The Blue Walls of Heaven
Book One: Error Message
Chapter One
There are two things I loathe above all else in this world: one is violence, and
the other is –
The other is deception.
So when I find someone who is genuinely innocent of the slightest trace of those
flaws, I tend to – what is the word? – revere. I tend to revere them highly.
And so it was, for a while, with Cora, my soul sister and guiding light in all
matters of the heart. Love smiled on us and I didn’t question why or how. It was enough just to see her in the early morning lying beside me, naked, happy
and innocent as the spring. Until the noises came.
Until then my life was serene and uncomplicated as a southern summer sky. I was
Adam Stone, games designer, writer, teacher, lover. Now all that has gone,
wiped out at a stroke, by the aliens.
The noises changed everything. At first I honestly thought it was a bunch of
smart-arse students somewhere beaming super-high frequency binary into my head.
It started always at the same time each night: 3.58am, and faded on the blowing
of the horn (that would be the early mail van announcing its presence at the
security barrier). I remember thinking, they must have some pretty nifty gear
to get inside someone’s brain without implanting any kind of receiver. Never for one instant did I
actually allow the thought that it might be aliens. As in not from this planet.
Well you wouldn’t, would you? No one has ever discovered any aliens. Unless of course.
Picture, if you will, the following early spring idyll. The scene: the bedroom
of a two-room garret off the Caledonian Road, North London, late February 1990.
A man (me), undernourished and overeducated, late thirties; and a woman, dark
haired, dark eyed, sensuous, entrancing figure, mid twenties. Cue action.
‘Cora? I think Henry wants to say good morning to you.’
Deep silence.
‘He’s got over his little problem. He likes you now.’
Even deeper silence.
Pathetic, yes?
Still, if a young and attractive woman lies naked next to you in bed, making
occasional contented sighing noises, wouldn’t you take that as a signal that she was interested in making love? Maybe not at
that precise moment, allowing for the necessarily complex processes of waking up, remembering where you are, allowing the heart to
orientate itself among the insistent siren voices of spring. But soon, say
within the hour at the very outside. It wouldn’t exactly be an outrageous stretch of logic to believe that, would it?
Especially if the person doing the lying and sighing were your own partner?
Wouldn’t you say?
One of those siren voices in the form of a passing police car forced its way
into my consciousness, momentarily disrupting my train of thought, which was
running roughly along these lines:
I exist. I breathe. I have a body that feels pain. I occupy spacetime. I need to
be fed and drunk. Thoughts flash around my brain, find a quiet corner and breed
in the dark. I say all this just in case you didn’t realize I was a real flesh-and-blood person. Just in case you imagined I was a
cardboard cut-out blu-tacked to the bedroom wall. Or even a character in a
novel. I assure you I’m neither. I breathe the very same air that you breathe.
Of course, I didn’t say all that out loud to Cora. She already thought I was as nutty as a veg
roast. But I said it to myself, over and over, just for the universe to hear,
and sensed the mind-waves rippling away at the speed of thought out into the
void. And something of it must have spilled out into the newly hatched spring
morning because she made a kind of little puppy-snort and shifted further away
on to her right side. I lifted the duvet a little so I could make out where she
began. Her slightly tanned body made a line of gently undulating sand-coloured
hills vanishing in twilight. Through the window the dawn sky trailed long rags
of indigo laced with lakes of apple green. For a second I felt I’d woken into the maw of a colossal machine whose purpose was entirely
incomprehensible.
Cora and I had just embarked on the biggest commitment of our lives and bought
an ultra-bijou top floor flat in a shabby side street in Camden Town that
enabled me to play the bohemian attic dweller sacrificing worldly success for
artistic integrity.
It’s early spring and Cora is beginning, reluctantly, to wake beside me, her sleek
body occupying the middle of the bed so that my acute-angled one is confined to
a narrow strip just wide enough for me to breathe but not to get really
comfortable. Or even slightly comfortable. But that’s fine, I think, because hey, what are a few inches when you’re in love, and cannot love move mountains?
I nuzzle her miraculously engineered back, her soft orange-scented skin that
fills me with heart-racing anticipation. I clasp my hand around her lovely cool
firm youthful breasts, which make me want to sing a hymn of praise to the entity which dreamt
them up. I can feel my mind expanding with bliss and longing to be inside her.
Two human beings. Two sympathetic minds. One bird-lucid morning.
I try a strategic approach.
‘Cora, I want to fill you with glorious teeming life. Right now.’
‘Don’t be stupid. Get your trousers on. You’ll be late.’
‘I can’t have sex with my trousers on.’
‘It’s eight o’clock.’ The exasperated mothering voice already already.
You see? Still it’s happening.
My mind I mean. Getting ready to go on the rampage. If only I could stop myself
in time. That’s always been the problem. Something goes Whoop! — bypasses my brain and connects directly with my legs or my voice or whatever
the instrument of torture might be. Self-torture I mean of course. That’s one of my specialities.
This time I seem to have gone straight into self-righteous indignation.
‘What the hell’s that got to do with anything?’
‘You have a job to go to. Remember? Work? Money? Parsnips?’
She knows how to get my pulses racing.
‘There was another visit last night.’
‘I’m not talking to you. Get away.’
‘Is this because of the Henry business?’
‘No. Of course it isn’t. I just want you to go to work. Like an ordinary moving person.’
‘But if that wasn’t in the equation you’d want me to stay wouldn’t you? You’d want to make love.’
‘No, I wouldn’t. It wouldn’t make the slightest difference to how I feel. But you being irresponsible and
putting your job at risk makes me feel very pissed-off.’
Observe, my lords, how seamlessly she becomes the teacher patiently explaining
some totally elementary fact to a recalcitrant child. You have to be impressed.
‘Not very long ago you used to say making love is more important than making
poison for children’s minds.’
‘That doesn’t mean you should lie around all day dreaming and wasting your life. This is the
present we’re living in, not the sixties. Everything’s different.’
‘Including your feelings for me?’
‘Adam, I refuse to have this stupid argument all over again. I’m so totally sick of it.’
‘Can I at least tell you my dream? It went further than the others. Five suns
this time.’
‘If it will get you out of bed quicker.’
‘I was up in the mountains.’
‘You can tell me without touching me.’
‘For fuck’s sake Cora! Are we lovers or aren’t we?’
‘Since you ask, no, at this moment we aren’t.’
I was sitting up now, wiping tears of frustration and rage from my eyes.
‘Jesus Christ. For Jesus fucking Chrissakes.’
‘And swearing isn’t the way to win me over, if that’s what you’re after.’
I said nothing, but rolled back to the safer edge of the bed and stared at the
pink clock as though it might save me. Twenty past one, New York time. (Not
that we’re in New York, but I’ll explain that shortly.) It was already becoming one of those days when I wish
I’d been born an HIV virus.
After an ice-age of silence Cora oozed a few conciliatory syllables.
‘Ok, Adam. Tell me the dream.’
So the importunate Blob has been graciously given permission to speak.
‘I’m up in the mountains.’
‘You always are.’ Her voice still thick with the indifference of sleep.
‘Cora, I’m trying hard. Very. Bloody. Hard.’
She wakes up enough to find my hand and squeeze it. ‘I’m sorry. Go on.’
This brings on a brief but enthusiastic tail-wagging.
‘I’m on a walking holiday somewhere in Europe. A bit like the Italian Alps: the
weather is blissful. All around me are these immaculate snow-capped summits
under a flawless blue sky. I’m alone on a narrow track that twists and plunges between skeletal trees and
house-high boulders. After I’ve climbed quite high I stop and look down into a deep chasm engulfed in shadow.
The shadow resolves into a mist, roiling and welling upwards like some awful
toxic chemical cloud, threatening to overwhelm my refuge. I panic and start
running crazily up the path, away from the valley. But the path gets steeper,
narrower and more precipitous, and then ends abruptly. There’s a sheer wall of rock ahead of me. There’s nowhere I can go. Then I look up and see the suns. There are five of them now:
ruby, ice-blue, emerald, amber, and smoky grey. And suddenly I know without the
slightest shred of doubt – and this is the most horrible bit – I know they are the end of the world.’
‘Ok. Now will you get up?’
You might be forgiven for thinking we don’t have much of a future as a doting couple. But in fact we have a truly loving
and caring relationship. It’s knowing that that allows us to slag each other off all the time. The debris
from our constant collisions on the ever deepening journey of love. I turn back
to her.
‘You’re just not interested are you? Nothing outside your self-
important mind concerns you one jot does it?’
‘That is just so not true! I want you not to lose your job! You seem to take it
for granted that it will be there regardless of how you behave. Well it won’t. Not in this age.’
One thing you could say about Cora, she could always come up with an answer.
Whatever the complexity of the problem, whatever the layers of inscrutability
deftly folded within it, she’s never at a loss for a solution – or an apparent solution. For her everything is extremely simple. Problem: no
money. Solution: Job. Why complicate things by applying reality?
But my reality was alternating extreme fear and acute boredom. Once I’d learned the routines and craft of games writing I didn’t see any point in continuing. It all seemed like one huge – well, let’s say waste of time. Luckily the job left me largely free to pursue another
long-standing interest: imagination. Imagination was what had always got me
going. What was it? Why do we have it? How does it further our survival? What
happens to us when it’s not embedded in our lives? Is it possible to live and be happy without any
trace of imagination? And so on. I started an internet forum in an attempt to
get the academic world interested. It fell as flat as a two-dimensional tennis
ball. Nobody seemed to see why imagination might be a key to the perennial
conundrum of what caused humans to be essentially different from animals, if
they are.
So I was on my own. The paper threatened to grow into a book, the book into an
obsession, the obsession into a life: mine. I took extended leave from the job
and concentrated on my secret project. Fortunately I was offered some part-time
work teaching creative-writing (don’t ask) at our local college, which enabled me to do less software work. Which
was how I was able to have a holiday in Paris, which was where I met Cora.
It was three nights after that dream that the demon scratching began.
Chapter Two
It was the same dream again: the path, the dead-end, the black mist, the
terrible suns. But this time everything was intenser, more threatening. I awoke
with my heart doing its impression of a one-legged race and cold rivulets of
sweat trickling down my ribcage. The blue clock said 4.05am. (the red naturally
stayed forever faithful at 11.23 New York Time). I needed a piss urgently but
my brain was distracted by a noise. It took me some seconds to work out that
something was talking to me. Talking only in the widest sense, that is – scratches, scrapes, whistles, croaks and grunts all mixed up together. But some
part of my brain knew it was a communication, don’t ask me how. I hunted around trying to find the source but it didn’t appear to have a source: it seemed to be in the very centre of my brain, the
eye of the hurricane, where all the black monsters hang out and laugh their
terrible heads off at my pathetic doomed struggles to be normal.
I quickly realized there was a pattern to the noises: the same sequence was
being repeated over and over with an interval of exactly forty-five seconds. At
first I assumed it happened only in the dead of night, because then it was
clearest. But pretty soon I began to listen for it as soon as the groan of
traffic and the claptrap of the neighbours’ TVs had subsided. After the same thing happened five nights in a row Cora
suggested I take sleeping pills.
As inexplicable noises go this one was remarkably reticent. There were times
when it almost faded out altogether, though there was always a ghost of it (the
ghost of a ghost?) present, dead on cue. I tried creeping around the room, a
yard at a time, like a stage lunatic, listening for any change. I dragged on my
trousers and coat and crept outside to listen. It took some time to hear it
there, because there was some slight traffic noise from a distant motorway. But
then there it was: croak, whistle, pause.... croak, whistle, pause... I put my ear to the ice-cold
ground to see if its source was beneath the surface: no difference. Maybe it’s a kind of tinnitus, I thought, that only manifested at night. I made a mental
note to ask the doctor if there was such a thing, but it seemed a long shot.
It was about this point in the burgeoning fiasco that Cora, after discovering me
crouched naked in the cellar one night with my ear pressed hard against the
wall, began to wonder about me. We started to have intense conversations. The
lack of sleep was beginning to get to me. Cora at first suggested, and then
insisted, that I saw a doctor, an idea which struck me as bizarre, considering
the usual attitude of doctors to unexplained psychic phenomena. He’d either give me stronger pills or tell me to buy some good earplugs.
* * *
The thing I first noticed about Cora, when we first got to know each other, was
her nose. In a way it was the most eloquent part of her. Everything else was
careful and circumspect, dare I say even calculating? No, better not say that.
But her nose was entirely spontaneous. It wriggled like a little wild creature
caught in a flashlight, appealing for mercy. That nose was what did it for me.
It seemed so helpless, exiled in the middle of her sunlit face without anywhere
to run to. Especially with the rest of her such a control freak. No, I
defintitely shouldn’t say that. After all, I’m in love with her, aren’t I? You can’t say things like that about the One in your life.
In the eighties she was a performance artist with an inclination to shock people
in a harmless sort of way. We first met at a left-bank gallery in Paris where
she was designing an installation called ‘i 2 i’. (think about it). I was out of my depth from the start. For me art was a
personal, inside kind of thing: a quiet conversation with your soul on matters
of some import.
Performance art was almost a contradiction in terms. To be truthful I never
really worked out what it was she saw in me: we were at opposite ends of the
cultural plectrum: she dug The Clash while I worshipped Lennon. In our
relationship we warily approached each other from opposite continents.
She challenged me in lots of ways. If I tried to get her to talk about herself
at the wrong time, she’d instantly vanish from all radar screens. When I felt romantic, she’d be offhand and indifferent; when I wanted to go off and nurse my melancholy
muse she’d question me until I realized what I was feeling, which was usually anger.
Still I must have inspired some interest on her part because a few weeks later
she turned up at my autumn writing class, in the days when I thought creativity
could be handed over like a master key, full of excitement about this new magic
box called language. I confess I was a bit baffled. Up until then she’d given no indication whatsoever that her interests lay in that direction. But
at the end of the first week she’d decided that installations were so last year, and literature was the future.
Within days she turned in a short story about a wild horse on the Cornish
cliffs that frankly knocked my socks off with its energy and passion. So
naturally I had to take her for a coffee to let her know what I thought of her
work, and ask her why didn’t she think about publication, and from then on we were seeing each other
regularly. I was all for us living together without delay, but she demurred,
arguing that we both had some growing up to do first, and what was all the
hurry about anyway? If only I’d listened.
Listening was not my strong point in those days; my hormones were creating too
much noise of their own. I fretted that if we didn’t achieve bonding status and live together at once she’d find someone she liked better than me, who’d offer her more goodies, more security and better dreams, and I’d be out in the cold like a Christmas gift whose magic had faded too soon. So
somehow I persuaded her that ‘shacking up’ together was the best way of resolving our differences. As things turned out it
was two years before our cohabiting impulses synchronised, and we finally moved
our worldly goods into a two-room flat off the Caledonian Road, and in two days
had furnished it in minimalist white pine and Laura Ashley floral curtains.
I soon began to feel strangely optimistic about my life. Britain seemed to be
on the brink of a new dawn with New Labour. Tony Blair had promised to banish sleaze forever: anything seemed possible.
Actually Britain was indeed on the edge of a new dawn, but it was a very
different one to what anyone, including Blair, could possibly have imagined.
Cora turned from a tentative short story writer to an increasingly confident
novelist. We took exotic holidays together to the Far East of Cornwall. She
started worrying that all this shenanigins would affect my work, and she was
not wrong: I’d found myself listening desperately for signs of them, because I very much
needed to know what happened during the daylight: if they really stopped while
the sun was up, or if the ambient noise of the day simply masked them. I began
taking loo breaks so I could sit in relative silence and concentrate: but of
course even at the quietest time there was always some residual noise in the
building – water pipes, electrical hum, phones ringing, echo-distorted screams of frustration – that served to disguise them.
Slowly, half consciously, tensions were building. The spring seemed unusually
gloomy and wet. The walls of our flat seemed to be closing in day by day.
Unknown lifeforms were evolving in the dark beneath the sink, and instead of a
new dawn London was beginning to feel like a trap. I realized we had to get out
or we would end by tearing each other’s eyes out
Chapter Four
Cora and I took a short holiday in Cornwall, renting a pink-washed cottage close
by the lower reaches of the River Fowey. We both thought the place was perfect:
no cars, no television, no visitors, no nosy neighbours – just unpolluted space and uncluttered freedom. This is just what life was made
for, I remember thinking; two people in love discovering each other without the
world’s interference, and with no limits on their time together.
And indeed everything did seem to conspire to help us reconcile ourselves to
our relationship: for the first two days we weren’t apart for more than thirty minutes each day, and that only for answering
essential calls of nature. Our needs did not lead us beyond the house and its
immediate environs, apart from a visit to a café on the waterfront for afternoon tea. It was the smallest café I’d ever been in: just three small tables and a counter wide enough for two medium
size tea-cakes on reasonably good terms to pass each other. In the back was a
tottering display cabinet that dominated the tiny room with its stack of
brilliantly lit but probably uneatable pastries.
A stout white-haired woman in her fifties with dark, nervous eyes greeted us.
After we’d sat down she continued to stand perfectly still behind the counter as though
someone had tugged out her power cord. As it was difficult to ignore her Cora
began asking her about places to visit. At once the woman clicked into life.
‘There’s an old church at Lanteglos, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.’
Oh, if only that sentence could be erased from the record of human history. But
of course nothing can be erased. What has happened is engraved in time
irrevocably.
* * *