by James Lasdun
“Can we have a rest?” the boy said as they passed above the buildings. He was panting heavily.
“No. We should keep going now.”
“But I’m tired. My eyes hurt.”
“Come on.”
The boy stood still on the path. “I can’t!” His lip trembled. “I’m not walking anymore!”
Craig stared down at him. “Okay,” he said. “Get on my shoulders.”
He stooped down, and the boy climbed on his shoulders. Slowly, with a slight backward lurch, Craig stood up, his thin frame looking perilously top-heavy under its burden.
“Christ,” he muttered.
They walked on along the path, their progress even slower than before. Luke huddled over his father, resting a swollen cheek on his head. The air was cool, but after a while beads of sweat began to slide down over Craig’s face. A vein stood out on his forehead. He looked at Caitlin. “I’m not going to be able to carry him all the way.”
She nodded, saying nothing. There was nothing she could think of to say.
A few minutes after this she heard the cars, returning along the trail behind them. She had been listening for them, but even so, a feeling of dread came into her. It seemed to sink through her, twisting slowly as it fell, like some heavy object drifting down through oil. As they drew near, Luke raised his head and turned back groggily to look. His eyes were thin red slits in the cushions of flesh around them. Craig moved to the side of the path but went on walking steadily forward, acknowledging nothing.
It occurred to Caitlin that he wasn’t going to be able to ask the people for a ride. She could feel, as if she were him for a moment, the impossibility of it. He couldn’t carry the boy all the way, but he would break his back trying rather than ask these people for help. At the same time he must have been able to see that that would solve nothing. Dimly it seemed to her that somewhere in the stubborn grid of his thoughts there must be a calculation that she would do the asking, that if she did, it would be possible to accept. A part of her rebelled at being counted on like this. For a moment she was tempted not to play along, just to see what he would do. But even as she tried to assume the necessary attitude of indifference, she knew that his calculation was correct: that she didn’t have the heart for it. She turned to face the cars, smiling helplessly and putting out her hand to stop them. As it happened, they were stopping anyway, and the driver’s window of the front car was sliding down.
“Il est malade, le petit?” came the voice of the guide.
“Excuse me?”
“Your child is sick?”
“Yes, yes, he’s sick!” Caitlin said, then shouted: “Can you help us? Craig! Stop!”
Craig swung slowly around, his face streaming sweat now.
The guide got out of the car, looking up at Luke.
“What happened to him?”
Caitlin answered: “We don’t know. We think some kind of allergy …”
“I thought this when I saw him before. Did he go near to some of the caterpillars who make these nests?” She pointed up into the trees.
“He was near them, but he didn’t touch them.”
“You don’t need to touch. Even if you just go near to them and breathe the air, it can be dangerous. Especially for the eyes.” She came close to where Craig stood with the boy on his shoulders. “Ah! But you must bring him to the hospital immediately! Come with us. We’ll drive you.”
Craig said nothing, but he lifted Luke from his shoulders. The guide took charge, installing the three of them in the backseat. A gray-haired couple moved over to make room for them. In the passenger seat in front was a man with a shrewd, pointed face. He and the couple made sympathetic noises to Luke as the woman led the convoy off again. The boy buried his head in his father’s shoulder.
“Where are you staying?” the guide asked. She was driving fast, much faster than she had before.
Caitlin named the farm.
“Ah. This side of the mountain. The hospital is on the other side. You’ll have to take a taxi after you—”
She slammed on the brakes: “Mais c’est quoi—?”
They had come to the tractor tire.
“I’ll move it,” Craig said, opening his door. Passengers got out of the cars behind. Caitlin thought she should stay in the car with Luke, even though the boy wriggled free when she tried to hold him. She watched the people help Craig move the enormous tire, laughter and puzzlement on their faces as they returned to their cars. She heard someone say a farmer must have dropped it. Craig climbed back into his seat and stared fixedly out through the window. Caitlin’s heart was beating fast, almost fluttering in her chest, as the car started up and they sped off once more.
“Are you all professors?” she asked. “Is that why you’re—”
“Heavens, no!” The man in front chuckled.
The woman of the couple spoke: “We’re members of a rural preservation group from Suffolk. We go on a jaunt somewhere abroad every year.”
Again the guide slammed on the brakes.
“Mais … !”
They had come to the rocks.
Craig was out of the car almost before it had stopped. Others got out to help him once again. This time there was less laughter. The man in the front seat looked at Caitlin in the mirror. She turned away, blushing. He said something very fast in French to the guide as they set off again. The woman looked disbelieving, but at the first of the fallen trees she stopped more gradually, as if half expecting it. Craig jumped out, and this time only a couple of people from the cars behind came to help him. At the next tree nobody came. The four cars stood with their engines idling while he dragged the heavy, skeletal trunk back into the woods. Then they rolled slowly forward to the next, where he got out again. He was armoring himself, it appeared, in a kind of stoical detachment. But for Caitlin the situation was unfolding with excruciating vividness. She watched him get out and move the remaining obstacles, one after another. Alone on the path he seemed to her a strange, parched, remote, beleaguered figure. His face was expressionless, but the straining muscles at his neck and the sweat on his face as he dragged the dead trunks across the dust and stones gave him an agonized look. She felt a desire to comfort him, even though she knew he would have repudiated any hint of pity. Climbing back into his seat after the final tree, he took out a handkerchief and mopped his face. The guide looked at him in the mirror.
“That’s the last one?” she asked.
He stared back at her a moment.
Then he nodded, and she drove on.
Nobody spoke after that. Caitlin felt the silence bearing down on her. What made it worse was that there was nowhere to look that gave any relief. Craig, Luke, the guide, the other passengers, the trees outside hung with their cocoons: everything seemed to add its own oppressive weight to the moment.
At the intersection they turned right and crossed over to the far side of the ridge. The valley below them was much larger than the one they had crossed on the way from the farm, and it was built up. Houses began halfway down the slope opposite, scattered thinly at first, but growing more dense toward the bottom, their lights hanging pale against the gray-green hillside. Caitlin glanced at Craig, then flinched away. She told herself that the hospital was down there, that these people helping them had also come from down there somewhere. But it was impossible not to think of the cocoons. She closed her eyes, but even then she could see them: pale shapes in the darkness behind her own eyelids, with the shadows of the caterpillars crawling around inside them.
ALSO BY JAMES LASDUN
FICTION
Delirium Eclipse and Other Stories
Three Evenings: Stories
Besieged: Selected Stories
The Horned Man: A Novel
Seven Lies: A Novel
POETRY
A Jump Start
Landscape with Chainsaw
Woman Police Officer in Elevator
AS EDITOR
After Ovid: New Metamorphoses
(with
Michael Hofmann)
Copyright © 2009 by James Lasdun
All rights reserved
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
www.fsgbooks.com
Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott
eISBN 9781429923330
First eBook Edition : March 2011
Originally published in 2009 by Jonathan Cape Ltd., Great Britain
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2009
These stories first appeared, in various forms, in the following publications: A Public Space (“The Old Man”), Granta (“Caterpillars”), New Writing (“Peter Kahn’s Third Wife”), Open City (“The Natural Order”), Ploughshares (“Cleanness”), Prospect (“The Woman at the Window,” “A Bourgeois Story”), Southword (“The Half Sister”), The Paris Review (“An Anxious Man,” “Oh, Death”), Times Literary Supplement (“Cranley Meadows,” “Annals of the Honorary Secretary”), and The Yale Review (“Lime Pickle”). The story “It’s Beginning to Hurt” was commissioned by Diana Reich for the Small Wonder Short Story Festival.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lasdun, James.
It’s beginning to hurt / James Lasdun.—1st American ed.
p. cm.
1. Short stories. I. Title.
PR6062.A735187 2009
823’.914—dc22
2008054251
