Slade House: A Novel by David Mitchell

Author:David Mitchell [Mitchell, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780812988079
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-10-26T23:00:00+00:00

I nodded off for long enough to slip into a stressful dream. I dreamed I got cold feet about meeting Fred Pink here this evening. Halfway across the cold park I turned back, but a black and orange jogger sprayed a blast into my face from an asthma inhaler. Then I saw a woman in a wheelchair being pushed by Tom Cruise. Her face was hidden by a raincoat hood and Tom Cruise said, “Go right ahead, take a look.” So I lifted the hood and saw she was me. Then we were traveling down a narrow alley and someone said, “You pay an army for a thousand days to use it on one.” Last of all was a black slab like the black slabs in 2001: A Space Odyssey and as it opened I heard Sally saying, “You have to wake up,” so I did and here I am, alone, in the upstairs room at The Fox and Hounds. As arranged. It’s seedier than how I remember it from 1997. The tables are scarred, the chairs are rickety, the wallpaper’s scraggy and the carpet’s the color of dried vomit. My tomato juice sits in a smeary glass. Liquified roadkill. The Fox and Hounds is on its last legs, clearly. Downstairs there are only six drinkers at the bar and one of them is a dog for the blind—and on a Saturday evening. The sole nod to alcofrolic jollity is an old-time enameled Guinness ad, screwed to the wall over the blocked-up fireplace, with a leprechaun playing a fiddle for a dancing toucan. I wonder if that leprechaun noticed Sally nine years ago, and if she noticed him. They sat up here, the “X-Files Six.” Several witnesses saw my sister and her friends, but nobody agreed at which table they had been sitting.

I press my forehead against the dirty windowpane. In the street below Fred Pink’s still having his “quick catch-up with Misters Benson and Hedges.” The streetlights are coming on. The sun sinks into tarmac-gray clouds, over one-way mazes of brick houses, gasworks, muddy canals, old factories, unloved blocks of flats from the sixties, multistory car parks from the seventies, tatty-looking housing from the eighties, a neon-edged multiplex from the nineties. Cul-de-sacs, ring roads, bus lanes, flyovers. I wish Sally’s last known place of abode could have been prettier. For the millionth time I wonder if she’s still alive, locked in a madman’s attic, praying that we’ll never give up, never stop looking. Always I wonder. Sometimes I envy the weeping parents of the definitely dead you see on TV. Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable hemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed. Like Schrödinger’s cat inside a box you can never ever open. For the millionth time, I flinch about wriggling out of inviting my sister to New York the summer before she started uni here. Sally wanted to visit, I knew, but I had a job at a photo agency, fashionista friends, invitations to private views, and I was just starting to date women.

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