The Weightless World (2 page)

We landed at Mumbai in the middle of the night. As soon as we entered the airport it was clear that something had happened. The Arrivals section was full of people, flight after flight of people, all apparently shouting. I talked to a group of women standing a little way in front of us who explained that the airport had been blocked for hours. When I asked why, they were incredulous. ‘Haven’t you heard?’ one of the women said, with a pitying, piercing note. ‘There’s been another bombing. Bangalore this time.’ It had happened while our flight was in the air. For now, the woman said, there were no other details.

I relayed this information to Ess, who tightened his lips and gave a single bleak nod. After that I didn’t raise the subject of the bombing with him again. I sensed that if I did he would take it as something very close to a personal insult.

From the roof terrace we take the lift down to the ground floor. It’s a slow, bumpy ride, the confined space of the lift resounding with the screech of unseen cables and feeling all the more confined for the presence of a uniformed attendant perched on a stool, a spry, quick, thinly grinning man with whom Ess keeps up a stream of garrulous conversation. When the doors finally smash open, the attendant taps the peak of his cap at us. Ess salutes
in return. I raise a hand to my brow, weakly brush my fingers across it, and sidle out of the lift after Ess as quickly as I can go.

In the reception area Ess launches into conversation with the man at the desk, then hands across his papers so the man can lock them into the hotel safe. Presumably this is a measure to ensure
they
don’t get their hands on his notes. So far Ess hasn’t suggested that my tablet needs to be locked up. Does this mean his notes are indispensible, but mine are not?

As we approach the entrance a turbaned doorman bows and pulls open the door for us. Not looking at the man, swaggering in his glamorous white linen, Ess throws off another salute. I stare at the tiled floor.

At the top of the steps outside, Ess pauses. When he looks at me his face seems full of the noise, the light, the heat, the panting life of the street below.

‘Well then, Mr Strauss,’ he says, ‘are you ready for an adventure?’

Funny: because two weeks ago I was asked the same question by Martin Cantor.

On a Friday afternoon, while Ess was off-site doing who knows what, Cantor invited me to his office. He was friendly, and welcomed me in among the film posters, the games consoles and pinball machines of his executive demesne. I had never been in his office before, though I knew Ess referred to it as the
Playpen
. It was pretty nice. A change at least from Ess’s office, with its Chinese screens, its Viking maps, its oil burners and incense sticks. I mean Ess’s office was nice too, in its creaky, fragrant way; it just wasn’t so much my thing. In my head – and occasionally to Alice – I referred to it as the
Perfume Counter.

‘So Steve! Looking forward to your big adventure?’

‘Oh, absolutely. I’m absolutely looking forward to it.’

‘Great.’ Cantor grinned and leaned towards me in a way that kept making me think he was going to tap my knee, though at no point did he do that. ‘You know, I couldn’t go to India. The States, anywhere in Europe, no problem. But India? Rather you than me.’

‘Because of the instability? The uh, political instability?’

‘Because of what I’ve heard described as the persistent and ubiquitous reek of shit.’

We laughed. It was the end of the working day, of the working week, and we were sitting on deeply comfortable reclining chairs, not quite facing each other, no desk between us. In fact I couldn’t see a desk anywhere in the room. I tried to imagine Ess’s office without a desk and it was like imagining a church without an altar.

‘Anyway,’ Cantor went on, ‘I appreciate your coming to see me, because I’m keen to get your take on all this. All this Ray stuff. All this… Indian… antigravity… stuff.’

I thought: There’s a
ray
now? Then I realised he just meant Ess.

‘Okay,’ I said.

He smiled, sat forward in his deep chair. ‘So… what is that?’

‘What’s my take?’

‘Yes, exactly that.’

I blinked, opened my mouth to speak, then a while later closed it again. I blinked and blinked. But there was nothing I could say.

‘If you don’t mind…?’ Cantor was smiling at me now as if he thought I was close to bursting into tears. Oddly it was true. I was close to bursting into tears. ‘I think it’s like this. Put me right, jump in at any point. But basically I think it’s like this. I think you’re extremely fond of Ray. You’ve worked with him for a long time, and you’ve certainly been loyal to him. You respect him, as we all do, and you feel sorry for him, as we all do, especially in light of his recent health issues. Am I on the right lines so far?’

I nodded, careful not to dislodge the tears trapped all round the inside of my eyes.

‘So there’s that. At the same time you’re a sensible guy. You hear him talking about this… stuff, and your heart sinks. Because you know all it means is he’s not really well. Not really himself again yet.’

After a while I nodded again, slowly, cautiously.

‘So there’s that. At the same time you’re thinking, “What’s Martin Cantor playing at? Why is he letting Ray go ahead with this?” That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?’

I tried to look at him, but couldn’t. I managed a gradual shrug.

‘Steve, like you I know this trip, this whole thing is madness. I don’t know what a doctor would call it – a symptom, an ailment. Why am I letting it go ahead? Because I believe it’s in Ray’s best interests for it to go ahead. I genuinely do.’

Now I did look up at him. He was still wearing that rippled smile.

‘I genuinely believe the best thing for Ray is to let him work through his issues in his own way. Let him take his own path through whatever he’s dealing with. Ideally with a good man at his side, a good friend, looking out for him at every step.’

I gave a low laugh. It sounded surprisingly normal.

‘And there’s another reason.’ Cantor’s manner abruptly hardened or flattened: he seemed to be speaking to me from behind a screen of glass. ‘You don’t know this, no one does yet, but next month we’re taking the big step and putting Resolute into administration. It’ll be a painful process. The end of the company, basically. I’m sure you can see why it would be in no one’s interests for Ray to be around while this happened.’

I stared at him, squinted at him – screwed up my completely dry eyes.

‘You know what he’s like.’ Cantor gave a metallic laugh. ‘How he always has to
get stuck in
… but he can’t fight the administrators.
This is a battle he simply can’t win. So I think we can agree that it would be no bad thing if next month, while we see to this administration business, Ray weren’t around. If Ray were elsewhere, happy, happily oblivious, pleasantly distracted. I think we can agree on that. Am I right, Steve? Can we agree on that?’

The street outside the hotel is either slowly disintegrating or slowly knitting itself together. The slabs of the pavement are shattered, scattered, widely separated by ashen black pits, as if blown apart by aerial bombing. I can hardly keep my footing but Ess is already at the end of the street, grinning and waving, waiting for me to catch up.

When I do, we turn the corner into a sort of bazaar. Mouldy-looking shops on either side of the street, shoe shops, clothes shops, jewellery shops, seem to have spilt a silky lining of their innards onto the pavement, masses of veil and awning under which stalls form a seamless rickety bank, an endless wash of shawls, scarves, bracelets, novelty T-shirts, Taj Mahal key-rings, Mahatma Gandhi oven gloves. Every few feet a smart young trader tries to take you into an embrace with one arm while evincing the range of his wares with the other. Ess loves it. He stands with these guys for minutes at a time, for quarter hours, half hours, talking and laughing with mutually clutched forearms. Well, this is what Ess is like, has always been like – meeting people, talking to people, making friends.

Still, he manages to buy a lot of stuff. When he shows me his purchases he’s like a stage magician conjuring an impossible string of handkerchiefs. It’s soon apparent that even with all our hands we’re not going to get everything back in his satchel. He tips his head back and laughs. Cramming pashminas into each jacket pocket, he says, ‘Seemed silly not to take the chance while we had it. But I see I may have gone rather overboard!’

‘Who’s this even for?’

‘Oh, there are always people. Cousins, nieces. The usual leeches and hangers-on.’ He doesn’t mention either his daughters, Kris and Esther (twins, owlish, unearthly), or Eunice, his ex-wife, and the girls’ jealous protector. But then (I think) why would he mention them? Filling his trouser pockets, he says, ‘I see I may have gone rather mad. Yet we’re here to buy, are we not? Besides, it’s good practise. You know, with the old haggling.’

‘That’s what you were doing? When you were touching up those guys? Haggling?’

“You have to do it. They expect it. They’d be offended if you didn’t.’

‘If you didn’t take the piss out of their gear then offer them a pittance for it?’

‘It’s not taking the piss. And it’s not really a pittance. These chaps aren’t daft. They know what they’re doing. Think of it as a ritual, a
dance
…’ He shakes his head, changes the subject. ‘Who’s on your list?’

‘I haven’t got a list.’

‘No? Didn’t think you might pick up an oddment or two for your folks? Couple of tea towels for those great big brothers of yours?’

‘Nah. Though probably I should get something for Alice.’

‘Alice! Darling Alice Darling! A lady of the most scrupulous discrimination. No stall-rat’s tat for such as she.’ His conviction, his certainty. Ess has met Alice once. ‘Happily I know just the place… along here a way, come on…’

While we’re waiting to cross the road, jammed into a pack of tourists at the edge of the pavement, a kid in stained jeans and an oily long-sleeved shirt presses against me. He mutters hotly into my ear, the same sound, over and over again. I step away, glance at him sideways. He’s grinning but his face looks as if it’s been carved out of very soft chalk.

‘What?’ I say. ‘Sorry?’

‘Hash,’ the kid says, keeping his voice low. ‘Hash, my friend.’

‘No,’ I say, ‘no thanks. I’m not interested.’

He shrugs and moves on to another section of the tourist pack, muttering hot and low: ‘Hash, hash, hash, hash, hash…’

We’re here to buy. But buy what?

Ess made it sound simple. On his previous visit to the country – which he referred to as both his
sortie
and his
sabbatical
– he met a man, an inventor named Tarik Kundra. He got along very well with this Kundra, who in due course took Ess into his confidence and agreed to demonstrate for him his greatest invention: an antigravity machine. A machine that cancels the effect of gravity. A machine that severs objects from the billion chain-links of gravity.

Ess asked Kundra to sell him the machine. Kundra demurred. Ess insisted. They negotiated – they haggled – and finally they came to an agreement. For ‘a sizeable sum’ (nothing more specific than that) Kundra agreed to sell the machine’s schematics, its sole working prototype and exclusive rights to reproduce it, to Ess and to Resolute.

It was as simple as that.

Except it wasn’t, couldn’t be.

‘But why?’ I asked. ‘Why would he just sign the thing away like that?’

‘You heard my talking about “a sizeable sum”? Don’t worry, Tarik will get his due.’

We were having this conversation in The Hanged Man, Ess’s favourite pub, where we had most of our conversations after Ess came back from India. He refused to discuss Tarik Kundra in his office – as if he feared
they
had bugged the telephone, the light fittings, the scented candles of the Perfume Counter. Each
morning we arrived at Resolute, met in his office, twiddled our thumbs for a bit, then skulked back to the car park, piled into Ess’s car and drove for fifteen minutes out of Yeovil until we came to the green hills and The Hanged Man. It was a bit of a codger’s pub, with its Toby jugs and horse-brasses, but I didn’t mind it. And Ess was happy enough, lording it over the cloth-faced yokels.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Why you? Why us? Why Resolute? Or any British company, or foreign company? Why doesn’t your pal Tarik want to sell in India?’

‘My pal Tarik is no great fan of his homeland, no patriotic model Indian. He feels his country has used him somewhat ill, let us say, and leave it at that.’

No, I wanted to say, let’s
not
leave it at that, let’s
talk
about this, because this doesn’t sound right, this doesn’t add up…Then I had to catch myself. The entire subject was – something other than real. None of it was going to sound right. None of it was going to add up. I realised I would have to form a new habit: the habit of letting Ess say and do whatever he wanted. Which would be difficult. After all, I’d spent the last five years forming precisely the opposite habit.

‘Applications!’ Ess now announced grandly. ‘And I don’t mean the bloody, jump-the-rope, count-the-slices-of-pizza playtime pissiness you kids are hooked on, I mean solid, real-world facts, light-of-day concretions, cash-value incorporations.’ He clapped his hands. No one in The Hanged Man looked round when he did this, though they really should have. ‘What have we got? Transport, obviously, freight, naturally. These are areas perhaps too massive for us to think about at this early juncture, so we may be best moving on… casting our net wide rather deep, so to speak. Remember, there are no limitations. None.’

This was how Ess liked to talk: wild, fast and loose, without the inertias of detail. He wouldn’t even say definitely how much
he thought the machine was likely to cost. One day he suggested that once it was in full production a unit could probably be sold at about the same price point as a mobile phone – and not a smartphone such as I had, but a dumb-phone such as he had, with its grainy green screen and twiddly physical buttons. But on other days he suggested that a typical unit could cost roughly the same as a paperback novel, or a desktop computer, or a family car.

The one detail he kept straight was that the machine was a circuit and a wire – a circuit and a loop. When you closed the circuit, any object encircled by the loop was freed from the dominion of gravity. The wider the loop, the larger the object you could so liberate. The size of the circuit remained the same.

‘About as big as your hand. Well, not
your
hand, a proper man’s hand. But you get the idea. Lampstand or battleship, it doesn’t matter. One flick of a switch on a device about the size of an adult male’s hand, and up it goes! Up into the wide blue yonder! Or rather, let’s say, up and wherever you like. Ironing board or oil tanker, you can steer it to Timbuktu with a hand fan.’

Now in The Hanged Man he said, ‘When you get right down to it, it’s a question of seeing. It doesn’t matter any more what we think, what we say, what we do, only what we see. What can we
see
? That’s the question, the only question left, the question of shapes, forms, embodiments. Which is to say, the question of applications.’

As he said this I was sharply aware that he was wearing a cravat, a plush burgundy affair plumped up at the throat. It was a new affectation, and it looked ridiculous. Altogether, in this grimy, low-lit gaffer’s pub, he looked completely absurd. But at least he didn’t look old, as he had looked old. In April, May, June, he’d looked very old. The soft crinkles under his eyes had dried and hardened, grown into ridges, bitter bone-lines. His lips had been the lips of a shrunken head. He’d looked mummified,
fossilised. But there was no trace of all that now. He looked a strong, ruddy fifty – forty-five, even.

And, while he went on and I sat nursing my glass of orange juice, I considered what Martin Cantor too had pointed out: wasn’t this better? Wasn’t this Ess a better Ess, quick, keen, fully alive, than the Ess you’d get if you shut him down, said no, called the strapping male nurses to peel him out of his chair and carry him shrieking to the ambulance, the quiet country hospital, the injections, the bed? Wasn’t this better than the creature you’d get then – blasted, hollowed, with trembling lips and druggy dithers?

It was. It was better. Obviously it was.

Later that day he said, ‘Here’s a curious thing. The other morning I was leaving the house, it was Sunday, I was going out to fetch the paper, and a car screeched to a dead stop in front of me. It wasn’t an accident, just some idiot driver who’d come the wrong way up a cul-de-sac. But that
screech
… awful sound. The tyres just screaming,
screaming
like they knew they shouldn’t be here, like they knew they shouldn’t exist any more.

‘And that was it. For the first time I understood, truly understood the magnitude of what we’re doing. Only one of the many terrifying implications of this project is we’re putting an end to the wheel. Do you see that? We’re making the wheel obsolete.’

Now we’re dragging round the crowded bazaar, harassed by heat, by thudding car horns, by a brightly wrapped little girl who won’t leave us alone, who toddles patiently between us, dabbing her fingertips to her lips and looking up at us, each in turn, with crater-wide eyes.

Stumbling on the broken pavement, I suddenly feel it: the click in my back. I keep walking but soon it’s coming strong and fast –
click-click-click
– working like the needle of a sewing machine,
piercing, puncturing. It’s painful, at about the level of a stubbed toe, and I go along with hunched shoulders and gritted teeth until Ess pats my arm and with a swiping glance at his watch says, ‘No point wearing ourselves out. What say you to a rest?’

‘I’m okay.’ I shrug.

Ess tips his head at me. He knows all about the back-click thing.

‘Really,’ I say. ‘We’re looking for a present for Alice, aren’t we?’

‘And the lovely Alice shall have her gift. Only now it occurs to me that I did say at about this time I’d call in with the fellow who runs Adventurers – you know, the tour company we’re using. Dreadful bore I shouldn’t doubt, but it may look good for Asha if we make nice, if we “touch base” so to speak, with her gaffer. Don’t mind, do you? And anyway, you may not need a rest, but I bloody do. Happily I believe the appointed place is not far…’

This is the first I’ve heard about a meeting with the fellow who runs the tour company. Probably I would have something to say on the subject – points to make, objections to raise – if it were not that my teeth are welded into a single piece.

The place appointed for the meeting is a surprise. I’m expecting some clammy shack but instead Ess leads me to a large, airy, Western-looking bar, all coffee-culture murals and retro signage. A man standing at the entrance nods to us as we step in among the crowded tables. As Ess hunts for a free space I glance back and see that the man at the entrance has halted the little girl who was following us. He speaks to her, with an emphasis that I’m not accustomed to seeing when people speak to children. Then she ducks her head and toddles away.

At the back of the bar we crush ourselves round a table still loaded with its previous occupants’ detritus, hot chocolate mugs, milkshake glasses. Ess goes to the bar to order and I sit concentrating on the sensations in my spine, not thinking about
the fact that I’ve travelled without insurance, not thinking about the likely condition of the local hospitals, not thinking about anything but the needly click in my back until Ess is again sitting next to me, nudging my shoulder, saying, ‘Here we go.’

He seems to be indicating the man seated at the next table, a large shaggy elderly guy with a bald head and a straggly white beard. My first thought is that Ess has been at it again – meeting people, making friends – then I recall that we’re here to meet someone. The fellow who runs the tour company. Asha’s gaffer.

‘Raymond Ess,’ says Ess, thrusting a hand at the man.

‘Harry Altman,’ replies the man, in one of those American accents that sound at first like a fairly serious speech defect. Then he brings his hand angling towards me, and I have no choice but to shake it too.

‘Steven Strauss,’ I say.

‘Raymond. Steven,’ says Harry Altman, as if assimilating our names into his accent. ‘How very nice to meet you gentlemen.’

‘You won’t mind my asking,’ says Ess, with a narrowing smile that makes me fear the worst, ‘but are they… they are, aren’t they? Look, Mr Strauss! They are, aren’t they?’

I look at Harry and Harry looks at me. Still I’m at a loss. What is what? Harry is wearing trainers, jeans, a green sweatshirt, a slightly flashy pair of specs. Then I get it.

‘The specs,’ I say.

‘You’ve seen these before?’ Ess is excited.

‘They’re smartspecs. They’re new, but I’ve seen them.’

‘I expect you have,’ Harry says, smiling with a sort of wan humility. ‘They’ve been around for a while. Maybe not out here so much. These I had shipped from the States.’ He takes pleasure in telling us this. The pleasure, like the specs themselves, sits somewhat absurdly, even grotesquely, on his ancient wreck of a face.