked, frowning.
“Just about a train delay in the tunnel this morning between the bridge and Wynyard.”
“I can save you asking any further. There were no delays, that’s for sure. I’ve been on duty since seven this morning and they’d radio me through anything like that. All the services were on time. Now there’s something unusual for you.” He smiled and relaxed.
As I ambled back across the park, the morning’s incident started to slide into that section of memory where we quarantine anything we can’t explain now, but might re-examine later. I put my watch back thirteen minutes and fell into step with the rest of Sydney.
By afternoon, I was feeling content and in control. I’d had a couple of interesting appointments, caught up on my backlog of mail and phone messages, and then went for a beer after work with my friend, Greg Roper.
We’d originally met at Sydney University when we’d played in a squash team together. He was studying medicine and had gone on become an orthopaedic surgeon. We used to go out on double dates together and one Christmas holiday we drove to Melbourne in his father’s car and stayed in the old Portsea pub over new-year. That’s when I met Prue. Strange to think of it now, she was wearing a yellow bathing suit when I first saw her on the ocean beach. I’d tried to work out a way to talk to her too, but couldn’t bring it off. Later, in the pub, I saw her again and bought her a drink to prevent her slipping through my fingers a second time. From that point, I was never attracted to any woman as much as Prue. That’s the sort of statement you might make to your wife, but probably not to your male friends. However, in my case, it was true, and there was a very simple reason, as I discovered later.
Greg was probably my closest friend, but quite different to me, especially in the way he thought and reasoned. He never ventured into the abstract, which I did often. He processed what he saw and heard. That’s probably what made him such a good surgeon.
As we settled into a couple of deco-style leather chairs with a small table between us, I wondered what we’d talk about. Probably the usual family stuff; how his boys were getting on and how my girls were doing too. Kids were always a reliable topic if you didn’t have a more interesting alternative.
“Something strange happened on the train this morning,” I suddenly found myself saying. “The damn thing stopped and the lights went out.”
“I bit disconcerting. And?” He raised his eyebrows.
“Well, it lasted quite a while. Eerie too. There was no sound at all. I tried to get some response from a girl sitting next to me, but she seemed to be dead.”
“And was she?” Greg was grinning.
“Yes and no. Anyway, she certainly came to life when the lights went back on and the train started again. The funny thing is, there was no news report about the stoppage.”
“Understandable,” Greg said flatly. “How would this sound as a headline: ‘Train has brief, unscheduled stop’? That’s hardly news.” He halted any further discussion by going to the bathroom. When he came back, he immediately started telling me about a Mercedes he’d test driven and was tempted to buy. He almost sounded as though he knew about the train stoppage, but wanted to avoid the subject.
* * *
I’m not going to bore you with the way I lived day by day, but there is something I need to mention here.
Sydney, along with everywhere else I’ve ever visited, seemed far simpler before the train episode than it is now. There was less variety of everything although, when I think about it, I certainly didn’t feel deprived. What I had was enough, and wanting more simply didn’t occur to me. You’d probably agree that today there is too much of everything, too many choices. We are forced to devote too much time to deciding which item, which model, which colour. It wasn’t always like that. The contrast is so bewildering now that I no longer understand what ‘sufficient’ really means.
Although the train episode slowly faded in my memory, as the inexplicable eventually does, it prompted me to start keeping notes at the back of the big desk diary I used at work. I reasoned that, if there were ever any more such episodes, I should record the dates and a few brief facts about them. I also decided to make notes of any unusual behaviour among the people I already knew and those I met. My first entry in that category, although a bit flimsy, was Greg’s apparent reluctance to discuss the train stoppage.
I convinced myself that I was not being melodramatic by making diary notes and I conceded that everything I wrote down about puzzling events or people probably had logical explanations. If and when that was shown to be the case, I would cross out the entry.
* * *
My next entry came three weeks later. By then, I’d virtually ceased thinking about the train stoppage. I wrote the new entry on the Monday following a Friday evening game of squash with Greg.
We’d booked one of our old courts at Sydney University. And old it was, unlike the modern courts with glass back walls where spectators sit and watch the game at floor level. The courts where we played were in the medical school and built at least seventy years previously—with not much maintenance since. The viewing gallery was high up behind the three courts. Players entered each court through a door in the middle of the back wall, and when it was shut, they were enclosed in a gladiatorial pit.
Greg arrived late, which he often did and, as usual, offered a medical emergency as his excuse. I had been warming up on my own for nearly ten minutes before he bounced through the doorway at the back of the court and then promptly sat on the floor to lace up his shoes.
I was annoyed by his tardiness and made the game tough for him by delaying my own winning shots to put the ball back into play, so that Greg had to do a lot of running. I soon had him panting and his rather elegant style began to look ragged. When I won a long first set, I anticipated he’d be buying the drinks to settle our established wager.
On that Friday, there were several people watching from the gallery. They were not there as spectators for our game, but players waiting their turn to use the courts. Later, they should have been witnesses to what happened.
We were halfway through the second set, and I had sent Greg scurrying to the front of the court to chase my drop-shot, when the lights flickered and went out. I heard Greg fall heavily against the tin section at the base of the front wall. Because squash is such a confined and awkward game, we sometimes fell during our matches, but thought little of it. However, this fall of Greg’s sounded serious. I threw down my racket and ran to where I thought he was in the darkness. Groping around, I found him sprawled against the front wall.
“Greg,” I said, close to where I could feel his upturned ear, “the bloody lights have gone out, so I can’t see if you’re hurt. Speak to me if you’re okay.”
There was no reply. I found one of his arms, which felt unexpectedly dead and heavy, and slid my hand down to take his pulse on the thumb side of his wrist. I could detect nothing. In growing panic, I dragged him away from the wall and placed my hand next to his nose and mouth to check his breathing. Again, there was nothing. There was a strong probability that Greg was dead.
“‘Is there a doctor up there?” I shouted to the gallery, “or anybody with a light?” My voice echoed around the hard walls, but drew no response. “Come on, I know somebody’s there. Speak up, for God’s sake! There’s an emergency down here.”
The absolute silence and blackness immediately brought back the train episode. Again I considered the possibility that I was locked in my own black void, that Greg may have been trying to deal with my problem, perhaps with the help of the waiting players in the gallery. But why was it that I could still feel the floorboards and walls of the court, still smell the stale sweat and the old wood of the place and hear my own hysterical voice?
I began walking, arms outstretched, until I came to a side wall, then followed it through a corner until I felt the door at the back. I reached for the inset ring and pulled the door open. Although I had stepped through the rear doors of these squash courts many times, I couldn’t exactly remember the layout in the dark. I knew there were stairs up to the gallery next to a passageway that led to the change rooms. There was also a door to the pathway outside. I tried to picture it. As I felt my way along, I bumped my head on the underside of the concrete stairs.
“Shit!” I shouted, and followed it with “is there anybody out here?”
If there was, they wouldn’t reply. I came to a door which felt like the one to the outside out of the building, but when I pushed it open I immediately felt the cold tiles of the change room wall. I called for somebody to speak and was greeted with silence again. I felt my way down to the row of lockers and put my hand out to find the bench seat where I could sit and think out some sort of plan. But instead of soggy wood, my hand came into contact with a leg. Somebody was sitting right in front of me.
“What the hell has happened to everybody?” I asked him. There was no reply. I had a flash of the man sitting near me in the train. I needed to know if this was a similar case. I felt for a shoulder and gently pushed. Whoever it was fell off the seat and hit the floor with a thud and a slap. I knew there was no point in testing him for life. He would be just like Greg.
As I sat down on the bench, I wondered how many other men there might be in the change room and why none of them would speak to me. I decided to find my way out of the building and go for help on the campus. Surely all the people in all the buildings of Sydney University couldn’t be affected in the way this one was. I rose, stepped over the fallen change room man and groped my way to where I remembered the door to be, but instead I found myself in the showers. I was angry for making such an error, and started back. This time, the lockers were not where I thought I’d left them. I must have turned too far. I began moving again and bumped against the wash basins overlooked by tall, decaying mirrors. I could smell the soap left there for the use of the players. I remembered clearly the mirrors being at the far end of the room opposite the door that led in. I felt for the position of the basins, turned 180 degrees to face the opposite direction and lined myself up again with the basins behind me. This time I couldn’t be wrong. I took four tentative steps and found myself back in the showers again.
I felt like a mouse in a maze. I wanted to shout in anger, but instead I began searching again, and when I discovered the lockers—in yet another position, it seemed—I sat down on the adjacent bench to think. I found myself going through the same question and answer process as I had on the train.
Then the lights suddenly flickered and came back on. There were three men in the change room and two more talking noisily above the splash of the showers. The tall, thin fellow I had pushed on to the floor got to his feet without looking at me and continued to dress.
Another man entered the change room, bag in hand and whistling to himself. I noticed he wore on his lapel the enamelled snake badge of a doctor.
“There’s been an accident on court two,” I said to him. He lifted his eyebrows in surprise. “My partner crashed into the wall just as that blackout struck.”
“What, he had a blackout?”
“No, the lights went out while he was running. He hit the front wall.”
“I don’t remember the lights going out. I’ve been sitting in the gallery. There was no blackout there.”
The exchange was beginning to sound annoyingly familiar.
“Okay, forget about the blackout,” I said testily, “I need help for my partner, Greg.”
“Are you talking about Greg Roper?”
“Yes. Now, could you come and lend a hand? He’s knocked himself out, or perhaps worse.”
Before I could lead the man towards the door, now in its rightful place, it was opened by Greg.
“Gone for a piss, or what?” he asked brightly, still puffing from his exertion.
“Didn’t you fall as the lights went out?” I asked. “No, let me put that another way. You did fall over and you stopped breathing.”
“Well, if I did, I seem to have started up again,” Greg laughed, and then looked over my shoulder. “Hi Nigel,” he said to the man at the locker. “Here for a bash? This is Adam Exx, incidentally. Adam, meet Nigel Chandler, an old colleague.”
I absentmindedly shook hands with Chandler, noting the contrast between his warm palm and the cold, deadness of the skin of the men I had touched during the blackout. I turned back to Greg. “Nigel doesn’t recall a blackout, but surely you do. You lost your footing and crashed into the tin on the front wall. I heard it.”
“No way, Adam,” Greg said, still grinning. “There was no blackout and certainly no crash. I ran forward to a short ball and, when I hit it, I looked around to see you leaving the court. I waited for a couple of minutes and then came looking for you. What’s up?”
The argument was going nowhere, and I was not enjoying making a fool of myself in front of this Chandler fellow.
“Okay, you’re right, I did come off for a piss,” I said, heading for the toilets. “Be back in a tick.”
When we returned to the court to continue the game, I had lost momentum and started making mistakes. My mind was continually being drawn to the blackout. Greg easily won the next three sets.
I decided not to refer to the blackout until we had showered, changed, and were seated in the warm dimness of the Graduates Club bar. I brought two large glasses of beer to our rickety wooden table and sat down.
“I think I’m going to be sued,” Greg began, before I could start talking about my mystery, “and it will all be because I protected an assistant during an operation. It was a mistake I might have made too, one of those marginal things where you make a decision and when the patient expires you know it was the wrong one. Trouble is, the patient’s father is a retired surgeon himself.”
Greg went on to detail, using medical terms I didn’t understand, the diagnosis, the surgical procedure decided upon and the progress of the operation on a woman until the final nasty scene when he had to tell the waiting relatives the bad news. The story lasted until the end of our drinks. The whole gabbling performance seemed out of character for Greg.
“How are you placed for a meal?” I finally broke in.
Greg looked at his watch. “God, I don’t believe the time.” He quickly stood up. “We’re having Liz’s parents for dinner. I’ll have to run. Sorry old mate.”
“Before you do,” I said bluntly, also standing, “I’ve got to ask you again about that blackout.”
“I thought you’d given up on that one,” Greg called over his shoulder as he hurried ahead of me. We left the building and walked across the road to the car park.
“No, not by a long way,” I said as I jogged to catch him up. “There’s a lot to go over. I’m a bit worried, Greg. Maybe I need some sort of professional help.”
“I doubt it,” he said with a quick laugh, “but, if you insist, it should be with somebody I know is good.” We reached his BMW. “Listen, Adam, if there was anything to worry about, I’d make sure you saw the best people, you know that. Try to keep a record of any more of these events.” He squeezed my elbow and slid into his car. “I’ll call you Monday if you’re still worried and I’ll give you a referral. Love to Prue and the girls. And Ludwig too.”
The car started with Germanic precision and, in a bright smear of red tail-lights, left the car park. I stood for some time without moving. Granted, I was basing something I saw as a serious problem on only two examples, but it did seem as though nobody wanted to let me talk through these damn blackouts. Even when I did succeed in starting to talk about them, more important matters seemed to take over and I was left with the question: are they real or imagined? Neither possibility made sense.
I’d told Prue that I’d eat with Greg, but if I called her now she could make an extra meal for me to eat when I arrived home. I planned to ask her to sit with me while I ate dinner so I could discuss the blackout. I would resist any distractions until I’d finished my story.
I pulled out my mobile phone and was halfway through dialling when a voice stopped me. Nigel Chandler emerged from between two cars.
“Hello again, Adam,” he said, as though we had known each other before tonight. “About to dial a date?” He smiled, showing a good humoured space between his front teeth.
“No, about to dial a wife,” I said. “Greg stood me up, well, not really, but I thought we would have our usual greasy fish and chips to celebrate Friday. Unfortunately, he has people coming to dinner.”
“I’m in a similar position,” Chandler said quickly, “although I wasn’t going to dial my wife because I’m not married, but I am flapping around without company. I’ll stand in for Greg if you still feel like fish and chips.”
Chandler seemed the kind of man who would be easy to talk to. This could be an opportunity to discuss the blackouts, especially since he’d been at the courts too. I nodded. “Sure,” I said, pushing my phone back into its holster, “you’re on.” I threw my squash bag into the trunk of the car and fell into step with Chandler as we walked back across the car park.
We returned to the club and reclaimed the table that Greg and I had been sitting at. I took a detailed look at Chandler for the first time. He was a big guy with the hands of a bricklayer rather than a surgeon or a musician. He had plenty of almost-black hair, suggesting help from a bottle. His mouth curved pleasingly upward at the corners and he had what I’d call the perfect nose. I couldn’t imagine him being able to look angry, especially when you added the smile creases around his soft blue eyes.
“Tell you what,” he said, “you get a couple of glasses of wine and I’ll look after the food.” We returned to the table at the same time.
“Hope you wanted red,” I said. “As you probably know, the white here isn’t worth the trouble of opening the bottle—or I should say cardboard cask.” We briefly toasted each other and started on the fish and chips.
“How do you know Greg?” I asked.
“Let me see. I think we first met in London when he was finishing off his surgery ticket. And of course we met up again out here when I got my research grant.”
“Research, interesting. Into what?”
“Well, I was a practicing psychiatrist for a while, until I found myself trying to cure physical ailments with psychological treatments. The scary part was that sometimes it worked. That set me thinking about the gateways that exist between the two and how we could use them if knew more about them.”
“Researching that must be difficult.”
“Yes, it is. Laboratory rats are of no use. In fact, some of my detractors say they’re too smart for me to use. My experiments call for observation over an extended period of a patient’s life.”
“So you really need several lifetimes to complete your work.”
“True, which means I have to set the study up in such a way that a couple of generations can continue with it. And want to continue with it, I should add.”
“We don’t have anything as noble as that in the law,” I said. “Cases seldom outlast the lawyers who run them.”
I found myself warming to Chandler. He considered my questions before answering, which flattered me. There seemed deep layers of stored knowledge beneath the surface of his conversation.
“Nigel, I want to ask you something about the squash courts tonight,” I eventually got around to saying. “I’m sure the damn lights went out, which meant I spent quite a bit of time groping around in the dark. I think I accidently pushed somebody off the bench they were sitting on in the locker room. The trouble is, nobody, especially Greg, who I was playing with, will verify that it happened at all.”
Chandler looked at me for quite some time before he spoke. It was as though he was trying to guess how I would react to what he might say.
“There are several possible answers to your question,” he said carefully. “Your perception may be right and everybody else’s wrong, or your perception may be wrong and everybody else’s right. In other words, you can’t know whether it was real any more than you can know if people are going to tell you the truth about it.”
“So, you’re saying that if I ask you whether you experienced the lights going out, I won’t know whether or not you’re telling the truth when you reply, no matter what you say?”
“That’s about it.” Then he laughed, showing that space between his front teeth. “I’m playing a bit of a philosophical game with you, Adam. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s probably best to forget about it. No harm’s done. The only thing unresolved is your curiosity.”
“But what if it happens again?”
“I can’t really advise you. Just deal with it as it comes, but don’t let it become too important to you. You got over that earlier episode all right.”
I put down my wine glass so hard I nearly broke it. I was grateful for the club’s thick glassware.
“But I didn’t mention anything about the train episode,” I said. “How did you know about that?”
“I didn’t know it had anything to do with a train. Greg must have mentioned something to me.”
That was far from a satisfactory answer and I was tempted to challenge him with a volley of follow-up questions as I might have done in court, but thought better of it. After all, I didn’t know this man. Now I began to feel less comfortable in his company, almost as though I was the subject of his amusement. I finished my wine and stood up.
“Better get moving,” I said. “I like to see my daughters before they go to bed.”
We shook hands and I walked out to the car park.