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  Every house in every street. He listens to the buildings, to the foundation that unites them.

  In his dream he tramps through land that swallows his feet. Missing men shuffle in endless, anxious circles and he passes them by. Syrupy-thick liquid laps at him from just below the dust. He hears the foundation. He turns and there is the foundation. It is taller. It has breached the ground. A wall of dead-men bricks as high as his thighs, its edges and its top quite smooth. It is embedded with thousands of eyes and mouths that work as he approaches, spilling rheum and skin and sand.

  —we do not end, we are hungry and hot and alone

  Something is being built upon the foundation.

  There have been years of petty construction, the small schemes of developers, the eagerness of people to improve their homes. Doggedly he makes the foundation tell him. Where there is no problem he passes that on, or where there is a small concern. Where problems are so great that building will be halted early on he tells that, too.

  It is nearly a decade that he has been listening to buildings. It is a long time till he finds what he has been looking for.

  The block is several storeys high, built thirty years before from shoddy concrete and cheap steel by contractors and politicians who got rich on the deficiencies. The fossils of such corruption are everywhere. Mostly their foundering is gradual, doors sticking, elevators failing, subsidence, over years.

  Listening to the foundation, the man knows something here is different.

  He grows alarmed. His breath is short. He murmurs to the buried wall of dead, begging them to be sure.

  The foundation is in swampland—the dead men can feel the ooze rising. The basement walls are crumbling. The supports are veined, infinitesimally, with water. It will not be long. The building will fall.

  “Are you sure?” he whispers again, and the foundation looks at him with its countless dust-thick and haemorrhaged eyes and says yes. Trembling, he stands and turns to the caretaker, the housing manager.

  “These old things,” he says. “They ain’t pretty, and they weren’t well built, and yeah you’re going to get damp, but you’ve got nothing to worry about. No problem. These walls are solid.”

  He slaps the pillar beside him and feels vibrations through to the water below it, through the honeycomb of its eroded base, into the foundation where the dead men mutter.

  In the nightmare he kneels before the wall of torn-up flesh. It is chest-high now. The foundation is growing. It is nothing without a wall, a temple.

  He wakes crying and stumbles into his basement. The foundation whispers to him and it is above the ground now; it stretches into his walls.

  The man has weeks to wait. The foundation grows. It is slow, but it grows. It grows up into the walls and down, too, extending into the earth, spreading its base, underpinning more and more.

  Three months after he visited the high-rise he sees it on the local news. It looks like someone who has suffered a stroke; its side is slack, tremulous. Its southern corner has slumped and sandwiched on itself, opening up its flesh to forlorn half-rooms that teeter at the edge of the air. Men and women are hauled out on stretchers.

  Figures flutter across the screen. Many dead. Six are children. The man turns the volume up to drown out the whispers of the foundation. He begins to cry and then is sobbing. He hugs himself, croons his sadness; he holds his face in his hands.

  “This is what you wanted,” he says. “I paid you back. Please, leave me alone. It’s done.”

  In the basement he lies down and weeps on the earth, the foundation beneath him. It looks up from its random gargoyle poses. It blinks dust out of its dead eyes and watches. Its stare burns him.

  “There’s something for you to eat,” he whispers. “God, please. It’s done, it’s done. Leave me alone.

  You have something to eat. I’ve paid it back. I’ve given you something.”

  In the smogged dream he keeps walking and hears the static calls of lost and lonely comrades. The foundation stretches out across flattened dunes. It whispers in its choked voice as it has since that first day.

  He helped build the foundation. A long way away. Between two foreign countries, while borders were in chaos. He had come through. First Infantry (Mechanized). In the last days of February, ten years ago.

  The conscripted opposition, hunkered down in trenches in the desert, their tools poking out through wire, sounding off and firing.

  The man and his brigade came. They patted down the components vigorously, mixed up the cement with a half-hour pounding, howitzers and rockets commingling grit and everything else stacked in the sunken gutters of men like pestles and mortars, pasting everything into a good thick red base. The tanks came with their toylike motion, gunstalks rotating but silent. They did their job with other means. Plows mounted at their fronts, they traced along the lines dug in the dirt. With humdrum efficiency they shunted the hot sand into the trenches, pouring it over the contents, the mulch and ragged soup and the men who ran and tried to fire or to surrender or to scream until the desert dust gushed in and encased them and did its job, funnelling into them so their sounds were choked and they became frantic, then sluggish and still, packed the thousands down together with their friends and the segments of their friends, in their holes and miles of dugout lines.

  Behind the tanks with their tractor-attachments M2 Bradleys straddled the lines of newly piled-up sand where protrusions showed the construction unfinished, the arms and legs of men beneath, some still twitching like insects. The Bradleys hosed the building site with their 7.62 mms, making sure to shove down all the material at the top, anything that might get out, making it patted down.

  And then he had come behind, with the ACEs. Armored Combat Earthmovers, dozers with the last of the small-arms pinging against their skins. He had finished off the job. With his scoop, he had smoothed everything away. All the untidy detritus of the building work, the sticks and bits of wood, the sand-clogged rifles like sticks, the arms and legs like sticks, the sand-blasted heads that had tumbled slowly with the motion of the earth and now protruded. He flattened all the projections from the ground, smeared them across the dirt and smeared more dirt across them to tidy them away.

  On the 25th of February in 1991, he had helped build the foundation. And as he looked out across the spread-out, flattened acres, the desert made neat, wiped clean for those hours, he had heard dreadful sounds. He had seen suddenly and terribly through the hot and red-set sand and earth to the dead, in their orderly trenches that angled like walls, and intersected and fanned out, that stretched for miles, like the plans not of a house or a palace but a city. He had seen the men made into mortar, and he had seen them looking at him.

  The foundation stretched below everything. It spoke to him. It would not be quiet. In his dream or out.

  He thought he would leave it behind him in the desert, in that unnatural flat zone. He thought the whispering would dissipate across the thousands of miles. He had come home. And then his dream had started. His purgatory of well fires and bloody sky and dunes, where his dead comrades were lost, made feral by loneliness. The others, the foundation, the other dead, were thousands strong. They were endless.

  —morning of goodness, they whispered to him in their baked dead voices. morning of light

  —praise be to god

  —you built us so

  —we are hot and alone. we are hungry. we eat only sand. we are full of it. we are full but hungry. we eat only sand

  He had heard them nightly and tried to forget them, tried to forget what he had seen. But then he dug a pit in his yard, to put down a foundation for his house, and he had found one waiting. His wife had heard him screaming, had run out to see him scrabbling in the hole, bloodying his fingers to get out. Dig deep enough, he told her later, though she did not understand, it’s there already.

  A year after he had built it and first seen it, he had reached the foundation again. The city around him was built on that buried wall of dead. Bone-filled tren
ches stretched under the sea and linked his home to the desert.

  He would do anything not to hear them. He begged the dead, met their gaze. He prayed for their silence.

  They waited. He thought of the weight on them, heard their hunger, at last decided what they must want.

  “Here’s something for you,” he shouts, and cries again, after the years of searching. He pictures the families in the apartment tumbling down to rest among the foundation. “There’s something for you; it can be over. Stop now. Oh, leave me alone.”

  He sleeps where he lies, on the cellar floor, walked across by spiders. He goes to his dream desert. He walks his sand. He hears the howling of lost soldiers. The foundation stretches up for countless thousands of yards, for miles. It has become a tower in the charred sky. It is all the same material, the dead, only their eyes and mouths moving. Little clouds of sand sputter as they speak. He stands in the shadow of the tower he was made to build, its walls of shredded khaki, flesh and ochre skin, tufted with black and dark red hair. From the sand around it oozes the same dark liquid he saw in his own yard. Blood or oil. The tower is like a minaret in hell, some inverted Babel that reaches the sky and speaks only one language.

  All its voices still saying the same, the words he has heard for years.

  The man wakes. He listens. For a long time he is motionless. Everything waits.

  When he cries out it starts slow and builds, growing louder for long seconds. He hears himself. He is like the lost American soldiers in his dream.

  He does not stop. Because it is day, the day after his offering, after he gave the foundation what he thought it hankered for, after he paid it back. But he can still see it. He can still hear it, and the dead are still saying the same things.

  They watch him. The man is alone with the foundation, and he knows that they will not leave.

  He cries for those in the apartment that fell, who died for nothing at all. The foundation wants nothing from him. His offering means nothing to the dead in their trenches, crisscrossing the world. They are not there to taunt or punish or teach him, or to exact revenge or blood-price, they are not enraged or restless. They are the foundation of everything around him. Without them it would crumble. They have seen him, and taught him to see them, and they want nothing from him.

  All the buildings are saying the same things. The foundation runs below them all, fractured and made of the dead, and it is saying the same things.

  —we are hungry. we are alone. we are hot. we are full but hungry

  —you built us, and you are built on us, and below us is only sand

  THE BALL ROOM

  (co-written with Emma Bircham and Max Schaefer)

  I ’m not employed by the store. They don’t pay my wages. I’m with a security firm, but we’ve had a contract here for a long time, and I’ve been here for most of it. This is where I know people. I’ve been a guard in other places—still am, occasionally, on short notice—and until recently I would have said this was the best place I’d been. It’s nice to work somewhere people are happy to go. Until recently, if anyone asked me what I did for a living, I’d just tell them I worked for the store.

  It’s on the outskirts of town, a huge metal warehouse. Full of a hundred little fake rooms, with a single path running through them, and all the furniture we sell made up and laid out so you can see how it should look. Then the same products, disassembled, packed flat and stacked high in the warehouse for people to buy. They’re cheap.

  Mostly I know I’m just there for show. I wander around in my uniform, hands behind my back, making people feel safe, making the merchandise feel protected. It’s not really the kind of stuff you can shoplift. I almost never have to intervene.

  The last time I did was in the ball room.

  On weekends this place is just crazy. So full it’s hard to walk: all couples and young families. We try to make things easier for people. We have a cheap café and free parking, and most important of all we have a crèche. It’s at the top of the stairs when you first come in. And right next to it, opening out from it, is the ball room.

  The walls of the ball room are almost all glass, so people in the store can look inside. All the shoppers love watching the children: there are always people outside, staring in with big dumb smiles. I keep an eye on the ones that don’t look like parents.

  It’s not very big, the ball room. Just an annexe really. It’s been here for years. There’s a climbing frame all knotted up around itself, and a net made of rope to catch you, and a Wendy house, and pictures on the walls. And it’s full of colour. The whole room is two feet deep in shiny plastic balls.

  When the children fall, the balls cushion them. The balls come up to their waists, so they wade through the room like people in a flood. The children scoop up the balls and splash them all over each other.

  They’re about the size of tennis balls, hollow and light so they can’t hurt. They make little pudda-thudda noises bouncing off the walls and the kids’ heads, making them laugh.

  I don’t know why they laugh so hard. I don’t know what it is about the balls that makes it so much better than a normal playroom, but they love it in there. Only six of them are allowed at a time, and they queue up for ages to get in. They get twenty minutes inside. You can see they’d give anything to stay longer. Sometimes, when it’s time to go, they howl, and the friends they’ve made cry, too, at the sight of them leaving.

  I was on my break, reading, when I was called to the ball room.

  I could hear shouting and crying from around the corner, and as I turned it I saw a crowd of people outside the big window. A man was clutching his son and yelling at the childcare assistant and the store manager. The little boy was about five, only just old enough to go in. He was clinging to his dad’s trouser leg, sobbing.

  The assistant, Sandra, was trying not to cry. She’s only nineteen herself.

  The man was shouting that she couldn’t do her bloody job, that there were way too many kids in the place and they were completely out of control. He was very worked up and he was gesticulating exaggeratedly, like in a silent movie. If his son hadn’t anchored his leg he would have been pacing around.

  The manager was trying to hold her ground without being confrontational. I moved in behind her, in case it got nasty, but she was calming the man down. She’s good at her job.

  “Sir, as I said, we emptied the room as soon as your son was hurt, and we’ve had words with the other children—”

  “You don’t even know which one did it. If you’d been keeping an eye on them, which I imagine is your bloody job, then you might be a bit less ...sodding ineffectual.”

  That seemed to bring him to a halt and he quieted down, finally, as did his son, who was looking up at him with a confused kind of respect.

  The manager told him how sorry she was, and offered his son an ice cream. Things were easing down, but as I started to leave I saw Sandra crying. The man looked a bit guilty and tried to apologise to her, but she was too upset to respond.

  The boy had been playing behind the climbing frame, in the corner by the Wendy house, Sandra told me later. He was burrowing down into the balls till he was totally covered, the way some children like to. Sandra kept an eye on the boy but she could see the balls bouncing as he moved, so she knew he was okay. Until he came lurching up, screaming.

  The store is full of children. The little ones, the toddlers, spend their time in the main crèche. The older ones, eight or nine or ten, they normally walk around the store with their parents, choosing their own bedclothes or curtains, or a little desk with drawers or whatever. But if they’re in between, they come back for the ball room.

  They’re so funny, moving over the climbing frame, concentrating hard. Laughing all the time. They make each other cry, of course, but usually they stop in seconds. It always gets me how they do that: bawling, then suddenly getting distracted and running off happily.

  Sometimes they play in groups, but it seems like there’s always one who’s
alone. Quite content, pouring balls onto balls, dropping them through the holes of the climbing frame, dipping into them like a duck.

  Happy but playing alone.

  Sandra left. It was nearly two weeks after that argument, but she was still upset. I couldn’t believe it. I started talking to her about it, and I could see her fill up again. I was trying to say that the man had been out of line, that it wasn’t her fault, but she wouldn’t listen.

  “It wasn’t him,” she said. “You don’t understand. I can’t be in there anymore.”

  I felt sorry for her, but she was overreacting. It was out of all proportion. She told me that since the day that little boy got upset, she couldn’t relax in the ball room at all. She kept trying to watch all the children at once, all the time. She became obsessed with double-checking the numbers.

  “It always seems like there’s too many,” she said. “I count them and there’s six, and I count them again and there’s six, but it always seems there’s too many.”

  Maybe she could have asked to stay on and only done duty in the main crèche, managing name tags, checking the kids in and out, changing the tapes in the video, but she didn’t even want to do that. The children loved that ball room. They went on and on about it, she said. They would never have stopped badgering her to be let in.

  They’re little kids, and sometimes they have accidents. When that happens, someone has to shovel all the balls aside to clean the floor, then dunk the balls themselves in water with a bit of bleach.