An extract from the novel The Human Use of Caves by Richard W Strachan
Sometimes as he walked, taking long and meandering digressions down side streets and across squares, through underpasses and over raised walkways that spanned like triumphal arches the segments of silent motorway, the architect liked to think that the very formlessness of his wanderings was a kind of pattern in itself. He strolled at no great pace, having nowhere urgently to be, but in his steadiness and in the seeming randomness of his directions an outsider would have been hard pressed to say he was walking without purpose. He came to like the tight grip of his rucksack on his back, the hard feeling of his feet as they swelled inside his boots, the grit of the street on his face. As he walked, trying at the same time not to see all this evidence of decay, he felt that the pattern he was unspooling on the city’s grid might somehow be able to bind it back together, and that if you were to mark his route on the map that no one had yet made of the city, you would recognise the elaborate tangle of a fisherman’s knot at the very moment of its tightening. He was the barbed hook in the city’s throat. He would reel it in, apply the priest to its struggling head, and once silenced he would have in his hands an image of unchanging perfection.
So, he walked, he looped his thread, and he tried to look with unprejudiced eyes at what had become of this place, what we had done to it. It’s not so bad, he thought. This is surface detail, this is purely a symptom of neglect. Once the people come here, the citizens, everything will be taken care of …
But he wasn’t so deluded to think that the citizens were really coming. Not now. For months, like a shipwrecked mariner parsing a pale horizon, we had waited for the citizens to arrive. Every day we expected the convoys to pull up and disgorge their load. Perhaps the plains would give up a column of migrants, all walking with energy and cheerfulness into their new homes and, once settled, making the city bloom with new life. Many of us had speculated on this, pondering the issue over long evenings while we sat in our apartments and watched the sunset, or out on our balconies during frosty sunrises while we sipped our first coffee of the day. What would our houses feel like with other people around us? Would we even be allowed to stay? Would we have to get jobs and become productive members of this new society, or would we be evicted from this degraded paradise by the new arrivals, our time now spent – released from our duties as caretakers or experimental subjects or whatever role it was that we had been designed to fulfil? While the subject had been one of lively discussion or quiet contemplation for the rest of us, for Axelsson it was the source of more troubling questions, a gnawing uncertainty about details that he may have missed or intentions he may have misunderstood. Walking now on the fringe of that brutalist housing estate of which he was so proud – the sweeping pedestrian bridges, the vast podium supports encrusted with maisonettes, all rendered in a sandy concrete that glittered with embedded minerals – the architect felt again the gripping uneasiness that fell on him whenever the subject of the future citizens came to mind. Where were they? Why was this (the housing estate) not already a thriving community of young professionals and families? The brief had been so vague, so capacious, that he had thought it reflected confidence in his ability and skill; a blank cheque issued with the sure knowledge that whatever he spent it on would be of value. But it felt more like a trap now, a way for the clients to avoid commitment. They had been so hands-off, only once journeying in a fleet of blacked-out BMWs to cast approving smiles on the building site. There had been no direction, no orchestration beyond what he, the architect, had put in place. What had he missed? Was the whole city like a London apartment complex built solely for overseas investment, designed only as a concrete sink for liquid funds or a return on that investment for shell companies and multinational speculators? And the people who lived here now, were they just the caretakers after all? Nightwatchmen to make sure vandals didn’t degrade the estate and thieves make off with the copper and lead. If that was the case, then what on earth had they done? Had he, Axelsson, allowed this disaster to happen, and would there be a reckoning at the end of it?
The distant light glittered in the west. With unerring directional instinct Axelsson paced his way across the city towards it, an unaccustomed wariness descending on him, a sense of unfamiliarity that even just a few weeks ago he would have thought impossible. To know how each street latched to each, to have the whole design riveted in his mind, had always been a point of pride. The creator should know with exact recall the lineaments of his creation, but soon he found himself slackening the pace, nervously pausing at crossroads and corners as if unsure what direction to take. He glanced at the sun and tried to angle himself on its zenith rather than trust to his own knowledge. He would hesitantly cross streets and then, halfway over, back track with an embarrassed suspicion that someone might have seen him. At other times, scolding his timidity, he overcompensated by striding briskly down roads that he knew perfectly well were dead ends, or that led him further away from his destination. There was something wrong with his inner ear, he felt, a dizziness, an insult that struck at his sense of orientation. He was going in circles, tending as hominids do in unfamiliar surroundings to curve gradually to the right, and so return to accustomed ground. He kept finding himself at the same avenue, a block further down, irritated beyond reason that every time he returned the breeze had equidistantly kicked a scrap of dirty newspaper to keep pace with him (from where? What newspapers?), so that for one all-encompassing moment of rage he impotently lashed and kicked at the newspaper until it had been trampled into the gutter. It was only when he came out of that rage that he noticed the gutter was full to the brim with dead leaves, a rising soup of backwash now flowing from the grille and pouring into the street. Transported, bitter, the architect stormed off.
He went on without paying attention to where he was going, sinking into himself and wondering where these rages were coming from, anger being no more than the flashpoint response to a situation out of your control (meaning that, in this context, rage was perhaps the most rational course of action). There was no way to repair what had gone wrong. He had no resources anymore, no means of guiding a workforce towards essential tasks. There was no workforce to start with, and no funds to hire a new one. Had the clients just lost interest in the whole project? Where were the people? He imagined a finger trailing down the columns of a spreadsheet, the catch in the calculator’s throat when it reached the final total. Offset investment or upkeep costs would swamp the projected profits, or too deeply strain the more intangible benefits. An election coming up, the risk of awkward questions, a fragile trade deal. Out came the red pen, the rubber ‘Reject’ stamp. There is no way of salvaging this, none.
He looked up, waking from these reveries. The sound his feet made on the pavement had modulated to a deeper and more sonorous note, as if he was walking over a hollow space. The ground beneath him had changed from smooth asphalt to a reddish sandstone. Long shadows fell in the wash of the declining sun, great beams of heavy black painted across a wide terracotta courtyard that was bracketed on one side by a tall, whitewashed cloister that he had no recollection of ever having designed. The walls of this cloistered building were dazzlingly bright, the shadows within it contrastingly thick. All ambient noise from the city seemed suddenly cancelled. There was no sound here. Rather, he felt that he had just stepped into the aftermath of sound, perhaps a muttered argument between two men who even now were going their separate ways, the scuff of their footsteps muffled by the deep afternoon, or a fruit seller walking a lonely vigil for vanished custom, the echo of her cry having just that moment faded before he stepped onto the scene. He had that feeling again of audience, of observation, as if he’d wandered onto a stage the moment the act had finished, but before there had been time to clear the scenery away.
Ahead, the courtyard opened into a wider square, a long grid of flagstones. On the other side of the square he could see a tall domed building silhouetted against the sun. Beyond were the plains. He raised his hand to shield his eyes. The lengthy shadows drifted another lazy inch. The sun was heavy on his shoulders and the heat was making him drowsy. He drank the rest of his water.
He didn’t recognise any of this. From the angle of the sun he knew he must be heading in the right direction, towards the city’s western flank, but in no part of his plan could he remember having designed this enigmatic space, a locale that as far as he could see had no domestic or commercial function and that lay here against the tide of the plains as no more than an evocative backdrop, a last ornamental frieze of empty space. A frame for low sun and profound shadow, the weight of a late afternoon.
He crossed the hot square, tightening the straps of his pack, flexing his tired feet in his boots. He passed the domed building, a watchtower of faintly Islamic design. Glancing back, the courtyard with its cloisters seemed enveloped in shadow, apart from one small segment that gleamed like beaten gold. An inverted triangle, the point of which aimed back at the heart of the city he had just left, pale now in the setting sun, the reaching spires and blunt nodes of the tallest buildings frosted by the light.
A low stone wall capped with a marble balustrade marked the edge of the city. He paused a while beside it, hands resting on the cold stone. Here, the edge of the plateau sloped gently down on a mild gradient to the plain, where dun grass ravelled in the breeze, a grainy drift of dust. Rocks were strewn across the scrub grass as if placed to represent a wilderness, and far off, massively backlit, was the range of mountains and the winking light at their base, visible even now, the movement of something catching at the day’s last light.
He slept that night hard up against the wall, wrapping himself in his sleeping bag although the night was sultry and warm. He had no dreams. In the morning, woken by the dawn, he tried to imagine the journey ahead. He pushed himself forward into a moment of crossing, trying to feel the uneven ground beneath him, the presence of the sun without visible shelter. He couldn’t judge the distance to the mountains, couldn’t grasp the scale without relative markers, and in the plain there was nothing, no human structure, no geographical extrusion to measure himself against. He climbed the wall and set out. He didn’t know how long it would take him to cross over, but he had his sleeping bag, an apple or two. He wasn’t concerned. He had a destination, and nothing to divert him in between.
Richard W Strachan lives in Edinburgh, and has had stories printed in magazines like The Lonely Crowd, Interzone, New Writing Scotland and Gutter. He was shortlisted for the Manchester Fiction Prize in 2015 and won a New Writer’s Award from the Scottish Book Trust in 2012. He also writes regular book reviews for the Herald and the Scottish Review of Books.