Read Online The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway - Free Book Online Page B

supernatural skills. Having thus ascertained by introspection that I lack whatever it is this gentleman is seeking, I feel able to observe his living room, which is itself remarkable. It is, as well as being a place to sit and read and eat cake, a treasure house of oddments and curiosities—a gold statue of a warlike pig in one corner, a pair of Foo Dogs on the mantle, standing lamps from various periods of design, weapons and china ducks on all the walls. Wu Shenyang is still assessing me—I can feel the stress of his regard—and so I begin to catalogue the contents of this place with an eye to returning perhaps as a cleaner or a general dogsbody.
    Item: two armchairs, split in various places and of considerable antiquity, but also to all appearances monstrously comfortable. These are positioned loosely on either side of an open fire at one end of the room, along with a coffee table whose clever construction allows books to be stashed willy-nilly beneath the tabletop.
    Item: with its back to us, a leather sofa of similarly advanced age, showing signs (to wit, a pillow and a blanket) of having recently been used as a camp bed. Indeed, there appears to be a person camping on it still, because a pair of white-socked feet, slender and almost certainly feminine (by the pattern of the weave) and perhaps my own age or a little younger, protrude from the western side.
    Item: a grandfather clock, running smoothly if somewhat previous, in dark and gold-leafed wood with a fine, painted face. The panel door is open and the pendulum is visible as it makes its long, slow strokes from left to right and back again, producing a steady and undeniable
tock tick
noise in defiance of convention. This
tock tick
also reassures me that the person on the sofa is alive and not dead, because her northernmost foot
tock ticks
along with it from time to time, and then returns to a state of rest.
    Item: one desk and chair, both liberally covered in cake crumbs and paper. The desk is functional rather than impressive, and surmounting the piles and stacks of letters and drawings is a single sheet of blank paper and a pencil. Mister (Master) Wu does not use a pen for casual work, because where—or maybe
when
—he comes from, ink is expensive. Thus, the softest of soft leads, because Mister (Master) Wu is writing in Chinese.
    Item: an ancient gramophone, literally; not a stereo or a turntable, not a CD player, but a scratched and whistling construction with a chrome arm and a huge flower-shaped horn and a thick, blunt needle making music from brittle black discs which turn at 78 rpm. The entire trick is accomplished mechanically, without electricity or transistors or silicon.
    To me, a child of the digital age, this is a great white magic, so awe-inspiring that I forget for a moment to be nervous of Wu Shenyang. It is in any case hard to remember that he is a person of dread solemnity and pomp, because he seems to approach everything as a kind of game. He is even now leaping over to the gramophone to display it in full glory: winding it, picking out an old record by the Fisk University Jubilee Singers and grinning widely as he waits for my reaction to his fabulous trick. I am too lost in the crackling perfection to smile, until the record comes to an end and his deft fingers lift the needle away. He drags out from beneath the machine a bag of yet more impossible records and presses them upon me. I leaf through them with aching concern that I will shatter one, and finally play the adagio from Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A, listening until the very end. Mister (Master) Wu’s gaze lights on my fingers as I lift the needle just as he did, because this thing is too perfect, too carefully preserved and lovingly made, to allow it to be injured by carelessness. And then finally I am looking at the man before me.
    Wu Shenyang is tall and thin. He does not look like Buddha, he looks like a ladder in a dressing gown. Time has polished him,