I woke up remembering my grandfather crying. It was the last spring before the years of our evergrowing shadows, more unsettled than anyone had expected.
On that late May day, in the gardens along the Thames, everybody’s roses were in bloom. The sun was bright, but the sky hazy and the roar of jet planes coming in to land seemed louder for their invisibility. I was spending a few days with my grandparents while my mother was away at one of her innumerable conferences. Blackbirds were chi-chi-ing incessantly and the maroon roses on the straggly branches, too high up the neighbour’s wall for my grandfather to reach, blossomed where the sun had warmed the buds into heavy blooms with ball gown pleats and voluminous petals. My grandfather was resting on his rustic oak bench, feasting his eyes on the butterfly florescence of a deliciously yellow laburnum tree. It was mid-afternoon. The garden was a riot of colour. Eldon, nearly eighty years old, seemed completely at peace.
‘Granda, are you going?’ I asked.
‘Where?’
‘To the show.’
He had been looking at a newspaper article on the Chelsea flower show. ‘I don’t think so. It’s not for people like me. Anyway, the crowds will tire me out.’ He sighed, as he often did, and lit another cigarette. He turned the page to the cricket which was his other restorative. His team – the old home team – was on a roll.
‘You want to play with the hosepipe?’ He pointed a crumpled cigarette at a spool of green plastic tubing by the fence. ‘Those roses need water.’ His tone suggested that the sight of the spray would revive him too: a gushing pipe in warm, still air. ‘Pull it out.’
On my way over, I spotted a mound of crumbly brown earth at the border of the lawn. I plucked a dandelion and poked at it with the furry stem.
‘What have you found?’ Eldon called out. ‘Don’t you want the hose?’
I reluctantly left the colony of alarmed ants and got hold of the pipe.
‘Turn the tap on,’ he instructed from his resting place. ‘There is a control on the nozzle.’
The tap squeaked in my hand and bubbled. Stepping over a line of seedling cabbage, I unwound the hosepipe. A dribble from where the crosshatched plastic was locked into the red ring wet my feet. ‘It’s coming, Granda,’ I shouted holding down the trigger with both hands and tracing a silver line to the edge of his oval lawn. Water poured into the dry earth of the flower bed like a river. A muddy puddle quickly formed and a rich gurgle filled the garden.
‘Turn it some more so you get a proper spray.’
I wanted to run the water to the ants. A little trench quickly filled; a dark foaming head slithered towards the nest.
‘Do the roses, Marc. The roses. Give each bush a good minute and a half. Count to a hundred, then move to the next.’
All of a sudden my arms went limp. I wanted to cry. ‘Granda, do ants drown?’
For a moment he looked blank, as though he was trying to work out whether ants breathed. Whether they had noses and nostrils. Lungs that might fill with water. Whether their tiny legs would flail, splashing about, before they sank down beneath the surface. He gazed at me as though I was somebody else. ‘Yes, son. Yes, I suppose they do.’
‘Have you ever killed an ant, Granda?’ I wanted his hand to give mine the strength I could not find.
‘You mean deliberately?’ He hunched his shoulders as though he was in a fighter plane, like my father, swooping down, with the gun muzzles on the wing blades jabbering neat lines of dust-puffs to match the spasms of a dying column. ‘I never flew even the Hurricanes,’ he muttered.
I didn’t understand. ‘What hurry cranes?’ I asked.
‘I mean not into combat,’ he added absently. ‘But what did you ask?’
‘If you ever killed an ant.’
‘No, never. Never deliberately.’
I was wondering about accidents when Grandma Cleo called out, ‘Eldon, telephone.’
He heard her, but it took him some time to return from his reverie.
‘Eldon, telephone for you.’
‘Right.’
I watched him stub his cigarette out on the side of the garden bench and slowly struggle to his feet. I followed him into the house.
‘Who is it?’ he asked.
Cleo shrugged, spooning sugar. ‘Markee, you see nobody pass here …’ she sang to me instead, weaving the lilt of her childhood into mine.
Eldon waved a hand dismissively and picked up the telephone. ‘Hello. Yes. Speaking.’ I could see him press the receiver hard against his ear. ‘Can you repeat that, please.’ He shifted the receiver to his other side. Then I saw his whole body shrink until there seemed to be nothing left inside.
Beyond the French windows a robin hopped around the ivy and opened its beak; the spring in its throat uncoiled in a shrill insistent song. I looked back at my grandfather; he was clutching the back of a chair. ‘Are you sure it was his plane?’ He waited for the crackle in the receiver to cease. Then he put the phone down.
I ran up to him and grabbed his hand. ‘Why you crying, Granda?’
I received no answer at the time.
With fire we live, with fire we die. There is no going back. In the crematorium my grandfather’s coffin, my mother’s and my grandmother’s vanished behind a motorised curtain in a succession of heartbreak, suicide and old age; the flames of my father’s aircraft, falling, flaring behind each of them, again and again.
The cave – our refuge – slowly filled with the light of a different star. I felt the sun’s rays had burnt ulcers in my dream, but my two companions were still asleep. I carried my shoes in one hand and crept over to the entrance. Outside, the dawn was silent. The silence of aftermath: the emptiness of a spent storm. Climbing around to the other side of the rock, I found myself above a great reservoir with a view that dissolved in the morning’s marrow mist. The air was moist and chilly. Something in my brain slipped, like a wheel on wet grass. Pictures of my father, and of my grandfather standing against the same landscape, materialised. I imagined the two of them with me, at last finding a place where we might all be close together again, free of discord. ‘Look, can you see what I can?’
Eldon always said freedom did not come easy. ‘I remember the lyrebird’s call to be free of the past,’ he would complain. ‘But everyone seemed, even in those days, to want to replace one kind of past with another, cabbage with bortsch. I wanted to be an artist of the air not just a Fitzrovian intellectual, you know. An eagle soaring, not a damn peacock strutting.’
From my vantage point I could just make out the jade rim of the jungle on the other side. The flat, calm water was as still as paint, cleansed by the storm that had melded the lake and the sky into one. Clumps of trees, like steep islands, stood in shallow water; the platinum trunks of those struck by lightning bared, with not even an egret to ruffle the slowly evaporating shrouds. The morning light was turning the sky blue. Into my head flew the remnants of an illustration from Eldon’s boyhood: grebes, sandpipers, red-shanks, green-shanks, golden plovers, scarlet minivets and high above, a cloud of whistling teal watched by fish eagles, marsh-harriers and brahminy kites. He used to tell me a story of a lakeland ghost who carried a dead child whom she offered to any man she encountered. If the man touched the child he would die, but if he refused to take the child the ghost would turn him into a swine. Eldon said that this was the avenging ghost of the original queen of the island spurned by her cross-water lover for a pedigree mate from the mainland. ‘She was our Circe,’ he would say drawing a link, like Uva’s father, to his other world, ‘too often completely misunderstood, demonised for her natural heart.’ I wondered if she still lurked there.
Then two gunshots reverberated around the rock.
I dashed back to the enclosure. Kris was outside with a gun in one hand, and a brace of dead bats in the other. ‘Yakitori.’ He grinned at me and slouched over to a stone slab where he had placed a basin of rainwater. He squatted down and started to skin the bats with his knife, rocking back and forth on his haunches, humming softly to himself.
‘They might have heard you.’
Kris carefully peeled back the fur to expose the slimy, stringy flesh of the animal. ‘There’s nobody here.’
I went inside the cave.
‘What happened?’ Jaz was hunched up, on the far ledge.
‘Kris has been hunting.’
‘Hunting what?’
‘Breakfast.’ I collected the seat-pads and took them outside. ‘So you won’t starve,’ I added.
Jaz sighed, immensely relieved. ‘But, darling, doesn’t he know? I’m a vegetarian.’
Further along from where we had slept, Kris discovered a shrine room. Jaz claimed that he could smell oranges, or was it passion fruit? Kris lit a white flowlux that spread everywhere. The rock walls had plaster on them; the passion was sublimated into frescoes.
I had seen photographs of similar paintings in the outdated guidebooks I had studied before coming, but in the cave the images seemed much older than any I had read about. The pale russets, burnt ochres and delicate lilacs hovered in space like early holograms refashioning the contours of the most ancient gods. The figures seemed to shift with every movement of the eye, reviving stories of long-lost times. I imagined old candlelight, flickering; our shadows moving among the protean pigment. These were the memories I had wanted to trace: history, myth, legend all defined in one supple line marrying the seen to the unseen, the spirit to the bone.
‘How come this place has not been zapped?’ Jaz clung to me. ‘I was told all these icons, all the olden-day stuff, got completely destroyed.’
‘This cave must not have been known about at the time. Or was forgotten. This whole area was abandoned by everybody.’
Kris intervened. ‘We should go now.’
‘And where, Kris, are we going?’ Jaz detached himself from me. ‘Do you even know where to go?’
‘Kris will take us to the hills, like he promised. From there I want to get to this place called Samandia. Uva will be waiting there.’ I glanced at Kris, but he didn’t react. ‘We go down south, yes?’
Jaz patted my hand, bemused. ‘You shouldn’t say that, Marc … unless you really mean it?’
‘Why? Is it like going down into the underworld?’
Jaz pinched his lips together with his fingers to stop from laughing at another of his Carnival gags.
Near Samandia was the place, Uva said, where the first inhabitants of the island had been awakened by butterflies splashing dew at the dawn of time. The dew formed a lake and their wings a floating stairway spiralling up to heaven. It was here that the first human drowned and ascended to become a god or, according to others, where the first couple – Adam and Eve – were expelled to become real lovers, descending on steps of mortal confetti; their loins swollen, their fingers entwined, their lives ignited. Once a realm of pilgrimage and veneration, it was forsaken after the neutering of the south-west, the devastation of the lower rainforests by rogue missiles and botched nuclear deterrents.
Uva claimed it is purely a matter of chemical balance in the body that makes us feel that the best may be behind us, or even yet to come. Touching my head with her fingertips, she added, ‘Or here, if the serotonin is spurting. Right?’
My scalp prickled. ‘Yes.’
That was the evening she showed me where the turtles were said to have laid their eggs in the old days.
‘Are you sure?’ I had assumed it was on the other coast. In the south where the sand was easier to dig and the sea free for thousands of miles.
‘There is no other beach,’ she said. ‘They must have migrated.’
I didn’t think so. But then the butterflies migrated. We all did. From one world to another, sometime.
The road plunged through thick, pulpwood scrub. In some places it deteriorated into bomb craters and potholes but the big billowing wheels of the cruiser rolled over them all, flattening brushwood, scattering rocks. Jaz, bouncing in the back, bawled out, ‘Why on earth did you ever come to a hole like this, Marc?’
How could I explain to Jaz how much I wanted from this island? How much it represented of a world I had once believed I could never reach. ‘My father’s father was born here. My father died here. I thought I might find some remains. Something, maybe, about who he was and who I am. I came to learn what my life is all about.’
He leant forward, greedy for more. ‘And got enchanted?’
‘There seemed no point in going back until I found something, and when I did – how could I?’
‘Once you met Uva, huh?’
I looked up at my rear-view mirror and saw Jaz’s eyes gleam with vicarious pleasure.
My father’s decision to come here, flying east on his own – over the Alps, the deserts of Arabia, the Indian Ocean, over camel humps, golden dhows, catamarans and shoals of singing fish, to a place where sealost sailors believed they would see the springs of heaven rise – began to make sense to me only after I followed him.
Grandma Cleo knew I would do so, long before I did. Whenever I said I wanted to be still, she would rock her head and say it is in my blood to move. ‘You’ll find child, one day, there’ll be a journey you’ll have to make. We all have little Argos of our own, dear, you jus’ like me.’ She too had travelled east, as far, to meet her Eldon in an overcast Britain – an island halfway between their own two warmer ones, hers in the Caribbean Sea and his in the Indian Ocean.
I used to wonder how she and Eldon could have found anything in common: she had come from what she always called the West Indies to support a war of an unknown, and unloving, motherland; whereas he, Eldon, made no secret of his distrust of stories of hope and glory. Once when I came back from a school visit to an exhibition about nations at war, he got quite upset. ‘There is nothing to learn from war except the colossal stupidity of men,’ he exclaimed. ‘Museums these days sanitise the past to make it shine more interestingly – educatively – than it ever should be remembered.’
‘But if not for war you wouldn’t have met Grandma,’ I pointed out, too young to understand the deeper logic of life as it has to be lived.
Eldon had been a well-heeled student when he had first come to England. ‘Those days, the poor of the Empire only travelled out of this country, not into it,’ he’d explain, drawing for me a picture of a whimsical young man indulging in lazy punts and preposterous motoring jaunts. ‘I was the first to get the new super-fast Alvis, you know. Glorious car. Even at the height of austerity I’d happily blow a month’s petrol ration on a single afternoon’s romp in that magnificent machine.’ He’d chuckle at my consternation and flap a hand in the air. ‘To get to my age, dear boy, you have to have had some pranks to laugh about.’ That was why, he said, he learnt to fly. ‘I thought I might one day write a sonnet in the sky.’
In the end though, he admitted, he had never even finished his degree. ‘I decided that there was more to life than posturing in a cap and gown. I came to London and learnt to see the history of our times in a different way …’ He said he had met people who made him rethink everything he had taken for granted before. ‘Over warm beer and cigarette smoke they exposed the injustice of the whole colonial enterprise. The Empire they said was an occupying force, a greedy enslaver. Firebrands like Satish and Vernon were ready to punch the lion right on the nose. Independence, revolution, had to be now or never, they claimed. Out of the rubble of Europe they wanted to build the road to our freedom.’
Eldon told me he was never very sure about the metaphors they used, but London did seem then to be a cauldron of cabals. ‘Quite a different thing from the collection of villages that the natives imagined,’ he added with a slight smirk. ‘In those days the Indians here knew even each other’s bellybuttons, and the West Indians I met all seemed familiar with every inch of each other’s backyards. Even our fellows in town got on well enough for a regular monthly bunfight, you know.’
Then came the war. ‘I was called for an interview in some musty office off the Kingsway. “We need you,” a big oaf from the Air Ministry announced.’ Eldon cleared his throat noisily as if trying to untie a complicated knot inside. ‘I told the fellow that this was a squabble that had nothing to do with me. A military brawl between European powers that had been systematically looting the rest of the world. Napoleon, Bismarck, even that woman Victoria had all been, to my mind, pompous bullies craving a bit of their own sun to swagger in.’
His mouth curved down as he recalled the next few months. ‘It was only in September 1940, when the bombs began to fall on civilians in London, that I saw that this, like Spain, might turn out to be something really very different.’ He met refugees who had managed to escape to England and began to feel a bond with those under siege. Even so, he said, he couldn’t bring himself to take life, human life. Influenced by the fringe pacifists of the time, he preferred to give humanitarian help – charity – as foreigners often do in foreign places everywhere. He joined the air medical services, ferrying supplies and wounded patients into hospitals around the country.
It was on one of these missions that he had met Cleo. She had come to England following her brother who had got into the RAF. She had wanted to as well. Eldon said he had been intrigued by Cleo’s loyalty for a country that seemed so keen not to reciprocate her affections. I guess an abundance of love was what allowed her to feel protective; showed her how she sometimes might have to sacrifice the more simplistic ideas about what one should or should not do for the sake of something more dear. I can understand that now, but I am not sure Eldon ever did.
Eldon and Cleo were married after the war. By then Cleo had no one else; her brother had been killed in action, her parents were both dead. Eldon was no war hero but, I suppose, she must have seen something in him she recognised. A commitment to her. He sold his fancy Alvis and started a small air service business to earn a modest, but autonomous, livelihood in a country he was beginning to call his own. For a marriage like theirs, he said, post-war Britain despite the soot, the rancid fog and the ration cards seemed to be the only place. By then, he said, he had realised the prejudices of his old home towards a bond like theirs would be even harder to break.
For me my grandfather’s inadvertent migration and awkward pacifism was all the more poignant for being rejected by his only son, my father.
When I was a little older I asked Eldon what he believed was really at stake in that early war he’d tried to shun.
‘In some ways everything, just as in the conflicts we have today. The dividing line between what is right and what is wrong.’ Eldon tapped a column of ash off his cigarette into an empty teacup. ‘Look around you now. There are some things people do that are very clearly right, and some very clearly wrong. But there are a great many things we do that are easily confused, especially by ourselves.’
I didn’t know what he was getting at. It seemed to me he was the one confused. I tried to pin him down. ‘Do you really think there was an alternative then?’
He brushed aside some specks of ash that had drifted on to the table. ‘During those years not everyone understood what was going on, or why. So much was bungled to begin with that the motives became quite mixed up. Sometimes, it seemed to me, fighting was fuelled more by xenophobia …’
‘That’s not really true, is it?’ I protested, not quite sure of the word, but certain that it was unfair. Perhaps it was his old age, I thought, muddying the past. ‘Anti-fascism, wasn’t it? There’s no real choice, is there, about tolerating tyrants? You have to fight evil.’ Appeasement, I had learned, could not be right. Everyone talked of the need for strength. How you can’t give up the fight. I had the beat in my blood.
He looked at me a little in surprise. ‘Yes, of course, but the question is how do you do it? By fighting for peace? By violent retaliation? Revenge?’ He waited for the words to sink in. Then, in the silence, his gaze dimmed. I felt something retract. He continued in a quieter voice, as if to himself. ‘We now know don’t we, that if you hit someone to teach him a lesson, the lesson you teach is how to hit.’
I could see that, but I couldn’t make sense of it. ‘But if you destroy the monster, isn’t that the end of it? It’s not a lesson.’
Eldon hesitated. ‘Have you heard of the Hydra?’
‘It was eventually killed, wasn’t it?’ I replied. ‘Not tamed.’
He wasn’t listening. ‘We have yet to learn the true cost of a bomb: how it accrues over years, decades, lives. I like to believe we can learn – that the young will see more clearly.’ He fixed his eyes on me again. ‘You must do better in your life.’
I went cold when he said that.
‘The art of killing cannot be our finest achievement,’ he added, cupping his hands to light another cigarette. ‘At least, I could never accept that. Not then, not now. Not even in the most ancient battles of the world. It can’t be right. Nothing is inevitable. Not even history. There is always an alternative.’
I remember looking at him then and thinking, he still doesn’t know what he should have done; what anyone should have done. The uncertainty had troubled him all his life, and maybe through him also affected my father’s. The thought frightened me. I wondered whether all my father’s heroic sorties were only a reaction against Eldon’s opinions. I tried to imagine what he would have said in my place, what his real convictions were. Why did he not bale out on that last flight? Doubt, it seemed to me then, could be a flaw.
But there were moments of doubt for me too – and culpability, I now know – when clips of muted bombs and missiles were shown on TV. I’d see a child’s face, like mine, dodging behind the screen, behind the indiscriminate incendiaries. Eldon would sink back in his chair after watching with me. ‘How can they kill ordinary men, women and children for the sake of an idea planted in their heads? Destroy one life to save another? How can anyone believe in such a hierarchy of souls?’
Perhaps, as he claimed, it has something to do with the face you know, and the one you don’t. Could it be that easy? Or is there a need to help the innocent, the weak, against the strong? Sometimes maybe we have to work out what is the greater good, however inadequate our mathematics. But he wasn’t there to argue with by the time I came to think of that.
* * *
The jungle expired and we broke out into a stretch of parched fields. The road broadened. We passed a few broken-down houses. Kris peered out and said it was OK to continue. There was no sign of anybody around. We came to a village pond and a schoolhouse. In the centre of the grounds, a tall empty flagpole held up a patch of dirty sky. On the periphery large tamarind trees spread a speckled shade and dry gunge covered the ground.
‘There may be something we can use here. Something to eat even,’ I said to the others and parked by the gate.
Kris got down and looked around for a food store. I went straight into the school office and opened the cupboard I found in there. It was empty. ‘Who would have been here?’ I asked Jaz who had followed me in.
‘Maybe it is not yet occupied, you know? Maybe it is one of those new villages they are always planning and then forgetting to copulate. I mean populate.’ He laughed nervously. ‘Sorry. Just a joke.’
I ignored the comment and stared out of the doorway. From the office I could see the whole compound: the rusted earth, the trees, the glimmer of the pond on the other side of the road stuffed with big grey leaves rotting in the heat. Not a single sound stung the air.
Jaz flicked a stray cowlick back and walked hesitantly away. By the window he stopped and seemed to perk up. He shut his eyes and sniffed the air; his crushed bustle rose fetchingly off his haunch. ‘This way,’ he exclaimed and set off at a brisk trot.
‘Where?’
‘The perfume, darling, the perfume. Can’t you smell it?’ He wagged his head in exasperation. Quickening his pace, he disappeared around a corner excitedly invoking young sailors and the scent of sun-warmed smegma.
I was glad to be left alone. I tried to imagine what might have been taught in this desolate school. History? The past choked with wars, disputes, borders as pointless as chalk lines in water. Ideology? Doctrines bloated with blood and bones, perverted by power. My own lessons, I realised, had taken too long to learn; I guess it was nobody’s fault but mine.
Then Jaz returned, beaming, with a bedraggled, bare-bodied boy at his side. ‘Look what I found.’ He had one hand on the nape of the boy’s neck and in the other an old-fashioned automatic. He threw the gun to me.
The boy had no shirt, he was wearing torn khaki drills and grubby Shanghai trainers. He had a belt of bullets masking his narrow waist and a brown rag wrapped around his head. His skin was sunburnt. A wispy beard blurred the edge of a pretty, thin face dominated by dark protruding eyes. He reminded me of an early hero of mine whose poster had been on my wall for years: a cover version of his song about shooting the sheriff came to me. Eldon, I remember, did not like it one little bit.
‘He says he is a fighter, but that gun of his doesn’t even work.’
I tried to open the cartridge chamber. ‘What’s he doing hiding here?’
‘Dreaming of smetana.’
‘Where is your camp?’ I asked the boy, passing over Jaz’s cryptic comment.
‘You don’t know his language?’ Jaz interrupted. ‘They don’t speak English out here.’
‘Why, what does he speak?’
‘A junghi-bhasa.’
‘And you know it?’
Jaz’s eyes lit up. ‘I know them all. New recruits sometimes don’t have a city language. They come with all sorts of jungle cocktails. But in my line of business you have to be able to communicate with anyone. The tongue is everything, you know.’
‘Ask him, then, where all the village people are.’
Jaz translated. The boy sulked at first, but then grunted out an answer.
‘He says they are hiding in the jungle.’
‘Why?’
The boy didn’t reply when Jaz asked him, but Jaz took the boy’s hand in his and gently urged him. The boy listened apprehensively. All at once his whole face seemed to surge with emotion, and words blubbed out. Eventually Jaz turned to me. ‘Because of attacks.’
‘Who attacks them?’
‘He doesn’t know.’
‘How many of them are there?’
Having opened up, the boy seemed unable to withhold anything from Jaz. According to the boy there were about seventy of them in a settlement. Some were refugees from this village, some from others. Mostly children. They lived in woven huts which they dismantled and shifted from time to time, whenever smokeseed poisoned the air, or wailing. He had no idea how long they had lived in this makeshift manner.
‘What’s his name?’
‘What does that matter?’
‘I’d like to know. He must have a name. I’d like to know who he is.’
‘But a name will tell you nothing about who he is.’ Jaz raised his eyes. He asked the boy, nevertheless.
‘Ismail.’ The boy wiped the sweat from around his mouth with his arm. Ismail meant something to me, although not to Jaz.
‘Did he go to this school?’ I wanted to know whether he was connected with the place.
Yes, was the answer. Once.
‘Is the schoolmaster still here? The headmaster? An imam?’
Ismail looked confused.
‘I don’t think there are any older men left.’ Jaz spoke slowly, as though he was solving a riddle in his young charge’s eyes.
Kris fixed the boy’s gun, fascinated by its quaint mechanism. He showed the boy how to dismantle the trigger and refit it, how to release the jammed magazine. Only then did Ismail agree to take us to his refugee camp. He sat on the roof of the cruiser, directing the way. As we approached a small hill, gashed by a landslip on one side, a crowd of scruffy children appeared.
When we finally stopped, several of the children came close. They seemed to be peculiarly fearless, but it was perhaps the lack of any reaction, a deadening in the eyes, that gave the impression of fearlessness. One child, a boy with a shaved head, picked up a stick and pretended to shoot us: ‘Da-da-da-da-da-da, pschew, pschew, pschew, da-da-da-da-da-da.’ The other children observed him, and us, as though they were watchful moths.
Ismail rolled off the cruiser. The younger children scurried up the slopes; the older ones shuffled back a few steps. The boy with the stick pointed it at Ismail and pretended to shoot again. ‘Da-da-da-da-da-da.’ He then dropped the stick and quickly picked up a handful of pebbles. He moved to one side of the cruiser and crouched. Across the road several empty cans were lined up on a broken culvert. He threw his pebbles hard, knocking one, two, three in quick succession.
Ismail called out and several women emerged out of the bush. They all looked prematurely aged: the nearest, a white-haired mother with a small child tugging at her, immediately began to berate Ismail. She lifted her face, bobbing her chin at the vehicle. Ismail talked back with obvious vehemence, but her expression remained one of suspicion. Only when he reloaded his gun in front of her and she saw that we made no effort to disarm him did she relent. She watched and then she took the gun off him before turning to Jaz. Her voice was sharp but she invited us up into a makeshift community hall hidden behind the trees: a large thatched hut with a few pieces of tatty furniture purloined from the schoolhouse down the road.
The three of us were ushered to a bench behind a table. Ismail half-knelt on a stool. Children and mothers slowly filled the shelter. A red clay pot of water and three cracked plastic cups were placed on the table in front of us. Ismail poured out a small amount of water into each and offered the cups around. He explained to Jaz that this was for us to drink. He looked relieved to be back in a crowd, even a crowd as weary and despondent as this.
Silence seemed to grow between us as we each took our sips. The children watched, awed by the sight of strange men drinking water.
I felt their eyes congregate on me. Even Jaz and Kris were looking for me to say something. What could I say? I didn’t want to alarm them, nor did I want us to become unwitting hostages. Eventually I started to tell them about us, asking Jaz to translate; pausing, from time to time, to gauge their reactions while Jaz tried to catch up. They listened without a flicker of emotion as I explained that the three of us were refugees too, escaped from the city on the coast. That we meant no harm and wanted only information: news of danger, soldiers, military reconnaissance, risks.
‘Rice,’ one of the older mothers interjected from the side.
Jaz brightened. ‘She can see we are hungry for rice. Her name is Karuna.’
‘Where do they get rice?’ I had not noticed any paddy cultivation on our journey.
Karuna explained that the abandoned villages in the area all had granaries which they had emptied into large canisters and buried as secret stores. Last season they had also tried planting red rice – patchai-p 2462/11, she recited the name of the variety as though it were a benediction. The numbers were in English. She said they had a small secret mud patch behind the schoolhouse from which they hoped to gather a quick harvest before a passing skyplane picked up the trace and bombed them. Vegetables they grew under removable camouflage thatch with watchers on shift, throughout the day, to let the sunshine in and warn of cloudbursts.
‘The children are secret farmers, she says,’ Jaz explained excitedly.
Uva’s dream children? I wondered. ‘Do you think they know her?’
Kris, who was fidgeting on the bench, knotting his fingers around each other, jerked his head up. In his glance I could feel the edge of a knife. He snorted and buried his eyes back in the hard, stamped earth of the hut.
‘Uva?’ Jaz looked doubtful.
Two of the women left the group and slipped out.
‘Ask who taught them how to farm. Where do they get their seed?’
‘It’s not her. They say they find what they need. They go from one plundered village to another collecting whatever’s left.’
Only then did I notice that all the younger women were nursing babies.
Jaz was the one who asked about the men. Karuna told him that there were none. They’ve been killed or have gone to fight as rebels. They rarely return.
‘She says her group is a band of mothers and children.’ Jaz’s voice dropped lower. ‘The bigger kids are stolen by marauders. Six boys and four girls were taken last time. The rest, the weak are butchered, the women who are caught are raped …’
The marauders had not been seen for three seasons but the mothers remained vigilant. ‘They will be back.’ There was no doubt in Karuna’s voice. ‘They always come back.’ The women had no weapons for protection, Jaz was told, but they had learnt to move fast. Ismail had found his gun only the other day and wanted the youngsters to learn to fight. Some of the older ones had already gone to try to find a rebel group to join. The women didn’t approve. They wanted Ismail to get rid of his gun. They felt it hampered them, distracted them from better strategies.
As the talk increased, the children began to shift about, looking at each other more than at us, picking at their sores. Suddenly one child started to sing. It was impossible to tell his age: he could have been five, or six, or seven. The voice more hurt than young. Jaz whispered that the boy was singing a nursery song about flowers floating in a pond. A couple of other children joined the chorus, but then the first child came to an unexpected stop.
His mother stifled her sobs in her hands. We learnt that the child had seen his two elder brothers and a baby hacked to death in their home by the village pond. The murderers included a man who had come before. One who had raped her; the baby’s father. She still had her life only because she seemed to have died the second time.
The child’s eyes were dull, even though his voice had trembled.
Another woman brought forward a slightly older child. This one did not speak any more, Jaz was told. ‘Pushpa is ten,’ he explained. ‘They dread the day she will see her own blood.’
The child’s face was beautiful, clear and fresh, but she was lame and her legs were scarred by jagged rips. There were thick welts across her back, clearly visible through the straps of her dress. The marauders had used a bayonet on her, to pitch her from one to another. The woman unbuttoned the back of the dress to show us a pit the size of a fist by the girl’s lower spine where her lacerated flesh had been scooped out. It was a miracle that she had survived.
The child twisted her hands together and slipped back behind the woman. I wanted to call her by her name, Pushpa, and promise her a life she need not fear. But I couldn’t. She dropped down on her knees and peeped out. I felt ashamed. This was not the world she should have been born to see.
‘She has seen too much.’ Jaz looked away, unable to stop the tears. ‘Her eyes have destroyed her tongue.’
There was no more singing. A warm wind blew through the hut. Karuna offered to show us around the settlement while the food was being prepared. The children filed out, the mutilated remains of an assortment of communities where pain had passed like a malady from one jumbled generation to the next. These were children who had to nurse a numbness to their past; condemned to destroy their progenitors, or remain fractured themselves for ever.
I stayed behind for a few minutes, alone in the hut, unable to shake off the idea that perhaps my own father might have cast the shadow under which these children, or the ones before them, had lived: Lee the veteran bomber. What had he been doing flying over here? Cleo believed one thing, Eldon another. Who was he really helping? I wished then, for the first time, that I hadn’t come. This was not at all what I had wanted to learn. With Uva, I had hoped things might become simple; I suppose nothing ever is.
Closing my eyes I can see again the yellow tree on the video behind my father’s voice. Why did he not follow his mother Cleo’s dancing drumbeat rather than Eldon’s suppressed thakita-tha? Why didn’t I? A different time must mean a different place. And yet by being here now I know this land and its tragic past – its ruined children – become, like the whole of the tainted world, as much mine as anybody else’s.
The others had assembled outside a kitchen; the cooks were dishing out a concoction of rice mixed with sour fruit. They had salt-stones, and pastes of chilli and vinegar. Jaz was prattling zappily between mouthfuls about the coloured kafs and bakeries of his underground mall, delighted to have an appreciative audience again, even if only a bevy of grey-haired women with spellbound kids.
* * *
Later I asked Jaz to help me talk to the oldest woman in the camp – Mukti.
‘Questioning, questioning, all the time questioning. Why? What is it you want to know so much?’
‘I want to understand what has happened here. Did she ever see fighting in the sky? Aerial bombing? Warplanes shot down?’
Mukti looked to be at least ninety. Her face was puckered into pouches, her skin mottled; she had no teeth, but her voice was strong and her babbling faster than even Jaz’s. Her conversation was difficult to follow and left Jaz stranded between the events of the previous century and a past that might have been only days old.
‘I don’t know what she means,’ he complained helplessly. ‘Her words are too old. She says that yesterday’s water was bitter but better.’ The span of her life seemed beyond anything Jaz could imagine.
‘Where does she come from?’ I asked. ‘Where does she belong?’
Jaz understood her to be saying that her father fought in the first war here. Her family, like the whole village, was on one side for that one, and the other side for the next. He asked if she meant the dark war with the cloud. The old woman looked baffled.
‘The Great War?’ I suggested, but this time Jaz was stumped.
When we were alone, I took Jaz by the arm and steered him towards the edge of the camp. ‘You know, I think that place with the school – where at least our Mukti seems to have once belonged – is much older than it seems.’ We could glimpse the pond in the distance, and the roof of the schoolhouse. ‘That little pond – the tank – could be from the ancient days. The village must have been inhabited and abandoned many, many times.’
‘What? Like this? A bunch of people hiding out, scratching a living until they are scratched out. Over and again?’
‘This is a jungle that must have been fought over a hundred times, if not more.’ I picked up some earth and crumbled the rusty soil between my thumb and two fingers, thinking of Uva’s description of warlords thriving on each other’s crimes. ‘Killing and maiming again and again. It’s like some kind of disease.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. Perhaps something in the air? Some infection. Or maybe it’s the water so steeped in the past.’ I remembered Eldon’s poem.
The teardrops of the original inhabitants,
our old gods,
destroyed by invaders,
wreak perpetual revenge on their descendants …
The words absorbing, renewing, however dispiriting the story; performing our only true human magic: transforming even pain into a line, a scrap of verse, a rhyme. A greater design.
Jaz plucked at his ear, his larger one, contemplating me. ‘You just love that, Marc, don’t you? Poems and all that. But the fighting here is not because of some hoary old demon, you know. Don’t they fight just as much where you come from? It’s just that when people think too much of themselves, their tongues get too fat and they can’t talk but shit. That pond may not be anything so mysterious. It’s probably just a crater, you know, where some anal dropped another bomb and blew a great big hole in the ground.’
* * *
In the evening the three of us were given rope beds in a small hut. I asked whose place we had taken, uneasy about us too displacing someone.
‘Never mind whose, at least we can sleep in some velvet tonight.’ Jaz tested one. He lay down and patted the bed next to his. ‘Come, Marc. Take this one. Lie down and tell me a nice, cosy story.’
I shook my head, tight-lipped. I lit the lamp we had been given and adjusted the flame. I didn’t have any tales to tell. I had spent too many years holed up alone, stuffing my head with straw and somnambulants, to suddenly start spouting some crappy little yarn for him.
Jaz shifted his gaze and looked out of the open door. The sun had dropped; a few strands of stars showed between the planets unbuttoned in the sky. He seemed to be searching for something. ‘How about a big mega-epic then, about a world out of this world, huh, Marc?’ His face had an appealing delicacy, despite the multiple layers of souring cream.
‘I can’t.’ I shook my head again. I really couldn’t then. I didn’t even know where to begin. Not then.
‘You are as bad as Kris.’ Jaz pouted, more than a little peeved. He opened his pouch and took out a tube of Vaseline. He squeezed a little on to his fingers. ‘What is his problem anyway? Does he never relax?’
Kris was outside, scowling at the sky, pacing up and down.
I told Jaz about the first time I had seen Kris. A small cameo to appease him. It was the best I could do. ‘Working his sheets of metal, sharpening his tools; making something out of the passing of time: that’s what he needs to relax.’
I was about to mention the butterfly knife when Jaz butted in. ‘Like me. My relaxation is also my work, you know. Working the sheets. A bend in the flesh. Shall I show you?’ He reached out.
I pushed his hand away. ‘Stop it. Do you know where you are?’
He drew back, docile and dutiful. ‘Close, Marc, close to the very last planet. The very end …’
‘What?’
‘The end of my tether.’ He looked down and solemnly made a mudra with his fingers like a mendicant soliciting solace; then he broke into a laugh, reddening in the glow of the lamp. ‘Oh, maybe it is the Amazon then. Is it?’
‘Be serious.’
‘Why?’ His head popped up. ‘Why?’ Both his eyes welled up. ‘If I was, I would cry.’
I realised then that I knew nothing about what he must be feeling stuck in the camp. Perhaps he too was once a waif from a place like this? His face was always expressive of every nuance of every moment, but he never betrayed anything of his past, or the world hidden beneath the eloquence of his body. At that moment he seemed to be clinging to the surface because he was frightened of what lay below. I should have asked him something, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I didn’t want to get so close.
Outside I heard the hiss of fresh torches being lit, and someone checking the bells and chimes strung around the camp. They were trying, at least, to save what they could of their lives.
I went out to join Kris. A few minutes later Jaz also came out.
‘Tomorrow we must go,’ I announced to a small group that had gathered around us. Before Jaz could translate there was a scream in the outer darkness. The women sitting at the centre of the camp scrambled to their feet. Several grabbed flaming torches and began to run in circles while others brought out drums from their huts and began to pound them. The rushing flames and the furious drumbeats speeded up frantically until the wailing began to fade, as though a tortured infant was being carried away. Driven away.
‘Devil,’ Mukti, the old woman, spat out.
At dawn, the whole camp was on the move. Huts were dismantled, carts loaded, cattle harnessed. Jaz learned that the cry of the banshee-bird was believed to be a harbinger of catastrophe. The women said they had to move whenever the devil’s voice was heard. Otherwise they’d be attacked.
‘Where will they go?’
‘They won’t tell me. They think the bird is something to do with us. They are terrified of it.’ Jaz kept wringing his hands. ‘Even Ismail seems to think it has something to do with me.’ His lips, his cheeks, his whole face drooped.
I clasped his hands in mine. ‘I guess they have lived in terror all their lives. They can’t help but suspect us.’ I wished I could do something more for them, or for him.
Kris was all ready to go; I led Jaz to our vehicle. We left with no farewell, no words, the wind low in the west.
I drove slowly, unsure of the veracity of old jungle omens. The road disappeared from time to time, but I followed Kris’s directions and it reappeared in fits and starts under the wheels. The jungle with its fatherless children faded behind us in twists of temporary oblivion. We travelled through a more arid zone until finally we reached the lush humps of the hill country. The temperature dropped. I stopped the cruiser and suggested we stretch our legs.
‘Here?’ Jaz shied away from the door like an animal that had been tricked too often.
I said I needed a break and leant back, putting my hands behind my head. The metal tag was still pinned to my ear and I began to fiddle with it. Much to my surprise it came away in my hand; I couldn’t stop the smile spreading across my face. ‘It’s gone.’
‘What?’ Jaz took a sidelong look.
‘It’s come off.’ I held up the tag like a Lilliputian trophy.
Kris grinned. For a moment he was almost charming. Then he was out of the vehicle, checking the headlamps, the radiator, the aerials.
Jaz leant over and examined the place where the tag had been. ‘You’ll have such a cute scar, Marc.’
The brief illusion of freedom, unshackled, was bliss. I hadn’t realised how much the metal had been affecting me.
Eldon often invoked the hill country when, as a child, I would help him stir the sweetener in his tea on the patio. ‘Tcha, just like in the old days, no? A fine cup of tea, roses, trimmed lawns. The comfort of illusions.’ Eldon would launch into a treatise on tea production, even though for me, at that age, tea was only something textual – far down the alphabet – rather than a matter of taste. ‘Two leaves and a bud, that’s what they pick, you see. From bushes about the size of you. Tick, tick, tick.’ The old man would pretend to pluck them off my head. ‘Then it goes into this huge factory with a wonderful aroma, where the leaves are dried and roasted and rolled and packed off to tickle the fantasies of a global network of humpty-tum addicts.’ It took me years to recognise the freshness of that vacuum-packed bouquet he was so fond of, and the reveries it induced, but by then the natural product was on the wane and Eldon’s quirky disquisition quite out of date.
I wasn’t too happy driving at dusk but Kris was keen that we press on. I switched the headlights on. As we swung around each hairpin bend I saw how the roots of stunted tea bushes gripped the earth. We came to a drive leading down to a factory that, in the fading light, looked as though it had been deserted for decades. Without waiting for Kris to say anything, I turned the cruiser in through the entrance.
‘What’s this?’ Jaz demanded, rested and much more himself.
‘A tea factory.’
‘Oh, how divine. Happy tea?’
‘No. Just tea.’ He was incorrigible. I locked the wheel and the cruiser lit the front of the factory in full beam. The windows of the building all had grilles but most had rusted through.
‘Just what?’
Kris jumped from the cruiser to check the place out.
I began to tell Jaz how tea had been the major export from the island until synthetics made traditional forms of tea production obsolete everywhere. How tea estates around the globe had turned into tourist museums until real-time museums themselves were superseded by more successful resorts concentrating solely on hedonism …
Jaz seemed to be watching my mouth, more than listening. ‘Like our underground Carnival?’ he asked dreamily.
Jaz knew so little of what had happened in his own environment, to care so little for the past. I wished I could give him the bigger picture in some easy dose. ‘You see, then they became a subject of organic archaeology, and the best of them were remoulded into evocation centres. That is until war made the air of some tea-hills too ghastly to breathe …’ As I was speaking I realised war may not have been the only scourge here; perhaps a reign of autocrats and blunderers coupled to an oligarchy of bloodsucking dorks, as Uva would put it, might have been the bigger curse.
Before I could go on Jaz nudged me. ‘Hey, I do like that teapot.’ There was a silhouette of a giant teapot at the far end of the factory. ‘With a spout like that, it must be happy tea, sweetie.’
At this I lost my temper. I banged the heel of my hand on the steering wheel. ‘No, no, no.’ I slapped the dashboard. ‘This is an ordinary tea factory. Out of commission. Dead. Don’t you understand anything? Don’t you care about anything?’ I shouted at him. ‘What the hell am I doing here, I don’t know. I am tired out driving this shitty little wagon, trying and trying to give you something of your own miserable history to understand. All to no bloody avail. I just don’t want any more sweetie this and darling that from you, sitting there, stroking yourself like God’s own head is stuck in your pants. No more, you hear, no more.’
Jaz had recoiled at the outburst. He leaned towards me when I stopped and patted my shoulders gently. ‘OK, there, there, simmer down. I was just trying to keep our spirits up, you know. That’s all.’
I stared at him, feeling both sorry and upset. It was impossible to stay angry with him. He looked troubled; his flamboyant mask besieged by a thin fuzz of mannish bristles sprouting out of control. I thought again about how the last two days could not have been easy for him. But I was fed up too. I wanted to be alone. I wished I was back in my mousy flat, where I could bask in the comfort of drip-feed dreams and deep screen insulation. It was too late now. I was tired. ‘We have to stay here tonight. I’m sorry. I need some quiet. I must sleep.’ I didn’t care if I sounded like a flatulent old grouch, I wanted to be still.
‘Yes, swee … tea. Yes, you must.’ He spotted Kris skulking around the building with his flashlight. ‘Kris will discover a way in. He perked up. ‘He’ll find us somewhere inside to sleep.’
Kris identified the bunkhouse at the back of the factory and broke into it. I followed him in, brushing aside the cobwebs and gunny flakes. The room was empty. Jaz retreated at once into a corner. He dusted a bit of the floor and sat down with his torch. He started to file his nails using the tiny emery board he always carried with him. Kris offered round a packet of biscuits from the cruiser’s emergency rations and then settled into a private meditation of his own, nodding to the rasp from Jaz’s fingers. I bit into the digestive and let it slowly disintegrate in my mouth. Our plight had blunted my hunger. Jaz seemed too subdued now. I wanted to comfort him but didn’t know how. What would become of him? He was not a cross-country trekker, whatever his origins. And Kris? Always so aloof. What would he do when we reached our destination? Uva, I realised, was the only one who could merge us into any kind of a community.
‘This hill road will take us over the central mountains to Samandia, won’t it, Kris?’ I tried hard to stop my voice from betraying my concern.
Kris, fiddling with his butterfly knife on the other bunk, looked up as though thwarted or something, but then quickly regained his composure. Nothing else gave in his eyes. Watching him open and close the knife I wanted again to hold it; draw closer to her through the metal clone. ‘She knows the way there, doesn’t she?’ I asked, seeking some reassurance. ‘Uva?’
From the other side of the room Jaz stifled a yawn. ‘Uhuh, sure she knows. She’s always been one for the great outdoors.’ He put away his nail-file. ‘But a rainforest is not really for me, you know. I like a place with a little electricity. A shaving point at least. Some indoor life.’ He let out a heavy sigh. ‘Your Samandia is not exactly famous for its bars, you know.’
The next morning the sun was a smoky grey. I made my way on to the main factory floor. The place was gutted. All the machines had been removed, but the interior still smelled of tea. It rose out of the floorboards and off the walls and seemed to stain the air with the odour of old ghosts.
In its heyday who would have been here? Sometimes it is so difficult to remember who belongs where, when. Or why. Whose was the labour, and whose the capital? There would have been blasts of hot air and the noise of dryers and rollers; wheels turning, the smell of burning, roasting tea. Narcotic sweat. There was a time when the sound of machines would have filled the air all around the hills. Factories in full swing. A steam train chugging up to the central hill towns. Eldon loved to recall those scenes, complete with sound effects: the clacking of wheels, the hoot of the engine, the constant gabble of conversations between strangers. It was a land full of talk, he would explain. ‘Everyone always wanted to place everybody else. People would speak to bridge the gulf between them. We had hope, you know, in those days. We all shared the same vision, the same sense of order even if not all our wealth.’
Sanctimonious claptrap, I suppose, but for me that morning there was no sound in the factory, or outside, other than the sound of my own breath misting the air. No words, no birds. Nothing. It seemed as though there was no one else left in the world. Not that I wanted hordes; all I wanted was Uva. A life that was our own.
I tried to picture her journey. Would she have a vehicle? A cart? A bullock? Anything? Survival with no provisions, only a knife for a weapon, I feared would be impossible however close to the earth she might feel. For an instant then I even doubted if she had understood the plan that had seemed so clear to me. But she must have thought as I did: Samandia was our only hope. I remembered the scent of her body as though she had just passed by, leaving a spoor – an urgent pheromonal odour – for me to follow. But is our lake a pool of sorrow now? I see her curled up in a basket of leaves; her head turned in, her neck bared. My arms are empty; they encompass nothing but air, thinning with each passing moment, and yet I can feel the shape of her being from our last embrace: imperfect but strong. The warmth seeping from her leg curled around mine, the curve of her back, and the painlessness of giving in, falling into a new-found deep, dark past. If I could live my life again, I would wish it to be shorter. Let it end with her, quickly, rather than last so long – these interminable hours of her pain; my vigil, remembering, giving breath to our loosening lives.
Jaz appeared. ‘Cuppa tea?’ He did an extravagant pirouette across the other end of the factory hall.
Jaz beamed. ‘There’s this packet.’ He held up a small green carton framed by decorative gold leaves. ‘It’s full of black stuff. Is it original toasted tea, do you think?’
My heart skipped. Eldon’s tea.
‘Kris will help me make it. I’ll bring the tray out to the front.’
A tea tray?
I was just twelve. I wanted to be the first one up in the house. A low snore like the whistle of a turbine emanated from Eldon’s room, but by the time I got down the stairs he was already shuffling out. ‘Good morning,’ he greeted me in a stage-whisper. I followed him to the kitchen which was filled with sunshine. He stood in the light, blinking, then shambled over to the sink and turned on the cold water tap. He let it pour into a plastic washing-up bowl which had streaks of red curry fat stuck to the rim. After the statutory two minutes, he filled the electric kettle and switched it on. He opened a Twinings tea caddy and picked two tea-bags and put them into a white teapot. He didn’t bother to warm it. ‘I am not a slave to habit,’ he mumbled more to himself than to me. ‘In any case it is nearly summer,’ he observed, as if it made a difference. The beauty of spring and summer for Eldon was being able to spend time in the garden, in the open air, making up for a winter indoors where the central heating dial was permanently fixed at 24 degrees Celsius. His skin would become drier than tissue paper, until the summer allowed it to heal again. Eldon said even the blood flowed around his body a little easier after the honeysuckle bloomed on Mayday. The robin was on the window sill, staring in. ‘Hungry, are you?’ Eldon lifted a microwave dish cover and picked at the fried belly pork that Cleo had saved from the previous night’s dinner. He opened the side window and the robin hopped a couple of steps back, staring defiantly. Eldon placed a charred piece of rind on the window sill. The robin immediately hopped over and picked it up. After another quick stare at Eldon, it flew away, whirring. The kettle bubbled to a roar and clicked itself off, the water subsiding like a passing jet. For some reason I became conscious of his tremendous age then. I felt anxious watching him pour the hot water into the teapot. After a quick stir, he closed the lid. He got two cups and saucers out, making more of a clatter. ‘This is my test,’ he grinned at me. ‘Carrying a tray with two cups, one for me and one for your grandma.’ He had invested in extra-large cups so that he could carry them half-full, with plenty of margin for spillage during the bumpy ride upstairs, and yet retain enough liquid for more than a single sip in bed. It meant the tray was substantially heavier. The weight should be helpful, he explained, for finding the centre of gravity, in keeping his hands steady. But that morning his wrists seemed to show the strain. He grumbled about having to do too many infuriating calculations to work out what was best: reduce the volume of tea and thereby the weight; walk faster and reduce the time but increase the risk of a missed step; take one cup at a time. Drink his first, then take Cleo hers, or vice versa. He looked for a moment like a harassed captain of an aircraft, constantly redistributing his payload for optimum lift in a journey from nowhere to nowhere.
I offered to carry it for him.
Eldon snapped back. ‘No, no. I can manage. I could fly a jumbo once, you know.’
That afternoon, while I was still at school, he had been rushed to hospital. He had died before the ambulance had crossed the gates. In the coffin his hands were cold and rigid; unshakable. Unfairly steady.
Jaz sipped the brew and screwed up his face in disgust. ‘I can see why they’ve gone out of business.’
In front of us the hills formed a troop of bowed green heads. The once tightly curled tea bushes, slackened with neglect, seemed to be stretching out for freedom. I breathed in the cool air; the fragrance of the infusion, the blend of Uva and my grandfather, was like hope released. I saw Eldon restored with his cup and cigarette; a mist rising, warm and pungent, his eyes lighting up cheered by each bittersweet sip; his hands strong, puffed full of life once more. All the pointless exclamations and vacant phrases that he used to punctuate his days with – his Ah … Bliss… I like a cup of strong tea – slowly began to make a safe and meaningful world again. A lost world of small true affections. One I was just beginning to recover with Uva.
‘What’s that sound?’ Jaz cocked his head, his ear turned towards the suck and chug of a valve pumping air.
The sound grew louder. I looked back at the factory, half-expecting its phantom machinery to be starting up. Then Kris came running from the back, looking up at the sky, circling one arm over his head and pointing with the other at the cruiser. The sound was deafening. I ran to the vehicle and shot it into the parking shelter just before the military Dragonfly whirred overhead, chopping the cool air and swooping down towards the open front of the factory. But the space was too small for its long, vicious rotors and it veered up sharply to one side. It circled the factory once more, and then moved on. The suck-swop died away, although by then my blood was pumping as hard and as loud in my ears.
‘Was it them?’ Jaz asked. ‘Do you think they saw us?’
I didn’t reply. The aircraft had no markings; but even if it was not from Maravil, it was clearly a gunship. Kris quickly began to pack the cruiser with our few belongings.
By midday we reached what had been cultivated smallholder land: narrow, old terraces that once might have harboured cabbages, radishes, cauliflowers. Sunshine burst through the bobbled fleece in the sky, creating pools of light and shadow on the road and the slopes; we seemed closer to a thinning above, a hole. But then the cruiser’s wheels slowed down. An alarm bleeped from the dashboard signalling a malfunction.
‘Is it the gas? Is it the gas?’ Jaz rapped his knuckles furiously on the fuel gauge.
I coaxed the cruiser on, working the throttle, the overdrive, even the ignition. The tank was not empty. I thought if we could just get up to the ridge, then we could see where we were, but when we reached it the air was mulled with the dust of collapsed farmsteads and toxic fumes from the valley below. We rolled down the next dip. The road seemed to evaporate before a large arena wreathed in smoke.
‘Race-course.’ Kris pointed out the white wooden rails of a defunct oval. Two skinny ponies were nibbling at the edges of a smouldering mound of rubbish. Could this be the famous hill town Eldon used to praise for its pure air and perfect turf?
I stopped the cruiser.
‘Won’t it go any more?’ Jaz asked in a voice that seemed more lost than I was.
I said we had better take a look. I couldn’t get up any proper speed. ‘There might be soldiers around. We might have to move fast.’
Kris grunted. According to him we were on the edge of a hill town that might still be a Maravil outpost. ‘Best avoid it.’ He slipped out and opened the engine panel. The steel intestines were too hot to touch. Kris fiddled with a spring mechanism.
‘My grandfather understood these things, but I never had the knack,’ I confessed, baffled.
One of the ponies reared its head and whinnied. The other one stamped and lunged at it, pushing it out of the way. In a sudden frenzy they went for each other, neighing and biting. A pack of other ponies – black, brown, scorched grey – emerged from behind the festering garbage; they all entered the fray, their hooves pounding the earth. They tore at each other, drawing blood, and charged through the debris, wild-eyed, churning it up and spreading the embers of small fires around them until flames began to flare up briefly everywhere, singeing their shin hair and tails. Jaz stuck his head out of the window. ‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘They want to be rid of each other.’ Kris clenched his teeth and set about testing the connectors on a black tube. He then wriggled beneath the vehicle to check the rest of it.
While Kris was underneath, the ponies turned towards us. I could see their ribs sticking out. ‘They are heading this way,’ Jaz warned from inside. ‘You’d better get in quick.’ They came up to the side of the cruiser, kicking at each other, rattling their hooves. The grey bumped the vehicle, rocking it. Blood was trickling out of a gash on its face where the flesh had turned inside out. Kris squirmed out on the other side and we piled back in. I tried the ignition. The engine started; I revved it. The ponies in front reared up. Then they broke away from each other and cantered back into the rubbish.
‘I don’t like those animals. I don’t like this place. I don’t like it at all.’ Jaz locked all the doors.
I calmed him down. ‘We’ll go now, we’ll go.’ The cruiser moved sluggishly forward. ‘How do we skirt the town?’ I asked Kris, easing into second gear.
Kris directed us to a road leading to even steeper hills.
‘We’ll never make it. We still have no power. Is there no other way?’
‘It’s the only way. The engine won’t fail.’
But with each increase of the incline the cruiser dropped its speed by half, until we were barely crawling up the road. The engine was grinding as if ready to burst; Jaz clamped his hands over his ears and lowered his head. ‘Oh God, can’t you do something?’ I reached for the handbrake but Kris would not let me stop. ‘Keep going,’ he commanded. When we finally got over the first range, the darkness was impenetrable. The weakened headlights lit up only the verge, the outer tendrils of the giant plants, but not any further, not even the earth of the hillside rising behind those infernal ferns. When the road turned into a hairpin, the lights missed everything and failed at the cliff’s edge.
‘I can’t drive like this,’ I said. ‘We have to stop. At least for daylight.’
Kris picked up his gun and placed it across his knees. ‘OK,’ he agreed grudgingly.
I parked the cruiser and turned off the engine.
Kris opened a ventilator flap. ‘You two sleep. I’ll keep watch.’
Jaz rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and settled into his seat. ‘I don’t think I should ever have spoken to you, Marc. It was a big mistake. I should have given you a bottle of Pin and walked away. Walked right away. Kept you out of my sweet, safe life.’ He kicked off his shoes and stretched out under his blanket in the back. ‘I had a such good life, you know, in my nice blue bar before you turned up.’
The air was cold in the morning; damp with hill-chilled dew. I had slept collapsed over the steering wheel. Next to me, Kris had also slumped forward and dozed against the dashboard. Outside, moisture seeped out of the grass, making the moss creak. An unbelievable contrast to Maravil with its harsh brackish breeze. I wondered, if I were to utter her name, would the wind carry it to her wherever she lay?
When Kris woke up, he immediately got us moving again. As we climbed higher, the road twisted between trees that became more and more deformed, brutalised by the winds escaping the lower country. Only a variety of moonwort seemed to thrive between the granite rocks. Below the airflow, small pink wild flowers clung to the edge. In places wisps of cloud blew over the road, momentarily obscuring the view of the foothills below, as well as the road winding ahead. We moved slowly, as though every tread on each tyre had to secure a foothold before turning, a groove at a time, up the sharply drawn zig-zag of the road appearing in front of the cruiser.
At the summit, a long stretch of soggy grass reached out for the grey hank piled against the horizon. The cruiser picked up a bit of speed and seemed to roll with the land. The heat, the venom of the lowlands, even the belligerent ponies seemed more than a world away. Jaz was humming behind me, happy again. I could see him in the mirror, supine in the back with his hand trailing out of the window. I wanted to sing too, feeling absurdly hopeful. At last able to believe that the air was unstained, that light was illuminating and that the future was not, in itself, a pollutant.
But then Kris held up his hand. A small waterhole came into view where a big black boulder broke the surface like the back of a beast. There were more rocks on the shore, and two small trees. I slowed down. Under one tree an enormous hawk-eagle hunched, gripping a rodent in its talons. Its wings swelled threateningly as it bent down to tear at its prey with a great hooked beak. I felt my own hunger tighten inside. ‘An eagle.’ I swallowed hard. ‘A real eagle.’ I waited for Kris to raise his gun, wanting not its death but that lean, feral meat.
He eyed the bird without moving. ‘We are nearly there,’ he breathed.
I was surprised. Samandia? It couldn’t be.
‘Let’s go then,’ Jaz chivvied from the back. ‘Let’s go.’
Kris nodded and I, squeezing in my empty stomach, eased the vehicle forward. We rounded another small glen, a rise and a fall, and came to the manicured grounds of a colonial palace. A red and white striped barrier marked the end of the road.
Kris put his finger to his lips. I cut the engine. Silence enveloped us. Before I could stop him, Kris slipped out and padded ahead. He paused by the side of the barrier and listened with his head held slightly at an angle. Then he turned and signalled to us to wait. A moment later he disappeared into the grounds. We watched him steal up the side of the steep garden, weaving in and out of the shrubs.
‘Why does he do that? Like a machine he just goes.’ Jaz shook his head. ‘Why can’t he communicate a little?’
I felt anxious but Kris seemed to know what he was doing. I opened my door.
‘Wait.’ Jaz hobbled into his shoes. ‘Now don’t you start too. Wait for me.’
I sneaked up to the barrier. The building at the top of the hill seemed to be floating like an empyreal pagoda crested with balconies and glazed ochre tiles. The scene was a picture held in glass. Protected, but with a sense of emptiness that echoed like a loss of heart, a truncated life.
After a while Kris appeared high up on the front steps, his sleeves rolled up, waving. ‘He’s calling us.’ Jaz tugged at my belt.
Halfway up the rough concrete walkway Jaz paused. ‘This place is really deserted, isn’t it?’
At the entrance to the building, two stately black doors dressed with rows of lacquered brass studs and finger plates were open. The walls on either side, decorated with ornamental pillars, were painted a regency red.
Kris, breathing heavily, ushered us in as though into his own home.
‘Is there no one here?’ Jaz asked, dubiously.
Kris coughed into his hand. ‘It’s safe.’
Inside there was a courtyard with a garden of ageing rose bushes in the middle and a gallery of delicate fretwork around it; a stone sculpture of a metamorphosing fish occupied the centre. Out of its lips the black streak of a defunct fountain ran.
There were stairs at each corner of the quadrangle and right opposite, a glass wall curtained from the inside.
‘What a gorgeous curtain.’ Jaz prodded me. ‘Aren’t you just dying to know what’s behind it?’
I looked at Kris. He bowed.
The door was secured only by a simple tubular lock; Kris had no trouble opening it. Inside we discovered a dining hall with a dozen polished hardwood tables, each with eight chairs whose spindles seemed to imitate the cosmology of an extinct priesthood. Against one wall a sideboard with glasses and a cutlery box; above these a felt-board with notices pinned to it. Jaz went up to the board and read them out aloud as though they were poems on lentil soup, tofu, and mango mousse. He did an excited flamenco stamp. ‘My God, can we stay, can we stay?’
Kris nodded. ‘Yes, for now we can all stay. There is nobody to stop us.’
The far wall, also of glass, was uncurtained. I crossed the polished parquet floor and stepped down into the lower half of the hall. The view of the land below was extraordinarily pastoral: a vale of blond, gently sloping grassland, dotted with small inky tarns of calm water. The higher ground of the hills on the other side was fringed with tufts of matted jungle. The scene was familiar, even though I had never seen it before. Somehow the pastel colour of the grass, the reflective water, the balance of sky, cloud and soft sweeping hillsides each in its own way seemed connected to a faint glimmering inside my head.
Meanwhile Jaz explored the pantry next door. I heard him open cupboards, larders, eco-fridges and cardboard boxes as if on a shopping spree. ‘Look at this stuff.’ He hauled out pulse packets and grain bags with huge, bounding exclamations. ‘Here.’ He passed around a packet of cereal bars. ‘Something decent to eat at last.’ He crammed a couple, quickly, into his mouth and opened a can of spaghetti hoops.
Kris went to the sink and tested the taps. They worked. He washed his hands thoroughly and rinsed his forearms several times. He shook the water off in slow, wringing motions.
Although Kris seemed remarkably at ease, I was not. I shovelled in some food quickly. ‘Why is there no one here?’
Kris shrugged. ‘There is no one.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘It was locked up. I had to break in. Trust me. We can stay here.’
I still felt uneasy, but Jaz was delighted. He spooned out more canned slop. ‘Here, have some more. This will have to keep us going until I get a proper meal sorted out. Hey, we can have a real party tonight.’
‘But somebody must live here. Look at the way it has been kept.’ I couldn’t understand it.
‘This is Farindola,’ Kris explained. ‘It was once a Chief’s retreat but the military have withdrawn. No one will come here now. We can stay. We must stay, until you work out what you want to do next.’
Of course it could not have been Samandia. There were no coconut trees. In the excitement I’d forgotten Samandia was meant to be in the lower country. Much further on. Kris’s Farindola must be where Eldon used to go hiking as a boy. What he had called the lunar plains.
‘But who has kept it like this?’
‘Whoever it was, they are not here any more. No one can come here except on the road we drove along. This is where it ends. I’ll rig up an alarm system.’
Kris was right; we needed some time to figure out what to do. I had expected the road to take us all the way, not to come to a dead end. I quickly finished my bowl. ‘I’m going to have a look around,’ I announced and wandered out. I was glad of his confidence about the safety of the place, even though its immaculate emptiness made me a little uncomfortable.
My first surprise was the room on the floor above.
As I entered I saw, on the wall, a large engraving I recognised from the frontispiece of one of Eldon’s books: a portrait of a plump man in a shoulder-first pose with a flag depicting a flattened island unfurled below him. As a boy I had often studied this man’s picture while Eldon recounted the adventures in the book. As I examined it once again I heard Eldon’s exasperated voice. ‘This fellow from England spent twenty years on our island and wrote a whole bloody book about it; I’ve spent sixty years on his and haven’t even written a damn letter.’ His old friend Anton who was with him sniffed ungraciously. ‘That’s that book that inspired Robinson Crusoe, no? Our fellows didn’t know what they started when they held that bugger prisoner.’
I went over to the glass case in the centre of the room. It was filled with fishing reels and gaudy, feathered flies. In one corner there was a pocket-sized pamphlet: Trout Fishing on Top of the World. It had a photograph on the cover of a family gathered by the banks of a stream. I imagined Eldon as one of the party; the youngest boy: scowling at a fishing rod, already concocting some wild exploit to relate in his later years.
The light outside changed. A soft hill rain misted the windows forming small elongated drops. Lower down the glass they converged into a more crowded map of minute coalescing lakes distorting the view of the black tarns below – the trout ponds, I reckoned. The rain drifted down the hillsides. The sealed room was quiet but, watching the mist and the moisture, I felt that even in the open there would be no sound to this rain.
* * *
In our new abode, Kris seemed to come into his own. He identified the keys to every lock, and allocated each of us a bedroom as though he was the proprietor of a country inn.
Mine was on the corner of the second floor. After being reacquainted with the old engraving and having imagined Eldon outside as a boy, I felt more at ease. I was content to walk alone. As Uva would put it, our independence and our interdependence were locked into one embrace. An embrace, I now long for.
Cold, thin cloud entered the open airy corridors of the building in drifts, blowing a welcome dampness that clung to every surface even my clothes, my skin, my hair. Down in the inner rose garden a small bird was pecking furtively about the statue in the centre. It had a striking cerulean breast, and a head crested with busy yellow streaks. For some reason I was glad not to be able to identify it. I listened hard, leaning over the parapet, hoping to catch the notes of its song, but there was only windrush, the hush of mist turning into moisture, a beak rapping. Then a trickle of water came out of the mouth of the statue. It had to be Kris at work, I reckoned, turning yet another system on: it was as though he wanted to settle in Farindola for ever.
On the landing, at the top of the stairs, I found the door bearing the number he had given me. It opened to a large room with a bed, a desk and chair, a bookshelf and a wardrobe. Another door within led to the bathroom. I turned and was startled; it took me a while to recognise the dishevelled figure in the mirror. My face had got quite brown and was caked with dust; my hair was matted. I needed a wash. Kris had said that everything was solar-powered, even the hot water. I turned on the tap over the bathtub. The chrome pipes, peppered with age, spluttered and hissed at first but within seconds settled to a fast-flowing stream of warm, slightly yellow water. Even the sound of it was a comfort: the gurgle of water on water amplified by a cast-iron drum. The whole room turned humid as the bath filled. I tested the temperature with my fingers and added a bit of cold. Then, stripping off each grimy garment in logical succession, I sat on the luxurious commode until steam entered every pore. Afterwards I lay full length in the hot frothy water with only my face and my knees protruding. I turned the taps off with my toes and let my feet sink to the bottom. A thin skim of thoughts swirled like rainbow-spills on a wet road. A warm current wafted up the insides of my legs, as she might slide to sheathe me.
I rubbed coconut oil down her arms and legs: a muscle leapt beneath my fingers. Her skin was sometimes as tight as a drum, as if she was all bunched up and ready to fly, and at other times it seemed as capacious as the surface of an ocean.
In that bath, that evening in Farindola, the memory of her seemed somehow to revolve within every other thought that came to me, and yet I was unable to hold on to her. Each time I tried, the sense of her, the essence of her, seemed to slip away; disappear, just as each time my fingers moved towards a patch of coloured bubbly water, it floated further out of reach. The time we had had together was like a dream, eroding, conforming as all our memories do to the shape of our immediate needs. Up in Farindola, although something of her straddled my innermost nerve, I simply could not clasp her, cherish her, as I wanted to. When I closed my eyes I saw Jaz instead, submerged in his own bath, with a wet flannel on his face and his swollen shiny glans breaking the spumy water.
* * *
When I came out, later, the sun streaked briefly again across the western sky. I heard Jaz chatting to Kris in the rose garden and went down to join them.
He was immaculate in a crisp maroon sarong and a narrow indigo tunic. His hair was gelled back, his freshly depilated chin and cheeks glowed in the sunset. His eyes were larger than ever; the lids freshly painted with azurlite and a frit of silver.
‘Nice costume,’ I smiled, conscious that the clothes I had put on after my bath had yet to be cleaned, but wanting his pleasure at least to last.
Jaz pranced around delightedly. ‘You like it? I found these fabulous clothes in my room. Feel the sarong. The threads are so exquisite. I love it. And the tunic is divine. It fits perfectly, like it was tailor-made for me. And there was a gorgeous kit of make-up. Did you try the jojoba shaving stick?’
I chuckled and teased him about how someone must have known he was coming.
‘What? You think they know?’ He ducked down and spread out his hands, his fingers wide apart and curving up at the tips. ‘You think they might be watching us?’
‘I was just joking. Don’t worry.’
‘But they might be out there. My God, maybe it’s a trap.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Kris mumbled behind him.
‘But you don’t know.’ Jaz kept his shoulders pulled in, compressed. ‘I like this place, you know. I really like it here. I don’t want any bang-bangs.’
The sun disappeared. Swiftly, in the afterglow, shadows seemed to grow. Jaz grabbed my hand. ‘Why is it so dark?’ He called out to Kris. ‘Can’t you do something? What’s happened to the lights? I thought you’d fixed them?’ But even as he spoke the flowlux began to glow along the corridors. They were slow to brighten, but the faint rims of light were enough to pacify Jaz. Even the rose beds had lights peeping through. Kris led us up the stairs. From the balcony we could see the walkway light up, and another string of pearly lights marking out the edge of the garden. Jaz clapped his hands happily. ‘A magician, darling. I told you. A real magician, this man. Look at it: a lovely beacon, don’t you think, for dear Uva?’
Kris stiffened, his face set hard as it did whenever Uva was mentioned.
‘You don’t think it will attract the wrong people, do you?’ Jaz added, after a slight hesitation.
‘We won’t be disturbed,’ Kris assured him gruffly and turned away.
Jaz took my arm, relieved. ‘In that case, I think it’s time for me to make us our first dinner. You boys can open the gin. There’s a huge bottle in the lounge.’
I prised myself away. I wasn’t ready. ‘You go ahead. I’ll be along in a while.’ Although Kris seemed to have allayed Jaz’s fears, in the dark I felt my own disquiet, for no apparent reason, return.
I decided to explore the inner lip of the garden; to follow the walkway around the building before going to the dining room. Along the way I noted evidence of a devout gardener: freshly painted trellises, young cuttings recently planted, protected old trees.
Farindola seemed to have been created with real concern: the natural viewpoints, the curvature of the land, all enhanced rather than diminished, and everywhere a desire to accept the past expressed in terms of circles and spirals, care and conservation.
Beyond the gingko tree lower down, I reached a clump of rhododendrons: sprays of purple buds lifted upwards as if in perpetual offering to the gods of the mountains. One of Kris’s lamps, threaded through the bushes, blinked in distress. A loose connection, I guessed. This, I told myself, might be something I for once could fix. A nice turn of practical success – a bit of handiwork – to relate to the others. I located the cable and followed it into the thicket. The bushes, disturbed, gave off a rich, nauseous smell: night breath, our life blood, earth’s own profanity exhumed. I tugged the cable and the branches juddered. I pulled aside a clutch of leaves to free it. I thought I knew what to do; how to use my instincts, shake, fiddle, fix. Strip a lead, splice a tape, that had been my forte. I broke a stem to make an opening I could crawl through, and got down on my hands and knees. Then, in the flickering light, I saw a claw. At first I assumed a clump of twisted twigs had tricked me, but then I realised it was a hand. For several seconds I couldn’t even breathe. The bony hand with its gnarled fingers, its dry crinkled skin, looked petrified. Tentatively I moved another clump of leaves and exposed the rest of the body: that of a hunched woman with a knot of hair steeped in blood. The blood had just about congealed along the slit cut into her neck. My hand must have shifted the cable into position; the bulb next to me buzzed, as if about to short, but stayed on. I could see black globules stuck to the pasty flesh. The seam of her cardigan was thick with coagulated bits snagged by the coarse brown stitches. The earth reeked as I knelt before her. I tried to haul the body out but I couldn’t shift her limbs to get a proper grip even though the rest of her body had not yet completely stiffened. The arms were cold; iced inside. Her head was at an odd angle. Something snapped, muffled by the dead flesh. My stomach turned. Sick surged up the back of my mouth. I had to pull up my shirt over my mouth and nose to stop from vomiting. It was worse than seeing the red puddle swell on Kris’s workshop floor. This corpse was in my arms. I forced myself to look at her face. Her ruined mouth gaped open revealing a few misshapen, badly stained teeth; her eyes were squeezed dry by her collapsed wrinkles. My grandmother Cleo was probably older when she died, but in death she had lost all the markings of a close-held life. In her coffin she had become younger than I had ever known her, her skin stretched and smoothened beyond recognition by the undertakers. But here death had robbed this old woman of something more in its violence. I looked up: the whole place was much darker than before. Further along the walkway several of the lamps had gone out.
It wasn’t long before I detected the second body, that of a parched elderly man who must have been her husband shoved into a bed of orange azaleas. His fate had been as brutal and as disconcertingly recent.
When I stepped inside the dining room, my hands were shaking.
‘Are you cold?’ Jaz offered me a glass of gin. ‘Here, have a drink, while I finish up. The kitchen is my domain, OK?’
I grabbed the glass gratefully, and took a quick swig. Jaz bustled about, whistling and warbling as he set dishes on the table, arranged flowers, lit oil wicks. I drained the rest of the drink and went to wash my hands.
I went over everything that had happened since we had arrived: how Kris had darted ahead up through the grounds, his assurances, the pristine state of the building, the lack of any sign of danger. It was clear to me that Kris must have murdered the old couple, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything to Jaz just yet. Not only because the killing would upset him, but because it would defile for ever the evening Jaz had been so looking forward to. I wanted to protect the moment, even though I could do nothing for the dead. There was no need for their deaths, surely? The old woman and the even older man could not have been much of a threat.
I dried my hands on a towel which I then chucked to one side. I poured myself another drink – half a tumbler of gin – and went out on to the balcony. The sky was scored with falling stars. I wondered where Kris was. Whether perhaps I should tell Jaz now, after all, before it was too late. But what had been done could not be undone. What good could it serve?
Jaz called out, ‘Come and sit down. Sit, sit.’ He steered me to a table set with maroon place mats, elegant decorated china and stainless steel cutlery. Kris appeared with three sparkling goblets in his hands. ‘Perfect. Perfect. You found even wine,’ Jaz cooed. ‘Then we are ready,’ he proudly announced. His face was shining and he looked almost as ebullient as he had been in the Juice Bar when I had first set eyes on him. ‘We could live here for ever,’ Jaz crooned. ‘There’s loads of stuff. Everything you can imagine.’
I forced a smile.
Kris used a mechanical corkscrew to open the wine. I watched his fingers – stained with engine oil – close around the neck of the bottle. The grapey air of a previous decade escaped without a sound as the cork was released; I felt a tremor of revulsion as Kris filled each goblet with blood. Nodding politely he passed one to Jaz, and another to me.
‘So, who do you think stayed here?’ Jaz asked me, warming to the occasion. ‘You find any clues?’
I tried to suppress the image of the murdered woman’s face. I looked at Kris, but could not catch his eye.
‘Kris says whoever was here has gone for ever, but I don’t understand how. There’s fresh food, you know. I found garlic. And even some really sweet, tiny strawberries in a dinky little punnet.’ He giggled.
I said nothing. I picked up the goblet and, with a grimace, drained it. The wine was musty and smelled like farmyard shit, but I wanted it.
‘Hey, not so fast, mister. You need some food inside you.’ Jaz quickly served out his dish of semolina and chick-peas. ‘Here, you really must have this, Marc, before you guzzle any more of that stuff.’
I ate furiously, incensed by the clatter of cutlery around me. I poured myself more wine. The food was going fast. Only after downing a third glass did I slow down enough to speak. ‘I think Kris is right. This must have been a retreat once, before the base shifted. There would have been just an old caretaker couple left here to look after it …’ I paused, but there was no reaction from Kris. ‘Originally it must have been a place of peace. Tranquillity.’ I pressed on, determined to force a reaction. A confession, I suppose. ‘This must be the only place where real regeneration is still possible.’ I wanted to be effusive. If she were with us, I told Jaz, Uva would be thrilled to find this historic architecture, the self-sustaining technology, the balanced gardens and the wilderness so dutifully nurtured even if only for the benefit of a few. I got carried away, briefly, imagining her walking outside.
‘So where are they, then, these lucky folk? Do you think they’ll ever come back?’
I was nonplussed. It was difficult to focus on what I should say next. ‘Depends on what really happened here.’ I tried again to draw Kris’s attention.
Jaz laughed out loud. ‘Not that past business again, Marc? Please.’
‘There’s no tomorrow without yesterday,’ I said quietly. Everything was turning murky. ‘The future is inside us. The tree is in the acorn.’
‘Oh yes, I know all about that.’ Jaz shuddered with a deep throaty laugh. ‘And the acorn in the big-big tree, but what has that got to do with this place?’
Kris finished his food and began to clear up. ‘He knows how everything works here,’ Jaz explained admiringly as Kris disappeared with the plates. ‘He’s even fixed the old dishwasher in the kitchen.’
‘Good. I’ll go give him a hand. You just take it easy here.’ I decided to confront Kris alone. I tried to smile at Jaz. ‘It was a wonderful meal.’
‘Kris is the one who found the place.’ Jaz snuggled down in his chair. ‘He really is a darling little fixer, you know.’
I took my wine with me into the kitchen. When Kris looked up I raised my glass, unsteady but resolute. ‘Cheers.’
He made a slight sign of acknowledgment while cleaning his plate into the bin. The others were already stacked, methodically, in the dishwasher.
‘We are stuck here for a bit, I guess. It’ll take a few days, huh, to strip that engine right down? Do you think you’ll be able to fix it?’
He pressed the door of the old appliance and checked that it was shut properly. ‘Gas might be a problem.’
‘Anyway, this is a great place you brought us to.’ I couldn’t stop my face from sliding into a sneer. ‘At least we can get some rest, have some comfort until we work things out.’
He clicked the knob on the front panel to select a programme.
‘You think Jaz is right to worry?’ I was trying hard to control myself. ‘You think anyone will come back here?’
Kris’s head moved slightly to one side as if to catch the sound of a hidden lever.
‘What about the caretakers?’
Only then did he finally look up. But still he said nothing.
My chest was puffed-up. I was hot and thirsty. I swilled back the rest of my wine. There was another open bottle on the worktop; I sloshed more into my glass and drank it faster than I had intended, trying to swallow the words I knew even then shouldn’t be spoken. But I couldn’t stop them from bubbling up, like froth out of my mouth. A drum was beating in me.
‘I saw them, Kris, I saw them. A tiny old woman and an old, old man. I saw their throats. Why? They’d have just done whatever we wanted, wouldn’t they?’ The complicity I felt made me bluster. ‘Why did you have to do that, man, why?’
Kris turned to pick up the last of the dirty dishes, ignoring me.
I shouted at him. ‘Hey, wait. Don’t turn away. I’m talking to you, man. Listen.’ My voice was louder than it should ever need to be. The alcohol had plugged my ears.
He hesitated. He looked back at me. There was a shadow over his face, but even so I could see him tense up.
‘You know Uva. You know all about her, don’t you?’ I demanded. My mouth hurt, my breath hurt, I stared so hard that my eyes hurt. I don’t know why I brought her into it, but I couldn’t help it. I was sure there was a link between them. ‘Do you love her?’ The words spluttered out of my mouth. I knew I was asking questions that Kris would never answer, but my head was spinning. I lunged forward to grab him by the shoulders. ‘Tell me. Or did you murder her too … Tell me, you …’
With one swift move, Kris deflected my hands and knocked my glass to the floor. It burst, splashing the wine between us. Kris’s lips disappeared into a sharp straight line and a stream of mercury seemed to flow into his hands. His butterfly knife was unfolded.
From the other room, Jaz called out, ‘What happened? What broke?’
We stared at each other, stupidly face to face. His cheeks tightened; he opened his mouth a crack. I could smell the wine on his breath as he forced each word out, crushing every syllable into the next. ‘Yes, I know her, but it has nothing to do with you.’
I wanted to shove the words back in his face and push out my own but, in the end, I had to look away. I thought he would kill me too if I even opened my mouth.
The next morning I emerged from my room charily, my mind still in turmoil. It wasn’t just the corpses or the drink; I had lost control. I worried not only for myself but for Jaz, for everything. I couldn’t tell what was right and what was wrong. I didn’t know what to do about the bodies. About Kris. Was he a danger to us all? I made my way, gingerly, to the dining room where Jaz was eating. When he saw me, he brandished a piece of toast. ‘Want some?’
‘Where is he then?’ I asked.
‘Kris? By the time I got up he had already finished digging up a new flower bed, or something, in the garden. He had a big spade with him. He’s gone out into the jungle now. Maybe he wants to cultivate that too.’ Jaz stuffed a buttery soldier in his mouth and then examined his nails minutely. ‘I really must do something serious about these today,’ he declared between chomps.
I swallowed two large glasses of water. It was all I could manage. Burying the bodies was not enough. Something more had to be done. I went and picked up the gun from beside the cutlery tray.
‘You planning on hunting some beasties, like our Kris?’
I steadied myself against the table. I clipped a spare magazine of bullets to my belt, not quite clear what to do, but resolved to do something. ‘I’ll see you later.’
‘You should eat while you can, you know.’ Jaz reached for my arm, but I brushed his hand aside. He was not my sage.
From the docking bay at the back there was a footpath that led to an old iron turnstile. It clicked as I let myself in. The path continued down to the flat land through which a small stream ran. Small pinched yellow gorse flowers grew beside it. I looked for some sign of Kris, but there was nothing to suggest which way he might have gone.
Mist seeped out of the jungle wrapped around the higher slopes. Within moments the sunshine disappeared. Clouds scudded along the ground until the whole place resembled a primitive battlefield; the trees lower down the hillsides were tilted like wounded heroes. I had an urge to use the gun. As a child I always wanted to be a warrior who could avoid my grandfather’s censure by running low, crouching close to the ground in an imaginary world of clean theatrical wars spurred by cute computer games, heroic films, and the mysteries of my father’s foreign adventures. On my little walks with Eldon, it was easier to imagine the enemy behind the roses, or hidden in the evergreens, than in the slipstream of the aircraft up in the sky where my father flew. Napalm tossers and suicide bombers, like kamikaze pilots, belonged somewhere else entirely. We were in the realm of cream teas and maids of honour. Fantasies of safety.
At the stream I splashed a handful of icy water on my face. Every drop was crystal clear; I could see new moss on the pebbles at the bottom.
Eldon had always argued that no one could really justify the taking of another person’s life. But kneeling there I wondered, perhaps the dead couple were not caretakers. Perhaps they were retired despots. Experts in their day with truncheons, electrodes and flames. Torturers and murderers. Terrorists. Their victims, then, would have been avenged. Perhaps that is as it should be. Or maybe Kris knew of dangers that I did not. He had already killed two soldiers in our defence. Was that also wrong?
A sinewy brown swerve between the rocks in the water twisted into the flash of a wild trout. Wouldn’t it too value its own life more than those around it?
I had a difficult calculation to make. I got to my feet and followed the path around the side of a small hill, and then down to the first of the tarns. A placid pool that seemed to absorb effortlessly the turbulence of the stream gushing in through the stone sluice. I wished I could too.
From the other side of the pool the stream flowed on more sedately, stretching long strands of brown weeds into the second tarn lower down. I walked beside it, the memory of the night salting each crevice inside me, hardening me for things that I didn’t know were yet to come. I wanted to purify myself in the warm sun wishing that light in itself was forgiving.
The morning sun returned, ripened. The mist and cloud vanished. The air thickened, slowed down, softened into something summery. All around the ground uncovered itself. My thoughts slowed down; the sky widened. Eldon appeared, a young boy hiking about the vale. Was this what my father came looking for: the fount of Eldon’s youth? The dreamland of all those childhood stories that the old man had nourished one generation after another with? But the colours and shapes, the climate and temperature, seemed much more mine than his. It was as though I had arrived somewhere I had been before, rather than he. Perhaps that is what we all discover. That we’ve been here before. That everything we do has been done before.
I stopped moving and there was complete silence. The air itself seemed to doze, waiting. The stream rested motionless on the surface. Nothing moved. Not even a blade of grass. Then, a few steps further on, I noticed the sound of water dripping through the hillside, moss oozing. The green, the growing, came from giving, not taking. What did Eldon really give me? What did Uva give me? Wasn’t it the idea that things could be made better? That nothing was impossible, that our lives should not be limited.
The path forked. I took the left, hoping that Kris might have taken the other. I realised that the vague idea I had had in going after Kris was wrong. He had his karma, I had mine. It was not for me to judge him.
I passed the next tarn and the one after that, observing the occasional popple and threading, in my mind’s eye, those iridescent fishhooks in the glass case indoors. One life ends, another goes on. I saw then that even if Kris had shared a life with Uva, it did not matter. It did not have to alter what we had found together. Or so I thought I must believe.
A frog croaked. A moment later my eyes lit upon a single white moth. Nearby, on a piece of granite, a solitary fly rubbed its diamond wings; grass seed swayed. The sounds of wildlife rekindled Uva’s vision: flowers springing open, feathers unfurling. All God’s creatures dancing, spinning the earth and binding us together in one eternal space. Yes, all of us.
I followed the trail into a forest of eucalyptus and pine. The narrow red clay path rose up through a screen of rubbery vines and twisted, spongy trees into a final patch of grassland before reaching the end of the plateau. The last stretch was a hundred metres of frenzied vegetation; wave upon wave of trees and bushes piled into each other as though a spate of growth had been arrested in mid-flight: brought up short at the end of the world. I reached a rock ledge with a wall of cloud right up against it. Thick vapour hurtled from below. Surging up to the height of the tallest trees, it then curled in and dissipated. The jet of white was tantalising. I wanted to step out into it and be lifted off the edge of the earth. To leave all my tangled emotions behind and give myself up to the wind. But I didn’t. I stepped back and watched the trees drip with precipitation.
Then, unexpectedly, the cloud cleared; in the brief moment before the next one shot up, I caught a glimpse of the lowlands two thousand metres or more below. A carpet of green. Samandia.
There had to be some way I – we – could get down to the plains, the forests, the aboriginal lake. It was closer than I had expected, as a bird might fly. Fresh clouds thickened quickly, obscuring the scene once more.
After a while I followed the cliff path around the outcrop of trees to where I thought the cloud might be thinner. It brought me to a clearing: a concrete arena with two large domed sheds on the far side and a tube of iron – twin rails – that ran up to the edge of the precipice. I made my way cautiously along the perimeter, avoiding the painted markings on the ground.
The first hangar was empty, but in the second one I found an aircraft. A flying machine made in the shape of a giant peacock.