He said: When they called me up and said the cryo project was over she looked at me and she just said, There they go, John.
In the dream they were sitting on the beach. He had made a fire from damp driftwood. The smoke made a black mark where it touched the tarpaulin, at the top, where it was stretched over their heads. The ash was still falling. It made them sick, but only ever for a little while. Anything that hurt them only ever hurt them for a little while.
In the dream, she was sat next to a bundle of meat he’d cut, thighs mostly, for when they felt hungry, which happened rarely and always simultaneously. When it did happen they would be side by side, eating until their stomachs were sore. They would drink from the sea like dogs.
He said after a pause: You know the worst part? She cried. She and A— both cried. In each other’s arms, like babies. They were so fucking scared. And I was right there, and I couldn’t do piss. Everything I was and everything I had done, and I couldn’t do a damned thing.
He was quiet for a long time. The sea ate at the sand. The waves glowed a little even though there was no sunshine, only thick yellow cloud.
She prompted: So what did you do?
He said: A damned thing, didn’t I.
She said: When is the part where you hurt me?
He said: Soon. It’s coming up.
She said: I still love you.
And in the dream he rubbed his temple with his thumb and said: “You always say that, Harrowhark.”
DAY ONE
REGARDING NONA—HOT SAUCE IS WATCHFUL—THE CITY HAS A BAD DAY—NONA GETS A BEDTIME STORY—FIVE DAYS UNTIL THE TOMB OPENS.
1
LATE IN THE YEAR of nobody she really thought about that much in particular, the person who looked after her pushed the button on the recorder and said, “Start.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and began in a practised hurry:
“The painted face is on top of me. I’m in the safe water—I’m lying down, I think. Something’s pushing at me. The water goes over my head and it’s in my mouth. It goes up my nose.”
“Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“How do you feel?”
“I like it. I like the water, I like her hands.”
“Her hands?”
“They’re the things around me—maybe they’re my hands.”
The pencil scratched loudly on the paper. “How about the face?”
“It’s the picture face.” The sketch they’d made for her, the one locked in the secret drawer where they put all the really interesting things, like cigarettes and the fake identification cards and all the money they said wasn’t legal tender and couldn’t be used. The pencil obligingly scribbled its way across the page. It was hard not to open her eyes and look at the person opposite, so she amused herself by imagining what she would see: tanned sure hands on the notebook, head bent over it, the fringe pinned up waiting for haircut day. Imagining was better than looking anyway, because the battery lamp wasn’t switched on.
She said, “What are you writing?” because the pencil was still going. Most of the time the writing was interesting, but some of the time it was just boring descriptions of how her face was changing when she talked, like 0.24—Smiled.
“Incidentals. Keep going, you woke up late.”
“Can you change the alarm song? I can sleep through ‘Good Morning, Good Morning’ now.”
“Sure. I’ll drop a wet sponge on your face instead. Keep thinking.”
She kept thinking.
“The arms go really tight around me. They’re her arms, definitely.”
“Is she familiar?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“How do you know they’re ‘her’？”
“I don’t know.”
“What happens after that?”
“Don’t know.”
A long pause. “Anything else?”
“No. It’s gone already. Sorry, Camilla.”
“Not a problem.”
Camilla Hect depressed the button with a bright and final plastic clack. This was the cue, so she exploded into action. The rule was that she had to lie still and concentrate as hard as she could from the time that the button went down to the time when the button went up. When it went up, pyjamas came off; under the pale, wavering light of the tiny torch taped to Cam’s clipboard, she undressed and dressed herself at the same time, which required a lot of contortions. She wrestled out of her nightshirt with her arms and stretched on her trousers using her ankles, in the move that Camilla called worm with problems.