The Children of the City: {three chapters}

The Children of the City / a novel by Nick Sidwell / [email protected]

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The Children of the City {first three chapters}

a novel

by Nick Sidwell

{68,000 words}

[email protected]

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mailto:[email protected]

http://www.ifyoulikeittakeit.com/



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CHAPTER

ONE

here are towers.

In the shadows of the towers, the city is without limit.

Endlessly repeating chapters that spread forever onwards,

each a different mix of buildings mapped onto a grid-network of

streets. Each containing at its heart a smoking tower and

positioned always three blocks south, an education centre. Only

the river that meanders through the city from unknown source to

unknown mouth, the hill above the marketplace and the marble-

white complex, above all the marble-white complex, are not

mirrored throughout the urban sprawl.

The city is without children.

Except that every citizen is a child of the city. The council is

the great patriarch to them all. But in the gardens of the city, in its

streets, on its riverbanks, there are no sounds of childish play. The

city’s largest department store is stocked full with council-

approved goods. Inside, citizens between shifts or on lunch

breaks browse amongst fields of identical fashions and appliances

and utensils. An inexpressive building stands next to the

department store. It is education centre four. The children sit at

neatly ordered rows of desks, eat at neatly ordered rows of tables

and sleep in neatly ordered rows of beds. They have never seen

T


3

their parents. At birth, babies are taken from the mother to an

incubator. Vast rows of new life that are then assigned to an

education centre in which they grow. Families are strictly

forbidden.

The city is without history.

Along the city’s roads, trucks rumble, laden with documents

gathered from the collection bins. They are to be delivered to the

storage silos and sorting office in the marble-white complex. The

sorting office sluices and channels the documents into those to be

archived and those to be destroyed. The written record of every

life in the city is sorted. What would, if left unchecked, settle

eventually into the strata of history. The council carefully cleanses

history from the consciousness of the citizens. Only a little is

archived. The vast majority of what comes in off the trucks is sent

on to be crushed and packed, and then incinerated. History burns

in the towers.

The city is without crime.

Guided by the council, untroubled by history, the populace

identifies with the city. It is the city. It is the same vast, ordered

perfection. One could no sooner commit a crime against another

than he could against himself. Collectively the mind of the

populace is perfect. Localised anomalies are quietly ironed out by

the council and the city accepts that this is so. Individual minds

can sometimes go awry, it is the way of things. But the combined

mind is constant. The city believes in this faith.

The city is without a true concept of the past or of the future.

The city simply is.

In the shadows of the towers, in the streets of the city, there is

nothing but unblemished order.

*


4

LAZARUS CAVE TURNED away from the twelfth-floor window

where he had stood naked, watching the sun break slowly over

the eastern horizon. He padded heavily across the living room,

flicking the switch on the kettle as he passed the counter dividing

it from the kitchenette. In the bathroom, cold linoleum stuck to his

feet, still clammy from the night’s sleep. He lifted the lid of the

toilet bowl and urinated loudly into the still water below. The

large mirror above the bath caught his profile. He studied himself

critically. At forty-seven his physical prime had long since

deserted him. It showed its absence in a few extra pounds around

the middle, a slight droop to the muscles around his breast and

arms due to lack of use, a receding hairline which was

accentuated by the way he swept his hair back and away from his

forehead. The only thing moving in the whole composition was

the golden stream of piss. And then that too ceased.

In the bedroom the carpet was old and did not quite fit

snugly to the skirting board in places. Cave took a pair of scissors

from a drawer and snipped at the beginnings of a frayed edge

that threatened to disturb the neat order.

Outside apartment blocks rose from the carpet of the city.

Above them, the towers stretched towards the sky. In the centre of

the city, the tallest tower of them all from which the others

radiated outwards, one in each chapter, soared heavenwards from

the middle of the marble-white complex that housed the city

council.

Cave opened his wardrobe. Half of it was filled with freshly-

pressed blue shirts, the other half with crisp white ones. Below

them, pairs of black trousers were arrayed on hangers. Cave

selected a shirt and trousers and dressed himself. In front of the

mirror on the chest he looped his tie and slid the knot precisely

into place. With cream he slicked his hair back using carefully

measured strokes of his comb.


5

Through the streets of the city citizens moved by droves as

they made their way to and from work. The sky above was a pale

grey in the early morning sun. The buildings were grey concrete

and the murky exhaust fumes from cars filled the greyed tarmac

of the roads. The people themselves were grey too. Only the

brilliant white of the complex, the egg-yolk yellow sun and the

thick greenery on top of the hill to the south-east broke the

uniformity.

Cave donned a suit jacket and carefully swept his shoulders

with a lint brush. Sitting on the edge of his bed he laced his shoes.

Through the bedroom window the tree moved gently in the

morning breeze and beyond that stared the blank face of another

apartment block. In the kitchen Cave poured water from the kettle

into a mug and stirred in coffee granules, taking note of the

spidery way in which they dissolved. He blew on the coffee to

cool it and gulped it down, screwing his face up at the acrid taste

and the fact it burnt his throat as he drank.

He stepped out of the door at the front of the block and into

the thrumming efficiency of the morning city. He turned right,

walking in the direction of the nearest tower. An old red saloon

was parked further down the street. Cave unlocked the door and

climbed inside. He twisted the key in the ignition and the engine

came to life. It ticked over methodically for a while as he waited

for a security van to make its unhurried way down the road.

The morning traffic was slow but untroubled. The masses of

vehicles on the road slipped through the traffic lights, along the

city’s grid of roads in a controlled formation. The morning

commute was an oiled habit and Lazarus Cave relaxed in the

worn leather upholstery of the car as he drove. Advertising

hoardings decorated the route, huge council-sanctioned images

bearing down over the citizens below. Picture-perfect products


6

and messages wallpapering the buildings and combining together

to cement the existence of the utopian urban landscape.

At the gated entrance to the council compound Lazarus Cave

slowed to a halt, wound down the driver-side window and

showed his security pass to the sentry on duty. The sentry’s eyes

flicked back and forth between the ID photograph clipped to

Cave’s suit and the face of the man in the car. With an apparently

satisfied grunt he opened his mouth to speak and Cave noted in

approval the starch in his collar, the closely shaved stubble and

the neatly aligned teeth that were displayed as he drew his lips

back to form the words. ‚Thank you, sir. You have a good day

now.‛ Cave returned a nod of gratitude and proceeded under the

rising barrier, closing the car window as he drove slowly

forwards.

In the vast parking lot Cave made his way towards his

assigned parking bay. Other cars beetled forwards with the same

measured pace. People on foot moved along marked paths.

Everything migrating inwards.

Cave parked up and killed the engine. It made mechanical

popping sounds as it cooled rapidly in the uncommonly chill

summer air. He climbed out and shut the door behind him,

bracing himself against the cold. Overhead geese flew in

formation, a vee of dark shapes standing out against the dull

canvas of the sky. They came in from the southern edge of the

complex, appearing from over the crown of the giant immutable

oak that stood inside the council grounds and continuing in a

straight line until they were lost behind the imposing marble

façade of the Civil Security Advisory building.

The throng of staff making their way towards their stations

began to disintegrate as it approached the separate buildings that

made up the council’s administrative body. As groups and bodies

flaked off, Cave continued on past the CSA, the urban planning


7

department, the sorting shed and storage silos that dominated the

western portion of the complex. He watched as a truck made its

way from one of the silos to a chute in the side of the sorting shed.

Reversing up to it, the driver raised the rear section, released the

tailgate and waited as a white cascade of documents poured

down into the hoppers below. To his left the monumental,

monolithic tower stretched upwards like a pillar supporting the

canopy of the sky, the smoke from its top seamlessly mingling

with the clouds. Its shadow in the low morning sun elongated

until the tip lay at the revolving glass door of the archives.

Inside the archives the broad lobby was as encased in marble

as the outside of the building. Cave strode across the cold floor to

the bank of lifts. A tall, thick man in his fifties with a heavily

developed paunch and second chin was waiting in front of them,

studying the lights as they ticked along the scale of numbers

above each set of double doors. He heard Cave’s footsteps echo in

the marble lobby but kept his eyes focussed on the numbers until

he was confident which lift was approaching next. Cave waited

for the big man to position himself in front of the correct lift

before he spoke. ‚Morning, Sal.‛

Sal Bernieri looked at him. ‚Morning, Larry.‛

Bernieri was a friend or the closest figure that Cave had to

one in the city. He was an amiable man and his slightly lazy

appearance belied a warm energy that ran deep within him. He

lived a few chapters away from Lazarus, with a woman named

Marge, who was herself tall, thick with a heavily developed

paunch and second chin. They went well together.

‚Marge being good to you?‛

The lift arrived. Its doors slid noiselessly open and the two

archivists stepped inside. Cave pressed the button for the floor

below. Bernieri patted his stomach. ‚She’s up early every day. The

woman knows how to cook a good breakfast.‛ He chuckled.


8

The doors closed and the lift descended. There were three

floors of the archives above ground and a further four that

stretched below. Two were full of offices. The lower two were the

archives themselves, cavernous networks of rooms without

apparent limit that contained within them files and documents

that formed precise records on every single motion in the city.

Cave had experienced Marge Bernieri’s cooking once before,

a monumental portion of stew, heavy with dumplings. She had

drunk wine, which was unusual for the city. Sal had a glass; Cave

didn’t drink. The evening had been light and homely. They had

discussed relationships, the way they coalesced around the shared

faith in the city that ran through the entire populace. The faith

that was at the heart of everything. Friendly hours had passed.

Cave had asked if they had ever had children and Marge, who

would have been talking and talking, fell silent. The Bernieris had

shifted uncomfortably. Sal had explained. ‚Well, you see, truth is,

Larry, we don’t know. We might have done. It doesn’t make sense

from the outside – but think about it, the body, it’s the only record

we really have. We know better than most perhaps, you and me.

Everything else is in the archives, or burnt more likely, gone. Your

hair, take your hair. It’s retreating. Soon it will be even further

back.‛ He had paused for a moment then with a smile, ‚my

stomach. It grows. But pregnancy is different – there’s a bump

and then it’s gone. Sooner or later the extra weight goes too. Or it

stays and just becomes a part of getting older. Our hips broaden

with age too so that becomes inconclusive. And the memories, bit

by bit the memory goes. Our pasts are so expertly cleaved away –

cleaved away by us, Larry – that we only ever have the bare

present. Sure we talk about the past, the future too, we have

words for them. But they’re gone. And not just past but really

gone, buried or burnt, either way they’re gone and everything

that has been held within them goes with them.‛ He looked


9

strained for a moment and then his normal easy-going

demeanour returned. ‚I mean, I can’t even remember how me and

Marge got together. We love each other because we love the city.

We know we love each other because we always have done. But

was there a time when that love was growing? Or when we didn’t

love each other? Or when we hadn’t met? Probably. But then it

doesn’t exist anymore. Not in diaries, in photos. In memories

even. So no there wasn’t. We’re Sal and Marge. The Bernieris.

Same with children. Probably. But that doesn’t mean anything,

not without a past, so no. Even you who knows the archives,

who’s part of it all won’t understand this. But ask any couple and

they’ll tell you the same. I guarantee it. But don’t ask. It’s not the

done thing.‛

Cave had not stayed much longer after Sal finished. Marge

Bernieri had remained muted until the goodbyes. Sal had

reassured him that he had not been out of place and at work he

remained warm and jovial but Cave had not been invited back

again.

The lift reached the lower ground floor with the softest of

jolts as it came to a rest. The lift shaft opened into the middle of a

long corridor filled with electric light. Several large ventilators

were used to circulate fresh air around the building. Time, which

registered only vaguely in the passing of seasons in the city

above, in the aging of bodies, down in the archives seemed to

cease all existence.

Bernieri and Cave walked part of the way down the corridor

and then turned right into a large open-plan office. They made

their way to the far corner in front of a glass office with drawn

blinds where four cubicles faced each other across low partition

boards. Schmitz was already seated diagonally opposite from

Cave’s desk. Donald Schmitz was a year or two younger than


10

Cave, but smaller and badly balding. The three men exchanged

perfunctory greetings.

It was the role of the archivists to curate the endless

repository of information that was not burnt. They trawled it

ceaselessly, monitoring and making sense of the city around

them. On the occasions when there were irregularities in the

behaviour of citizens, it was the duty of the archivists to sift

through the archives, searching for the strands of information

hidden in the vast records that might lead them to an

understanding of this behaviour.

*

THE TABLE IN Landau Krauss’ office was long, rectangular and

made of dark wood. Seven people sat round it. Cave, Bernieri and

Schmitz had been joined by Arthur Camras, the fourth archivist.

Camras was somewhere in his thirties, a thin, quiet, precise man.

The four of them flanked the table. At one end sat Tess Dalton

and Carlos Waites. At the other, Krauss was finishing a one-sided

telephone call. The head of the archives was a heavyset man in his

sixties with thick gunmetal grey hair. Imposing eyebrows sat atop

thin wire-framed spectacles. The others waited for him. At last the

voice on the other end of the line ceased. As he returned the

telephone to its cradle, Krauss signed off, ‚yes, councillor, of

course. I understand.‛

He surveyed the group. Cave could see thin lines of strain

creased across his brow. The conversation with the councillor had

not been a pleasant one. ‚You all know Carl.‛ As one the table

inclined their heads towards Waites. ‚And Tess, these are my

archivists: Sal Bernieri, Larry Cave, Don Schmitz and Arthur

Camras.‛ He counted them off in turn. ‚They’ll be supplying the

information you need. Tess Dalton joins us from Analysis.‛


11

Analysts interpreted the banks of files held within the

archives. They differed from archivists in that they modelled vast

swathes of information to produce data that described the

patterns and behaviours of individuals, groups, sectors,

industries, companies. On their computers was a perfect

deterministic representation of the city, indistinguishable from the

living, breathing physical reality itself. When it came to the city,

the analysts were never wrong.

‚The council is keen to see that we bring this event to a quick

resolution. Carl will brief you in a moment. We know anomalies

crop up. We’ve all seen them before. It’s rare. It’s even rarer on a

serious scale. Mainly clerical errors; gentle hiccoughs. The council

guides the people, gentlemen; sometimes there are individuals

who seem intent on disrupting the harmony of the people. Carl,

please.‛

Carlos Waites was head of the CSA, a hard-formed man not

given to emotion. He leaned forwards and looked down the

length of the table. Cave could detect the uncharacteristic nerves

as he cleared his throat. ‚Landau’s right. At the CSA we deal with

one or two cases a year. Mainly diarists, often loners.‛ He caught

Cave’s eye and did not look away as quickly as he might have

done. ‚We detect; we deal. History is just a giant river; we can see

where it flows. If it stops somewhere other than us, here, in this

complex we just detect and deal. Four weeks ago we ran into

something,‛ he paused, searching for the right word,

‚<something. It’s an anomaly. It’s not a bureaucratic slip. We’ve

had the analysts on this too and we can see the flow of history

being siphoned off. But we have two problems. We’re not talking

a loner here. It’s a pair. A couple. And we know that the history is

being diverted into this pair. But it’s not stopping with them.‛

Camras asked the question. ‚Where’s it going?‛

‚Have you heard of Canscot?‛ It was Tess Dalton who spoke.


12

Camras shook his head. He looked round at the other

archivists, each of whom was doing likewise. Waites resumed.

‚Neither had we. This couple are a male and a female, cohabiting.

Two days ago my agents photographed the female depositing

documents in a collection bin. They’re still depositing most of

their stuff. It’s an exceptionally clean flow they’re diverting, no

ragged edges. Not one. No firm evidence that we can pin directly

on them. It’s smart. But one of the photographs showed a

letterhead in the documents bearing the name Canscot. It’s the

only time the name’s appeared. We think they’re diverting

everything into Canscot.‛

Bernieri raised an eyebrow. ‚You think?‛

‚As sure as we can be.‛

‚Why aren’t you certain? And where do we come in? Who

are Canscot?‛

‚We don’t know.‛

Carlos Waites looked at Tess Dalton who nodded

confirmation. ‚My analysts have run everything we’ve got.

Canscot doesn’t exist anywhere in the models.‛

Lazarus Cave spoke next. ‚You’re sure about this

letterhead?‛

Tess nodded again. ‚It’s genuine. I’ve seen it. It will be in the

archives this time tomorrow. There’s something out there in the

city that we can’t account for at present.‛

Donald Schmitz had been sitting with his arms crossed over

his chest. Now he unfolded them. ‚I can see why that would be a

problem.‛

Landau Krauss leaned in. ‚The councillors are<concerned.

It’s impossible for something to exist that the council knows

nothing of. Everything in this city is certain. We know this.‛ He

cast his right arm about himself. ‚Canscot’s in here somewhere.


13

Somewhere in these archives. You four are to trawl until you find

it. Any mention of it goes straight to Tess.‛

Schmitz mulled this over. ‚Do we know why they’re doing

it?‛

Waites shook his head. ‚Nothing conclusive. The CSA are

monitoring them.‛

‚Bring them in. If we know they’re doing it, we should bring

them in.‛

Again Waites shook his head. ‚We can’t. They’re clean as far

as withholding history goes. As I said, it’s smart. We can link

them to Canscot. But we’re stuck without details on what Canscot

is. We can’t bring them in for a link to something that, according

to us, doesn’t exist.‛

For a few moments nobody spoke. Only the hum of the air

conditioning and Cave tapping his pen on the edge of the table

disturbed the silence of the office. The scale of the problem settled

on the archivists. Cave stopped the tapping. ‚I don’t like this.‛

Sal Bernieri clapped a supportive hand on his shoulder.

‚Faith, Larry. The council knows everything. So we have to root it

out. You heard Carlos. Detect and deal. So the detection’s a little

harder here. Faith.‛

Cave didn’t respond. Instead Camras spoke next. ‚When do

we report by?‛

‚Feed anything through to the analysts as it comes up. The

CSA are keeping agents on the ground. The councillors want a

report with full details on Canscot by five tomorrow afternoon.

We don’t have to like this. But Canscot’s somewhere in here.

History is the enemy of freedom. This city is blessed because it

has us to absolve it of the responsibilities that history tries to

impose. We haven’t a single crime. Our citizens are perfect

because, without the troublesome knowledge that history forces

upon them, there is nothing else they can be. We won’t let reckless


14

individuals threaten this.‛ Krauss cast his eyes around the table.

All apart from Cave who sat studying the tabletop, met his gaze.

‚That’s all for now. Tomorrow at five, gentlemen, I want a report

on my desk that I can deliver to the councillors.‛

They all stood. Lazarus Cave was the last to rise. The news

troubled him. It made him feel old. He probed his receding

hairline with his fingertips as they filed out. There was urgency in

the voices of the others but Cave remained silent. Bernieri laid an

arm about his shoulders as they approached their desks and

repeated his mantra. ‚Faith, Larry.‛

*

HALF A MILE from the eastern edge of the central complex, the

ground sloped up away from the tightly packed shops and stalls

of the city’s main market. In the north-eastern section of the

market, behind the bustling section where the butchers collected

their stands, the heavy sentinel form of a tower stood at the corner

of the hill. Some two hundred and sixteen steps led out of the

marketplace, from near the base of the tower up to the expansive

rectangular plateau at the top. Three more towers kept guard at

each of the other corners, the smoke from the crowns rolling

gently southwards in the early afternoon breeze.

It was the lunch hour. Halfway up the steps, Cave paused for

a few moments on a bench that looked out over the market.

Behind him, the top of the white marble dome of the research

laboratory could be seen hanging above the crest of the hill.

Below, the cobbles of the broad square were busy with people.

Dark grey awnings, red-and-white coverings, white tarpaulins

were all hung or draped over a scaffold framework that stretched

around much of the perimeter of the market. In the centre of the

square, a fountain bubbled pleasantly. Set in the ground around


15

its edges, drainage holes took the excess water down into the vast

old sewers that ran under the city. Traffic was not permitted

entrance to the marketplace during business hours, but a security

van slowly made its way through the crisscrossing citizens.

Overheard, a cloud of white smoke from the tower behind the

butchers’ corner was trundling across the sky.

It began to rain as Cave walked across the top of the flat hill.

Bedraggled roses with their thorns on show flanked the gravelled

pathway. On the right there was a sculpture consisting of three

great blocks of polished metal arranged as a corner of a cube. Up

ahead, the imposing façade of the laboratory dominated through

the light drizzle. There were other people up on top of the hill,

couples and small parties come to visit the zoo that lay in the

gardens behind the research centre.

As he got closer, Cave could see raindrops hanging like

limpets on the marble columns. He pulled the collar of his coat up

round his neck and strode up the long, low flight of marble steps

leading up to the double wooden doors that were thrown open to

the inhabitants of the city.

In the cavernous atrium, electric strip-lights fixed around the

edges of the room made up for the wet light that was leaking in

through the skylight in the top of the dome. From the inside, its

enormous, smoothly curved sides and the circular pane of glass at

the top made it look like a single huge eye. But if Cave was inside

looking out, there was almost nothing to be seen apart from the

thin tears of rain that trickled over the top of the roof.

On the far side of the atrium to the broad entrance doors an

exit led out to the zoo. A steady flow of people moving in both

directions passed Cave standing at the top of the ramp that led

down to the enclosures. He watched the bodies around him. The

women in the atrium and the women in the gardens were the

same. The women by the monkeys and the women by the


16

penguins. The men too were identical, with identical clothes and

hairstyles and conversations. All perfect products of the perfect

city. And everywhere women and men and no children. Cave

smiled. He was a good citizen. And then he thought about his

body, how it had looked in the mirror that morning and he felt

again his hairline and the sensation of aging filled him so that in

his mind he was a good citizen but in his heart he could feel only

the strain of the steps he had climbed, the constriction of the fatty

build-ups around the muscle and a beat that felt tiring and

anxious.

The two towers standing at the northern edge of the hill were

visible through the mesh fences of the animals’ habitats. The rain

had given out to a cold, wet unseasonal wind. Endless smoke bent

in the breeze and continued to be carried southwards. There was

a clear view over the rooftops of the city to his right, which he

turned to face. Spreading out east, tall and small buildings rose

and fell like a breath to the horizon. When the sun shone, Cave

could see the twisting river shining as it curved south, but now

there was a only a grey smudge where the flashes of light had

come from. He rarely went to the chapters that lay to the east of

the hill, although he knew their roofs in detail, the chimney stacks

and guttering, and they way in which they formed endless

patterns that forever shifted around and surprised him, like

clouds. Lazarus Cave could sense the vitality of the buildings, and

in them he knew that people lived as the soul of the city; and

perhaps it was a change in the wind but his mind wandered as his

eyes swam along the skyline and he asked himself what the souls

of the people were, and what they would look like, and where

they could be found; and maybe the wind changed again and took

the answer away with it, but Cave could not respond to his mind,

and he would have stood a while longer musing on this but a

visitor bumped sharply into him, and a crow cried its harsh caw,


17

and these events fixed his mind back in focus, and draw his gaze

in from the western chapters; they caused him to forget about

citizens and souls, and instead he apologised to the visitor who

had collided with him and had now walked on, and turned his

attention towards the zoo and, in particular, the rhinoceros.

The enclosures of the larger animals fascinated Cave. He

meandered past the giraffes and bison and great apes; each

specimen was a precise living representation of the illustrations of

animals that were displayed in the education centres. A bulky

hippopotamus stood in its soft mud. A pile of lionesses lay

slumbering near a glass viewing window where a wall provided

some shelter from the wind. Another lone lioness was lookout,

alert on a raised section of the enclosure, steadily watching a

group of women who pressed up to the glass to look at the cats.

The rhinoceros pen was as far from the research centre as the

zoo stretched. The path that ran alongside it stopped abruptly at

the edge of the hill and beyond it, the city continued to the north

in another endless expanse of dwellings and commerce. The

towers were great pillars planted into the ground around which

the houses and shops and offices seemed to cluster. It looked as if

they were exerting a pull over all that fell within their rotating

shadows; they bound the buildings and streets and chapters

together with careful precision. Without them, Cave imagined

that the city and its inhabitants would simply float away, lost and

directionless in an uncertain disorder.

There were several bodies already neatly resting on the

viewing rail that ran past the two sides of the rhinoceros

enclosure that fronted on to the tarmac paths that spread like a

grid through the whole zoo. On the other two sides, the

rhinoceros gazed out over the edges of the hill to the north and

east. Inside the habitat there was a long, low trough of food, a sort

of deep pond, towards which the ground on either side sloped,


18

and a hut or shed towards the rear that was filled with straw and

the sweet, nasty smell of a female rhinoceros not visible at this

moment. There was also a rough dead stump of a tree against

which the animal could scratch its tough hide. Piles of dung were

scattered over the flat ground; even in cold rain they had

managed to attract a few sluggish flies.

Information plaques were spaced evenly along the pen’s

viewing rail. Their primary subject was grazing stoically on a bale

of hay by the edge of the pond. Cave sat down on a bench by the

side of the tarmac path, from which he had a clear view between

four bodies at the viewing rail; two couples, reading the short

solid lines of information, mirror images of one another – the man

on the inside, taller than his blonde-haired partner, with his arm

pushed around her shoulders. Perhaps the male and female

suspects came here. Maybe they were now in the zoo, with his

arm pushed around her shoulders, walking along the tarmac

paths laid out in a tidy grid, carefully cutting away segments of

history and cauterising the telltale wounds as they did so in order

that no errant thread was left dangling which could be pulled and

unravelled to reveal exactly what it was they were secreting, and

exactly why. The thought troubled Lazarus Cave and he dropped

his focus from the matching couples and fixed it instead on the

great bulk of the rhinoceros.

Its huge ruminating body was sewn into heavy folds of grey

skin that rolled like great plates of armour when it moved. And

when it did move, Cave wanted to feel the hill to which his bench

was securely bolted shift and groan from the shock. A couple of

hardy flies buzzed around its rear end, and it swung its tufted tail

like a lazy whip to move them on. The enormous rump and

shoulders were covered in wart-like bumps. Where its majestic

horn should have sat like a crown on the end of its snout, there

was instead a perfectly rounded knob, worn down over years of


19

tracing the same steps, over and over, on a patch of raised earth in

the heart of the city. When Cave looked into the beast’s dark eyes

he saw an expressionless black, and he could not tell whether the

rhinoceros was looking at the grass towards which it lowered its

head; at its attentive double audience at the viewing rail; at the

bird that glided from the edge of the hill and into a mass of smoke

from the nearby towers; or at Cave himself. Or at none of these,

because Cave knew that the eyes of a rhinoceros could not see

well, and maybe the taste of the grass was all there was, or the

smell of the pale smoke, or the sound of the twin couples moving

away, and two more stepping in to take their places. Or perhaps

there was nothing but expressionless black, and the rhinoceros’

eyes simply reflected this, and the rhinoceros knew that this was

the case.

An old man with weathered features approached the bench

and sat down next to Cave. He was wearing grey worsted

trousers and a padded brown jacket, buttoned up around a

woollen scarf. For a while both men watched in silence as the

rhinoceros munched at the hay. Overhead the clouds began to

gather in a more organised fashion, preparing for a storm. The

replacement couples left, and another two arrived to fill in the

gaps. The rhinoceros took two steps forward and lowered its grey

mouth towards a mound of fresh hay.

‚There’s something kinda sad in that behaviour, don’t you

think?‛

Cave followed the rhinoceros carefully, the lowering of the

head, the movement of the jaw muscles, the shifting of the hind

legs as the soft ground subsided. It was possible that the eyes of

expressionless black could be the colour of sadness. ‚What else is

a rhino in a pen going to do?‛

Again the twin couples standing at the viewing rail moved

away and two fresh pairs slotted into place.


20

The old man said, ‚I wasn’t talking about the rhinoceros.‛

Lazarus Cave did not rise from his seat. He barely shifted as

he switched from looking at the rhinoceros to looking at the two

new couples who stood in front of the information plaques. In

both cases the man was on the inside, taller than his blonde-

haired partner, with his arm pushed around her shoulders.

Moments passed as he looked at them. ‚I should tell you I work

for –‛

The old man interrupted him before he could finish. ‚Don’t

tell me. If you were going to report me, or look me up, or ignore

me you would have left by now.‛

Cave twisted around to see who it was he was sharing the

bench with. The old man was scrutinising him already and Cave

examined the weathered portrait in front of him. What little of the

neck that showed over the broad scarf and the chin above it were

clean-shaven. The hair on top of the head was full but white.

Although the skin was aged and leathery, the face was sharp and

clear. Bright blue eyes like his own stared back at him.

‚Who are you?‛

‚What makes you think I can tell you?‛

‚Your name? Where you work? What you do?‛

‚Oh, I can tell you what I am. A good and true citizen, that’s

what. Who I am? Other than my name? The who lies somewhere

between the layers of what I am now, and what I was before that,

and before that, and so on. But memories fade. I’m an old man

and so my memory fades more than most. That who you ask

about is whatever picture the separate whats create. But the city

keeps our history, you know that, and with it, it takes away pieces

of the puzzle. I know more about who that rhinoceros is than I do

about myself.‛

The old man sounded neither happy nor sad as he said this,

neither angry nor resigned.


21

‚Your name then.‛

‚I’ve lost everything else, I’m not giving my name away too.‛

‚All the other information, the archives hold that.‛

The old man looked at Cave and laughed. ‚You think that’s

information they keep down there in their big storerooms?‛ He

laughed until tears streamed from his eyes and Cave did not

understand. ‚Information indeed! Those archives are nothing but

a great repository of souls.‛ He got stood up and moved off

without looking back, still chuckling to himself.

*

IT WAS PAST midnight by the time Lazarus Cave decided to leave

the office. Half an hour had passed since Bernieri had left him by

himself, trawling through the endless archives, hunting for a trace

of Canscot. Nothing had yet been found by the archivists. He

flicked the switch on the computer monitor and watched the

screen disappear to a pinprick of light and then fade out from

grey to black.

The strip-lights in the ceiling of the office and corridors

buzzed and flickered as he walked out towards the lift. Cave

could hear the low rumble of the air conditioning units gulping in

great mouthfuls of air to be transported through the pipes hidden

in the walls to the workers below ground level. Somewhere a

switch on a cycle clicked on and whatever it controlled whirred

briefly. As the doors of the lift closed behind him, a water cooler

around the corner gave a muffled belch.

Outside the night air was clear and chill and Cave decided

that he would walk home rather than drive. Yellow streetlamps

cast pools of light over the cold pavements as Cave made his way

westwards along the ambling boulevard of 3rd street. There were

a few other citizens tramping silently along the road, thick


22

overcoats drawn up closely about their necks. They were shift-

workers most likely, or individuals making their way home from

the bars scattered around the central chapters. The bars

themselves were low-profile venues, single rooms mostly, located

on the dim, narrow streets that connected together the broad

carriageways such as 3rd street.

An old man with sad eyes passed Cave coming round a

corner at the top of one of the constricted side roads. His breath

smelt of whisky and he walked with an uncomfortable stiffness in

his left leg as if he had forgotten how to bend his knee. Cave

could see the bar from where he had come, its murky light

spilling out from small windows. They were subdued places. In

the sublime idyll of life within the city, Cave felt a seam of

loneliness that ran through the populace. The bars were the places

of the chronically lonely. Drinks were served to citizens for whom

the constant presence of the council in their lives could do nothing

to fill in the disconnection that they felt from themselves. In the

midst of their unquestioning satisfaction with the city, of their

happy acceptance of their fealty to the council, there was a tiny

barren pocket into which, in place of a concrete realisation of self,

fell long nights spent circling the bottom of whisky glasses.

Drinking itself was a slow and measured activity, the bars careful

always to never permit a customer to depart disordered. The bars

were the grey vessels into which the uncertain needs of citizens

could be decanted.

Cave continued homewards. He disapproved of the bars, had

never set foot inside one. Any simple needs that arose within him

were ably met by his determined faith in the council. In place of a

vacuum, an aging belief washed through his idea of himself.

The tower that stood at the end of 3rd street was a huge dark

monolith keeping a quiet watch over the sleeping city. In the late

afternoon its shadow stretched back down 3rd street under the


23

sinking sun. In the distance Cave could see the white smoke

flowing from the massive tower in the centre of the council

compound. Above him, the top of the nearby tower was dormant,

colder and blacker even than the night sky it rose into.

The flat was cold as Cave opened the front door. He set some

beans on the hob and stood at the window, overlooking the city.

The 3rd street tower was visible from the living room. Sparse

lights in homes and offices floated like boat lights on an endless

rolling ocean, curiously disembodied lives drifting through the

night on the currents. Emerging from the waters, the tower was a

hard emblem of the power of the council.

The chessboard was in the gloom at a corner of the room that

the weak bulb struggled to reach. He withdrew a crumpled

envelope from his pocket. Its seal had been neatly broken and

then taped back down. The tape bore the crest of the council; the

correspondence of all city officials was monitored in this fashion.

Cave went into the kitchen to fetch a knife with which to slit open

the pre-read letter. An image of the old man by the rhinoceros

enclosure idly entered his mind and paused there for a moment as

he wondered what the monitors would do if they knew that he

had failed to report the conversation. The reflection dissolved

back in the lounge as he slipped the tip of the knife under the

corner of the envelope and cut along the sealed edge. Inside a

tatty piece of paper which had in black ink the stamp of the

censor’s office revealed the move he was to play out on the

chessboard. Cave picked up black’s defensive bishop and placed

it where instructed. The air by the window was cold through the

single pane of glass. Cave sat at the small chess table and rubbed

his hands to keep warm. He stared at the board for a few minutes,

attempting to decipher the move’s coded intentions, before giving

up on the task.


24

He ate the beans. When he had finished, he meticulously

washed both saucepan and crockery. After a while he moved

away towards the bedroom where a small oil-burning heater

offered greater comfort.

A milky patch of moonlight fell across the pillow on Cave’s

bed. It was the only source of light in the room. The apartment

block that sat across from his window was poker-faced in the

dark. Grey-black shrubs waved in a night-time breeze around the

base of a large tree, smudged against its gloomy backdrop so that

its outline was sometimes here, sometimes there and never

definable. Cave picked a framed photograph up off the chest and

lay with his head on the pillow and the picture angled towards

the moonlight.

There was a man and a woman in the photograph, they stood

with their arms around each other, smiling from behind the brittle

protective glass of the frame. The expression in the eyes was hard

to decipher in the dim haze of the moonlight. It looked like pride,

or something that was supposed to look like pride. Perhaps it was

not even that; it seemed more like something that was supposed

to look like something that was supposed to look like pride. Like

an image run through a photocopier a hundred times. A copy of a

copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. Of a copy.

Cave carefully removed the back of the frame and lifted the

photograph of his parents out so he could see it without the

reflections of his own face caused by the glass. Exposed, their eyes

seemed to change so the expression that was pride or something

like it before, slid into love, then reproach, then command, before

coming to rest in a distance that was almost so removed as to be

less expression and more just a snapshot of a pose by two figures

so perfunctory as to be without a soul. On the reverse side the

photograph bore the printed logo of the city council. Cave’s

parents were the parents of thousands of other citizens. Identical


25

framed photographs were displayed in countless homes, copies of

that ambiguous expression staring out at the children of the city.

Rain started to fall outside again. Thick, heavy drops that

soaked the air and pinged off the metal stairs of the fire escape

that zigzagged down the back wall of the apartment block. Cave

lay on his single bed, listening to the notes they struck as they did

so. The light in the bedroom was turned off but the curtains were

undrawn and Cave’s eyes were open. The head of the bed was

positioned by the sash window and he could see out over the back

of the adjacent apartment block on 43rd street. In the night it was

like a tall, dark face that gave nothing away.

A light switched on in one of the windows. The curtains were

drawn but badly, and Cave could see a metre or two of floor

space inside the flat. From his vantage point he was marginally

above it, but not by much. Cave lay where he was but kept his

eyes fixed on the gap in the drapes, waiting for a body to cross

into the unguarded light. When she did, he smiled to see her

again.

The gap between the two buildings stretched about sixty feet

and the distortion created by the viewing angle made it hard to

determine her features. She had red hair, shoulder-length and cut

straight. Her posture and gait suggested somebody slightly

younger than him. Without ever deliberately keeping a watch for

her, Cave enjoyed her intermittent appearances. He had seen her

once or twice walking down the strip of road he could see

between his apartment block and hers. Most often though he

came across her like this, at irregular times when her window

would shine out of the sleeping array around it. Her appearance

now both did and did not surprise him. Lying in the narrow dark

he allowed himself to briefly love the unpredictability of her

habits. Of course she worked in a job that involved shifts which,

although apparently here and there, were laid out as any other by


26

the council. The light in her living room window in the early

hours of the morning was, had Cave known everything, to be

utterly expected. But still he could not help himself but watch her

until the apartment again fell dark. And when it did, he dreamt

that her hair floated in the space between their buildings, and that

he could irresistibly elongate his hand to reach out across the gap,

and that his fingers could run gently through her red tresses with

a touch that only dreamers could feel.


27

CHAPTER

TWO

t is gone four in the morning. Lazarus Cave sits on the edge of

his bed, his back curved and shoulders hunched forwards. He

is wearing a white vest and undershorts, the same garments that

he wears during the day under his neatly pressed shirt and

trousers. He has his socks on against the cold, the oil-burner

having long burnt out. The photograph and frame lie

unassembled on the floor by his feet.

In the kitchen, dressed for work, Cave rests against the work

surface eating pineapple rings from the tin and drinking

supermarket coffee brewed from a jar with a po-faced brown

label. Dawn is still several hours off as he closes the front door

behind him and walks down the central stairwell, cold footsteps

echoing off the dull walls.

*

THE AIR DOWN by the river where it curved westwards after

passing the southern slope of the hill topped by the grand

research centre was distinguishable from the rest of the city by its

smell. Market scents drifted down during the day and hung

around before mixing with those than floated north from a sugar

I


28

refinery located somewhere in the chapters down that way. The

resultant subtle tang seemed to permeate the water itself as it

flowed slowly by. It was on these banks that Cave stood, leaning

over the railings that edged the towpath and into the tarnished

silver of the river below.

Inside the council compound he had seen the hellish glow of

the furnace in the base of the massive tower, the city’s icon. It

burnt constantly, reducing records by the tonne into rolling,

voiceless clouds of smoke. They too sometimes blew southeast to

add an extra tinge to the river’s odour.

Although it was barely past five in the morning, there had

been the stirrings of activity already in the market square.

Butchers and grocers were unpacking tables in preparation for the

vans that would shortly arrive to deliver fresh produce. Cave had

crossed its expansive cobbles, ignoring the sounds of traders,

heading without really knowing why towards the oil slick of the

river. Thickly the water passed by under his gaze. Colours

without origin danced across its surface as stodgy wavelets broke

and fell. Above, the clear sky allowed the moonlight to coat the

river in its milky luminescence.

A long time ago he had seen a body floating by. It was an

animal of some form and the water moved quickly then as if

trying to pick it up and hurry its indecence away. Now it trundled

almost listlessly, washing the city of its history, the constant

surface over the currents below.

Cave shuddered. He turned and made his way back across

the market place where the exhaust fumes of the first delivery

vans condensed rapidly in the cold air. He thought about Canscot

as he passed the fishmonger who was unpacking insulated boxes,

arranging the fish inside on the trays full of ice that covered his

stall. How could the records of a whole company slip undetected

through the supposedly infallible grasp of the council and its


29

many departments? It should not have been possible. Nothing

like this should be able to happen. Every strand of activity within

the city was bound together in an enormous web that like a

spider’s, reverberated to a hundred million frequencies, each

tremor telling of a single moment in the minutiae of urban

existence. The city was both the cause and effect of everything

that transpired within it and the council, like the spider, sat in the

centre, interpreting the endless signals, regulating where

necessary, sometimes here, sometimes there, and governing,

overseeing, administrating. Omniscient and omnipotent, they

maintained the perfect order of life within the city. The council

could not be broken, and as he braced himself against the stiff

southerly wind Cave found this fact supportive.

But the anomaly of Canscot complicated matters. Cave ran

his fingers along his hairline as he thought. This was something

altogether different. It suggested the possibility that there had

occurred an error or a loophole somewhere inside the flawless

system. Refusal to cede records was an obstinacy of will that

ignorantly sought in the individual the security and peace that

only the council could provide. However, the existence of a

company that did not according to record exist, that in the reality

of the city did not exist was uncomfortable, insidious. Destructive.

A little way from the Council complex, he nearly collided

with Bernieri as he rounded the corner of 3rd street and 22nd.

Cave’s face was slightly flushed, the wet air by the river and the

cold of the early morning giving his cheeks a ruddiness that brisk

walking had accentuated. The presence of Bernieri had surprised

him. It was still not yet six o’clock and he had not expected to

encounter any of the other archivists until later on. Sal Bernieri’s

appearance had intruded into the gentle turmoil that had been his

reflection upon the implications of the case they were handling.

Cave did not want to seem flustered in front of his colleague, but


30

it took him a moment or two to compose himself and partition

and calm his thoughts.

‚Sal<sorry about that. Up early this morning.‛

‚Morning Larry. Krauss’ deadline. I get the feeling we’ve got

our work cut out with this Canscot business.‛

Cave acknowledged his agreement with a murmur and the

two men fell into step together as they resumed walking in the

direction of the complex.

For a while neither spoke. The silence suited Cave. His heart

was still beating fast, as if Bernieri had glimpsed something

private that he wished to cover up and sweep quietly away. He

made no effort to provoke a conversation.

22nd street was a long road, but not an interesting one. The

two archivists were travelling northwards up its expressionless

pavements. There were no shops or restaurants around here, just

high-rise blocks of apartments and offices crowded together in an

endless strip along both sides of the road. They rose so high that

in the morning and afternoon they blocked the low-lying sun and

in the winter they turned 22nd street into a zone of almost

perpetual dawn and dusk. At one point they passed an open

manhole cover. Cave looked down into a big pipe, almost a

tunnel, easily big enough for a crouching man. Along its curved

base he saw flickers of light and could hear the sound of the sewer

draining down towards the river.

As early as it was now, a regular flow of cars moved quickly

in both directions, taking advantage of the lack of cosmopolitan

bustle to bypass the more congested roads that lay to the west.

Over the archivists’ shoulders at the distant end of the road

another monolithic tower was planted firmly in the ground like a

great, ageless tree, its roots drawing the sustenance from the

urban sprawl surrounding it. About half a mile ahead of them the

road curved down for some distance so that where before there


31

had been endless facades of grey buildings, there was instead a

patch of grey sky, illuminated by streetlamps and framed by the

last apartment blocks before the dip and so uniform of colour and

rectangular in shape it looked as though someone had cut it from

a patch of felt and stuck it there as drab decoration.

Shortly before the road descended, Bernieri and Cave turned

right. Not far down the road, shining like a great white crown

amid the absence of colour they could see the south-western

corner of the marble wall surrounding the council buildings. They

were close now, barely more than ten more minutes walk until

they would enter the atrium of the archive house, at which point

the silence and all it portended would be lifted by the promise of

fresh investigation into the case. New priorities would arrive in

both their minds and maybe this ugly walk they were sharing

would be forgotten. Perhaps, thought, Cave, they could make it to

those doors, he could place his foot into the sanctuary within

without having to speak.

However, the hope, if seriously entertained, was soon

dashed. They had advanced only a short way along the street

when Bernieri finally broke the silence that had sat between the

two men. The question, innocuous, polite, appeared to Cave to be

an affront to the tacit pact of silence he imagined them to have

entered. ‚What brings you over this way, Larry? Your flat’s over

that way isn’t it?‛

Bernieri indicated with his thumb a location roughly to their

left and behind them, the opposite direction from which they had

come. Cave looked at his companion, unable to hide the

indignation that Bernieri had thought to disturb the equilibrium

with such an ordinary question. Indeed, it was hardly a question,

more a statement. Lazarus Cave knew that Sal Bernieri was

perfectly aware of the address of his apartment. The inflection he

raised in his voice at the end of the second sentence was little


32

more than a creature of habit. It provoked within him an irrational

passing impulse that Bernieri had somehow some how wasted the

silence, that this was an act of treachery. All this passed through

Cave’s mind so swiftly he could not consciously separate one

strand of thought from another. Likewise a quiver of emotion, a

certain tightening of his expression that he could not resist,

passed across his face without his full awareness. And Bernieri,

although not able to extrapolate from what he saw as a

momentary grimace a robust spectrum of emotions, nevertheless

discerned in Cave’s face a fleeting sense of discomfort.

‚Trouble sleeping,‛ he answered after a pause. A sudden

gust of cold air, wet with the possibility of an encroaching fog that

smelt of the river made both men shiver. Cave sniffed. His throat

was dry and he coughed loudly into a handkerchief with which

he then blew his nose.

‚Is everything okay?‛

Again Cave felt the pressing intonation of Bernieri’s question,

as if he was either stressing the validity of a pointless query or in

some way wedging the question home so its roots took hold

under Cave’s skin as it burrowed towards a core of truth. Lazarus

looked up at him. He brought an awkward smile to his lips and

fought the urge to cough with a weak, tenuous laugh.

‚Can’t you feel it too?‛

For a moment Sal Bernieri could not determine whether his

colleague was referring to the bitter chill in the morning air or

something else.

‚We’ll be there soon,‛ he replied, indicating the entrance to

the archives with a wave of his hand. By now the two men had

entered the compound and were crossing the parking lot. Before

Cave could acknowledge this latest piece of commentary Bernieri

continued. ‚Canscot’s nothing to worry about.‛


33

Cave started, his head jerked round in surprise. ‚I never said

it was,‛ he responded with a nearly stumbled immediacy.

They reached the edge of the car park and followed the

footpath for the short curved walk to the main doors of the

archives. Bernieri stopped for a moment with his hand on the

door. He ignored Cave’s defensiveness. ‚We’ll have Canscot by

the close of the day,‛ Bernieri laughed, ‚how do they think they

can possibly succeed when this is all here?‛ With his eyes he

indicated the endless solid walls of white marble all around them.

As Cave followed him through the open door a torrent of rain

came tumbling down from the dawn sky. Two drops of water,

thick, heavy and cold caught Cave at the point where his coat

collar parted slightly from his neck and they trickled

uncomfortably down his back.

*

LANDAU KRAUSS SAT behind the closed door of his office. His

telephone rang intermittently, sharp peals that he cut off on the

third bell by lifting the receiver cautiously from its cradle. Most of

the time it was Tess Dalton, either calling with updates from the

analysts, or else requesting them from himself. Once it was the

councillor. Through the partially closed shutters that covered the

large glass windows, he could see Camras, Schmitz, Cave and

Bernieri hard at work.

Progress for the archivists was frustrating. It was

approaching midday. They had run and re-run countless data

sets. Vast swathes of the digital archives had been cross-

referenced and there was not a single fleeting mention of Canscot

anywhere in the mix.

There was a clock hung behind Schmitz, directly in Cave’s

line of view. He glanced up at it. The minute hand seemed to be


34

speeding round far too fast. Already midday had advanced upon

them, and soon it would be past and they would begin eating up

the afternoon. He stared back at his computer screen, flicking

rapidly, randomly through programs, scanning for a link or a

connection or a pairing that had been missed.

Nothing.

‚I don’t understand it, this shouldn’t be possible.‛

Donald Schmitz responded to Cave, ‚It isn’t possible.‛

‚Then why can’t we find a single mention of Canscot

anywhere? There’s nothing here.‛

‚If we haven’t found anything yet, it’s because we’re not

looking hard enough, or in the right way. We’ve got a huge

amount of haystack to shift before we can find our needle.‛

‚Don’s right, Larry, you know that.‛ Camras nodded in

agreement with Sal Bernieri’s words. Bernieri continued, ‚we

know the system’s perfect. It’s everywhere, here, in this office,

throughout the building, outside in the streets and the houses and

smoke that comes from the tops of the towers.‛

‚Every bit of that is based on our belief that the needle is in

the haystack, somewhere. There’s a heck of a lot hinging on that

faith.‛

‚Faith’s got nothing to do with it, Larry,‛ interjected Camras,

‚that needle’s fact.‛ He gestured broadly around himself, ‚and

we’re sitting in the middle of the bloody haystack.‛

Cave pushed his chair back from his computer and stood up.

‚Arthur, you’re right. You too Donald, of course. I don’t

know<I’m going to clear my head.‛

As he strode out of the door, Krauss emerged briefly from his

office. ‚Everything alright out here?‛

Camras and Schmitz exchanged brief glances. Bernieri

inclined his head to the affirmative, ‚we’re working on it.‛


35

*

LAZARUS TOOK THE lift up two floors, stepped through the

spacious lobby and out through the main doors. The air outside

smelt dank and used. Clouds were darkening overhead, heavy

with the promise of rain. He wandered, subdued to the edge of

the parking lot and stared at the city that grew up before him. For

a while he rested on the hinged barrier that was across the

entrance. It sank down a little under his weight and when he

shifted his feet it creaked. The city was endless, a vast sprawling

ocean with edges as seemingly flexible and impossible to define

as the sea itself. At unfailing intervals the towers emerged from

the teeming hubbub of buildings and people. Effortless,

emotionless, they were the calm symbols of the council’s

unassuming, absolute power. It was the towers, the massive

furnaces within them, that performed the essential maintenance of

the city, executing the council’s binding edict that compelled the

citizens to scrub history from their lives. Every single minute cog

of the city rested in a sublimely constructed system atop the twin

facts of the council and the towers. A little way behind him, the

massive unceasing tower housed within the complex grew

upwards so that its dark grey smoke mingled with the clouds and

it looked as if the weather itself was coming out of its crown. It

was emblematic of the entire city, the embodiment of everything

Cave believed in. Profoundly. But now, leaning on the entrance

barrier, he was trying to suppress a tangible sense of doubt.

Beneath the uncharacteristically blank eyes, he was wrestling with

a hesitation that was needling him, constantly, carefully staying

out of reach of the established fingers that sought to wring its

neck. Of course Canscot would be found. If it wasn’t, it threatened

everything.


36

Drops of frozen rain started to fall. A chill wind whistling

down from the north made him shiver. Cave turned back towards

the archive building. He reached the impassive glass entrance

doors as the sleet began to come down faster. Pushing through

them, his troubled reflection stared back at him, seeming to ask

the question of why was this affecting him so? The other three

archivists searched on through the banks of data, supported by

their steadfast faith in the world around them. For the briefest of

moments Cave thought he saw another reflection standing behind

his shoulder. The red hair of the woman he could see from his

window seemed to be fleetingly caught in the glass but looking

backwards, all he could see was the miserable weather outside

with no one around.

In the elevator riding back towards the lower second floor

Cave checked his watch. Half past twelve. He had been long

enough outside; he ought to be heading back to his desk to

resume the task in hand. But if the fresh air was supposed to blow

the doubts from his mind, it had done little but whip his thoughts

into further disorder. His own irresolution bothered him now

nearly as much as Canscot itself did. The whole fact of his

discomfort was edging towards assuming its own identity.

With a low chime, the lift reached its destination and bumped

to a halt. The twin sets of doors slid open with a quiet hiss and the

carpeted corridors and yellow lights overhead waited for Lazarus

Cave to emerge. Inside the lift, backed into the far corner by the

control panel, Cave stood motionless. Quietly the doors closed

shut. He reached out and pushed the button to take the elevator

down two more floors to the lower fourth. In the shaft that

stretched the full way to the top of the building cables creaked

and gently lowered him downwards.

Stepping out into the elevator lobby, the familiar noise of the

air conditioning unit hummed slightly clearer than it did higher


37

up. Oddly the air down here, even further from the surface, tasted

cleaner, fresher, less recycled. Cave inhaled deeply and looked

around. It was clear from the two healthy looking plants standing

in deep ceramic pots on the floor that people came down here

regularly. There was little other sign of active life, however. A

long, straight passage led away from the lifts, bathed in crisp

electric light. About halfway down there was a small door set into

the left-hand wall, a janitor’s closet perhaps. Cave walked past

this without a second glance and continued firmly on towards the

double doors at the end of the corridor.

Made of dark, heavy wood they were an incongruous

addition to the vast marble building with its glass fixtures. Behind

them was a section of the archives that lay largely ignored,

dormant files stored on great racks of shelves neither part of the

city’s record keeping nor consigned to burning in the furnace of

one of the towers. They were both part and not part of history.

Housed within the archives, they were considered little more than

clerical errors. Although carefully categorised and kept, they were

not incorporated into the data bank that serviced the analytical

department. Included amongst them were official forms that had

been spoiled in some way, incomplete formal documents –

anomalies that would disrupt or distort the data stream that the

archives fed to the analysts. Also retained in the innumerable

piles of defunct documents were extinct records, shapeless

information that did not appear to form part of the recognisable

boundaries laid down by the council, that for some lost reason

were kept here amongst the city’s apocrypha rather than having

been reduced to ash.

Cave walked down one of the vast banks, running his

fingertips along the riveted metal shelving. There was not a speck

of dust on them. He was not at all sure what he would find down

here. Stretching high up towards the ceiling, rows of boxes


38

impassively filled all the space. Affixed to each box was a log of

its contents. There was no computer system for all this grey data.

Nothing stored in this spotless room had any counterpart in the

living, breathing streets of the city above.

Canscot should not, therefore, be found in here – the

letterhead was a tiny, undeniable proof of its reality. Its

authenticity had been determined by the CSA immediately on

discovery. Company goods could not be obtained without a

business registration document held on the civic records. CSA

agents had simply cross-checked the transaction between Canscot

and the printing firm that had supplied the stationery and

confirmed that proper procedures had been followed. It was proof

from the system itself that the system was functioning correctly.

Cave walked along the aisles, searching for the section

containing commercial business papers. Being in this dead archive

troubled him. The evidence provided by the CSA showed it was

undeniable fact that any details relating to the nature and

activities of Canscot were to found within the city’s official

documented records. It was fundamentally impossible that it

should not be. Bernieri, Camras and Schmitz believed as much.

Krauss did too, presumably, and Tess Dalton also. Everybody, in

fact, allied their faith with the city’s voice, and in turn that voice,

and the vocal chords of the council that spoke it, demanded,

needed the absolute conviction of its enforcers, its amplifiers. It

was dangerous for Cave to be down here, doubting.

But doubting what? The city? Himself? Cave found the

section he was looking for at last and began to scan the catalogued

contents of each box, searching through the alphabetical listings.

He would not – did not – think it possible to fully divide himself

from the machinery of the city. It was impossible that there

should be any trace of Canscot in any of these files, but he had to

see for sure, as his click of his shoes on the cold, hard floor echoed


39

with each step drawing him progressively down the alphabet,

through A and now onto B, he was driven on by the awful

compulsion to see for himself the state of things.

Reaching the files marked with a C Cave slowed his step,

reading each index with care. His heart slowed too, deep, paced

beats in his chest, hardly daring to break the controlled hope he

maintained that ‘Canscot’ would not appear on one of the labels

in a neat, formal typewritten font.

*

KRAUSS SAT BEHIND his desk, rolling a pen around and around in

his fingers, irritated. Outside he could see Sal, Donald and Arthur

hard at work, glued to their computer screens. Where the hell was

Lazarus Cave? It was gone four o’clock. The deadline was

approaching. So far his archivists had produced nothing. In hours

of searching they had failed to turn over a single lead in the

endless sea of information. And his best archivist was missing,

vanished, and not responding to his pager. The telephone rang.

Krauss picked it eagerly off its hook, hoping it would be Cave

calling in with revelatory news that would explain his absence.

He was disappointed. At the other end of the line Tess Dalton’s

fraught voice asked him if there had been any developments.

Krauss shook his head, struggling to bring the words out for fear

of what they might mean if by five he and Dalton could still not

deliver a definitive response to the council. ‚None at all,‛ he said

in a carefully measured voice, and carefully lowered the receiver

back down, severing the line without waiting for a response from

the analytical department. Cave gone, answers unforthcoming,

and this relentless Canscot problem at the heart of it all. He leaned

back in his chair and turned his face up towards the ceiling.


40

Krauss was still sat like this when the door to his office

opened unceremoniously. Cave strode in, tossed a thin, buff-

coloured file across the desk and turned straight back out without

a word. Krauss moved to call after him but the name on the file

caught his attention. In unmistakeable black type across the ID tag

were the words, ‘Canscot: extinct’. He pulled the folder open.

Inside was a solitary two-part business registration form.

Registering a company with the council was an

uncomplicated process administered by the council’s business

and enterprise arm. The elegant simplicity of the requirements

was supposedly the safeguard for the system against abuse. Part

one of the form was both application and primary registration.

The business applicant completed it, the authorities ran

corroboratory checks on the information provided, assessed the

application and logged it onto the public record, a process which

took about a week. There were then four days for notice of

ratification to be dispatched to the applicant, and for the applicant

to return part two of the form, the acknowledgement of

ratification and acceptance of the conditions under which

businesses were permitted to operate within the city. Within those

four days, the new business was permitted to conduct a limited

range of operations, all restrictions being lifted upon return of the

part two. Any failure to properly submit part two within those

four days would lead to the voiding of the original application

and the removal of the company from any records. The two-part

business registration form was then filed in the extinct archive as

incomplete paperwork, the company named upon it becoming

termed an extinct business.

Krauss scanned the topmost sheet in the file. Red capital

letters inked the word ‘Void’ over each sub-section, but clearly

legible underneath it were the names of the two suspects and an

application for an enterprise named Canscot. The form was dated


41

eighteen months previously. He hurriedly turned over to the

second part. As he expected it was totally blank except for a single

diagonal line that had been struck through it and the several

Voids stamped on top.

Trying to understand what this might mean, Krauss

remembered the CSA confirmation for the order of the

letterheads. He had a copy in his desk drawer and he grabbed for

it impatiently. The voided business form was a rarity, but Krauss

knew that in such an unlikely event strict protocols were followed

to ensure that no unattributed transactions from the four-day

interim period were left floating through the city’s records.

Quickly he read through the CSA material. At the bottom of the

transaction page in a small, innocuous detail he found the answer

– a request to delay the processing of an order for one batch of

letterheads for a week.

Anger rose within him. Official letterheads allowed them to

acquire information via a non-existent company; as soon as

something became Canscot’s, it vanished from the city. He

thumped his fist down on top of the document lying in front of

him. Again the telephone went, its shrill tone piercing his rage. It

was the councillor requesting news as the deadline approached.

Krauss took a deep breath to calm himself and delivered a single

line: ‚We’ve got them.‛

*

IT WAS FOUR THIRTY-SEVEN when Landau Krauss emerged from his

office. After speaking to the councillor, he had informed both Tess

Dalton and Carlos Waites at the CSA of the breakthrough.

Lazarus Cave was sitting in his chair, staring vacantly at his

monitor. He had been utterly unresponsive to the queries of the

other three archivists upon his return and with no knowledge of


42

what Cave had discovered, they continued their fruitless searches

for listings relating to Canscot in the official archive.

Cave hardly heard as Krauss broke the news, the words of

relief, of congratulation directed at him, of reinvigorated

confidence. Bernieri raised an eyebrow in askance towards the

impassive Cave before joining Schmitz and Camras in celebration.

Cave looked up at his colleagues. Cheering, backslapping, their

faces were flushed with the knowledge that they once again had

the upper hand against the two otherwise ordinary citizens

suspected of storing history, of providing themselves with the

potential to construct a narrative, a story at odds with the absolute

unity preached by the council. Belief coursed through the

archivists, Cave could feel it fill the office. And in the centre of it

there was something missing. He could not connect with the

emotion that buoyed the others. Rather, he could not fathom the

enormity what he did feel. It struck him in the pit of his stomach

where it felt as though the bottom had been removed and now he

stood on the edge, too afraid to look in, too uncertain of what to

expect.

Cave excused himself to the toilets, complaining of feeling

unwell. Safely inside the bathroom, shut away from the sounds of

affirmation ringing through the archivists, he gave himself over to

the nervous panic within him. Shutting himself in a cubicle, he let

his heart thump fast and loud against his breast. Slowly it calmed

down. He sank onto the seat of the pan, loosening his tie. A cold

sweat had broken out over his body, he could feel it beading on

his brow.

Minutes passed, he couldn’t tell how many. In clothes

creased from the efforts of the day, Cave sat in a crumpled heap

inside the cubicle, almost motionless. After a while longer the

door opened and footsteps entered onto the tiled floor.


43

‚Larry? You in here?‛ It was Bernieri’s voice. Cave’s feet

were visible in the gap below the door, Bernieri wasted no time

knocking on the right cubicle. ‚What’s up with you, man? You’ve

just saved our asses out there.‛

Bernieri could hear movement behind the door. The toilet

seat clanked as Cave stood up. He exited the cubicle, flattening his

suit with his hands and look squarely at Sal Bernieri.

‚That file should never have been in there, Sal, you know

that.‛

‚What are you on about? If it hadn’t been, we would’ve been

totally screwed. C’mon, we were turning nothing up from the

regular archive. It was inspiration itself to go looking there.‛

‚Do you hear what you’re saying, Sal? That’s just it, we had

nothing from the archives. We had nothing because there was

nothing – but we didn’t know that, we were sure there was

something.‛

‚And you found it Larry, which is why everybody outside is

so pleased. And you’re locking yourself in toilets, what’s going on

Larry?‛

‚Don’t you see, Sal, I went to the extinct archive to not find

that file. It couldn’t have been there. When I saw it I just wanted

to rip it up, scrub it out<something. Anything but the fact it was

there.‛

‚What are you on about? It being there has given us the

concrete link between Canscot and the people out there who are

trying to disrupt the very things this city stands for.‛

‚But it can’t be concrete, Sal. It is and it can’t be. If it’s

concrete, it means Canscot’s real, in some way it’s real<but that

file was in the extinct collection. Canscot should be an extinct

company, non-existant, nothing there. It’s concrete enough

though, isn’t it? It’s out there, in the city, but it’s just not part of

the reality that we create and stick by. It’s a ghost, Sal, the whole


44

thing’s a ghost and there’s nothing, nothing in the archives, in the

council, in the whole damn system that should allow a ghost to be

possible.‛

‚Larry, you’ve got to calm down. It’s underhand trickery by

enemies of the city. It’s designed to do this, to get to you. You’ve

just gotta relax about it.‛

‚Whatever, Sal – it shouldn’t be possible. The city’s meant to

be infallible, Sal, that’s what we believe<it shouldn’t be

possible.‛

Cave paused for a moment, deflated, exhausted by the effort

taken to force out thoughts he had not even admitted to himself.

He looked down at his shoes and scuffed a toe idly along the

restroom floor.

‚I’m going home, Sal, I need to get out to the air. I’ll see you

tomorrow.‛

‚You’ll feel better in the morning, Larry. Get some rest,

you’re tired, emotional – we all are. Get some rest, you’ll come

round to what I’m saying in the morning.‛

Cave looked at Bernieri’s face, saw the undiminished fervour

in his eyes, felt the conviction in his words. ‚Maybe Sal, we’ll see

tomorrow.‛

He walked towards the bathroom door, pushed through it

and let it swing shut behind him. Bernieri watched him go.

*

THERE ARE TOWERS. They represent perfect, unadulterated,

unthinking order.

Beneath the towers, in the streets of the city, walks Lazarus

Cave. It is early evening. The sky is a dull gunmetal grey, the

colour of mercury. These are the last fingers of sunlight, somehow

hanging onto the city’s skyline although the sun set over an hour


45

ago. Darkness is closing in and Cave is making his way home

towards his single apartment. In the streets of perfect order, while

citizens with beatific smiles pass hurriedly by, Cave’s mind is in

total chaos.

*

ON ARRIVAL AT his flat, it was not yet late enough for the

temperature in the main room to have dropped to the chill

normally induced by the large windows and Cave switched the

heaters on in order to conserve the warmth for a while.

Sitting at the small chess table, Cave could still not work out

the intentions of the recently moved black bishop. The mug of

fresh coffee grew steadily colder while he stared at the pieces on

the board. There were still avenues open to him that an aggressive

rook or knight might exploit but in each potential scenario he

could not account for the plans of the bishop. He examined his

own dissimilar bishops, one poorly placed and out of position as

it was. They were of broadly matching dimensions, but where

they should have had precisely corresponding features to become

a pair, they did not. This one’s mitre was higher and more pointed

that that one’s; one was a chiselled white plastic, the other was

plastic also but faded and yellow like old enamel. But they did

work; they worked as a pair, lines of an unseen field holding them

together in relation to one another as they swept across the board

in disparate diagonals. He had expounded this field theory once

to Camras, himself an occasional chess player. Mutual lines

connecting like pieces, obviously apparent in the subsequent loss

of efficacy of one bishop or knight or rook if the other should be

felled. Arthur Camras had nodded sympathetically then as he

finished summarising his idea, chuckled and dismissed the

notion.


46

But still none of this helped. Cave reached for the coffee,

drank from the cup and cringed at the cold bitterness of the milky

brew. Resignedly he got up without having moved a piece, the

black bishop sitting smugly in its strange square. He poured the

coffee down the sink. It was early still, not yet nine o’clock and he

had not eaten, but he was tired and the thought of food after the

tumultuous day did not come as an appetising one. Turning off

the main lights he went through to the bedroom where the oil

burner hummed pleasantly.

Once in bed, sleep did not come swiftly or easily. He lay for a

while, ten minutes maybe – thirty? An hour? – studying the

ceiling with unresting eyes. When at last his lids did begin to

close, Cave’s slumber was fractured and unsettling. Tossing and

turning, in a half-daze he thought he saw a light come on in the

next apartment block, but he couldn’t tell whether it belonged to

the woman with red hair or not. He tried to force himself awake

to identify it, but his mind was so heavy that he could fix only the

floor it was on or the number of windows it was in from the edge,

but never both at the same time, and as soon as he did have one

coordinate, he forgot it immediately upon searching for the

second.

Soon he could not see any lights at all, but he could see her

face. He could see it as he slept, it haunted him through his

dreams, through the streets of the city he knew well, through the

streets of other cities different to the one in which he lived that he

had never seen before. Sometimes it would come before him and

let him look upon it, its beauty; but in other cities it remained

always to one side or behind him, sad or angry, leering, repulsed,

all manner of unpleasant variations; and then there were cities

that were like ghost towns, he walked through deserted streets

and empty roads, entering and leaving unstaffed shops, and

wandering into uninhabited houses and through laughterless


47

parks, and the face in these cities was neither before nor behind

him, nor to either side, but it appeared in the shape of the clouds,

in the ripples of puddles, in the shadows of the buildings where

they clashed and overlapped. In each city it was different and in

his dream Cave tumbled from love to hate and from fear to desire,

but in each city is was the same also for it was only ever just a

face, not disembodied or detached – just a face with no further

body.

At one point in the night Cave sat bolt upright in his bed and

screamed. His skin was white and sweaty and as his heart slowed

to a regular beat, he turned to the window and looked for a

moment out into the deep black. There were no lights on in the

next building now, none anywhere as far as he could see, just

streetlamps and the odd passing headlight of a car, and away in

the distance, across two or perhaps three chapters, raised up on a

hill he could see the dancing orange speck of a fire at the base of a

tower, loosely outlined, flickering, standing against the darkness

of the night.


48

CHAPTER

THREE

cat slinks along the side of a low wall. Stealthy paws move

forwards and its gaze is fixed upon the blackbird pecking at

the ground beneath the thick, venerable oak tree that stands

within the central complex. Slowly now it places one foot and

then another, taking care not to crinkle fallen leaves under its soft

pads. The blackbird pecks on, oblivious.

Loud steps come by suddenly and the blackbird, startled,

flutters up into the safety of the branches. The cat twitches its tail

and for a while stares thoughtfully at the treacherous legs

receding into the distance, before suddenly dashing off in a

different direction as though there is something else that cannot

wait to be dealt with.

*

NO ONE KNEW where the rumour of the child had come from.

Lazarus Cave waited for the automatic barrier to raise and pulled

into the council lot. CSA agents clustered ahead of him, some in

small pockets of conversion, others making their way to and fro,

loading up the four official vehicles sitting on the tarmac. Two of

them were standard security vans, their interiors filled with

sophisticated monitoring equipment. The other two were empty

A


49

except for hard looking plastic benches along each side wall. Cave

could see that the walls and door panels were reinforced with

some kind of metal or fibreglass framework. He parked up his old

red car outside the archives, away from the activity, and entered

the office minutes later. Although it was only just gone seven,

there were a number of staff already there and the muted voices

that passed rapidly between them did little to mask the

excitement of the occasion.

Arthur Camras and Don Schmitz were already seated at their

desks, sharing an animated conversation in hushed tones. Cave

sat down opposite them and with a curiosity that, temporarily at

least, suppressed the disturbances of the previous day, questioned

the two archivists. Camras spoke. ‚CSA agents were outside the

suspects’ apartment last night. The report came in a couple of

hours ago, just after four,‛ Camras nodded over his shoulder,

‚Krauss has been here all night. Nobody has any idea what it

contains, there’s nothing official from anywhere at the moment,

not us, nor analysis – certainly not from the CSA. The word’s

leaked out though that the suspects have a child in the flat. It’s

impossible to know for sure what truth there is in that. Krauss’

door has been shut since we got here. I thought I could hear him

on the phone once or twice, voice raised, but most of the time its

nothing but whispers. All we know for sure is that report has

made its way directly to the councillors. We’re waiting from

there.‛

Schmitz pointed towards the door to Krauss’ office. It had

been opened a crack and behind the closed shutters they could see

the dark shape of Landau Krauss’ body. It was as if a seal had

been broken and the archivists fell silent, waiting expectantly to

see what lay within.

The time was seven twenty. Landau Krauss walked slowly

out into the main office. Despite the dark patches of skin under


50

his eyes and the unruly wave to his hair, he looked alert and

focussed. The previous two hours had been ones of revelation and

decision. Krauss looked at the three men seated in front of him.

As he prepared to speak, Sal Bernieri appeared around the corner.

Upon seeing his colleagues arranged as they were, he strode

quickly over to the desk and took his seat. The full complement of

archivists waited to hear what Krauss had to say.

‚At three o’clock this morning, a CSA inspection team

discovered evidence that strongly suggests the suspects in the

Canscot case are illegally harbouring a young child, their own. It’s

believed to be aged between three and five months. We think that

Canscot was a shadow entity being used to withhold documents

and records for later use with the child. A security team is

currently stationed outside of the suspects’ residence. The CSA

will be dispatching a team of agents to arrest the suspects within

the next ten minutes. Lazarus, you go with them. I want thorough

records. Everybody else, be prepared for when they bring them

in.‛

*

IT WAS NOT yet time for the roads to be filling with commuters.

Driving full-speed through the sparse early morning traffic, the

journey to the 111th chapter took less than fifteen minutes.

Lazarus Cave sat in the lead vehicle. Six CSA agents were packed

tightly into the seats around him. Three more vans followed

behind in a speeding convoy, each with a trio of agents. As they

tore eastwards along 261st street Cave looked out of one of the

side windows. Everything – buildings, homes, offices, shops,

pedestrians, trees, litter bins, flower pots, pigeons, the polished

windows of cafes serving the city’s breakfast – was smeared

together into one endless smudge in a dingy organic palette. Still


51

looking sideways, his stomach turned slightly as the driver

wrenched the van into a left turn and soon after rushed them to

an abrupt halt outside their destination.

In front of them another security van was parked,

presumably the reconnaissance team that had been dispatched

during the night. Sliding panels on either side of Cave’s van flew

open and the CSA agents rushed out towards this other vehicle.

Only the driver and the archivist remained inside. Behind, the

three other vehicles performed the same routine, the drivers

pulling into the kerb and two agents sprinting out.

Moments later the remaining four agents exited via the

drivers’ doors of their vehicles and joined the group ahead. Cave

remained where he was, notebook and pen, both stamped with

the insignia of the council, two body-less hands clasped together,

poised and ready to document the proceedings.

He couldn’t hear what orders were being given to the CSA

personnel, but he could make out the urgency that was being

imparted to them. Their captain divided them into carefully

defined groups. Two agents took up positions on opposite

pavements, diagonally across from one another and level with the

ends of the row of parked security vehicles. A further two stood

guard in front of the main entrance door of the building. Three

others were dispatched to secure the rear and emergency exits.

The captain and the remaining four agents entered the ground

floor of the apartment block. The automatic light that attempted

to splutter into life fell dark mid-flicker. Cave assumed it had

been quickly fused.

There were lights on in most windows. In the privacy of their

apartments, Cave knew that citizens would be eating breakfast,

ironing shirts, drinking coffee – preparing to depart for work.

Others would be at the other end of their day, returned from one

of the numerous jobs that kept the city humming with


52

background activity during the dark; cleaner, post-worker, one of

the workers in the twenty-four-hour factories that operated

through the night to meet the prodigious appetite of an endless

city. Others still would be shaving, showering, standing naked in

front of the mirror, forlornly contemplating expanding bellies and

widening hips, or admiring curves and muscles. Human bodies

were at the same time expansively universal and intensely

private. And then there would be those involved in some kind of

carnal act: urinating, defecating, copulating. Without moving

from where he sat, Cave’s imagination could guide the eye of the

city into the most intimate acts of its inhabitants without their

ever knowing.

He stared up at the one window in the building that

mattered. A female face appeared in it and then sharply

withdrew. Cave knew that she had seen the collection of security

vans, the agents dressed in their dark suits, standing impassively

on the street outside. He knew that she would be turning

immediately from the window to shout in panic for her partner;

that he would drop his full mug of steaming coffee on the floor,

the mug shattering, coffee splattering the kitchen walls. Barely

noticing this, he would run to the bedroom where the woman

would be standing over the crib at the end of the bed, gathering

the now screaming baby up to her chest. For the briefest of

moments they would look into each others’ eyes with fear and

love, and then they would run desperately for the front door. But

Cave also knew that five dark-suited CSA agents would, at that

moment, be reaching the top of the concrete stairs, looking for flat

number 72 with a red front door. Parents and agents would meet

in the stairwell. That was it; there could be no confrontation. Two

minutes passed, then the front door opened. Flanked by agents,

the two suspects, heads cowed, were bundled into separate vans.


53

The captain, holding a whimpering bundle of blankets, climbed

calmly into the final vehicle.

Cave knew that this was how it must have happened. As they

returned through the beginnings of the rush-hour traffic, he read

back the official record of events written in his own hand, a series

of stark facts littered with timing marks. 0751: Agents enter

apartment 72. 0759: All vehicles return. The arrest had taken less

than ten minutes. Even sitting inside the van it had been

exhilarating. Seeing the suspects led from the building,

handcuffed, defeated, was invigorating. Onto their hunched

shoulders and bent necks Cave allowed himself to cast, with

anger, the barrage of doubt that had welled up within him over

the Canscot issue. Here they were, the engineers of his torment. If

they had succumbed to the system, then the system could not

surely have been so badly pierced as Cave had feared. He caught

sight of the giant central tower of the council compound and his

heart surged with joy.

Upon entering the walled complex they drove directly to the

CSA headquarters building. A small group of agents were already

waiting for them. Cave climbed out the van and took up a place

half way up the steps leading to the great double wooden doors to

the CSA offices. From the second van, the male suspect has

escorted up the white marble steps towards the imposing

building. Cave stared at the white line of his scalp where his hair

was parted neatly down the middle. Agents either side of the

female took her from the next van back and she too kept her gaze

fixed firmly on the impassive ground. A slight wind played with

loose strands of hair that hung down from her fringe. Out of the

final vehicle stepped the captain, the baby in his arms still

wrapped in blankets now silent.

The three of them walked in a heavily guarded line towards

the open double doors. Cave could sense the tension in the air. In


54

that small family, now broken, there was the essence of a

revulsive attack upon the infallible values of the city, the values

that the citizens whether public or private adopted for their own.

The marble steps were constructed with rounded overlaps at

the edge of each tread protruding over the level below. The

captain’s front foot caught the first of these nosings, causing him

to stumble. A shrill cry arose from the bundle he was carrying.

Two frantic arms were pushed upwards, shaking the coverings

from its head and Cave could see now its thin, fragile skull with a

sparse covering of black hair. Eyes screwed up firmly against the

world, the cries rose and fell in an arrhythmic wail.

Without warning, the female twisted sharply in the grip of

the agents and threw herself back down the steps towards her

crying child. With arms outstretched, she tried desperately to get

a hold of it but her hands were restricted by the handcuffs she

wore. She cried too, tears of rage streaming from her eyes as she

screamed and fought with the agents trying to bring her back

under control. At the top of the steps, extra hands rushed to take a

firmer hold of the male to prevent him from seeing the struggle

below. A cord of blanket that had come unwound from the child’s

swaddling swung now within reach of the female. With a lunge

she grabbed it.

The blow that landed on her unprotected back sent her

sprawling but she held on still, lying on the cold ground, blood

from her mouth staining the clean white steps where she had

connected with them.

It looked for a second that one straining fingertip had reached

the warm body of her child but then the agent who had struck her

was upon her and wrenching the blanket from her fist.

Throughout it all the crying continued, a pervasive, anguished

noise.


55

Then the struggle was over as swiftly as it had begun.

Quickly the agents cleared the steps and shut the wooden doors

behind them, and Cave was left standing there, staring at the

bright red spatters of blood that were beginning to turn brown,

with the sharp smell of a baby’s soiled nappy lingering in the air.

In his ears he could still hear the haunting screams of the

frightened child. Deep in his gut, he could feel the wrench of the

previous day’s disquiet. Hurriedly he made his way back towards

the archives.

For the rest of the day, Lazarus Cave found himself unable to

join in the atmosphere of celebration that filled the archives. After

being debriefed by Landau Krauss, he sat subdued in front of his

computer screen, working over the mundanities of archive

maintenance. In contrast to Bernieri, Camras and Schmitz, all of

who had removed their ties and released top buttons, Cave sat

quietly, smartly with his tie neatly in place and his collar tightly

fastened.

If anybody else in the office noticed, they did not let on nor

question his reticence. It was unlikely Cave would have registered

even if they had. Amidst the almost carnival atmosphere of his

colleagues, those cries, the despairing, lonely cries of separation

echoed in his memory. They carried sentiments that he

understood. The shattering realisation of the imperfect power of

the parent; the dismantling of the belief that every human is born

with, that the one who nurtures it is limitless in time and

knowledge, just as they are eternal sources of warmth and

nourishment. The torment of the baby, although sharper, more

keenly felt, was made of the same stuff as the doubts prompted by

the failure of the system to carry a record of Canscot that had

troubled Cave himself.

*


56

THE SUN WAS setting noticeably later as summer progressed.

Despite the unceasingly miserable weather, life was flooding the

city, and in time it might bring a renewed belief, perhaps.

Cave unlocked the door of his car and climbed into the

driver’s seat. The polish he used inside gave off the smell of

factory-new upholstery, even though the seat fabric though not

dirty was faded by exposure to sunlight. This was the first time he

had been alone since the news of the arrests in the Canscot case,

as it had semi-officially been termed, had been relayed to all the

archivists.

He felt exhausted.

Peering upwards through the windscreen he followed the

grey of the western sky is it progressed upwards, getting darker,

through liquid mercury and powdery charcoal, forever tending

towards the black of night, waiting for the earth to spin round far

enough on its axis. Thin clouds the colour of dusk filled the higher

reaches of the atmosphere. The wind blew cold and softly,

probing at the seals of the car doors. If summer was truly here,

Cave could not sense it. He found it difficult, from his position

behind the large, three-spoke steering wheel to imagine that the

clouds could ever lift. It was as if spring had never happened and

everything seemed to be caught in an eternal winter where the

amount of daylight was merely a variable that swung gently back

and forth against the constant of the season. After all, change

could be registered only in relation to the state of things as they

were previously – historically. The careful and precise eradication

of history from the city subjected it, surely, to an unbreakable

stasis. Each new day could not be different from the previous day

because the towers and the archivists had sterilised it and

scrubbed it clean. No change meant no progress, nothing with

which to mark the passing of time. The city felt like a timeless,


57

limitless sprawl in which there was no conceivable way the

gloomy coldness of now could ever give way to a future warmth.

For a moment, Cave fought the urge to shake the steering

wheel and scream. Instead he unclipped the glovebox and

reached inside for a boiled sweet. With his tongue he pushed it

round his mouth, probing the conundrum of the city’s existence.

Still thinking, he turned the key in the ignition, listened to the

engine grunt into mechanical life and drove with a low rumble

out onto the streets of the city.

Canscot. Aimlessly he drove in looping circles round blocks

of buildings, past the parks and gardens that sprung up all over

the city, past the towers that held it together with unflinching

regularity. Cave’s destination was his apartment, but the route he

took to get there hardly mattered. He felt like driving

purposelessly, putting as much distance between himself and the

events of the day as possible. Only when he felt the need to stop

driving, or when he ran out of fuel, would be bring his

meandering to an end.

At one point he found himself approaching the education

centre in the 104th chapter. As he reached its first wall he slowed

the car to a crawl and looked up at the building, and he found

himself repeating this same process over and over again with

other education centres until the sun had vanished completely

and the lights in the dormitories had come on and gone off again.

He was outside the centre in the 2nd chapter when he pulled

the car over to the side of the road and stepped out onto the

pavement. An electronics shop with televisions on display was

directly in front of him. On the screens he could see the official

headlines broadcast by the official bulletin of the council-

sanctioned news channel. There was no mention of Canscot,

neither in the first, second nor third rung of stories.


58

The education centre was located across the road from where

he had parked. Cave turned to gaze up at it. In every detail it was

exactly the same as the education centres in every other chapter

Cave had driven through so far. Each institution was prepared to

exactly the same blueprints, and each was uniformly equipped

within and without with identical equipment and facilities. Cave

sat on the bonnet of his car and wondered which centre he had

grown up in and graduated from. He ran his eyes over the

unremarkable façade of the 2nd chapter centre. It could have been

this one, he acknowledged to himself, but then it could have been

any of the other identical buildings he had seen that evening. He

tried to think about his past, but he found that the past no longer

existed for him. Even the memories of the life within their

protective walls had faded into the uniformed beige in which the

corridors were painted, and in which it so seemed that the

corridors of his memory were also covered.

He scratched at his hairline and thought instead of the

children lying in their beds in the darkened dormitories, heads

and bodies cushioned between pillows, soft mattresses and thick

duvets. The cry of the baby from that morning rang unbidden in

his mind and he knew that the children in the education centre

would never know the rift in feeling that could produce such a

cry. By raising its citizens under its own parental auspices, the city

never had to witness them undergo the breaking of the

fundamental belief in the awesome power of the mother.

The older Lazarus turned to go. Reseated in his car, he started

the engine and watched the dashboard come to life. A series of

lights came on and went off again, leaving just the handbrake

indicator illuminated. The needle on the fuel gauge twitched

upwards and then settled just on the cusp of the red warning

band that told him he was running low. In the central console, the

green digits of the clock gave the time as nine forty-three. Over


59

three hours of driving. Cave slipped the car into gear and

accelerated gently in the direction of home.

Approaching the 111th chapter from the north, rather than

the east as he usually did, Cave drove down unusual roads. There

were few houses and shops around here. An enormous factory

loomed up in the dark on his right-hand side. A vast structure,

blacker than the lantern-lit night, it cut across the tops of several

roads running north-south, creating a kind of massive island. The

surrounding streets were full of storage depots, workshops,

smaller refineries that took whatever was produced in the factory

and turned it into more manageable materials. Only the

occasional anaemic-looking block of flats, presumably home to

some of the factory workers, interrupted the industrial landscape.

Cave knew roughly where he was; he had travelled through

this area once or twice during the daytime, but he had little reason

to do so often. As far as he could he kept his eyes fixed on the

great monolithic tower located in the southern part of the chapter

and headed towards it; somewhere on a straight line between

here and there was home. Sometimes though he would have to

turn a corner by a warehouse and then he would be hemmed in

by the building’s high sides and he would lose sight of the tower,

momentarily unsure of his bearings before regaining sight of it in

a gap between buildings.

Dark and deserted street fed into dark and deserted street.

Jaundice-yellow patches of streetlight pooled like blood on the

pavements. Bruised shadows fell in awkward joins between

uncomfortable buildings. The city seemed ugly tonight, without

another living being to share it with.

Driving swiftly down one long narrow road, with the guiding

tower unsighted from anywhere along it, Cave was trying to

escape the cloying atmosphere of the industrial quarter. Even

breathing the air, it felt repulsive in his nose so that he could


60

imagine himself choking on it. Distracted, he hardly noticed the

small shape dart across the road until almost too late.

Immediately he slammed his foot down hard on the brakes,

wrestling the steering wheel to prevent the rear end from

spinning out of control.

The eyes caught in his headlights had shone brightly in the

dark; alarmed, frightened, like a stray dog. Cave sat for a moment,

gripping the steering wheel, bringing himself back under control.

Calmly now he stepped from the car, leaving the door open

behind him and the keys in the ignition. The engine ticked over in

neutral, the sound magnified by the close-in brick walls of the

warehouses and the complete silence otherwise so that it seemed

to fill the whole street. Exhaust fumes condensed in the cold night

to form a thin white fog at the rear of the car. Taking a deep

breath Lazarus Cave walked towards the young boy he had so

nearly collided with.

The boy had untidy brown hair and white skin coloured grey

with the city’s muck. Lines of clear skin did show through where

he had smiled or cried or wrinkled his forehead, a network of

threadlike roads built by the muscles of his face and the dirt of the

city. He pressed himself against the wall as Cave approached,

petrified. Cave held his hands outwards, palm up in an attempt to

reassure the boy. Whether it worked, or whether the child was

simply too scared to coordinate his legs, he did not move. Cave

bent down so that his face was level with the boy’s. He looked

even younger close up, barely more than eight or nine years old.

Pale freckles spread over his nose and cheeks were almost

indistinct from the dust and grime on his skin, his clothes

appeared warm, once, but they were torn and frayed now, and he

was painfully thin. But it was his eyes that Cave noticed most.

They danced. Flicking from side to side, fixing upon his own,

unsure, threatened, defiant – they sparked with a life Cave was


61

not used to. Gold flecks seemed to shine from the dark brown

irises, themselves almost impossible to make out clearly in the

meagre light.

They stared at each other, an intense, unlikely pair. ‚Do you

need a lift to your education centre?‛ Cave asked.

Surprise came into the boy’s eyes and then was gone just as

quickly. He shook his head.

‚Do you need a lift anywhere?‛ Again the boy shook his

head, slowly, solemnly and his eyes appeared to carry the same

answer.

Cave looked up and down the road, they boy following his

gaze with his own. There was still nobody else in sight. He

strained his eyes. Not a sound. What was this child doing out, let

alone out here, here, at this time? The nearest education centre was

a good distance away. He would surely have heard if there had

been a runaway. Canscot had dominated recently, of course, but a

runaway was unprecedented, surely something of that scale

would make itself heard. He brought his attention back to the

child, placed a kind hand on his shoulder to try and reassure him.

The boy flinched but did not move away.

‚What’s your name? I’d like to help you.‛ Cave waited for a

response.

The boy hesitated and then shook his head, not moving his

vibrant eyes from Cave’s own.

‚You don’t have a name?‛

The boy confirmed by shaking his head again.

‚Do you have any parents?‛

Parents. The word was unnatural sounding, a concept that

had no real place in language beyond the parental scope of the

city and its council. Cave knew he was stalling, one step from the

final question, hesitating like the boy had hesitated.


62

Once more he looked both ways along the length of the street.

At the end furthest from him, on the corner, was the fuzzy halo of

the light from a telephone box. Telephone boxes in the city were

not for personal use, they were emergency items only. Cave knew

that all he had to do was lift the receiver and he would be

connected automatically to the council switchboard. He was at

least two hundred feet from the phone, he wondered how he

would get there and not lose the boy in the process. Stationary as

the child was now, Cave could tell he was still terrified and

should he, Cave, transform from unknown quantity into clear

threat, the boy would undoubtedly kick and bite and struggle –

all enough to make a two-hundred foot journey and subsequent

telephone call highly difficult, if not quite impossible.

When he looked back at the boy he realised the child’s eyes

had not moved an inch from his face but when he opened his

mouth to speak, the boy’s entire body tensed under his hand and

he knew that the boy understood why he had been looking down

the street.

‚Does anybody know you’re here?‛

The boy didn’t move, didn’t nod or shake his head, he stood

perfectly still, every muscle strained and ready to run. Cave

didn’t need the boy to speak or indicate the answer with his head,

everything he needed to know was written in the boy’s eyes with

their alarming quality of life.

For a while they held the pose, the boy standing, Cave

crouched, his arm a bridge between the two of them. Then he

relaxed the grip of his fingers and lifted his hand away from the

boy’s shoulder. Carefully the boy edged away, turned and began

to walk rapidly up the road. Cave got back inside his car, pulled

the door shut on the now cold interior and followed him slowly in

first gear. A dark narrow alley that Cave hadn’t noticed before in

the dark night appeared in a cut between two solid walls. The boy


63

turned into it and Cave brought the car to a halt opposite its

entrance. It was a dead end as far as he could tell, all that was

inside was a line of bins. There was just enough space between the

edge of the bins and the wall for a grown man to fit sideways. The

boy walked easily between them. Only when he had reached the

end of the row of bins did the boy turn back and look at Cave

watching him. For a moment he thought the boy was going to

turn back; for a moment he thought he should get out of the car

and follow him. Then the sound of another engine in a nearby

street broke through the silent night. The boy heard it too. As

Cave’s attention was distracted by the growing beam of oncoming

headlights that was forming at the end of the road, out of the

corner of his eye he say the boy dart sharply behind the last bin.

Cave released the handbrake and accelerated away as a

security van on patrol turned into the street. Car and van passed

each other travelling in different directions in the dark of the

night. Both drivers looked out of their windows but the vehicles

were moving too fast and neither was able to see the other. Then,

with their briefest of encounters over, they left the road at

opposite ends. Soon after silence settled again like a blanket and

there was not a living creature anywhere in sight.


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The Children of the City: {three chapters}

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Transcript of The Children of the City: {three chapters}