White and Other Tales of Ruin

Brownian movement, and from there Einstein, and from there the unified field theory, and then superstrings and the theory of everything …

“Make her stop!” Lucy-Anne shouted, standing up and walking away. Her glass spilled red wine into the earth. “Please, Doug,” she said, without turning around, “just bring our daughter back for a while.”

Doug remembered a time a couple of years before when Gemma went through a short stage of waking in the night, screaming. It was only a week or so, but the sound of her scream was terrifying, and after the first night neither of them slept at all until it ended as suddenly as it had begun. And when they asked her what was wrong she could only say The moon, Daddy, the moon was in my room and it was cringing at me. He had never really understood what she was afraid of, not then, because the moon was a familiar thing, and the man in the moon was something she loved.

Now, he thought he could see what had disturbed her during those few frantic nights. The man in the moon was something she had known from her storybooks, but that same man cringing at her was something new entirely, something threatening and unpleasant and secret, a bastardisation of what she had once known.

And that was why Doug felt like he did now. With death approaching, his daughter scared him because she was acting as she never had before. She was still Gemma, but she was a strange Gemma.

He would not have time to come to terms with this new strangeness. He would have to live with it, and die with it.

“She’s trying to tell us something,” Peter said.

“Huh?” Doug could not look away from his daughter. If he did, something might happen.

“Gemma is trying to tell us something. She’s imparting information … ideas, theories, histories … she’s throwing a jigsaw at us and asking us to complete it.” He was becoming more animated now, standing up, pacing as he drank and thought. His expression was wide and frank, not narrow and sardonic as usual.

Doug shook his head. “Peter, she’s terrified. She’s seen people dying on TV in the last couple of days, she saw … she saw a bunch of men raping women in the road. I don’t think Lucy-Anne covered her eyes quickly enough …” He trailed off. Lucy-Anne was coming back, wringing her hands, sitting next to Gemma and trying to soothe her out of whatever hyperactive trance she was in.

Peter glugged another glassful of wine and gave himself a refill. “It’s like she’s reliving the life of humanity in the face of its end. Flashing our collective memories in front of us before we drown.”

“She’s just rehashing stuff she’s heard.”

“You know that’s wrong, Doug. Don’t you?” Peter held out his hand as if offering some invisible truth. “It may be incredible, but what’s more incredible than the here and now?”

Doug looked away from Gemma and felt something lift from his shoulders, some strange weight of responsibility, as if the old man’s words had convinced him that none of this was his fault. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply, smelling the wine Lucy-Anne had spilled.

“So what is she trying to say?” He thought to humour Peter, but as he spoke he realised he was curious. And, perhaps, there was a spark of truth in the old man’s mad words.

Peter shrugged, but he was twitchy now, more animated than before. “I don’t know. That there’s hope, perhaps? A way to stop all this?”

Doug barked a short, bitter laugh. “And we’ll be able to do it, will we?”

Peter frowned, then shook his head. He stared down the valley to the south where somewhere over the horizon past, present and future was being nulled. “Of course not. But it would be one bitter irony, wouldn’t it?”

That made them go quiet, all except for Gemma. One bitter irony, Doug thought. Oh yes indeed.

He looked at Gemma, listened to what she was saying and tried so hard not to find sense in any of it.

It did not work. He found sense. They all did.

Gemma fell back into an uneasy trance, but she never stopped talking. Even as she slouched down into Lucy-Anne’s arms and her head drooped to one side, the endless monologue continued, spewed out like good breath fleeing bad flesh. A few birds landed in a nearby tree and twittered and cocked their heads, perhaps listening, perhaps not. And what would they hear, Doug thought? Unknowable banter, or unbearable truths? Because wherever Gemma was recalling all this from … or reciting it … it was beginning to hurt.