Cloudfall: Chapter 6
A Parting of Ways?
Contents | Chapter 3| Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7
“You are what?” said Ben, his eyes wide. Selina was filling boxes with papers and books. Selina blew her creeping fringe from her eyes and hefted a full container onto a growing pile. She stopped and put bunched fists on her hips, arms making triangles as she looked at Ben.
“I’m done here. Didn’t you hear me the first time?” she said.
She looked at him like he was stupid. He felt stupid. All she had said about leaving was that she was leaving. No explanation was given, and now Ben was standing in her office, watching it get packed into boxes.
“I don’t understand,” was all he could say as she started to fit books into a new cardboard box.
“Nothing to understand. I am finished here at the university,” she said, stopping again and looking at the office door. “Break the habit of a bloody lifetime, will you, and close a sodding door behind you. God, did your parents raise you to be a child forever?”
Ben turned and shut the door, padding back to the boxes, looking into the one she was filling, unable to meet her eyes. Selina threw the small book she held down and covered her forehead with one hand.
“I’m sorry, Ben,” she said, sighing.
She walked forward and lifted his chin with delicate fingers. The truth was, she rather liked it when he pouted like a child. She could see him as a little lost boy, his dark freckles even cuter than now. It wasn’t the first time she wondered if his mother had difficulty rebuking him as a boy. She looked into his eyes. Pleading was floating to the surface. Selina was not a sentimental woman nor often very affectionate, but Ben drew it out of her.
“We knew this day would come,” she said, stroking his cheek with her thumb.
“We knew the university wouldn’t have my back forever, not with the type of work we do in the lab. I’m the sacrificial lamb, the offering they can give to the ethics board while keeping the research alive,” said Selina.
“Was it the the Jacobs thing?” Ben said.
“That definitely didn’t help; too much bad PR, after all. But no, it wasn’t just that; likely, my attitude and the flirting with the Artemis people didn’t go down too well, either,” she said, dropping her hand from his face to his hand and holding it.
“They sacked you?” asked Ben. Selina just shrugged and went back to packing boxes. He suspected the Jacobs affair was ninety per cent of the trouble. Selina was not averse to a fight nor running foul of those in charge, but the Jacobs issue? That had been a red line. One she had exuberantly wheel spun across. Ben cleared her office chair of piled books and slumped into it, thinking of Annalise Jacobs. She had been the first notable failure of the lab. The bio-engineered frame and brain cot, an updated version of the unique design Selina had produced for Shay, hadn’t worked.
“Well, no more seizures,” Selina quipped after the surgery. A surgery that had ended with Annalise Jacobs’ time of death being marked.
“Did the Chancellor mention that quip?” Ben asked. Selina kept packing, her eyes on her work.
“Yes,“ she said, “that and my other conduct was questioned. They even brought up Shay, our relationship and threw in some bullshit about my questionable moral standards, if you can believe that.”
Ben sat quietly, staring at his shoes. He felt like his world was falling apart. With Shay off touring and Craig back in New York, he leaned on Selina much more. He was now teaching at the university part-time and had settled into a comfortable life in Glasgow. It was home now, and although NY was only an hour away nowadays, it might as well have been a light-year. His son, the political situation - it was all too much for him. The country was not the one he grew up in, and without family beyond his semi-estranged son, there was nothing for him to see and too many memories to wallow in. His life was here now, in his adopted home. Selina was peripatetic by nature, her work anchoring her to Glasgow for a decade. He knew her feet would be itchy and suspected her combativeness came from that place. She had been still for too long. Now, she was moving on, keen to follow a new path to the work that had become her life.
“Why mention Shay,” Ben eventually asked.
Selina filled the latest box and added it to the growing wall between her and Ben. She knew the answer, but it didn’t pay to say it out loud, at least not to Ben. All those years ago, he was in such need of hope, and she needed a breakthrough. So, who dares wins became her motto. And she dared, gambled heavily, and won hugely.
“I think it’s mostly because of our relationship. Shay was the first and best example of my device type working. I suspect that the ethics committee isn’t so enamoured with my use of arcane precedents to get Shay sorted, but then it has brought much funding into the university. Something the board and the Chancellor forgot to mention when I was in for summary dismissal,” said Selina.
She took another flat cardboard lid from the pile, examined her office and exhaled. There was still a lot to clear.
“Sod it,” she said, throwing the lid over her shoulder, “Fancy a drink?”
Rain dappled the glass facade of the Lian building. To Ben, the exterior was like a windsurf sail, frozen in time, full of wind, rounded and triangular. They walked past it, spilling from the campus out onto University Avenue, arm in arm, as the breeze nudged the onlooking trees and pushed them gently along.
“Nine years,” she announced.
“What’s nine years?” Ben asked.
She stopped, uncoiling their arms and turned to him, “Us, you ignoramus!”
She smiled at him, arm snaked back around his. He just nodded, distant as the grey clouds polluting the evening sky. In the light rain, everything seemed filthy. Ben turned the name Artemis over in his head; she said she had been “flirting” with them.
What does that mean?
He chewed on this, face troubled as they walked to Ashton Lane and its selection of pubs. Selina settled on Jinty’s out of habit, and “the Guinness will stop me starting on the whisky.”
Ben didn’t follow her logic, but he followed her lead as they found a seat in the narrow pub, a wall of Irish writers looking on, the Guinness as black as his mood. Beneath Yeats’ framed picture, it read, “Come away, o human child.”
Ben studied it, not looking beyond the first calligraphed line. Then he dipped his eyes down to the creamy head of his pint. Selina sank a third of hers before noticing her partner.
“Christ, I’m the one that got fired, not you,” Selina said.
Artemis.
The name took form in Ben’s mind now; he knew who they were.
“Artemis, as in the corporation? You said, ‘flirting’. I guess it’ll be more than ‘flirting’ now, culminating in you leaving,” Ben said, finally drinking from his pint.
She puffed her cheeks.
“There’s only so much mileage in the little boy act, Ben.”
His name as accusation, a challenge to look up. He accepted the challenge, not counting on the furious gaze he would receive.
“I get bagged today, and all you can think about is you? Christ, man!”
The barman shot Selina a warning glare, which she ignored. Her volume caught the attention of other drinkers, too, and Ben squirmed in his seat. He sipped his pint, barely getting beyond the head. Selina drained hers, got up, and went to the bar. Ben was left drowning in her wake when, before, he had just been bobbing slowly. He knew Artemis only worked off-world. And he knew too that she did not use the verb flirt without purpose. She returned to the table with a gin and tonic, and an expectant scowl. He pushed the pint away, sitting back and looking at her.
“When do you go then?” Ben asked.
Selina sagged but kept the scowl, which was less effective now.
“I don’t know,” she said, turning the gin tumbler in her hand. I haven’t accepted any offers.”
“You could have told me that they made an offer, Selina. You could have said.”
What was there to say? She found she had little or nothing to say. Nine years together, nine happy years, nine productive years, but nothing now. She had thought only of the work, the subjects, the intractable problems that lay ahead, and the latitude a private, off-world facility would grant her. She had not thought of him and hadn’t wanted to think about it, to ponder a goodbye. Was it because he would have stopped her? Would he get in the way of her work? What to say? Hey, it’s been great; thanks for the memories, but the show must go on, with or without you. Had she not thought of this precisely because breaking his heart would have shattered hers, too? She had emotionally budgeted for this outcome, knowing that if it were a choice between Ben or her work, there would be only one winner, with neither her heart nor his making the podium. But to budget was not to spend, it wasn’t a commitment, just an idea, a hope. She thought again of her work and hardened. She thought of how middle age was taming him, making him needy, taking his eye off the prize, off the purpose. Then she cast that thought aside. She was inventing a reason to be angry with him.
He had changed, though. He had been so motivated to come here, so insistent with Shay, getting her the procedure, the help she needed. He had moved his family here to Glasgow, and now he was just a little lost boy. Had she made him this plaintive, this needy? She couldn’t say. Nevertheless, they were here, and perhaps she was pathologising his sadness when she should recognise the man before her, emotionally stunted but caring and perceptive enough to know something.
She sighed loudly, drank long from her glass and then locked eyes with Ben.
“Venus is what they were talking about. Venera City. You know, the old military thing? Artemis bought it after that treaty, the one that was all over the news, you know the one?” Selina said, snapping her fingers.
“Interplanetary Non-Proliferation,” offered Ben.
“Yes, the very one. Well, that’s opened up some possibilities. You know, a chance to push the boundaries of research beyond these oh-so-hallowed walls. Hell, even beyond what the Russians or Africans would let you do. And the pay is hardly crap,” she said.
He just looked at her, “So you’ve thought about it. When were you gonna tell me?”
“I’m telling you now,” she said, not quite pulling off the hurt expression she was going for.
Ben sighed, picked up his pint and drained it. He stood up and walked out, leaving Selina alone to wallow in the dregs of her gin and tonic.
He walked in the light swirling rain, his collar high against the wind. He went north, up past the gentrified shop fronts of Byres Road. In summer, it was a mess of street cafes and market stalls. The street had long since given up on cars, as had much of the city. Instead, the median held tucked-away seating, safe from the autumn rain, huddled under gazebos and large awnings. He continued up to Great Western Road, stopping at the junction with The Botanic Gardens. It was closed, and the park was dark, so he opted to take the Great Western Road away from the city centre. He figured that if the weather breached his thoughts, he would jump down to the metro, maybe even ride it out to Renfrew or Paisley, where the line terminated. He had done this routinely when Shay had flown the nest straight after Craig, opting to explore the subterranean transport links rather than rattle about an empty house alone. He would pop up mole-like in different locales, often having a pint or food and then walking or pinballing across the public transport system towards his West End flat. He had asked Selina several times to move in and help to occupy the empty flat. He even suggested that she could place her antique desk from her flat in the circular expanse of the corner bay window. It looked out onto the park and the Kelvin beyond, across the street. But despite Selina enjoying sitting there when she stayed over, her love of that spot hadn’t convinced her to move in with him. Neither had his pleas or appeals to financial rationality, “Hey, what’s the point in us having two places to keep going?” he would routinely ask. And she would routinely demure.
Was she trying to tell me something?
If she was, he wasn’t listening close enough. Now, though, he was all ears. Staying two kilometres away was one thing, but one hundred and forty million was quite another. He knew of others who had taken the Artemis shilling and hadn’t regretted it. Some even returned to Earth regularly, managing two or more visits yearly. Could he manage that, though? He walked on, the rain soaking through as he wondered about Selina, himself and what to do next.
He didn’t know.
He felt her refusal to tell him the extent of her deliberations was deliberate, designed to save her blushes rather than upset him. She had just blurted it out, after all. Or maybe this was how she told him: just get it out in the open. She was not above callousness.
Nine fucking years man.
He stopped at Anniesland Park, standing on the mound looking out over the suburbs of Knightswood and the sandstone villas of Jordanhill. Beneath him was the metro and roadway, buried in the hollow of this artificial hill. He looked west into the wind. The rain was a tepid mist, forcing him to screw his eyes against it. He leaned on the panel at the railings. He ignored the glowing panel beneath him, the digitised story of how the park came to be. He remembered it was something about trams; it had been a chaotic junction before that, a mess of traffic lights and walkways. Now, it was a grassy hill, a node in two networks: the transport and parkland. From his vantage point, he could see where the old roads had been carved between the buildings, indelible scars covered by the sticking plaster of narrow, interlinked parks. These revived streets were freed from cars and returned to pedestrians and nature. He had marvelled at them when he first came to the city, trying to imagine New York doing the same and finding he could not. Cars, hustle and bustle were to The Big Apple what breath was to lungs. Tens of metres beneath him had been the centre of one of the city’s busiest junctions at one time. This intersection had roads going north, south, east and west, the four cardinal directions. Ben could turn around, walk east, back the way he had come. It was familiar, filled with apologies and his pleading. He could go left, southwards and take another familiar road, one that took him away from home and filled with pain, loss and despair. There was west, a chance to run, take a road not so unfamiliar but not frequently trodden. This road called to his inner child, telling him just to take off, not look back, and not handle or deal with anything; instead, to simply put miles between him and difficulty. Then there was north, a road that would eventually take him back to his flat, where he could ignore everything and just carry on, normality with added woe.
None of the four roads offered him what he wanted.
As the rain died, he stood facing west, back to the land of his birth all those miles across a tempestuous ocean. That was not home anymore, and he doubted it ever could be again.
So what to do?
He looked down at the glowing story of Anniesland Cross, the panel detecting his gaze and animating. He watched a video of cars awkwardly navigating the clumsy junction. The traffic lights were like overworked valves. The complexity and chaos came from one branch of the junction that did not follow the cardinal lines: Anniesland Road. It sat off to the southwest, an outlier. The path least travelled. Had his happiness in life not stemmed from taking such a path? He looked down the tree-lined street heading southwest and knew what to do.
Selina opened her flat door to a wet and grinning Ben a little after midnight. She had been napping, and the shadow of alcohol was shrinking against the unbearable light of a hangover. She was still dressed, and Ben guessed she hadn’t been home long.
“Can I come in?” Ben asked. Selina stood, shoulder against the door frame, eyes clouded with sleep and suspicion. The man in her doorway did not look the expected shade of contrite.
“Sure,” she said, relenting and moving to the living room. It was festooned with boxes, the archive ones from her office. Ben ignored them, moving to her and enveloping her hands in his.
“What’s going on here?” Selina asked, looking up into his impish gaze. The grin hadn’t budged, fixed from the first knock at her door.
“Look, I know you well enough to know you’ve made your mind up, but hear me out…”
She cut him off, “Ben, I don’t want to argue with you. I’m tired…”
He returned the favour, “No, no. No argument. I have a proposal instead. How about I come with you?”
Her eyes searched his for a long moment. He was serious.
Eventually, her throat dry, she croaked, “I couldn’t ask you to.”
He kissed her hand, “You didn’t have to. Without you here, all I have is an empty flat and some teaching, and I only do that so I can stay here with you. I made a big change once, and look how well that worked for me. For Shay. Besides, why the fuck not? You’ve packed anyway, so that’s one less job I have,” he said, looking around at the boxes, all from her office.
“I was angry with you, so I went back and finished packing,” she said, the glimmer of a smile playing on her lips.
In the morning they woke together, Selina going to make coffee whilst Ben studied the Artemis enrollment site on his phone. He spread the phone holo across the bed, the smooth pebble of his device buried in a bundle of projected papers. When Selina returned with the coffee, he sat and pondered how little a real argument in a relationship resembled TV and movies. One thing still bothered him, though, and he fought the urge to ask again just when were you going to tell me? He was scared this moment, this happiness, wouldn’t last, and the dark dejection of yesterday would return to smother his soul.
He could not face that again. Not yet.
The thought would live with him, but for now, it was a seed he would neglect to water, hoping it would never germinate.