It had been Jacqui’s idea to ask him.
At first John had been disparaging. ‘Take Jeff Toms into the Cloud Forest? Why should he want to go there?’
‘The doctor says he saved my life. The Cloud Forest’s my best thing. I’d like to share it with him, if he wants.’
‘My best thing is that gallery.’
Which now, ringed about with taboos, was barred to him. For the present, at least.
Jacqui spoke to Jeff and he said yes.
Up they went. To Jacqui, more than ever, it was a pilgrimage, the floor of the Cloud Forest thick with the silent seasons of a hundred years since her great-grandfather had come here.
To Jeff, it was very different. He had not been into deep forest since Vietnam, had been frightened to come for fear that the memories that still set his dreams on fire might spill over to revisit him even in daylight.
It was only because of Jacqui that he had agreed to do it. He hoped she would protect him from the evils of the past. Why a child should be able to do such a thing he did not know; because she was a child, perhaps.
As he walked, memories welled like mist.
Of killing when terror or even the second-by-second unfolding of events ran out of control. One day. This woman he knew. Vietnamese, Buddhist. A good person. He admired her, might even have come to love her, had he dared and she permitted.
He knew she was a nationalist. That was all right; they never spoke of it.
Even today, her voice echoed in his dreams.
‘You will tell the authorities of me …’
‘No. No.’
The notion would have been laughable, had it not been so sad.
He respected her as few others. They were sent out on a raid to pick up named subversives, troublemakers, enemies. Enemies of whom, no one said, or asked.
They went into the house, near Saigon’s Bring Cash Alley. A bellowing of voices, of feet trampling, the destruction of stillness. A bullet fired into the ceiling.
She was there, not with an AK but with something more deadly still: her faith and the sense of betrayal and anger that was hot enough to set the wooden house on fire. She was looking at him, at what was happening to her, to her world, at his role in her destruction. She saw the truth of what the world was, what war was, and he watched as the knowledge dropped acid into her eyes and heart. He knew, as she turned to meet him, her hands with their hooked nails raised in a passionate denial of the abominable realities of war that, if she lived, she would hack him to pieces, even as her nails sought to hack his eyes. That would have been bearable; what was not was the image of her handed over for interrogation, the ripping of skin and flesh and bone that these kinds of interrogations meant, of things far worse than the mere rupturing of the body. He knew that he could not permit that.
He held her wrists as light and brittle as the bones of birds while she screamed and panted and wept that he, that of all men he …
‘Why me?’
He knew she did not mean Why do you treat me so, why am I to die? but Why do you spare me, who am willing to bear all? Why do I read the destructive mercy in your eyes?
He wanted her to be far away, for time to have retraced its steps so that she had never been there at all, that none of them had been there in the midst of the flame and killing of war. He wanted the war never to have been, either, but it was too late for that, too late for him, too late for her, and he knew that she understood nothing or perhaps everything and that such knowledge, unchecked, would destroy her and so all meaning.
He read in her eyes that in that sense she, too, was an emissary of death. The knowledge burnt him; he could bear neither the truth nor the wishful longing for what was untrue that lay in all people. It was too late to push her away, to unwind the passage of the hours, so he did what he had to do. He lifted the muzzle of his gun, he pressed it into the yielding flesh of her breast, he watched the blue silence that came to her eyes. He blew her away. Yet no: because every night thereafter she had come to him. She continued to come. His greatest fear was that she would do so forever. No penance of his would close those eyes or still the words that he heard nightly from her lips:
‘Why me?’
In that moment of what he told himself was truth he embraced the insanity of war, became its implement and slave. Implement and slave: that was what her eyes told him. Amid the fire.
‘Are you all right, Mr Toms?’
Jacqui sounded scared because he was blundering, weeping, while John walked a little apart, eyes round and white in his dark face.
He did not answer, but they had come into the mist now, and suddenly — as it had for her — the mist parted. The world was a blaze of diamond drops.
She took his hand in hers as though he, too, were a child.
‘Look, Mr Toms …’
And Jeff Toms looked.