He brings back half their water – four two-litre bottles – and the medicine bag. When he approaches the lake he notices the telltale details they should have noticed earlier: there is hardly any vegetation within a couple of feet of the water, and what plants do grow are limp and blackened. The shine of the lake is wrong, it’s too opaque. He thinks he can smell something sharp as well, even though his nose is blocked from the air-con.
Has the jetty moved? He’s sure it wasn’t that far out when he left.
Jessie has dragged herself away from the lake’s edge and into the shade. He smells urine, sees that her bikini is damp. He helps her sit up and then slowly pours out the water over her foot, all the while looking at Ash and the jetty, willing the thing to stay in place.
‘You’ll be fine,’ he tells Jessie.
‘Try to squeeze the water out with some pressure,’ she says.
She turns her foot this side and that. The top part of the foot looks awful, but on the sole he can’t see any raw skin; presumably it’s hardier. He tells her that, tries to encourage her. Then the water runs out.
‘It should be washed for at least ten minutes,’ she says, slumping back on the ground.
He runs back up, but has to stop on the way and lean against a tree. He throws up in a hurry, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and somehow staggers to the car. He feels it is too late for everything, that it will never again not be too late.
He brings the remaining bottles. He starts pouring, tells Jessie, ‘This is all we’ve got.’ She stops him before he finishes the last bottle, then she rummages in the medicine bag. She puts on surgical gloves and pours the clear, watery content of a small plastic bottle on to the burn. She squeezes out a gel from a tube into her gloved hand and starts smearing it on to her foot.
He leaves Jessie, turns to the shore.
He wasn’t imagining it, the jetty is slowly floating away. Ash is still in the same spot on the platform, the sun bearing down on her, her face shiny with sweat. There’s something awkward about her pose: she is frozen in the middle of a movement, one leg slightly bent at the knee, the foot not quite resting on the jetty. She is trembling, he realises, trembling so badly he can see it from there.
He will go in and get her, he thinks, if all else fails he must go in, he just mustn’t think about it now or he will throw up again.
He gets as close as possible without getting his sandals wet. The jetty is only some ten feet away, she might even be able to jump across, but how will the jetty behave under that force? The thing might not offer enough leverage.
Her gaze is strange, flitting from him to the forest behind; he has only seen this look before on frightened animals.
‘Ash. I’ll go now, I’ll bring something to get you off,’ he says. ‘Are you OK?’
No reaction. He looks at her feet again: the jetty is dry, her feet look clean. She didn’t get any of that stuff on her.
‘Shock,’ Jessie says.
‘I’m going now. You have to shout if anything happens, if this thing starts sinking or something. OK?’
‘Sunscreen,’ Jessie says, and takes out a tube from the bag. ‘She’s cooking.’
He lobs the tube gently, and it lands on the jetty, a few feet in front of Ash. She startles, looks at the tube, but doesn’t move to take it.
‘Ash,’ he says, ‘it’s sunscreen. Just step carefully, you can take it. You need to put some on.’
She moves then. She’s stiff with fear, and her first step is awkward, like a new-born foal’s. But, he sees now, she has reason to be afraid. That one jittery step makes a back corner of the jetty dip below the surface. The tip comes up stained black. The whole jetty is slightly arced, he realises, bent, from old age or from the chemicals.
Ash has frozen again, still trembling as though in the midst of a seizure. He has never before felt so sorry for anyone.
‘Ash, listen to me. I will lift you off if all else fails. All right? You won’t fall in.’
She looks down at the planks, at the gap between them where liquid might slosh up. She tries to right herself, places one foot squarely in the centre of a plank. Her movements are jerky, lacking control, the opposite of what she needs.
‘Ash, OK, just leave it,’ he says. ‘I’ll be right back.’
She looks at him; the same helpless, terrified glance.
Behind him, Jessie is out of it. She is lying on her side, a bunch of pill bottles scattered around her.
‘I’ll be right back,’ he repeats.
How is it possible, he wonders, that he wasn’t deliriously, blissfully happy for the whole of his life before this?
Rope, he thinks; if we had some rope. He considers driving out, finding a village maybe, a farmhouse, before abandoning the idea: he has to stay near, just in case. He turns off the footpath into the forest in search of a fallen branch. He rushes this way and that, picks up rotten sticks that fall apart in his hands. He realises he should be careful where he steps; that acid gunk might have leaked from anywhere.
He wanders about aimlessly.
‘To hell with this,’ he says.
There’s the axe. He can chop off a branch.
He drives the Lioness a few feet on to the grass under a roadside tree, positions it under a long, fairly thin branch. He puts the axe on the roof of the car, then he laboriously climbs up himself, first on the bonnet then on the roof. The metal buckles under his weight. Holding on to the branch, he starts hacking at it, now and again checking through the foliage that the jetty is still where he left it. The position is awkward, the swing of the axe is too short, but he makes a dent in the wood, and eventually the branch breaks off, hanging on to the tree only by some fibres.
He goes on hacking at it, not sure he’s made the best decision even while pulling at the branch like a mad dog. He doesn’t trust his thinking; if only Jessie weren’t out of it.
He slides off the car and, from the road, pulls at the branch, twists at it, gets entangled in the smaller shoots growing off the main branch. The thing only gives in when he takes out the kitchen knife and cuts through the remaining fibres.
Then he lays the branch out and chops or cuts off the remaining shoots, until he’s left with a fairly clean, seven- or eight-foot pole.
He runs back to the shore.
The jetty hasn’t moved much, and Ash is as he left her, a trembling statue of herself, facing the shore and the sunset. She looks golden, and the so-called lake, it wouldn’t fool anyone in this light: it has turned densely black, opaque. The surface is so dark it appears to cast a shadow on the perfect blue of the sky.
Everything is still and quiet. He has an ill feeling, an inkling that the silence is all part of another deception, a trick to make them think they have all the time in the world to act.
Jessie is still curled up on the ground. He squeezes her shoulder, and she opens her eyes, but that’s all he gets from her. He hopes she’s just been knocked out by the painkillers.
He goes to the water’s edge.
‘I’ll hand you one end of this branch,’ he tells Ash, ‘and then I’ll pull you in.’
The same terrified glance.
‘I’ll sit down, to lower the centre of gravity. You have to come closer, and sit down as well.’
He does this as he speaks: he sits down just by the edge, and grabs the thick end of the branch under his arm. He swings it over the water until the other end is hovering over the jetty, about a foot in.
‘Ash. Get down on all fours. Slowly.’
‘Don’t drop it,’ Ash says.
Her voice is choked.
‘I won’t. I’m holding it.’
She must be afraid that he’ll disturb the jetty with the branch. She still hasn’t moved.
‘Ash.’
She starts lowering herself then, slowly, puts down one knee, the fingers of one hand, then the other knee. She is placing them squarely in the middle of the planks, avoids the gaps. That little movement causes the jetty to wobble, and she stops, l
ifts one knee back off the wood, freezes like that.
The jetty rocks front to back, gently, like a seesaw. He watches the front and back edges dip in and out of the sludge.
‘It’s fine,’ he says. ‘Just go slow.’
He has a desperate urge to bodily lift her off the cursed lake.
‘You’re almost there.’
She’s only two feet away from the branch.
She moves one knee forwards, all the while staring into the gap between the planks. That shouldn’t be her main concern: now that she has passed the middle point, the back end of the jetty is slightly raised and the front has dipped below the water.
‘It’s moving,’ she says. ‘It’s moving.’
‘It’s fine. You’ll make it,’ he says.
She takes another step, and another inch or so of the front of the jetty sinks below the water.
‘Wait there a second. It’s better if I stand up,’ he says. He will reach further, he thinks. He pulls back the branch and leaves it on the ground, then he takes the empty water bottles, stomps on them until they’re flattened. He places them one on top of the other just by the water’s edge, then he stands on them. He’s sure he has gained a couple of inches. Then he picks up the branch and slowly swings it back towards the jetty.
‘Try again.’
Ash stretches out and grabs hold of the tip of the branch.
‘That’s it, that’s it!’
But she is leaning forwards so much, he worries that she will topple and disturb the jetty.
‘Ash, move your legs forwards a bit. Just a tiny bit.’
She looks at him, shakes her head.
‘Ash. Just a step. One knee.’
She obeys then, drags one knee forwards so that she now holds the branch in her fist.
‘I will pull you in now, very slowly. Don’t let go.’
He pulls the branch, very carefully so as not to topple Ash or disturb the jetty. The thing moves, but it creates a small swell that he sees come towards the shore, he has time to consider stepping back, realises that the sudden movement would destabilise Ash, so he watches the black gunk slosh against the plastic and stop just short of his sandals.
He has wet himself. Only a drop, but he has wet himself.
He pulls in more of the branch, and now he can allow himself to step back slightly. But the front of the jetty is well under water.
‘You’re leaning forwards too much,’ he tells Ash.
She doesn’t seem to hear him.
‘Ash, listen to me. It’s better if the point where you grab the branch is further back on the jetty. It won’t wobble so much then.’
She is leaning far too much. She was so careful until now.
‘Ash!’
She is too eager, she’s no longer listening. She is holding on to that branch and leaning forwards as though it will support her weight.
She just wants to be on land.
‘Ash, please. You have to lean back.’
He pushes the branch into her chest, and that way he forces her to back off a little.
‘I’ll pull again, but I want you to stay where you are. Just hold on, don’t try to follow it. Just hold it where you are.’
She obeys, and within seconds the jetty is a foot from the shore, the front part resting on solid ground; there is no more dipping and seesawing.
‘You jump now,’ he says. ‘I’ll hold on to the branch, use that for support.’
She steadies herself and slowly stands up. She puts one hand on the branch.
‘Come on. It’s nothing.’
She jumps.
7
For days after the lake they are shaken. He feels wrung dry by fear, afraid even to move. He detects hostility in everything: he fears the air, their food, the houses they approach for provisions, that the tarmac will trip him up, that the Lioness will disobey his manoeuvres and crash into a tree. Accidents and misfortune have become the default setting.
When Ash had set foot on dry land, she had staggered away from the shore, stiffly, awkwardly, and then she turned back to face the lake. She gave a series of cries, shrieks really, her fists tight by her mouth, and Harry slumped to the ground by her side and grabbed hold of her legs, clung to her as to a statue he meant to hold aloft. It made sense, as much as anything. He didn’t even want her to stop. It was Jessie, still stretched out on the ground, sweat-soaked hair plastered to her skull, who made Ash snap out of it: ‘I don’t see – how – I can have cooked my foot – but she’s getting all the sympathy.’
Afterwards, when Ash was settled enough to walk and they helped Jessie back to the car, he asked Jessie, ‘It’s just a burn, right? I mean, it blisters and so on, but that’s it?’
She leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes.
‘Some chemicals have systemic effects if they get on your skin. They’ll cause organ failure.’
This isn’t necessary, it really isn’t. They have learned their lesson. They’ll no longer behave as though they are on holiday. Stupid, stupid. He thinks of the times they laughed since this started.
‘Do you know what it was?’
She shakes her head.
‘Suppose it was a bad one, what should we do? Don’t you have something for it?’
He will keep asking questions until a reply makes him feel better.
‘We should amputate,’ Jessie says.
He lets a noise escape him, a kind of whimper. Jessie turns and looks at him.
‘Harry, I’ll kill you,’ she says.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ he collects himself. ‘It’s just a burn.’
Ash is in the back seat. Her face, chest and shoulders are red from the sun, and she is clutching a tube of salve that she hasn’t yet managed to smear on to the burns. But the shaking is slowly draining out of her; it’s just down in her legs now.
He feels strangely naked, as though he has shed a protective layer. All through his life he has counted on someone keeping in check the bad things that might happen to him. He thought he had a deal: he’ll avoid the misfortunes it’s up to him to avoid, and some higher benevolence will keep him safe from the rest.
And now, he’s down to losing protective layers he didn’t even know he had.
For the first time since they left the cottage, he’s the one to enter houses and replenish their provisions. Right after the lake, it was a matter of urgency; there was no drinking water left whatsoever, and they made a detour from their south-eastern route just to get to a village before dark. He knows now what Jessie sees on her trips. He tries to hurry, to go straight to pantries or basements where people kept their water and tins, and his sight is impeded anyway by the mask he puts on for the occasion, and sometimes by the boarded-up windows and dark, cavernous interiors. But there’s still plenty for him to see. A naked man slumped over a kitchen table laden with rotten food, his right hand inside a jam jar, two tiny desiccated corpses in a twin buggy. A neat pile of leather-bound notebooks left on a sideboard by an entrance, with a handwritten A4 next to it saying, ‘Please read’. And yes, as Jessie said, a lot of shrivelled houseplants.
He tries to hurry them along. He has moments when he makes a tremendous effort to be rational, when he thinks he can scientifically resolve their sluggishness, and at those moments he can see what is happening: all these micro-decisions, many of them in a day, innocent and irrelevant when viewed separately, but together having the effect of slowing them down. They stop to pee whenever one of them needs to go instead of all three at once, they complicate their food breaks, when forced to veer off a road they don’t plan ahead to see if the one they’ve chosen really is the best alternative route. They don’t drive at night.
If only they could follow Jessie’s green arrow straight over Europe, ignore roads and motorways. If only they had an aeroplane.
They stop looking for survivors. They expect the roads and houses to be empty, they’re no longer cautious. His mind is in a sort of limbo, he realises: he has stopped believing that
they’ll meet anyone, but then he does not accept the idea that everyone is dead. Every night before sleep he takes out the scratch card, now soft, the metallic shine faded from sitting on it for so long. His prayers are wordless: he has an inkling that he should be praying for small, doable things, for clear roads and clean water, for speed, but how can he ignore this great load of horrors, all the suffering that should be undone? So he doesn’t say anything, just closes his eyes, holds the paper to his lips and hopes for the best he can get.
He and Ash help Jessie change her bandages daily and administer a thick, ochre salve to the burnt areas. They watch the blisters swell to twice the size of the foot, watch Jessie’s face for any changes; they ask her hourly how she is feeling and if what is happening to her foot is normal. They try to get her to take her temperature, make her walk up and down the tarmac with a stick. Ash wants to know which organs might be affected.
‘Look, I’ll know if something’s wrong,’ Jessie snaps at them.
‘And?’
‘I’m fine.’
At night, he wonders if he shouldn’t just accept that he will die morally in the red, that he cannot fix it. If it’s not more honest. If he hasn’t just been making it easy for himself by focusing on painting Tim, a pointless task that he could conceivably carry out, but which does not, cannot, right any wrongs.
All the time now, he can see the black lake out of the corner of his eye.
Their little joke with Monsieur Jacques comes to an abrupt end somewhere in Provence. They’re crossing a river that’s full of plastic bottles and bags; the stream looks like the tributary of a recycling factory.
‘Ah yes. Monsieur Jacques,’ Jessie says, looking over the bridge, ‘he throws his garbage into the river.’ And after that, whenever they come across waters foaming with yellowish froth, or when they try to wash themselves in a river that appears clean, only for them to dip a stick into it and find the water leaves a glutinous film on the wood, whenever that happens Jessie wheels out Monsieur Jacques as the culprit, to the point Harry has to snap at her, ‘We get it! Give it a rest.’
Under the Blue Page 17
