The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

  It was a little while before I realised he hadn’t moved at all, although he was still holding the tweezers and the clockwork. I’d assumed he was only thinking, but it was perfect motionlessness.

  ‘Everything all right?’ I said.

  He seemed not to hear. Slowly, I stretched forward and waved my hand under his eyes. Nothing happened. I was starting to feel uneasy when I remembered it had happened before. He had ignored us on the jetty earlier, sitting as still as this, when I’d thought he was going to kill something. I caught his wrist and lifted it gently. It wasn’t difficult to move him, but when I let him go, his arm didn’t thunk back down again. It fell at nothing more than the speed of relaxing tendons until his knuckles brushed the table edge and rested there.

  He looked up suddenly. I’d never known anyone to be frightened to see me before, but he was then. I sat back slowly to put some more space between us. He had clenched his fists. ‘Is everything you needed there?’ I asked.

  His eyes slipped down to the clockwork again as though it might have moved since he last saw it, then nodded. He got up and drained the quinoa into the sink. When he came back to the table to serve it, he rested the edge of the hot pan against his hand. I waited for him to realise and snatch it away, the muscles in the back of my neck tightening more and more the longer he didn’t, until I had to put my hand out to touch the pan rim. It burned even in a split second.

  ‘Christ, put that down. Can’t you feel that?’

  He put the pan down to examine his hand. There was a red mark but the burn hadn’t broken the skin. ‘No.’ He looked nearly worried when I reached out to stop him lifting it again. ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t.’ I took it off him and touched the handle experimentally, then had to pull my sleeve over my hand. He sat down to get out of the way. ‘Were you born like this?’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Analgesia isn’t nothing. Nor is catalepsy. Have you been to a doctor?’

  He gave me another brief glassen stare, more like himself again. ‘The doctor here is an empiric with some army ants and a hacksaw. What do you think?’

  I sighed. ‘That the Quechua medical profession is not all it could be.’

  He tipped his fork at me by way of agreeing.

  ‘Did you say empiric?’ I said after a second.

  ‘Is that wrong?’

  ‘No, I just haven’t heard anyone say that since I was small.’

  ‘What do you say now?’

  ‘Quack,’ I said, interested. He must have learned English from passing expeditionaries when he was young, although it was such an ancient slang word that it must have been an old man who’d taught him even then.

  He let his eyes drop and I felt awkward. I hadn’t meant to tip him into language fatigue but he didn’t say anything after that. It was clicking silence, because he was putting the clockwork back together again inside another glass fishing float he must have had ready and waiting. It was split in half neatly and when he had finished, it fitted together around a tiny hole, for the piece of string on which he had suspended the clock mechanism. There was no pollen inside yet and he wound the string round the ball and left it in a bowl between us filled otherwise with lemons and differently coloured maracuya, which must have had an English name, but I didn’t know it. He saw me looking at the latter and cut one in half to show me. You had to eat it with a spoon, which made it seem more like a purple egg cup of rice pudding than fruit, though it was much better than rice pudding. We saved some food for Clem, but he was so deeply asleep that he didn’t even stir when I shook his shoulder.

  Just as I came back, a singing bell rang from beyond the closed door to the nave. I thought at first that it was something I’d made up, but after a little lag, I heard it again, a sparkling noise that carried clear over the wind. Raphael was looking at the door too. After the second pause, it sounded once more, much longer.

  ‘Has someone been in there all this time?’ I said.

  ‘No. They wait in the woods until they see lights in here.’ He sat still, looking exhausted, but he never lost the rigidity down his spine. I had never seen him slouch, not even sitting on the floor at the miserable little inn in Crucero.

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘The . . . I’m not saying Chuncho any more, that just means wildman. The people who live in there. The ones who keep the border.’ When the bell stopped, he stood up. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘Bring the lamp.’

  TWELVE

  The door that led into the nave was frozen closed and Raphael had to push his shoulder into it. Ice cracked on the other side. When I went through after him, up a steep step and down again into a blast of cold air, I saw why. The main church was open like a cloister on all sides except ours, held up by pillars mostly invisible under the vines, which were red and dying. The normal order of things was inverted; we didn’t come out behind the altar but by a font. The altar was at the other end, at the base of the cross shape the church made. There were three candles on it, inside glass jars, and a bundle of blankets. Beyond was the open air and the looming blackness of the forest. Snow had blown crosswise across the nave, enough for us to make footprints.

  The bundle was a baby, wrapped up against the cold and tucked close to a rag doll. She was asleep. From behind the altar a beautiful marble statue stood watching and shielding it from the wind. The statue was holding a bell. Raphael lifted the baby up. It yawned and woke but didn’t seem to mind.

  ‘What?’ I said, bewildered. ‘Where did she come from?’

  ‘Look over there. Put your hand over the light.’

  I wrapped my hands around the pollen lamp so that it looked like I had a star between them, the light seeping out from between my fingers. He blew out the candles. For a few seconds all I could see were dim yellow bursts where the light had been, but then there was a glow somewhere under the trees. It flared and then faded, slowly, easily the size of a person. It startled some birds and suddenly a whole flock of them took off through the branches. Each one left a swooping trail of light. Nearer the ground, there was a soft haze of more muted light. They were vines, like Chinese lanterns, fragile and translucent and twined around the roots of the trees, which were as tall as me. They were dying now and hardly more than botanical skeletons, but inside they glowed, just. It was too soft a light to have seen from the well-lit church. The bright wake shone again, further away. There was a brilliant puff as whoever it was walked through a patch of the vines.

  ‘It’s the – pollen,’ I said, staring. ‘There was someone there. Just now.’

  ‘They leave crippled children here. I can’t see what’s wrong with her but there’ll be something. Where are you going?’

  ‘That’s the most fantastic thing I’ve ever seen, is it – what are these vines? I’ve never seen anything like . . .’

  ‘Candle ivy, but stop, don’t go any further in. The border’s just there, it’s in front of you. They’ll kill you if you cross it, stop walking.’

  ‘I’ve stopped.’ I swung my hand to and fro in front of my face, because there was a weird, after-firework glow whenever I moved. ‘It’s thinner here, they were further in . . . bloody hell,’ I laughed, because a hummingbird had just dived down to snatch something from a tangle of candle ivy just in front of me and shot back again so quickly that it left a hummingbird ghost in the pollen. ‘Come and show her this.’

  ‘She’ll see it every day.’

  ‘How often do you look at it? I live a mile from a beach but I’ve never swum there.’

  He looked like he might have accused me of childishness if he had had the voice to spare, but he came after me and let me take the baby. She was like a hot-water bottle and she squeaked and laughed when I waved a zigzag pattern into the pollen for her. Well up ahead, through the trees, whoever had brought her came into view again, or his pollen trail did. There was another one too, more off to the left, and another on the right. They came together while we watched, person-height half-ghosts. The light gleamed on someth
ing shiny on the ground: water or ice. I climbed up into the roots of the tree beside me to see. It was a straight line, the glass road, continuing well on into the trees. The light hung above it a long time after the pollen stopped flaring. When I eased back down again, the wind was stirring Raphael’s hair and motes of pollen floated by us like cinders.

  The baby cheeped and tried to catch one, which only set more off. Raphael touched my shoulder to turn me back towards the church.

  ‘Go inside. I’ll be with you in a minute.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To find some milk, go on.’ He gave me a push, very light.

  Although I hadn’t taken off my coat and he had come out without his, he didn’t seem worried about the cold and went to the bridge in only his shirtsleeves, without even putting his hands in his pockets. I cupped my hand over the back of the baby’s head. The cold was already taking the feeling from my fingers, and the skin across my knuckles felt like it was cracking even while we walked. I wound the rope of the pollen lamp round my wrist so that the baby could hold it and tugged the church door back open with my free hand. She pressed the lamp against her eyebrow to see the pollen move. I dragged a chair in front of the stove.

  When I sat down, I balanced her on my knees and put the lamp back on the table. She was just about old enough to sit up. She clapped twice and grinned when I copied her, then leaned forward to pat her hands against mine.

  ‘Clapping game?’ I said. I couldn’t tell if it was deliberate or not. She was the first person I’d met who was so young.

  She clapped again and waited for me to copy her, then looked irked when she tried and missed her own hands. I snorted and helped her.

  ‘Nothing wrong with you, is there?’

  She smiled. She was just starting to grow some teeth. When Raphael came back, he tipped half the jug of milk he had brought with him into a new pan and stretched to fetch down a glass beaker from the middle shelf of the cupboard. He was much smaller than whoever had put the cupboards up; he could only just reach.

  ‘Crippled children left here,’ I prompted him.

  ‘They leave three or four a year.’

  The milk started to boil before I would have expected and he moved it off the heat. Somewhere in the oven’s complicated interior, hot water and steam were singing and plinking. There was a sigh as a new bucketful rushed into the pipes. Once the beaker was full, he held his hands out for her. I gave her back again and touched the beaker to be sure it wasn’t too hot for her. The baby settled with it in Raphael’s lap. He had his hands around her ribs, which were so tiny he could lattice his fingertips together. Next to her, he looked pale and mistreated. The ring finger on his right hand was too stiff to move much, broken once and never quite set properly.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘This place is a hospital.’

  ‘With . . . one doctor with a hacksaw and some ants.’

  ‘Somewhere for them to live,’ he said impatiently. ‘Together. Being looked after. Not slowing down anyone who isn’t already slow.’

  The baby held out the empty beaker, just like anybody else would have, though she wasn’t old enough to seem like a proper human being yet. He gave it back to her again once I’d filled it. She took it carefully because it was too heavy for her. While she drank, she put her ear to his ribs and I had a feeling she was listening to his voice through them. When he wasn’t speaking, she looked up.

  ‘Bizarre thing to do, leaving them here,’ I said.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes. Slinging unwanted babies off a cliff isn’t bizarre. That saves time, food, labour over someone who’s never going to be useful. But leaving them somewhere . . . they’re not saving themselves anything, are they? They must have spared people to look after the first ones, and people here farm land and take up space and territory, same as they would if they hadn’t been left here – they might as well keep everyone together. Same effort.’

  He had been looking at me, but he turned his head slowly away while I talked. ‘I wouldn’t try and talk about Indians and common sense at the same time.’

  ‘I hate to break it to you but . . .’

  ‘There is a tribe,’ he said, over me, ‘about sixty miles up the road who decided it was a good idea to make women give birth alone in little huts two miles from everyone else, on the edge of a cliff. They’re well on their way to killing themselves off. Leave humans in a place like this for ten thousand years and you breed a special sort of moron. We’re not very impressive, as a race.’

  ‘The Inca were pretty bloody impressive,’ I protested.

  ‘The Inca lived in Cuzco, not in the Antisuyu.’ It wasn’t the first Quechua word he had used since coming back inside, I realised suddenly, but my hindbrain had parsed them without noting them. The Antisuyu was the land beyond the mountains. Anti, Andes. He had more of an accent now that he was tired too, with sharper consonants and those tiny sharp pauses mid-word which sounded profoundly more dextrous than English. However ambivalent I felt about his company, I could have listened all night. It was like hearing the moment when a ballerina stops walking and begins to spin. ‘We are not them. Are we?’ he said to the baby, who seemed not to hear. ‘Maybe she’s deaf,’ he murmured.

  ‘What happens to her now?’ I said. ‘And can you call her Ivy, please, because it would be a shame not to.’

  He almost smiled. ‘She isn’t mine to name. We’ll find her a family in the morning.’

  As if she didn’t like that idea, she began to cry. I gazed at them both and felt bleak about trying to sleep in a house with a crying baby in it. I saw Raphael’s nerves fraying with it too, but he didn’t shake her. Instead he only touched the back of her head to settle her again, then gave her a little toy horse. I didn’t see where he had taken it from, but she seemed pleased with it and bit the stitching on the saddle interestedly.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ he said once she was quiet. ‘I’ll leave a light on the ladder.’ I looked, because I hadn’t noticed a ladder before. It led up into the belfry, which must have been where he slept. There were no more rooms down here. ‘There’s an obsidian razor for you in the drawer behind you. They stay sharper than metal ones. Soap on the third shelf of the cupboard.’ He was losing his voice again. ‘There’s a basin below that.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  It seemed odd that he knew exactly where everything was until I remembered how orderly you can be, living alone.

  He got up slowly, the baby on his hip. She sat straight, looking around, then seemed to run out of steam and bumped her nose against his chest again. He put the toy horse softly down on the table on his way out. I tried not to feel envious when he climbed the ladder smoothly and one-handed. The baby had her nose resting against his shoulder, so I could only see her eyes, but they narrowed when she smiled at me. I waved and she put her head down, embarrassed.

  When I went outside, snowflakes settled on my hands for half a second each before they melted. It had never quite gone from the air and in the light it was blowing like the last disparate bits of fluff from old dandelions. A tiny kelly lamp burned in the outhouse to keep the intricate pipes from freezing. I didn’t remember his having gone to light it. On the church roof, the windmill kept on its uneven staccato creaking in the wind, and every couple of minutes new water rattled into the pipes.

  I fed the fire again once I was back and then sat down with a book, easily tired enough for bed but wanting to give the baby time to go to sleep before I tried. I jumped when I saw something fall off the table from the corner of my eye, then thought I’d imagined it when nothing clunked. I leaned down to see.

  It was the toy horse. It was a rocking horse and it was rocking gently on its runners. It hadn’t made a sound. When I tried to pick it up, I misjudged the distance and only knocked it. It spun gently, still silent. Wondering if I was going deaf, I poked it, and felt it sink and knock into the floor. As I took my hand away, it lifted again. Distrustful of myself, I got down on my hands and knee
s to put my temple right against the floor. The toy was floating a quarter of an inch off the flagstones. I could slide about twenty pages of the book under it, and the cover. Once I had, the horse sat on that. Eventually I picked it up and rinsed it off with boiling water. I put it in the middle of the table where it couldn’t scoot off again. It sat there like anything else would, rocking gently. It made me think of the statue at home again, whose closing hand I’d shunted off out of real memory like it had happened in a dream. I should have knocked it off the table again to make sure it fell properly this time, but I didn’t dare.

  THIRTEEN

  I woke up of my own accord, not too early, and nothing hurt. Because the room didn’t look in daylight how I’d thought it would, I didn’t understand where I was at first and had to lie still while I pieced it together. Instead of proper windows, there were glass bricks in the polygonal masonry, about one to every twenty stones. They let in irregular patches of light, tinged green and blue and, sometimes, where some sort of metal had melted into the vitrifying flow, a coppery gold. All together they made colourful light pebbles over the floor. A pipe must have run right beneath where I was lying, because although small shadows fell through the light where the snow was still coming down, there was deep, gorgeous heat under my spine. I sat up and linked my arms round my knees, feeling like someone had sewn up all my worn-out patches. Raphael must have leaned in at some point, because there was a candle burning beside the little shrine in the wall.

  Clem was breathing hard, even in his sleep. The air was better than it had been in Azangaro or Crucero but it still felt diluted. I folded his blanket back to move that small weight off his chest. I’d left my jumper out, but it was so warm now I didn’t need it. I leaned on my cane for a minute once I was standing, waiting. My leg was sore, but not half as bad as I’d expected. When I checked, the scar was much less angry than it had been in Crucero. It wasn’t until I saw how much better it was that I realised how much I’d been worried about it, or how I’d been seeing everything through the penumbral soot of a fear whose coals I hadn’t let myself look at, though I’d been carrying them – that if it got worse, there would be nothing to do out here except cut the leg off. Of their own accord, my shoulders relaxed. I hadn’t known I’d been holding them stiff. I felt like I’d surfaced from a mine.