Blue Shifting (17 page)

Then, as he watched, one of the buggies, seemingly of its own volition, turned and scooted off down the path, soon disappearing from sight through the gate. He experienced a sudden dizziness that sometimes affects the senses when the brain is forced to deal with an optical illusion.

Then he became aware of more of these visual impossibilities: a rain shower had started, and a multi-coloured host of umbrellas bobbed through the air – with not a soul beneath them. A dog trotted along the path, attached to a lead but without its owner, a surreal take on those mime artists who walk invisible dogs on stiff leads. As he stared more closely at the heath, he saw the grass darken in the shape of footprints as invisible citizens took their morning walks.

Miller hurried downstairs and stared through the front window. He felt an immediate relief to see cars and vans passing down the street – then was overcome with a stomach-churning nausea when he saw that the vehicles were empty. Brief-cases and shopping bags swung through short, impossible arcs a metre off the ground. A carrier full of milk bottles shot down the neighbouring drive.

Shaken, he made his way outside. He stood in the middle of the pavement, staring up and down the deserted street, normally at this hour thronged with people making their hurried way to work. For as far as the eye could see, the street was deserted – as empty as a stage set for some end of the world film – but dotted with a tell-tale signs that people still existed: the floating bags and folded newspapers, the occasional push-chair.

A disembodied voice sounded close by: "Excuse me, please." And another: "Do you mind?" He must have presented an unusual sight to passers-by, as he turned this way and that, his arms held up in a gesture of amazement and mute appeal.

He took a few paces along the street, brought up short as he collided with the solid bulk of a man who growled: "What the hell? What do you think-?"

Off balance, Miller fell to his knees. He reached out instinctively – grabbed a leg. A woman screamed, pulled herself away. The sensation of touching someone he could not see was at once bizarre and terrifying.

He felt rough hands on his arms, dragging him to his feet. "What do you think you're up to?" someone said in his ear.

"I'm sorry, awfully sorry. Migraine. Terrible migraine..."

He indicated his front gate. "If you could just assist me..."

Invisible hands steered him on to his garden path, released him. His heart pounding, bile rising in his throat, Miller staggered back to the house and lay on the settee in the front room, trying to make some sense of what was happening to him.

One hour later he stood and crossed to the window, staring out with a sense of dread. Even as he told himself that what he had experienced earlier might have been some temporary hallucination, he knew what he would see. And sure enough: driverless cars motored down the street, dogs trotted by on ridiculously rigid leads.

He phoned Selwyn. His agent's baritone boomed in his ear, reassuring him that all was well with the world. "Miller! This is a surprise. How can I help you, m'dear?"

"Ah.... Just a social call, Selwyn. How are things?"

"Things?" Selwyn shouted, non-plussed. "What do you mean, things?"

"Look out of your window, Selwyn."

"Eh?"

"Do it, just for me. What do you see?"

After a moment's silence: "People, Miller. Millions of bloody people. What's all this about?"

Miller replaced the receiver without replying.

He remained indoors for three days, each morning checking to see if the world had returned to normal, only to find that the strange phenomenon still maintained. It seemed that the world out there was still functioning as it always had: he monitored the news on radio and television, and if anyone else had been afflicted with this strange...
malaise
... then no mention of it was made.

On the fourth day he realised that he would have to venture out for food and other provisions. For fear of repeating his mistake of the first day and colliding with innocent passers-by, it occurred to him that in the guise of a blind man he would be able to walk the streets in relative safety. People would avoid him, and he would have an excuse in the event of accidental collisions.

His life slipped into a manageable routine. He avoided his acquaintances in the writing world, turned down invitations to talk at libraries and schools, and made excuses when invited to the theatre.

His only visual link with his fellow humans was through the medium of live television, where he could paradoxically view people – presenters, pedestrians, athletes – without hindrance. As the weeks passed, he almost came to accept the fact of his strange condition.

Of late, though, he had been much given to wondering if what was happening was the result of some external factor, or some malfunction in his own sensory awareness. He could supply no explanation as to what might have happened to the world to make its citizens invisible to him alone, but nor could he bring himself to accept the alternative: that the aberration was within him, that, in other words, he was going mad.

~

Miller sat back in the padded seat of the taxi, the driver invisible and the steering wheel turning as if by remote control, and watched the empty world pass by outside.

They turned into Upper St. Martin's Lane. The taxi came to a halt, caught in the snarl of bumper to bumper traffic contrasting with the deserted pavements. It was a strange enough sight to see the streets of Hampstead and Highgate emptied, but Miller stared, his amazement renewed, at the fact of central London cleared of all its citizens. The city had about it a Sunday morning deadness. Here and there, as he stared through the window, he caught the surreal image of hamburgers and hot dogs disappearing down invisible throats, newspapers hanging open in the air like details from a canvas by Magritte.

The taxi halted outside Harrington's, his agent's unofficial office. Miller paid the driver and stepped out carefully, tapping his way across the pavement with his stick. He made it to the door of the restaurant without mishap and pushed inside.

A muted babble of conversation greeted him from a seemingly empty room: the effect was disconcerting, as if a film soundtrack had been dubbed on to the wrong scene.

Then Miller noticed the small signals that belied the emptiness of the restaurant. Knives and forks worked in precise, deliberate rhythms, the movements of the knives economical, used to cut and then laid aside, those of the forks more lavish as they were lifted from plate to mouth and back again. Miller found the trajectory of the assembled silverware mesmerising – something that, when the world had been normal, he had never really noticed.

A dessert trolley trundled across the room. Trays of food, held at head height, floated through the swing doors from the kitchen to their destinations.

Then he heard: "Miller? Good God, man! Miller, is it you?"

The conversation modulated. He imagined heads turned his way. The voice sounded again, closer this time. "Miller – what happened, for Godsake?"

He felt Selwyn's meaty grip on his forearm. He was drawn across the restaurant to the booth which over the years his agent had made his own.

Selwyn, with the misplaced solicitude of the sighted for the blind, manhandled Miller into his seat. He resumed his own seat opposite: Miller saw the plush velvet of the backrest dimple. "Out with it, man! What the hell happened? Why didn't you tell me?"

Miller shook his head, less concerned by the question than by the strange phenomenon of the disembodied baritone. For the ten years that Selwyn Rees had acted as his agent, the big Welshman had been a whole entity, a physical presence – six-feet tall, built like a prop-forward, ruddy-faced – and now Miller found it almost impossible to relate to Selwyn reduced as he was to merely a voice.

He shrugged. "Just last week," he said, relaying the story he'd rehearsed in the taxi. "I fell down the stairs. Concussed myself. When I came to..." He shrugged. "The specialists say that my sight might return – they're still running tests."

Selwyn's brandy glass rose; a goodly quantity of the amber liquid disappeared down his gullet. "God, I don't know what to say. What about work-?"

Miller smiled. "Don't worry, Selwyn. I'm still writing."

"Thank God for that. Hell, this has come as something of a shock."

They ordered lunch, Miller selecting steak and kidney pie with new potatoes from the menu which Selwyn read out. He ordered a bottle of house white, then said: "You mentioned that something had come up?"

Selwyn's brandy glass bobbed in an acknowledging gesture. "Sorry to dump bad news on you like this, Miller. Bloody Worley and Greenwood – they've reneged on the contract for the third Kid Larsen book. Payment in full, of course – but they won't be publishing the book. 'Present financial climate' and all that crap."

"Any chance of placing the third elsewhere?" Miller asked. He had to stop himself from smiling at the charade of addressing a seemingly empty room.

"Think about it, man. If you were a publisher, would you touch the third book in a trilogy that wasn't selling that well?"

"Touché."

Their meals arrived. Miller watched the plates slide across the restaurant as if by a miracle of anti-gravity. He heard the waiter murmur that the plates were hot. Selwyn tucked into his sirloin with gusto, knife and fork working like pistons.

They discussed the state of the country – for about three minutes – before conversation returned, as ever, to the small world of publishing. Miller caught up on the gossip he'd missed out on over the months, nodded absently as Selwyn recounted the merry-go-round of editorial sackings and appointments.

They were sipping coffee when Miller said, "I've almost finished the latest, so I'd appreciate it if you'd look out for more of the usual." Meaning the hackwork with which he filled the weeks between his own work.

His words were greeted with a lengthy silence.

At last Selwyn said: "Miller – I don't usually hand out advice. You're a pro, you know what you're doing. But-" A pause. "Look – how about slowing down? Being a bit more... how should I put it? Selective. I know it's none of my business – and tell me to keep my bloody nose out if you disagree – but do you really need all this hackwork? Slow down. Take more time over the big projects. A couple of your latest books have been bloody good – and you know me, I don't hand out compliments lightly."

Miller nodded. "I appreciate your concern. You know how I like to work – I can't stop, and I work hard even on the rubbish-"

"I know you do. And it's appreciated – you don't know how glad editors are to have more than just a competent job handed in. But... between you and me, you're better than all that stuff." The coffee cup tipped at lip-level. "Okay. Sermon over. I've said enough."

At that second, movement flashed on the periphery of Miller's vision.

He turned his head in time to see – to his utter amazement – the quick figure of a young woman dash past a table on the far side of the room. It happened so fast that only after seconds, when the girl had disappeared through the door, did it come to him that he had seen, for the first time in six months, actually
seen
another human being... In retrospect, he told himself that the girl had even paused in her escape from the restaurant, stopped briefly and looked across the room at him – but the more he considered the episode, the more he told himself that it had been nothing other than the effects of too much white wine.

Selwyn was saying, "Well... I suppose duty calls-"

"Did you see anything just then?" Miller said. "I mean... I thought I heard... I don't know. Did someone just run through...?" He trailed off, realising how ridiculous he was sounding.

"You must be hearing things, Miller. Now, the bill. This is on me, and no protests."

Five minutes later Selwyn escorted Miller from the restaurant and insisted on finding him a taxi. As he was carried home through the London streets jammed with traffic but devoid of people, Miller sat back and considered what he had seen in the restaurant – if, indeed, he had seen anything at all.

~

Over the next few days Miller lost himself in finishing the last two chapters of the novel and beginning the second draft. When he considered the episode in Harrington's, he told himself that a combination of drunkenness and some desire of his subconscious had conjured the apparition of the young woman. He concentrated on his work, immersing himself in the reality of his fiction that was more real than the world outside. His life slipped into a comfortable routine of writing, eating, and strolling across the heath at sunset.

Then, just as he had succeeded in convincing himself that the woman had been nothing more than a phantom of his imagination, he thought he saw her again.

He was emerging from the deli with provisions for the next day or two when he caught a flash of white from the corner of his eye. He turned quickly, looking across the road. He could have sworn that he glimpsed the girl's slight figure dash behind the hedge of the house opposite. He moved to the edge of the pavement, staring. His manner must have appeared odd to anyone nearby – a blind man staring intently at something on the other side of the road.

Through the foliage of the hedge, he made out a fractured pattern of white material and brown skin as the girl ran away down the side of the house and out of sight.

Paradoxically, far from convincing him of the girl's physical reality, the sighting only served to convince him further that she was the product of his own subconscious: something about her elusiveness suggested that she was a figment, like the beguiling Sirens that down the years had called to him in his dreams, only to disappear with terrible, tragic finality upon his approach.

That night, after describing his sighting of the girl, Miller wrote in his journal: "There are two possibilities, of course. Either she exists in reality, or in my imagination. The latter possibility is less worrying – the thought that she is a product of my frustrated libido is one with which I can cope, as I have coped with similar frustrations over the years. The former possibility, that she really exists out there... this throws up a series of worrying questions. Why is she the only human being I can see? Is she following me – as the two sightings in different parts of London tend to suggest – and, if so, why? What could she want with me? I have to admit that over the months I have come to some psychological accommodation with what is happening. The advent of the girl upon the scene would serve only to confuse matters."