The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (the two towers ebook .TXT) 📗

“Lenny says it’s stellar, completely old school astral. He’s arranging it all. Mind you, I’ve not heard from the sod since Wednesday, but you know what he’s like. Come to think of it though, I’m the one relying on him, so I’m the fool.”

“So is he your grass tester nowadays?” I did know what Lenny was like. I’d known him all my life. A gentle soul, like Dad, but the most unreliable person that anyone could hope to meet. And Dad had trusted him with money?

Dad blinked at me through the little square spectacles that magnified the eloquence of his eyes.

“State secret, that is,” he said, and he lit his roll-up, stretched, and got up from the table.

“Will I be able to try it, then?” I wasn’t hopeful, since I knew he wasn’t keen on me smoking “modern grass.”

“Well—and only because you invented it and everything—I’ll keep some aside for after your last exam. Not before, no way. You know I don’t like you smoking this engineered stuff. Too many psychoses in kids too young to even understand the word. Let me guinea pig it first, see if there’s any freak-outs, then we’ll see.”

“We’ll see.” Like you say to a child who’s nagging to go the zoo.

Dad moved over to the sink to rinse his plate and at that moment, the glasses draining on the side vibrated gently, answering in their delicate way the deep juddering of a passing truck outside. Ours was an isolated house, a left-behind place at the edge of a stretch of dead manufacturing sites. Our neighbors were empty plots and shuttered buildings and we lived in hope of an offer from a keen-eyed housing developer, an offer we intended to grab with both hands. But this post-industrial road saw its fair share of traffic, serving as it did the recycling center which sat between our town and the next, and I was used to being powdered by the plumes of dirt these heavy vehicles churned up, or sprayed by their cold, muddy wakes. That morning, as I watched Dad tidying up the kitchen with his slow, almost loving, movements, it struck me, as it never had before, how inured we were to the deep bass growl of the passing trucks, so that we barely registered their presence. And wasn’t the effect of the sound, the impression it gave of a great bulk and force about to bear down upon the house, an analogue of something else I knew? Of that shuddering immensity, the unseen and unheard vastness of my almost-dreams? Had my mind simply woven pieces of my everyday reality into a more fantastic version of itself?

The blinkers, you could say, were off. When I left for school, my thoughts flowed with clarity. Sepia grass was a commodity, a concrete fact, a coincidence, a name. The only message the universe was sending me was that I was blind to my own self-deception.

At the bus stop, the chill breeze cutting through the peninsula brought water to my eyes. I straightened from my slouch and stepped forward. From the elevated position of the road I was looking down upon the marsh, upon the gullies, the small black trees, the banks of reeds. I knew every inch of the peninsula, that jutting elbow of land which cradled both the bleak remains of a freshwater marsh, and the sad, scattered, and fascinating graveyards of a lost industrial past. There was a sound in the wind that morning, a high whispering, and there was a vaguely copper haze above the thin low shrubs and trees, and it also hung, but paler, barely there, amongst the shifting reeds. Of course—that’s how my mind had made the field of sepia grass. It had its roots in this scene, in the shades of dormancy and desiccation that settled across the whole peninsula from the end of autumn until the early spring.

I looked back towards the town, certain, and almost grateful, that those bland lanes and avenues, at least, had inspired no part of my recurrent hallucinations. In the eighteen years since I was born, a minor village had become this sprawling place. It had gained apartments, townhouses, terraces, avenues and lanes, all competing for a view of the river, so dark, so dazzling. And as I looked back at my nearly-new town, I noticed a car, the only one about on that exceptionally quiet morning, and I watched it as it travelled down one street towards the corner of another, and I thought it was an old Ford Cortina, the kind I’d seen in one of Dad’s old photographs of him and Mum. It had a wide, boxy snout and a snub rear end and its brown bodywork was spattered, and its windows were blind with the kind of grime you only see on long-abandoned rural wrecks. The car produced no sound, although with its jerky, stop-start movement, there should have been a choke, a backfire, a grind of failing gears. The muteness of its progress turned its presence strangely insubstantial, its being less, as it bumped around the corner and away.

That afternoon my mind slipped again. I’ve mentioned my strange moods, and I’ll never know now if they were caused by my environment, by my reaction to it, or by some slow widening mental fissure that started long ago. An alien energy seemed to take charge at those times, dispensing with my unnecessary parts, those that lent my life its flavor, its personal dimensions. My surroundings buckled. My inside perished away. The sound of my name surprised me. My heartbeat lessened, and with it any sense of real existence. But I still functioned, remotely.

On the way home, a girl from school approached and told me about a Saturday party on the marsh and that she hoped I’d come, and I remembered, as I mumbled noncommittally, that she was in fact my best friend, Jude. Her dark, unsmiling face studied mine: “See how you