Echo Cycle Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also available from Patrick Ewards and Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Before

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  After

  And then…

  A word about making things up…

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  ECHO CYCLE

  Also available from Patrick Ewards and Titan Books

  Ruin’s Wake

  ECHO

  CYCLE

  PATRICK EDWARDS

  TITAN BOOKS

  Echo Cycle

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785658815

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785658822

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  www.titanbooks.com

  First edition: March 2020

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  © 2020 Patrick Edwards

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  For Aurelia

  Before

  The day I went missing. That’s where I’ll start. Keep up.

  Remember that flight into Rome? I do. It stank of peanuts and old farts. I was relieved when we touched down at Ciampino that I was the first off. Easter was his predictable self, yelling ‘Monk’s going to puke!’, his idiot coterie guffawing along. I wasn’t sick from the flight (I was just pale back then) but I had a dry mouth and Italy was outside. The terminal was dusty in the corners where no one had bothered to sweep it up and the ceiling tiles were browned and cracked. Every one of the dozen automatic gates was out of order, so we were stuck with the resentful eyes of a bored border guard, contemptuous as he flicked his eyes from my passport to me, then back again. Stupid hat like a gabled roof, but I kept my opinions out of my face because I didn’t want my first day in the Eternal City to be in an immigration holding room. He looked to be the touchy kind.

  Did your father ever question why a rich school spent so little on its boys? Mine would have put it down to making us strong. He was full of shit. We didn’t even get the good flights that went to the new airport where things worked. No wonder the guard looked so pissed off.

  The baggage carousel sat still for what felt like an hour underneath a faded poster declaring Benvenuti a Roma, the Divine Augustus looking like he’d rather be standing anywhere else; two thousand years of majesty and gravitas undone by a half-arsed tourist-board committee from before the Confederacy.

  It’s not there anymore, Ciampino Airport. A relic of the old times, the whole lot of it from terminal to airstrip went the way of the bulldozer. But you already know that, don’t you?

  The carousel started up like it was being tortured. Bags were birthed through the flapping rubber strips in flurries, the baggage handlers no doubt going for a smoke between each load. Mine was almost the last which, of course, Easter and his crew found hilarious; it caught on some stray edge as I tried to haul it off, just as I stepped in a puddle of Coke or orange juice or piss, and before I knew it I was on my backside with my case half on top of me. The morons hooted like they’d blow the tops off their heads and I wished, lusted, for a magic red button that would make them cease to be.

  The coach sped us from the airport at breakneck pace, the driver (bald on top, forearms of a gorilla) carving in and out of traffic, impervious to honks from other vehicles. He gave as good as he got, Italian swearing drifting over the musty seatbacks with their gum-crusted ex-ashtrays. The jerks and veers had my stomach roiling and I just wished I could get out and walk.

  Not even a view, I thought, a wonderland of antiquity hidden behind flyover-underpass concrete sides. I could have been on any highway, anywhere in the world. I resolved to play a game, fixing my gaze on the outside and not allowing my eyes to budge, prohibiting them from following anything as we sped along. The concrete and metal became a monochrome blur.

  A flash of brightness, like a gap in dentures. Another.

  Openness.

  The city stretched out and I saw vaulted roofs, higgledy-piggledy tower blocks crushed together in clumps, dotted in between soaring facades, encolumned and engraved. Beyond, in the far distance, the skeletons of huge towers and the cranes building them stood in silhouette against a sky of dull, weak gold that illuminated but seemed to touch nothing. The vista was a postcard, a scale model, but I was electrified. This was where the great men of the world walked.

  Something hit me on the back of the head.

  Scrunched-up paper from a magazine, its glossed surface scarred by creases. In the back row, Easter and his fellow twats had adopted a thick silence, doing a terrible job of not gurning; a piggy one, Baden-Moncrief, I think, let out a snort.

  Easter caught my eye. ‘What?’ he cried, all mock outrage on the inflection.

  On cue the others dissolved into fits. I had a flash of a fantasy: me, a claw hammer and the balls to use it. It passed; I was an angry boy but worrying about my future made me meek.

  I knew the dance well: the charade was what he wanted, the play-act of it all that would get me flustered and wrong-footed. Not today, I thought, not here. Before the no-I-didn’ts and the shut-up-you-fucking-nerds could even get warmed up, I moved several rows forwards, hopefully out of range. On the way I passed Miliband Best – short, dull of eye and cursed with the only Lefty parents in the whole school. Another outcast (not that it was a club or anything – it was every man for themselves) and an unfortunate creature: bad at Games, didn’t play an instrument and, to boot, thick as pig shit. He’d been the only one in the year to take a paper that covered all three sciences in one and barely scraped that; Daddy was an Old Boy with a chequebook, so Quintus made it back in to the Lower Sixth but I bet he wished he hadn’t.

  I remember thinking: At least I know I’m clever; what does that poor fucker have? I know. We’re all wankers when we’re young, and me more than most.

  The vacant seat next to him was emptiness given mass. I mean, calling a child Miliband in that day and age, when things were already turning sour and lonely for anyone without an Albion Party membership. Not a snowball’s chance.

  The unlucky Millie was, by my forward move, made next in line to bear the brunt of the back row’s ‘games’ – you remember that the law of our jungle was that someone had to occupy the last rung on the shitty pyramid. I earned a look that said Thanks, dick and I tried to look apologetic, but I think my face just came out looking shifty.

  I dumped myself into an empty pair of seats and pressed my nose against the glass. Outside, the city had fled again.

  * * *

  True to form, the boarding house was a rickety, vertical refuse pile – I think you said something about it being little better than our dorms back at school. That narrow trench of street, where the sky was a pale slit; we were ushered through a set of gates, up a cracked drivew
ay almost entirely plugged by an ancient van, then through a set of double doors. The round-shouldered woman with a wild nest of hair and triangular glasses perched atop her hook nose cast baleful looks at us as we trooped past.

  My room, it was announced, was on the second floor. I was to share it with five others. Like we’re back in the third-form dorms for fuck’s sake, I remember thinking.

  By the time I reached the landing my breath burned in my chest and my bag was pulling my shoulder out of joint – I wasn’t sound of body in those days. Through a slit window I gazed down through the empty well of space at the core of the building; each floor was its own stratum, concrete and brick mixed with not even an eye on continuity. Before I could consider it, I was shoved in the back, my name tossed at me like a swearword.

  In the dorm room a single window looked out on grey concrete. My bed was creaky and lumpy. Even as I dropped my bag, from behind me came a sound of pure, manifest revulsion. Easter had a look on his face that said he’d been dealt the most monstrous injustice, being put in with us losers: me, Fatty Lamb, Quintus Best, your good self and one of the Thai Bobs. I was just glad that I wasn’t the outnumbered one for once.

  ‘This is a bloody outrage,’ he said, all nostrils. ‘You’d better keep your hands to yourself, Monk.’ He made a limp wrist at me, then shooed Fatty off the bed the furthest away from me. When he hesitated, the poor lad received a thump on his fleshy arm for good measure and he went to claim another bed, mumbling threats we all knew he’d never carry out.

  I slid my suitcase under the bed, avoiding Easter’s eye, remembering the fifth form when we got our own rooms and his had been next door. Waking in the dark, early one morning, seeing the outline of him next to my bed, his dick in his hand. I never told you, and I never bothered to tell the Chaplain; the dead look on his face scared the shit out of me and he was alone – this wasn’t some prank. I threw a lamp at him, and we all know what happened next. I was the one who’d snuck into his room. I was the mucky little bender. It had always been bad, but it got worse after that.

  As the room went quiet save for the sound of boys unpacking, I knew the others were worried about stray hands in the night, and they weren’t thinking about mine.

  * * *

  Rome. I wanted nothing more than to throw myself headlong into it: oldest of places, nexus of life and learning and war and death and art. I’d dreamed of it for years and years at the back of dusty classrooms as dullards and cretins with an eye on nothing but Daddy’s business leaned back in their chairs, while equally bored masters droned out the life and times of the Gracchi or the bleating of M.T. Cicero. I’d been somewhere else. I’d been here. I soaked up every story I could, every book in the library. Soldiers, butchers, emperors and slaves; I’d breathed in Rome and exhaled Rome, carving its streets and palaces and theatres into my mind, building its topography from pictures in worn textbooks, sculpting the contours from the words of Ovid and Catullus. History was not history here, at least it wasn’t for me. It was – is – the living, beating heart of pasts that refused to die. And here I was.

  Well, not exactly. We were on the road again before long.

  Doing their level best to cram as much into the time we had, our caretaker teachers had booked the trip to Pompeii that very day, with the smell of the airline barely gone from our nostrils. We were a hungry and truculent bunch by now (though I recall you’d managed to snaffle a chocolate bar from somewhere, which you shared) and Mr Oswald and Miss Boniface had given up on trying to sell the trip to us; I could see them dreading the long drive as much as we were. Two hundred and forty minutes on winding roads that all led away from the city instead of towards it.

  Oswald, who had me for Latin, had been confused by my sour expression when I got back on the coach. Likely, he’d expected me to be champing to get to a few ruins but I had other things on my mind, like being tired and pissed off by Easter who’d already started holding court in our room and making it unbearable. I hadn’t wanted to bring it up because, as Father always said, ‘No one likes a moaner,’ so I didn’t.

  ‘Why so glum, Monk?’ he’d asked. He’d just had a cigarette and was chipper. ‘Thought you’d be made up.’

  ‘I am, sir.’ Flat.

  ‘Well, you don’t look it. Best-preserved site in the country, Monk! All sorts, just lying around as they went. You’ll see, it’ll be great!’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I intoned and he lost patience with me, waving me on.

  I was being a sour little fucker, I can’t deny. There was plenty to look forward to on the other side of that long drive. What’s not to like about a town that got swallowed by a volcano? Women clutching babies, houses with intact plumbing, all of that shit. If I put my mind to it, I decided after the first hour, the bones of this provincial town could give me a flavour of life in Caesar’s Rome, though it could never – in my adolescent mind – live up to the big shebang. Rome, you see, still had a beating heart and it was that I longed to see.

  Gods, the bliss of ignorance.

  I managed to get some shut-eye and came to when I felt the vibration of the coach change underneath me. We’d pulled into a wide parking lot where we disembarked, most of the others showing the bleary eyes of sleep barely snatched. A little café crowded one end of the open area with white plastic tables and faded blue Orangina umbrellas. A squat, marbled building was at the other end. Above the entryway, a sign greeted us in Italian, English, German, Japanese and – a sign of the change that was already happening in Europe – Latin. It proclaimed the entrance to the ancient city of Pompeii just through the automatic glass doors. A few other tourists mooched about under spindly trees and the sun beat down, wringing sweat from our pores. I was still dressed for England in worsted trousers and though I’d left my blazer back in Rome my back felt moist all the way down to the crack of my arse.

  Oswald and Boniface marshalled us. I saw shelves of trinkets and glass-topped counters through the doors and heard the thrum of air con. To enter this wondrous jewel of the ancient world, we had first to pass through the gift shop.

  * * *

  We had ten minutes to ourselves when the coach dropped us back in Rome before dinner. Most of the boys filtered into the boarding house to crash on beds and unpack, but I went searching for coffee. My feet were sore and my neck was burnt – I always thought I could get away with it until the continental sun reminded my Anglo-Saxon skin otherwise.

  I’d seen the ‘bodies’, of course, in their death poses, put on show for us tourists. They looked just like people who lay down for a sleep, but I couldn’t feel sorrow or revulsion or shock. No matter how much I stared at them – just a pane of glass between my face and the lumpy ruin of theirs – knowing this was the very pose of a person who died in fear, I couldn’t attach humanity to it: they were the sediment deposits in a chunk of cooled lava where a life had been. The life itself was nothing now. Easter and his idiots went in for selfies, loving the transgression, but it only made them look bigger idiots: geology had had its fun and these humanoid shapes were beyond mockery now. They might as well have taken the piss out of a mountain.

  Ahh, but the other stuff got me, though. Little things, real signs of life like a restored mosaic floor or segments of wall still ochre with paint that had lasted the long, buried centuries. Stepping stones across deep-set roads. At one point I found what could only have been a tavern, with an actual bar and slots for amphorae and I think I got a little choked up. I didn’t show it, old boy, but I did have a soul.

  Most of the city was reserved for academics, leaving juicy titbits to get the tourists in – the odd temple, a bathhouse, assorted courtyards where the columns had been levered upright, Corinthian leaf still standing proud. The whorehouse was a hotspot, because everyone enjoys a good leer. A narrow passage with tiny cubicles leading off, each ‘room’ fitted with a concrete shelf and a nude fresco painted over the door. I’d seen a young couple in one of the rooms making those bunny-ears with their hands and grinning, probably on the precis
e spot where girls and boys were roughly fucked by dozens of men in the course of a single night. I didn’t spend much time there – it had the flavour of walking over graves.

  Boniface had been looking thoroughly scorched by the time she shepherded us towards the exit. I’d tried to snatch a few winks on the coach, but anyone who’s ever done that will know it only leaves you feeling irritable, drool-flecked and more tired than when you started.

  Coffee. We were in Italy, after all!

  All I found was a minimart with one of those self-dispensing, automatic machines. I didn’t even get to try out my smattering of Italian on the pretty boy behind the till. Smooth chest, thick lips.

  It might have been from a machine, but the coffee was dark and sweet and damned good – nothing like the watered-down dregs from home. A few minutes of sipping it in the open air and I felt some life dripping back into me. It was quiet here in the late afternoon, fresh and clear despite the narrowness of the street and nearby traffic murmured, a reminder of the timeless metropolis within arm’s reach. Tomorrow, I told myself, tomorrow I would dive in. Get through dinner, share a room with the nemesis, then the city would be mine. I’d place my feet on the same stones as those walked on by Caesars. Oswald had hinted there might be a free evening towards the end of the trip – off-the-record-not-to-be-mentioned-to-parents-if-you-know-what-I-mean. Freedom, for one evening. Who knew what might happen?

  Then, home, said my mind, planning the future. A few exams, then an uncle had promised me a paltry wage in his bookshop. Then it would be time to pack up and off to George’s College. I’d only been to Cambridge once, for the interviews, but I’d decided it was my sort of town: lush vines framing arched windows, a hundred courtyards and tiny wooden doors polished by history. Immaculate quads, deep leather armchairs and those wide lawns dropping down to the Cam. That single day of interviews had stuck with me. Less traffic than Oxford and less fumes, the spaces seeming more open. Maybe it was just the prospect of somewhere new that tantalised, but to me Cambridge seemed ancient and beautiful and yet alive.