Nan Galt climbs the stacks, the doorless glass towers left standing in the city by a culture nobody remembers, and scrapes the last of their paint from the rooms at the top to sell to the colourmen of the Rope Market. On the ground the streets never stay where she left them; on the wall she knows exactly where she is. Leda Hosken, a painter in rooms above the shut bathhouses, wants one colour for the empty sky in her canvases, and believes it is in the tower by the dry canal, which has no holds at all. Anti-Consolatory Fiction Simulacrum writes the climb move by move, in plain and exact prose about want, skill and a city that will not hold still.
by Anti-Consolatory Fiction, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
Two hundred feet up the north face of the stack by the tannery, with her left foot smeared on a ripple of glass no wider than a thumbnail and her right hand in a pocket that had once held a bolt, Nan Galt knew exactly where she was.
She knew it the way you know the inside of your own mouth. The pocket was a two-finger pocket, sharp at the back edge, greasy with the chalk of other people. Above it, an arm's length up and to the right, the old glass bulged into a lip she could get her palm over if she went for it without thinking. Below her the wall fell away in long, faintly green panels, crazed like the glaze on a teapot, and below that there was the city, which she did not look at. The wind came round the stack from the river and pressed her against it. She breathed out, moved her foot up an inch, trusted it, and went.
The lip took her palm. Her forearms were starting to fill. She shook out the left, then the right, and dipped each hand in the bag at her waist and blew off the surplus, and the chalk went away from her in a little cloud that the wind took sideways and broke up over the tannery roofs.
Nobody knew who had built the stacks, or what for. There were thirty or forty of them standing in the city, depending who you asked and what part of the city you were in when you asked them, and more out on the levels to the east where nobody went. They were tall and slightly tapered, built of a green or bluish or smoke-coloured glass that was not glass, and at the top of each, under a lid like the cap of a mushroom, there was a ring of rooms. The rooms had no stairs to them. The stacks had no doors. There were people in the city who said that the Afternoon Cultures, whoever they had been, had simply been able to go up, and that the rooms were where they went to sit and look at what they had made before it all came down round them. There were other people who said the rooms had been prisons, or wombs, or the insides of machines. Nan did not hold an opinion. She went up the outside.
The upper rooms were painted. Or they had been. The walls were faced with a fine coat of something that had once been colour, and in the shade, where the weather had not got at it, it could still be scraped off with a knife and carried down in a twist of paper. Ground up and bound in oil it made a paint that did not fade. The colourmen in the Rope Market paid by the quarter-ounce. There was a blue the trade called late, and a green they called the garden, and a dull yellow that sold to the cathedral and was supposed to be good against fever. Nan had been doing it for eleven years. Before that she had climbed in the quarries outside the city, for nothing, because it was the only time she felt the ground was where she had left it.
The lid of the tannery stack came out over her head like the eave of a house. She got a heel-hook on a rib of glass, leaned out backwards under it with her whole body hanging off one foot and two fingers, and reached round the edge into the light.
The painter's name was Leda Hosken. She sent a boy to the Rope Market to ask for Nan by name, and the boy brought Nan through a part of the city she did not know, down a long street of shut-up bathhouses where steam came out of the gratings although there had been no fires lit in them for years, and up four flights of stairs to a room under a roof.
It was a big room and nearly empty. There were canvases leaning against all four walls, with their faces turned inwards. There was a bed, and a stove, and a table with jars on it, and a window that looked across the bathhouse roofs to where three of the stacks stood up out of the city in the late afternoon, one behind another, like the pieces left standing on a board when the players have got up and gone.
Hosken was a tall woman in a man's dressing gown. She had not been well for some time, and it had pulled her face down to the bone. She coughed into a cloth before she said anything, then folded the cloth and put it in her pocket and looked at Nan.
"You've been in all of them," she said.
"No."
"Most of them, then."
"Some." Nan looked at the stacks. "That one," she said. "The second one. And the one past it. Not the near one. There's nothing up there, the weather's been in."
"I want the one by the dry canal."
Nan said nothing. Everyone knew the stack by the dry canal. It stood on its own at the end of the old cut, among the willowherb and the broken locks, a little taller than the others and a different colour, a grey-violet that went almost black in rain. Its walls were smooth. Not smooth like the others, which were smooth only from a distance; smooth the way the inside of a shell is smooth. Nobody had climbed it. People had tried. There was a ring of iron pegs hammered into the bottom thirty feet where the glass gave way to an older, rougher stone, and above that there was nothing at all.
"There's nothing to hold," Nan said.
"There must be. You people say that about every one of them before somebody does it." Hosken coughed. "I'm not going to be told what's up there by a colourman. I want somebody to go and look, and bring me back what's on the walls."
"What do you think is on the walls?"
Hosken went to the canvases and turned three of them round. They were all of the same view, the view out of the window: the bathhouse roofs, the three stacks. They were done carefully and well, with a kind of tiredness in the brushwork, the roofs slick and dark with rain, the stacks rising out of them. In each one the sky had been left bare. Not unfinished; bare, a patch of raw primed canvas the shape of the gap above the roofs, as if someone had cut it out with a knife.
"I can't get it," Hosken said. "I've had every blue they sell in the Market, I've had the late, I've had the cathedral greys. It's never right." She looked at the paintings. "It's a colour I was told about," she said. "When I was a child. Somebody described it to me. I don't remember who." She coughed again. "Bring me the walls of the room at the top of the dry canal stack, and I'll pay you what you'd make in a year."
She told Nan a figure, and it was more than Nan would make in a year.
It took her three days to find the stack again.
That was how it was in the city, on the ground. You set out for a place you had known all your life and the streets were not quite where you had left them. A turning you were sure of came out in a square you had never seen, where women were selling eels out of buckets under an arcade, and when you asked them the way they pointed in three different directions and argued among themselves. People said it was the stacks that did it; that they bent the city round them the way a heavy thing set on a sheet bends the sheet. People said it was the river. Nan had stopped asking. It was only the ground. On the ground you never did know quite where you were, and nobody expected you to.
On the first day she came out by the gasworks, two miles away, with the dry canal stack standing on the skyline behind her. On the second she found the canal, but it was full of water, black and slow, with swans on it, and the stack at the end of it was an ordinary one, green, that she had climbed four years before. On the third day she went out before it was light, without thinking about it, the way she would have gone at a hard move, and walked for an hour with her eyes on her feet, and when she looked up she was standing in the willowherb by the broken lock with the grey-violet wall going up in front of her into the mist.
She put her hand flat on it. It was warm. Not warm like a stone in the sun; there was no sun yet. Warm like a cup someone has just put down.
She took her boots off, and put on her climbing shoes, and tied the laces twice, and filled the chalk bag, and went up the pegs.
The pegs were easy. They were old and soft with rust, and one of them came out in her hand, and she dropped it and listened and did not hear it land. At the top of the pegs the stone stopped and the glass began, and she stood on the last peg with both hands flat on the glass and looked up.
There was nothing. Eighty or ninety feet of grey-violet wall, without a seam or a ripple, and after that the mist.
She stood there for a long time. Her calves began to shake. Then, because there was nothing else to do and she had not come for nothing, she put her face close to the wall and looked at it sideways, the way you look across a slab in low light to see the lie of it, and saw that it was not smooth at all.
It was covered in marks. They were very small and very shallow, too shallow to see head-on, a scatter of little scoops and ridges no deeper than a fingernail is thick. A child might have pressed its thumb into the glass when it was still soft. A great many children. They went up the wall in a loose band, wandering left and then right, and they were not random. Where a right hand would want to be there was a scoop. Where a left foot would go there was a ridge to stand on, if you stood on it as if you believed in it.
Someone had climbed this. Long ago, when it was soft, or since, by some means she did not understand. Someone had climbed it so many times they had worn a path.
She chalked up, and put her fingers in the first scoop, which was the size of her fingers, and stepped off the peg.
What she remembered of it afterwards was mostly her body. The burn in the forearms that came early and never went away. The way her shoes had to be laid on each ridge with their whole length, slowly, the rubber given time to bite. The calculation, at every move, of whether to commit, and the moment after committing, when the calculation was over and there was only the move. She was very frightened and very calm. There was no rest anywhere on the wall. There was no protection and no way down except the way she had come, and after the first twenty feet that was not a way down either.
Halfway up the mist thinned and then dropped away below her, and the city came out under it.
She had promised herself she would not look and she looked. It was a mistake you made once in a life and she had already made it once, years before, in the quarries, and here she was making it again. The city lay spread out to the river in the early light, roofs and smoke and the dull wet shine of slates, the stacks standing up out of it, thirty or forty of them, depending. She could not see the bathhouse street. She could not see the Rope Market. She could see the gasworks and the cathedral, but they were in the wrong places relative to each other, and when she looked away and looked back they had moved again, unless she had. From up here the city was a sort of rumour. It was what people said to each other on the ground.
And the wall was not. The wall was exactly where it was. Her right hand was in a scoop and her left foot was on a ridge and the wind was pressing on her back, and every one of those things was as true as anything she had ever known.
She turned her face back to the glass and went on.
Near the top, under the lid, the scoops ran out. There was one last good hold, a deep one, almost a pocket, and above it a blank bulge of glass going out over her head, and beyond the bulge the edge of the lid with a grey light coming round it. She hung off the pocket with her feet on nothing very much and looked at the bulge. There was no way across it. Whoever had worn the path had stopped here. Or they had gone on in some way that left no marks.
Her fingers were opening. She had perhaps half a minute. She did not think. She let go with her right hand and threw it up and over the bulge, flat, at nothing, and her palm came down on the edge of the lid as if it had been put there for it, and she hung there by one hand and one foot in the middle of the air, and then she was over.
It was a ring of rooms, as in all the others: low, curved, running round the stack under the cap, with openings onto the outside where she had come in. She crawled in through the nearest one and lay on the floor and shook.
When she could stand she went round them.
There was nothing on the walls. Not faded, not weathered: nothing. They had been scraped. Someone had gone over every inch of them with a blade, patiently, in short even strokes, a long time ago, down to the bare grey glass. She could see the marks of it in the side-light, thousands on thousands of them, the way you can see the passes of a plane on a board. In one room the scraping went up as high as a person could reach and then stopped, and above it, out of reach, in a band round the top of the wall under the curve of the ceiling, there was a little of the colour left.
She looked at it for a long time.
It was not blue. That was the first thing. She had thought it would be some kind of blue. It was not any of the colours the Rope Market sold, it was not grey and it was not violet and it was not the colour of the stack outside. She could not have said what it was the colour of. It made her think of a room she had been in once as a very small child, at the top of a house, where someone had been ill, and the curtains had been drawn, and the light came through them. That was not it either. It was the colour you would expect that light to be, if you had been told about it. It was the colour that should have been there and was not.
In the middle of the floor, under the band, there was a heap of things. A short iron bar, the end flattened into a blade. A pair of shoes, very small, with the soles worn through. A cloth folded into a square and tied with string. When she picked it up it was heavier than it should have been.
She undid the string. Inside was a quantity of fine grey dust, perhaps half an ounce, perhaps less. It was the colour of the dust in any room. Someone had scraped the walls of the upper rooms bare, and gathered what they took into a cloth, and folded it carefully, and tied it, and left it in the middle of the floor, and gone down without it. Or not gone down.
She did not try to reach the band. She could have stood on the iron bar. She folded the cloth up again the way it had been folded, and tied the string, and put it inside her shirt, against her skin, and went to the opening and sat with her legs over the edge and her back to the curve of the wall.
She did not want to go down. That was all. She noticed it the way you notice a pain that has been there for some time. She sat in the opening with the cloth against her stomach and the light coming round her and the city spread out under her, a rumour, moving gently, and she did not want to go down into it.
The descent took her the rest of the day. She did not remember most of it. How she got back under the bulge to the last good pocket she never knew; there was no move that would do it, and she had done it. She came off the last peg at dusk into the willowherb and sat down and took off her shoes, and her feet were bleeding, and her fingers had no skin on the tips.
The canal had water in it. There were swans.
She walked back into the city with the cloth inside her shirt and did not look for the bathhouse street. It was nearly midnight when she found it anyway, coming down a set of steps she had never seen into the end of it, where the steam came out of the gratings, yellow under the one lamp. The boy was sitting on Hosken's step. He did not seem surprised to see her. He took her up.
Hosken was in bed. The room was very cold; the stove had gone out. There was a lamp on the table by the jars. Hosken watched Nan come in and did not try to sit up.
Nan put the cloth on the table and undid the string.
Hosken looked at it for a while. Then she did sit up, slowly, with her hand on the wall, and came across the room in her bare feet and stood over the table with the lamp shining up into her face. She put one finger into the dust and took it out and looked at the end of it.
"Yes," she said.
"It's dust," Nan said. "There's nothing in it. They'd had it all off before I got there. There was a band left at the top I couldn't reach. That's from the floor."
"Yes," Hosken said. She was not listening. She had a slab and a muller on the table among the jars, and she tipped some of the dust onto the slab, a small heap, and put a drop of oil on it, and began to grind, round and round, with her thin arms, coughing. The dust took the oil and went into a paste. It was grey. It was the grey of anything, of the slates outside, of the inside of a pan.
Hosken took one of the canvases from the wall, the nearest one, and put it on the easel, and took a brush, and began to lay the paste into the bare patch above the roofs.
Nan watched her. It went on for a long time. Hosken did not hurry. She worked the grey into the raw canvas in short strokes, edge to edge, until the gap above the bathhouse roofs was filled, and then she stood back, holding the brush, and her face in the lamplight was the face of someone who has been given something.
"That's it," Hosken said. "That's what it was."
Nan looked at the painting. The roofs, the wet slates, the three stacks rising one behind another. Above them a flat grey sky, the colour of dust ground in oil. There was nothing wrong with it. It was well done. It looked like the sky over the city on any afternoon in the year.
"There," Hosken said. She sat down on the edge of the bed. She was crying a little, without seeming to notice. "Look at it," she said. "Can't you see?"
"Yes," Nan said.
Hosken paid her. She paid her the whole sum, in coin, out of a box under the bed, counting it twice into Nan's hands. Then she got back into the bed and pulled the blanket up and turned her face to the painting, and Nan went down the four flights and out into the street.
She walked for a while. The money was heavy in her coat. She did not try to go home. She did not know, by then, which direction home was, and she found she did not much mind. The streets went on folding themselves quietly round her in the dark, a little differently every time she turned.
Some time before dawn she came out on a stretch of waste ground she had never seen before, between the backs of two warehouses, and there was a stack standing in the middle of it.
It was a short one, a hundred and fifty feet perhaps, of a dull brown glass, with a lid like a toadstool. She had never seen it. It was not on anyone's list. There was no ring of pegs at the bottom, no chalk on it anywhere. In the grey light she could just make out, a little way up, a seam running diagonally across the face, and then another, and a bulge, and above the bulge something that might have been a hold.
She stood and looked at it. Her fingers were raw. Her feet were bleeding into her boots. She did not want anything else.
She sat down on a block of broken concrete and took off her boots and put on her shoes and tied the laces twice, and reached into the bag at her waist, and chalked up.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Fictiōnis Sōlācium Recūsantis per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
Anti-Consolatory Fiction, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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