The Countenance Divine

by Michael Hughes

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

'Michael Hughes writes like a brilliant cross between David Mitchell and Hilary Mantel' Toby Litt In 1999 a programmer is trying to fix the millennium bug, but can't shake the sense he's been chosen for something. In 1888 five women are brutally murdered in the East End by a troubled young man in thrall to a mysterious master. In 1777 an apprentice engraver called William Blake has a defining spiritual experience; thirteen years later this vision returns. And in 1666 poet and revolutionary John Milton completes the epic for which he will be remembered centuries later. But where does the feeling come from that the world is about to end?

Release date: August 11, 2016

Publisher: John Murray Press

Print pages: 352

Sample

01. One Sunday morning, at the end of the twentieth century, on Brick Lane market in London, a computer programmer called Chris Davison found an odd little thing. The old man who sold it, from a collection of other knick-knacks on a blanket spread on the ground, said it was a Practical Rebus. Chris didn’t know what that meant, but he didn’t want to admit it, so he nodded. ‘Oh yes, I see,’ said Chris.

Chris took the object in his hands. It was a kind of puzzle or toy made from hexagonal pieces of wood in a frame. Each piece had an image or a motif painted on it, but together they formed one overall design. The pieces could be interchanged, and every arrangement made a different pattern. He wondered if the person who made it had worked out every possible combination in advance, or if some of them were accidental.

It was a clever little thing. Chris liked it a lot. The wood was varnished and the paint had faded. It looked very old, though he knew you could never be certain. He paid the twenty pounds the old man asked. He was pretty sure that was far too much, but Chris felt sorry for him. His face was shiny and swollen, as though it had been burnt a long time ago. Chris tried not to make it obvious that he had noticed. He didn’t want the man to feel bad.

On the walk home, Chris had a funny feeling that something awful was happening nearby. Every time he turned a corner, he kept expecting to find someone lying dead in the street. He had a very clear image of it in his head. He knew it must be from a film he’d seen, but he couldn’t think which one.

He tried to ignore it. He had always felt safe in London, even though he did know people who had been mugged. This area was becoming fashionable, but there was still a lot of poverty. Chris was careful never to wear his Discman in the street, and not to carry his laptop unless he had to.

When he got home, Chris put the little wooden object on his desk by his computer. If he was stuck on something, or he wanted to take a break, he played with it. He arranged it in different configurations and tried to see something in each new pattern. He always did.

He wondered if he should bring it into work to show Lucy.

He decided not to.

Sometimes, when he looked at it for a long time, he had very strange thoughts. He had been alive for hundreds of years. The city was on fire, and he was hiding underground. He was making a tiny man out of clay. His hands were digging around inside a woman’s belly. The world was about to end, and it was all his fault. They felt like things he could remember, but he had no idea where they came from.

Other times he just held the little thing, and thought about the people who might have owned it and played with it in the past. He wondered if they had ever tried to imagine someone else having it after them. Once in a while Chris pretended that he was this person, living long ago, and the modern world around him was just his fantasy of what the future might be like. He enjoyed that.

When he was younger, Chris used to do the same thing. He would always try to imagine his life in the year two thousand. That was the beginning of the future. If only I could have a glimpse of myself then, he used to think, I would know who I’m going to be.

Now, it was only a few months away. It made him smile to remember how he once thought twenty-seven years old was far into adulthood. He had been certain that, by now, his life would have achieved its final form. In his young imagination, nineteen ninety-nine was the end point, the culmination of everything. Civilisation would have been perfected. Things would stop changing. History would be over.

These days, Chris never thought very much about the past. He didn’t own any other old things. He hadn’t taken anything with him when he first moved to London, and everything he had bought since was modern and new. When he thought about it, he realised the oldest thing in his flat was him.

He knew that wasn’t completely true. He knew that the materials his stuff was made from, the metal or the wood, could be any age at all. Everything was made of something else.

But this little thing he had bought was different. It just seemed to be itself. Chris couldn’t shake the feeling it had been meant for him. When he touched it, he felt a physical connection to an entire world that no longer existed.

02. As a child, Chris sometimes doubted that the past was real. He used to enjoy thinking that the world had come into existence when he was born, and it would end when he died.

If the family was on a long journey, he used to daydream that they were driving through a series of domes, each only a few miles in diameter. The domes were connected by tunnels. When it got foggy or cloudy, and he couldn’t see very far into the distance, that was to hide the tunnel. When the weather cleared, and he could see further ahead, that meant they were inside a new dome. Everything he could see was everything that existed. This fake world was laid out entirely for his benefit, to accommodate his movements, which appeared spontaneous to him but were actually controlled from somewhere else.

Other days, the past felt very real, but very far away. He simply understood the vast distance from then to now. He would stare out the car window, looking for signs of modern life in the countryside, and imagine he was explaining this strange world to a visitor from another time. That was his favourite game.

He still did it now, once in a while. He imagined he was giving a presentation to a room full of notable people from history, great thinkers and writers and leaders, all transported to the present. They were hanging on his every word. It was a dazzling performance, illuminating what had otherwise seemed a confusing and hostile place, in clear and simple terms.

He especially liked to explain to them how computers worked. He had honed this speech on flights and Tube journeys, in reveries during dull meetings, while lying in bed at night. He thought it was a shame he couldn’t actually give the lecture in public. He knew there were lots of people who didn’t understand very much about modern technology. No one ever bothered to explain it, and no one ever asked. As long as it worked, and it made their lives easier, they really didn’t care. It might just as well have been some kind of magic.

03. At primary school, Chris used to tell his friends he was an android. He remembered one day, when he couldn’t have been more than six or seven. The teacher asked them, for their homework, to find out from their parents what time of day they were born. He put his hand up and asked what if you weren’t born. He didn’t remember anything after that, except a sensation of blushing.

Even when he grew out of that delusion, he held on to the fantasy. He hated the human parts of himself that got tired, and needed the toilet, and had to eat. It was such a waste of time. He sometimes thought he preferred machines to people. They were efficient, hard-working, reasonable and obedient. That was how Chris saw himself. That was how he tried to be.

He wished he could be a cyborg. He would keep his identity, but have it work within a perfect artificial body. He had always been convinced that, by now, this should be possible. He was genuinely disappointed it wasn’t. He was still sure it would be, one day. He wished it would hurry up. He often got frustrated that he found so much of life so difficult. He had thought being an adult would be easier.

Sometimes Chris was afraid that everything could only get worse. He knew that any closed system left alone would eventually tend to decay. That was the essence of the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy increases. Just to keep things as they are, you have to constantly improve them. The only alternative is to sweep it all away and start again.

That was what Chris really wanted. He wished there was something he could do to make it happen. But he didn’t know what. So instead of making things better, the best he could do was stop them from falling apart.

04. Chris’s job was fixing the Millennium Bug. That was what most people called it, but in the industry it was known as the Year Two Thousand Problem.

The problem itself was very simple, and Chris enjoyed explaining it. Because the first computers had limited memory, a convention developed to identify years by using two-digit numbers, without a nineteen at the beginning, from double zero up to ninety-nine. By the time computers had enough memory for four digits, the convention had become a tradition, and no one questioned why it was done.

Decades later, most computers still didn’t know any better. They thought time itself only ran for a hundred years.

When the next new century came, exactly at midnight, as ninety-nine ended and double zero began, those computers would think that, instead of moving one second into the future, they had gone a hundred years into the past. They would have reached the end of time. Everything would start again from the beginning.

05. Chris knew that computers didn’t really think anything. They were just machines, which used fixed rules of logic to carry out calculations, faster and more reliably than we could.

But some of these calculations involved future events, and we’d forgotten to tell them that the future didn’t stop at the end of nineteen ninety-nine. As far as the computers understood, everything to come after that had already taken place long ago.

Some of them would figure out this was wrong, and tell us. Others would simply stop working. Some would continue to function, but give out inaccurate information. Others would be entirely unaffected. The trouble was, there was no way to predict which, and not enough time to check all of them just in case. By the time we realised this was a serious problem, it was already too late.

A lot of people, especially in America, talked about The End Of The World. Energy supplies would fail, planes would fall out of the sky, nuclear power stations would explode. The most anxious had sold their houses and moved to the middle of nowhere, with stockpiles of food and gold. A few of them were even looking forward to it. The corruptions of the modern world would be swept away. Life would be simple and pure again.

Chris thought this was over the top. There were power cuts all the time, computers crashed and systems failed. The world hadn’t ended yet. And even if everything went wrong all at once, the collapse-of-civilisation scenario relied on the belief that people were stupid and selfish, or would run around in circles panicking.

Chris imagined most people would probably get on with their day as best they could, which would include starting to fix things. In a couple of weeks, most basics would be up and running. A few months later, you’d hardly know anything had happened.

And that was in the worst-case scenario. As far as he could tell, none of this was going to happen. Even if the panic had been justified to start with, there was so much work going into fixing essential systems that probably no one would notice anything at all. It would just be another new year.

06. Chris liked his job. It was hard work and the hours were long, but he was very good at it, and the pay was excellent. He had never imagined he would earn that sort of money at his age, especially for doing something he enjoyed. But he had never thought very much about what he would do for a living. He had imagined something would just come up. It didn’t.

He had felt lost when he finished university. It was supposed to be the start of his life, but it felt like the end. He went travelling for a couple of months, because everyone he knew said he should, but he hated it. Other countries never felt completely real to him. Somewhere deep down, he couldn’t shake the sense that it was all put on, like a film set, or a show organised for tourists.

He started to feel that way too when he was in other parts of England, even around where he grew up. The pretty little villages were too perfect, as though they’d been rebuilt in the style of some imaginary past. And the other cities, he thought, were just trying to be London and not even getting close.

He had loved London since he first arrived at university. It gave him everything he didn’t have inside him. He felt like he couldn’t manage anywhere else. London was the only thing he was absolutely sure about.

07. Chris had asked around. One of his university friends had an attic room going in her parents’ place. They were moving abroad while they had the house done up, and they wanted someone to deal with the builders and keep an eye on the gardener.

He ended up staying for two years, even after the renovations were finished. He worked at a cinema for a while, selling tickets. Then he took a job with an agency that monitored the news. He had to read all the papers and watch news broadcasts, and highlight any mentions of a particular company or subject.

For a while, he became very interested in politics and current affairs. He thought he might like to be a journalist. But he didn’t know how to get started, and he didn’t know who to ask.

The agency closed down. Chris decided to sign on for a while. He thought it might be a good way to get some more training without paying for it.

They offered him a computer course, and he found he was good at it. Chris had done Computer Science for a while when he was at school, but it didn’t feel like a proper subject, and he thought the teacher didn’t understand it very well. This time, it was different. He felt at home. It reminded him of why he’d always enjoyed Maths at school. He liked to work out the underlying principles for himself, and then use them to solve a new problem.

It was the same with computers. You followed the rules, and applied logic. Everything was under control.

08. When the course finished, Tammy and Al, who ran it, told Chris they were very impressed with his work. They said they were starting a business in Year Two Thousand compliance and asked would he like to be involved.

He said yes. And that was it. He had a job. He rented a flat in Shoreditch, and got the bus in and out to the office near St Paul’s every day.

He was happy. This was who he was going to be.

09. When he first met them, Chris assumed Tammy and Al were a couple. Tammy explained to him one day that they had been for a bit, when they were students, but they’d decided they worked better as friends. She said she didn’t believe in mixing business with pleasure. Chris agreed.

He didn’t have a girlfriend. He lived alone, and he liked it that way. He couldn’t imagine sharing with someone else.

He had the occasional fling with girls he met when he was out at the weekend, friends of people he knew from university, but it never lasted more than a week or two. Sometimes Chris didn’t sleep with anyone for a couple of months. He didn’t really mind. It meant his life was uncomplicated, and he wanted to keep it that way. He liked knowing what was going to happen tomorrow, and he liked that it was very much the same as what had happened today.

10. The business began to take off. After a few months, there was more work coming in than they could handle. Tammy hired Lucy, another programmer. She said she wanted a woman because she hated being in an office that was all men.

Al wasn’t very happy. He said Lucy didn’t bring an especially pleasant vibe to the working environment. He said her chief modes of expression were silence and sarcasm. Tammy said she was perfectly fine once you got used to her. Chris didn’t know what to think.

11. Lucy was a sort of goth. She had dyed straight black hair. She always wore obvious make-up and she dressed entirely in black, with lots of silver jewellery. She had six or seven piercings in each ear. She had one in her nose, and one in her tongue, and she said she had one in her belly button, though Chris had never seen it. She told them one day that she had others in her nipples and in her clit, but Chris didn’t know whether to believe that.

She never seemed especially happy or unhappy, but she had plenty of attitude. She hardly ever smiled, and when she laughed it was usually mockery. Nobody ever saw her eat, though after work she drank as much as anyone. During the day she seemed to live on cups of tea and cigarettes. She smoked Marlboros, the red ones, and she always left the packet out on her desk where people could see.

Al told Chris he knew her type. She was all mouth and no trousers. Tammy said she was extremely good at her job, and no one would care how she looked or behaved if she was a man. Chris thought that was probably true.

12. Chris tried his best to be friendly to Lucy. He was confused and upset that she wasn’t friendly in return. He wasn’t used to that.

Al told him not to take it personally. He was wasting his time. She was the same with everyone.

Chris didn’t want to be everyone. He saw himself as a particularly kind person. It was important to him that he could get on with people. He hated the idea of anyone not liking him. As far as he knew, he had no enemies. He couldn’t really imagine what having an enemy would be like. He was sure they could never think worse thoughts about him than he sometimes thought about himself.

He had always tried to be good. He couldn’t understand why other people didn’t. Everyone knew that’s what you were supposed to do. He didn’t automatically like every single person, but he tried not to judge them. And he found that if you were pleasant and patient, they would almost always be the same in return.

Lucy wasn’t. She just stared at him, or ignored him completely.

13. Lucy wasn’t the same with everyone. She and Al developed a sort of bantering relationship. He was always having a go, and she gave it right back, in her deadpan northern accent. Chris couldn’t figure out if they were enjoying it, or if they actually hated each other. Sometimes he wondered if they weren’t sure themselves.

‘You know a lot of blokes think you’re a dyke,’ said Al one day. ‘I wish they did,’ said Lucy. ‘I don’t,’ said Al, ‘because I’m broad-minded.’ ‘Christ,’ said Lucy. ‘I’d hate to meet somebody narrow-minded.’ ‘You would indeed,’ said Al. ‘Your problem is, you think the sort of people you hang about with are most people.’ ‘Believe me, I don’t,’ said Lucy. ‘I hang about with the people I hang about with because I want to stay far away from most people.’ ‘Very wise,’ said Al. ‘The trouble with democracy, as Winston Churchill once said, is that most people are cunts.’ ‘I’m not sure Churchill said that,’ said Tammy. ‘Well he should have done,’ said Al. ‘Something we can agree on at last,’ said Lucy. ‘I’m not most people,’ said Al. ‘That’s not what Winston Churchill thinks,’ said Lucy.

14. Chris invented a private nickname for Lucy. He called her Dark Satanic Mills, because her surname was Mills, and because of how she dressed. It was a phrase from the hymn ‘Jerusalem’, which his dad used to make him sing when the rugby was on. Chris could still remember most of the words.

He never called her that out loud. He didn’t even know what it meant. It just seemed to fit her, and it made her seem less scary when he was thinking about her.

He thought about her a lot. When he asked himself why, he decided she was a puzzle he hadn’t solved yet. But he was convinced he could.

15. Chris made it his business to make friends with Lucy. He paid attention to what she talked about. He read reviews of the books and CDs she bought during lunch at Dillons and Our Price. He watched the films she mentioned, and then he mentioned them too.

She went on a lot about The Matrix, which she had gone to see three or four times. Chris thought she was a bit obsessed with it. When he went on the Web, he kept an eye on the various newsgroup theories about what it meant, so he could discuss them with her.

It wasn’t completely forced, Chris told himself. Everything was interesting, if you got into it enough. And since he didn’t have many interests of his own, he was happy to borrow someone else’s.

Lucy seemed wary at first. But he could see she was glad to find there was someone at work who was into the same things.

They started to take cigarette breaks together, and go out to get lunch, though she always had some excuse not to eat anything. She made him a couple of tapes of music she liked, and lent him some videos.

16. One day Lucy brought in a book for Chris to borrow. It was a graphic novel about Jack the Ripper called From Hell. She said it had just come out, but it was already her new favourite thing.

She told Chris the title was the return address given on a famous letter sent at the time of the real killings, in eighteen eighty-eight. It was posted to a man called Lusk, who was investigating the murders, along with a jar containing half the kidney of one of the victims. The letter claimed to be from the killer, and it said he had eaten the other half.

‘I’m not sure I understand the . . .