The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

by M. John Harrison

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; General Fiction

Synopsis

*WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2020*

*A New Statesman Book of the Year*

'A mesmerising, mysterious book . . . Haunting. Worrying. Beautiful' Russell T. Davis

'Brilliantly unsettling' Olivia Laing

'A magificent book' Neil Gaiman

'An extraordinary experience' William Gibson

Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2020, this is fiction that pushes the boundaries of the novel form.

Shaw had a breakdown, but he's getting himself back together. He has a single room, a job on a decaying London barge, and an on-off affair with a doctor's daughter called Victoria, who claims to have seen her first corpse at age thirteen.

It's not ideal, but it's a life. Or it would be if Shaw hadn't got himself involved in a conspiracy theory that, on dark nights by the river, seems less and less theoretical...

Meanwhile, Victoria is up in the Midlands, renovating her dead mother's house, trying to make new friends. But what, exactly, happened to her mother? Why has the local waitress disappeared into a shallow pool in a field behind the house? And why is the town so obsessed with that old Victorian morality tale, The Water Babies?

As Shaw and Victoria struggle to maintain their relationship, the sunken lands are rising up again, unnoticed in the shadows around them.

Release date: June 25, 2020

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 488

Sample

1

Spending All Day with the Dead

During his fifties Shaw went through a rough patch. That was how he put it to himself. His adult life had been, until then, perfectly normal. He had been determined on normality. Perhaps that had been the problem. Anyway, his life lost shape and five years were expended on nothing very much. They slid into themselves like the parts of a trick box and wouldn’t open again. He would wake up to himself with utter clarity in – say – a crowded first-floor noodle bar at night, talking to people he didn’t know while he looked down into a street full of brand-new motorcycles. Then everything would slip away again, to be lived at one remove for a week or two.

A woman he met – one of several who instinctively discarded him during that period – came closest to defining what had happened to him. Her name was Victoria, and on greeting someone new her habit was to announce that she worked in a morgue. ‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ she would say vaguely, however you responded to that, ‘but then I’m someone who saw her first corpse when she was fourteen.’

It was an effective line, especially in a Hackney pub on a wet Monday evening. A doctor’s daughter already in her forties, Victoria had bleak red hair, an eroded look and the studiedly flat humour of the high-functioning romantic. She was one of those people only partly aware of their own nervousness; half detecting that agitation, she would project it onto you, and say, ‘You haven’t really got time for me now, have you? I can tell from your voice.’ Shaw found it confusing at first. Some discipline was required, or you would be caught up and, becoming nervous in turn, start fulfilling the prophecy by looking at your watch. The night they were introduced she was drinking heavily, obsessed with something her father had once told her about a subspecies of people born looking like fish.

‘Truly,’ she said. ‘Fish.’ She opened her eyes quite wide. ‘Don’t you think that’s amazing?’

Shaw didn’t know what to make of her.

‘I’ve never heard anything like it,’ he answered truthfully. He was more interested in the morgue. ‘How weird is that,’ he suggested. ‘Spending all day with the dead.’ To this she replied, with an inexplicable bitterness and as if referring to some pivotal event in her own life:

‘Well, at least they never answer you back.’

Victoria, whose surname was either Norman or Nyman, at that point Shaw wasn’t sure which, wanted to be talked into something, but that left him only the fish people to work with. Her father had described them as living in South America or somewhere similar. Most of them were born male, though it was women who carried the gene. They could live normally, do everything a human being could do. Isolated in deep estuarine valleys west of the Andes – perhaps stronger, certainly more intelligent than the ordinary tribes which had cast them out – they formed communities of their own, which, though small, survived and even thrived.

‘If that’s so,’ Shaw said, ‘why aren’t there more of them? Why haven’t I ever seen one?’

Victoria laughed the way laughter is reproduced on the internet: hahahaha. ‘Because this isn’t South America,’ she reminded him. ‘It’s Columbia Road. Anyway, it was just a joke of his on a little girl.’ She tapped her empty glass encouragingly, and when he got back from the bar added, ‘Perhaps you have seen one. Perhaps we’re all fish-people. Of one sort or another.’

They met a couple more times, went to bed, argued back and forth in the way people do when they’re just slightly more than attracted to one another; but when, one night at the Spurstowe Arms, Shaw tried to put things on a more permanent basis, she shivered. ‘You seem like a decent man,’ she said, holding his hand briefly across a table littered with empty glasses and the remains of potato ravioli with wild mushrooms, ‘but you’ve forgotten what everything’s about.’ He wondered if he had. If he had, how would he know? What would be the epistemology of that? The rain was coming down outside the pub. People were running in and out with coats over their heads, laughing. Shaw had lost his nerve, Victoria went on to say, and she didn’t think she could handle someone else’s anxieties in addition to her own. ‘To be honest, I’ve never met anyone in such a panic.’ At the time this assessment seemed less hurtful than meaningless. Later he would have more than one chance to appreciate the clarity of it. Meanwhile life drew itself closed as suddenly as cheap curtains and they saw less of each other.

Shaw’s problem wasn’t a breakdown. It was too late to be a midlife crisis. It wasn’t any of the predictable things. Perhaps, he thought, these periods of retraction happen in a life; perhaps you can’t be on all the time. The moment he felt free of it, he redirected himself like a parcel, as far from Hackney as seemed humanly possible; fetching up south and west of Hammersmith Bridge in a quiet suburban badlands between East Sheen and the Thames, bounded by Little Chelsea on one side and Sheen Lane on the other. There he rented a room in a Georgian house that smelled of dogs and fried food.









2

Washed Up

There was no wharf on Wharf Terrace and no evidence there had ever been one. Authentic Georgian frontage remained for about half the length of the street, but the houses behind it had been subdivided long ago into warrens of small low-ceilinged rooms. Shaw’s room at number 17, which he took furnished, was at the very top of the house. Almost filled by a single bed and a stunted-looking wardrobe, it smelled like a charity shop. He thought that in better days it had been a passage or landing of some sort, which had served the more spacious room next door. From the window he could see between buildings to the Thames, where squalls of rain hung across the tideway in the mornings. There was a garden at the rear, full of dusty buddleia.

Number 17 stood too far back to catch the river’s fogs; nevertheless it always seemed damp. Everyone there seemed to be someone else’s subtenant. Most of them were as suspended in their lives as Shaw himself. They came and went on a weekly basis. A smaller, more permanent core had the beginnings of careers over in Hammersmith or Fulham: though they would stay longer, places like this would be, in the end, less of a way of life for them. When the time was right they would move not on but up, to nicer rentals, to homes of their own, to the provinces. Meanwhile they had taken on some of the smell of the house itself. Above that they wore a layer of soap, antiperspirant and something Shaw couldn’t identify at all except as the smell of success. The men wore irreproachable Paul Smith suits and Ted Baker shirts from Covent Garden; the women were in middle management at Marks & Spencer – it was pretty full-on, you’d hear them say, but worth it for the security. Six in the morning, they left for their daily 7k in Richmond Park, each one gait-perfect, Pilates-balanced, thin as a ceramic knife in their BAM base layer and compression tights; at the weekends it was swim and spin.

The women, particularly, presented Shaw to himself as a paradox: on one hand he didn’t seem to exist for them; on the other, his retro bowling shirts, teenage jeans and used-looking skate shoes were clearly an irritant. When he crossed them on the landings in the evening, talking in their twos and threes, his ready smile went unacknowledged and conversation wasn’t resumed until he had moved off. He didn’t expect more.

From the start he was aware of something odd going on in the room next to his. The first afternoon it was open-throat singing, which he associated vaguely with Radio 4; a thud that shook his floorboards; and a voice saying, distinctly, ‘Damned!’, followed by silence as loud as a sound. Then open-throat again, or perhaps sobs. Shaw smiled and carried on unpacking. By now he was used to partition walls and the noises you heard through them.

Unpacking didn’t take long. He was used to that, too. He’d salvaged a few bruised cardboard boxes, contents undecided, from whatever discredited life he’d lived before his crisis; otherwise only clothes, which, folded loosely, still failed to fill an eighty-litre tarpaulin bag. Among the IT-sloganised T-shirts and washed-out Muji underwear were interleaved layers of paperwork – tax forms, receipts, severance notices from this or that HR department. He also found a travel clock, a second-generation smartphone the battery of which wouldn’t hold a charge, and two or three unread ‘modern classic’ novels including Pincher Martin.

As soon as he had retrieved and rehabilitated what he could, Shaw went next door to introduce himself. No response: though when he knocked he thought he saw the door shiver briefly in its frame, as though the occupant had pulled at it from inside then suffered a change of mind. The landing was cold. A little river-light filtered in through its small barred window. Commuter traffic could be heard building up on Mortlake Road. Shaw put his ear to the door. ‘Hello?’ he called. Just above the skirting board, he saw, the plaster was bruised and dented as if, on some bored afternoon long ago, someone had kicked their way methodically around the landing walls. Feeling exhausted by the emotional investment this project must have required, he retreated to his own room, where he imagined next door a figure in shirt and underpants sitting hunched on the edge of a bed in the gloom. Someone like himself, trying to decide whether to open a door.

For a week or two, that was how things went.

He knocked again. He Blu-Tacked a piece of paper to the door – Hi, I recently moved in next to you – and took to waiting just inside his own room until he heard movement on the landing, at which he would pull open his door. On springing this ambush, all he ever caught was a glimpse of a retreating back. Meanwhile there was coming and going on the stairs, especially at night. Voices were raised. Two in the morning, someone dropped a heavy object on the landing, while downstairs someone else leaned on the bell-push or shouted indistinctly from the street. Next door’s sash window, its frame warped by years of river fog, slid up with a long grunting sound. Next day Shaw might glimpse a figure making its way quickly across the landing to the communal bathroom, which it occupied for longer than a normal person; afterwards there was a smell in there. All of this seemed curiously old-fashioned. It seemed like behaviour from the fifties and sixties of the previous century, when the occupants of bedsitters across London, from Acton to Tufnell Park, were forced by a rigid if deteriorating public morality to pursue, in a kind of furtive dream, lives which would now seem perfectly normal.



South-west London was convenient for Shaw. His mother already lived there, in dementia care the other side of Twickenham on the A316.

The first time he visited after his move, he found her standing in the downstairs common room as if she had just turned away from someone else, a tall angular woman in a heather-coloured wool skirt and cashmere twinset, bent a little at the waist, staring out of the window into the empty garden. She was repeating, ‘The days pass so quickly. The days just pass so quickly,’ and her shoulders were rigid with something between anxiety and anger. He convinced her to go upstairs with him to her room, where he held her hand until she seemed to relax. Even then she didn’t acknowledge him, only stood in the middle of the floor and whispered: ‘It’s better out there now. I’m going to do some gardening.’

‘Come and sit down first,’ Shaw tried to persuade her.

‘Don’t be such a fool,’ his mother shouted. ‘I don’t want to sit down. I’m going to do some gardening, but first I must find my boots.’

‘Come and sit down, and I’ll see if they can make us some tea.’

She turned her head and shoulders away from him and shrugged. ‘When I was younger I wouldn’t have been seen dead in clothes like these,’ she said distantly.

‘I can believe that,’ Shaw said.

‘They won’t make tea. We can’t expect them to make tea at this hour.’

‘Let’s try anyway. Let’s see what we can do.’

‘Oh where are my boots?’ she asked herself, in the voice of a four-year-old. She picked distastefully at the hem of her skirt. ‘Where are my good boots?’

Nothing was easier than tea, it turned out.

‘You see?’ Shaw said. ‘Nothing easier.’

‘People can be very helpful when it suits them.’

They drank their tea in silence. It was often hard to get her to talk, always hard to know what to talk about. He felt that she expected him to share memories, but when he brought them up she laughed bitterly and looked at the wall. ‘That time I had diarrhoea on the way home from school – do you remember? You were so angry about that!’ The things he expected to say would not, in the end, emerge. Their absence only filled the room further with rage. Shaw felt he should bring her news, but wasn’t clear, in the end, what news might be: how it might be constituted. He heard nothing from the family, for instance; neither, he suspected, did she. Family was a concept fraught with complexity for them both. To repeat the national news didn’t seem appropriate. In the end he defaulted to his own; most of the time, he knew, she wasn’t listening anyway.

‘This new place,’ he said, ‘I’m enjoying it—’

‘My mother was a real Christian,’ she said suddenly. ‘But never to us. Never to us.’ As soon as she had his attention, she put her cup down carefully and turned to the window. ‘It will snow soon.’

Shaw put his cup down too. The tea had a metallic taste, as if it was dissolving a spoon.

‘It’s May,’ he reminded her.

‘I love the snow. When we were young it fell as big as pennies on the sea.’ And then, in a voice not quite her own: ‘I fell out of love with my parents quite soon. They humiliated me before I was five years old. I was a small, friendly girl, but nervous. Always nervous. I liked the beach. I liked fishing. I liked being up early and late.’ She laughed dismissively. ‘Too anxious on my own, too anxious in company. I was happiest with one other person. I was frightened of my father and very frightened of my grandfather. My grandfather gave me an old sea-fishing rod he had finished with, but I preferred to go fishing with my uncle.’ A huge smile transformed her face. ‘Snow on the sea!’

‘It’s summer,’ he said. ‘It won’t snow now.’

She stared out of the window, smiling quietly.

Shaw tried again. ‘I’m enjoying this new place,’ he said, ‘but it’s not very clean.’ He already avoided the bathroom, which was windowless, bigger than the dimensions of the landing seemed to permit, and lit by a forty-watt energy-saving bulb that filled it with an even yellowish-brown gloom. Centrally placed on the eroded chessboard lino stood an old-fashioned cast-iron tub, with chipped enamel, hard-water minerals concreted around the taps and a permanent chemical-looking tidemark. There was a separate shower stall. A fungal smell came up from the drains whenever you ran the hot water. ‘The first time I went to the lavatory I thought I saw something in the bowl! I didn’t feel as if I could use it until I’d cleaned it out.’ He had tried to clean the bath, too, prior to washing some of his underwear in it one Friday night when the house seemed empty. The stain remained, cupric, slimy, recording some mysterious high-water event.

‘How old are you?’ his mother said. ‘Grow up.’

Shaw shrugged.

‘Don’t muck about,’ she warned him. ‘Don’t wait for your life to start. I was always waiting for my life to start. Everything that happened seemed like a good beginning, but it turned out to be the thing itself.’

‘Everyone feels like that about their lives,’ Shaw said.

‘Do they? That’s what they all feel, is it?’

Neither of them spoke for a moment. She watched something in the garden. Shaw watched her. ‘Everything that should have happened in my twenties,’ she went on, ‘was stretched out over a lifetime. I get to seventy-five and I’ve just about collected enough tokens to begin.’ Then she sat down, filled her mouth with tea, bent over the table and – making eye contact with him like a toddler – allowed it to dribble out over the tablecloth. ‘What have I got left?’ she said. ‘Tell me that.’ He hated her moments of clarity, but they never lasted long.

By the time he got up to leave, she was looking out of the window again. She let him pull the door half closed before she said in a surprised voice, ‘John! John! Don’t just go like that!’ but as soon as he turned to go back in began repeating, ‘The days pass so quickly,’ again until he shrugged and let the door swing shut behind him.

‘I’m not John, Mum,’ he said. ‘Try again.’

Policy at the home was that the staff address their charges by forename; but they always called his mother ‘Mrs Shaw’.



He found a landline in his room and had it reconnected. A few days later, the phone rang and a voice said, ‘Is that Chris?’

‘No one called Chris lives here,’ Shaw said.

‘Not there? Chris?’

‘You must have the wrong number.’

The voice recited a number, which Shaw half caught.

‘No one called Chris here,’ he said. ‘Are you the engineer?’ There was no answer. ‘You’ve got a wrong number, I think.’ As he closed the connection, he heard the voice say, ‘I must have a wrong number then.’ Immediately he began to worry that, mishearing the name Chris and failing to recognise someone he knew, he had missed his first call. He picked the phone up again and dialled 1471, in case he could identify the number he’d been called from. He went through his things in search of an address book he thought he might have kept, but that turned out to be a ten-year-old diary, the 1 January entry in which read, ‘Be more outgoing.’









3

The Fish Talisman

The same day, he called Victoria Nyman.

‘Hello, stranger,’ she said. ‘What happened to you?’

‘What happened to you?’

‘Not much.’ She thought for a moment. ‘I bought a car. That’s exciting, isn’t it? I always meant to.’

And then after a pause, ‘Are you OK?’

Shaw said he was fine. He had to admit that the place he lived now had its drawbacks – he felt bound to mention the toilet bowl, the noises from the room next door – but the river was close by and he was getting into the psychogeography of that. He was walking a lot, he told her, making his way dérive by dérive up the Brent River from the boatyards at its confluence with the Thames, past Wharncliffe Viaduct and the zoo, towards the A40 at Greenford. It was all hospitals and sports parks, mud and child murder up there. ‘But some surprisingly nice pubs, too.’ Victoria received this report in silence; then suggested that, to her at least, he seemed a bit low. Was he doing anything tonight? Because she could easily drive over after work – perhaps bring a house-warming present? Shaw said no, it was too far out of her way, she shouldn’t bother, he was fine really.

‘Really, I’m fine.’

‘Exactly what way of mine,’ Victoria asked, ‘would that be out of?’ She added: ‘Trust me, you sound like shit.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Don’t thank me until you’ve seen the present.’

‘At first I thought you said “house-warning”,’ Shaw said.

‘Expect me at seven, or if the traffic’s bad, midnight.’

Suddenly anxious, he suggested, ‘Let’s not meet here. Let’s meet somewhere else.’ So they met at a pub on King Street, Hammersmith, then ate tandoori trout at one of the mid-market Indians just up from the Premier Inn. Victoria seemed nervous.

‘How do you like my hair?’ she said.

Thinned out in some way, centre-parted, chopped off with a kind of calculated incompetence a little above the jawline, it clung lankly to the sides of her face and head, curling out tiredly at the ends. ‘Neo-bluestocking,’ she said. ‘Very effective from certain angles, though I can see you don’t think so.’

Over the evening she drank a bottle of house red – ‘Nothing to see here. No change here’ – and talked about her car. Shaw said he would stick to beer. When he said he wasn’t much of a driver, she looked down at the charred tails and dyed red flesh of the remains of their meal, the filmy bones like the fossil imprint of a leaf, and said, ‘Who is? It’s not really about driving. I go to the coast a lot now.’ She laughed and made confused steering-wheel motions. ‘Up and down. Hastings and Roedean. Very slowly. Dungeness, of course.’ Then: ‘I think I’ve grown out of London.’ And finally: ‘I love the little spines of these fishes, don’t you?’

‘All I see,’ said Shaw, who felt better, ‘is my dinner.’

He then admitted: ‘I was in a bit of a state wh. . .