A Stolen Season

by Rodney Hall

  The only person he ever told was a stranger: Lloyd Farrell, the journalist. And he turned out to matter so much it’s possible he was a known target because when he returned to the vehicle, empty-handed, he grimly muttered something about Geneva before he swung the heavy door shut. Which, swinging shut, went off like a bomb . . .

  All this time later Adam realizes there is nothing to stop him downloading Lloyd Farrell’s dispatches to see what made the fellow tick. He soon picks up the same thread: More systematic than most analysts admit—CIA Black Sites are secret interrogation places. But this makes no sense. Why would the Iraqis single him out? Evidence suggests there are many Black Sites dispersed in different parts of the world. So, this raises a question. Could it be that we, the Coalition of the Willing, are torturers—hypocrites hiding behind a pretence of moral superiority? Lloyd Farrell. The little terrier. Adam gazes into the past, remembering. Next, for some reason, what comes to mind is a strange tower encased in a fragile shell of dry mud. That doomed city. Farrell was visiting HQ in the old library looking for further evidence. To take a leaf out of Spinoza’s book, the more we understand ‘singular’ things the deeper our enlightenment. The exposure of even one torture facility should surely . . .

  Adam chases down Spinoza. Till now he had never been clear what philosophy was, this being pretty much unknown territory for a sporting man. It turns out to be all words and more words. Still, he sticks to the task. He clicks on a link to Giambattista Vico and Vico’s Time-forms, because time interests him. Here he finds the theory of the four ages of human evolution—an Age of Gods followed by an Age of Heroes, then an Age of Men, an Age of Beasts and then another Age of Gods and so on—the timeless cycle of a constant evolution. Men becoming beasts he knows. And how beasts become gods he can imagine (take Egypt, for example). Once past the barrier of self-doubt he finds himself engrossed. The freshness of discovery. Reading as the new freedom. He flags the page before returning to Farrell: . . . to challenge our own government. To ask why lies are being told. And we need to ask, because no government has a mandate for violating international law.

  In that instant Adam glimpses how much he has changed. His own case is not unique. Paradoxically the future becomes possible. He discovers a use for his enforced idleness.

  Determined to train his mind, he now seizes on the fascination of logic, the endless reach of words, even simple words. He reads that No word enters the language without common agreement. This mysterious idea of common agreement reveals ‘the word’ as deep and uncertain. He needs to think as never before. So, for example, how did four simple letters H-E-L-P come to mean what they do? How did D-O-G mean dog? Words made strange because, till now, taken for granted. Even to ask why history itself is called history? A quick Google search tells him it’s from the Greek ‘istoria’, meaning a web. Connections. He gets it. Cool.

  Adam comes up for air.

  But immediately a tumult goes roaring through his head. Experimentally he attempts to halt it. All he needs to do is lock on to one frame at a time, then the meaning can be detached from the movement. That’s more like it: a ‘Time-form’. This guy Vico knew something. Observing his own detachment he stands back from it. Ha ha. Detachment from the detachment. Good humour kicks in while the unlikely vocation of scholar creeps up on him. Well, I myself am a Time-form. My injuries are the age.

  Someone knocks.

  Yao, hesitant on the doormat, does not dare to venture across the bare board floor. He explains this by indicating his cement-splotched boots.

  ‘Just about to get the mixer going. Thought I’d check it won’t spoil your beauty sleep.’

  ‘That bloody. Beauty of mine!’

  ‘Come and watch if you like.’

  So now, with the prospect of the work beginning, Adam emerges into the sunshine and sets himself up on the verandah, using the rail to support the Contraption’s elbows.

  ‘What do you. Ar. Do? I mean. Really.’

  ‘What do I do?’ Yao’s back descending down the steps takes up the question with amused seriousness. ‘Not much. I’m not trained, if that’s what you’re asking. Stuck on the bottom rung’—he has a jaunty way of moving—‘I’m kind of a free radical.’

  ‘I mean, do. For a living,’ Adam persists, as friends can.

  To his surprise he notices a load of sand and some bags of cement have already been delivered.

  ‘That’s what I mean, too. Just one thing or another. I take what’s on offer. Between times selling marijuana in a small way. Plus a bit of ecstasy now and then. Never heavy drugs. Just pot, really. Home-grown. Guaranteed clean. Prime quality.’

  ‘Here? Next door?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Can you spare. Me some?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And you sell. Enough to afford. The rent in. This suburb?’

  Yao laughs lightheartedly and begins shovelling the sand into a neat pile. ‘Shit no. I develop computer software for games design. Plus I teach tai chi. My ladies—clients—live around here. So it’s convenient. And when I saw the house, the state of the roof, I knew I was on the money.’

  Adam thinks this over.

  ‘I’ve been meaning. To ask. Do you speak. Chinese?’

  ‘You want to learn?’

  ‘Now that’s not. Ar. Really a joke.’

  ‘Sorry—bad taste.’

  ‘Still funny.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I’m mostly interested. Because I’ve been. Ar. Thinking lately. How much we’re. Trapped by the. Language we use. Common agreement. About meanings leaves us. Making the best of. A bad job.’

  ‘Trapped?’

  ‘Between the thing. And the word.’ He is enjoying himself. ‘Help only means help. Because that’s what. We’ve agreed.’

  Yao leans on the shovel to think about this.

  ‘You’re an interesting man, I’ll give you that.’

  Adam risks the unspoken, ‘And your. Partner?’

  ‘Linda’s mother? No, she doesn’t speak Chinese. She hails from New Zealand.’

  ‘Bog standard?’

  Still uncertain, Yao laughs again and politely backs off. He returns to the task in hand.

  ‘You know,’ Adam interrupts his own line of thought. ‘It wasn’t about. Me.’

  Digging deeper.

  ‘What wasn’t?’

  ‘That missile. The missile was for. A correspondent guy. Lloyd Farrell. Hardcore reporter. Who. Took shit from. No one.’

  ‘Seems consistent.’

  ‘How. Consistent?’

  ‘Well he’s dead, after all, and you aren’t.’

  There it is.

  With afternoon well advanced Ryan moves swiftly around his domain, seducing Bridget with thoughtful comforts. Guilty though she feels she admits that having a man so completely free of disfigurement is the biggest thing. He is like a separate species. So, by some underlying logic, she is not exactly—with him—being unfaithful to Adam.

  ‘You don’t have to entertain me.’

  ‘I wish I could,’ he says, indicating his semi-clad state with wry amusement.

  ‘But I wasn’t thinking of Adam, if that’s what’s worrying you.’

  ‘Then why mention him?’

  ‘He doesn’t know there’s anything between us.’

  Ryan perches on the edge of the mattress for a quiet moment. Near . . . though not touching. She sips slowly her drink. The vodka soothes. Eventually it’s her hand, without permission, that ventures up the contours of his arm. She leaves it there. He improves the contours.

  ‘So, what does he do all day?’

  ‘He works at keeping his spirits up. Amazing courage. Plus . . . well, he has discovered the internet. He reads. He questions everything. And he thinks about everything. He’s like a new person. Really, I suppose, he’s hunting for evidence of lies. Public
lies. Though he told me the more he uncovers the harder he finds it to grasp what they mean.’ She rests her head in his lap. ‘He tries to escape by listening to music. No luck, apparently. With one ear gone it’s a balance thing. He even tried classical, that’s how bad it is.’

  ‘You’re kidding!’

  Though Ryan commits a brief blurt of laughter she detects genuine sympathy in it. More to the point, sympathy for herself. She’s grateful. Well, in her view, neither man is perfect.

  A postcard propped against his bedside lamp shows a statue in some European church: the Madonna wearing a blue robe clasps baby Jesus on her lap. The extraordinary child wears a tall crown on his head. Bridget recoils from the incongruity of that crown. The outrage of it. Weren’t they, the Holy Family, supposed to be persecuted—asylum seekers—the infant born in a stable, escaping under cover of darkness? Fleeing to Egypt among other refugees? The crown in some way a betrayal, she decides not to turn it over or pry on the sender’s name. She puts the card back and entrusts her own head to Ryan’s lap. Feeling him stir under her weight.

  ‘My sister’s on holiday in Portugal,’ he explains, guessing at some hitch. ‘That’s a church she visited in Porto.’

  She processes her own reactions in silence before returning to the subject.

  ‘Going off to war was his way of not hurting me.’

  ‘Not hurting you?’

  ‘With the usual break-up.’

  ‘You mean the possibility of violence?’

  ‘No, no. He was never violent. Wild boy that he was. We just didn’t connect. He took chances. He gambled and lost.’ Yes, she thinks, he gambled with his life, leaving me free to get on with mine, because at the heart of his going was the underlying gold—his knockabout goodness. ‘I never realized,’ she confesses, ‘until that official letter telling me he was dead. Killed in action.’

  ‘Realized?’

  ‘What I felt. The grief. You know. Grief that we weren’t able to make it work. The follow-up letter came much, much later. He had been “found alive”, they said, and admitted to the military hospital in a critical condition. Whether they’d been keeping it from me, or whether they didn’t know who he was, or what—it had to be big.’

  ‘Did you go and visit?’

  ‘In Iraq? No. I did think about flying out. But what for? Just to turn up unannounced at the bedside? That would have promised too much. The idea of getting back together . . . no.’

  His quietness reminds her gently that the issue of a promise is still in question.

  ‘When the time came, the army gave me next to no notice. Then that was it.’

  ‘Poor Bridge.’

  ‘Poor Adam.’

  Yes, and she’d stayed in the house to welcome him home. Spontaneously she’d stayed with a recklessness reminiscent of his own. Though never, never, had it occurred to her that he might be delivered in such a state. There is so much to think about. She loses herself in the conundrum of her life. I am not a promiscuous woman, she insists silently, and oh, don’t worry, right now I despise myself for sleeping with Ryan.

  The offender’s hand strokes her hair.

  ‘You were miles away,’ he grumbles tenderly. Just by his manner he reassures her that, after all, she is doing no harm because they are somehow players in the same game.

  ‘Don’t,’ she says, ‘please don’t.’

  The thing about Ryan is his tact . . . and Bridget glances up at him to check. Other people call him cold and vain.

  ‘Miles and miles away,’ he murmurs, withdrawing the hand.

  Any fool can see what a catch he is. Her heart lightens with relief. His deeper feelings cannot be hurt because he has never let her that close. Really, he is not the problem. The problem is the turmoil at the pit of her stomach—and this is what she forbids herself to think about.

  Deep down do we hate and fear knowledge? Was Lloyd Farrell a man who knew too much, so he had to die? Hated by both sides? He writes of the forgotten Christian sects of the Middle East, There is even one holy book so secret that the text begins with a curse on anyone who can decipher what is written there. Too late, apparently, too late.

  After dinner Adam asks Bridget to switch the lights off. And she does so. She understands that the effort of eating exhausts him—an exhaustion all the more visible by the night lamp’s ghastly sidelong glow—well, she is exhausted too. Spooning the food in takes the best part of an hour. She delves for strength to offer a gesture adequate to his moon monster needs. Determined to turn over a new leaf, she knows what to do. Sitting with him she brings herself to take his hand in hers. Mutilated though it is. Her gorge rises but she controls herself. Tenderness is what he waits for with such patience and humility. She knows. His remaining fingers have pathetically little strength. An anguished groan escapes him.

  Is this the moment for her to commit herself? Agreement feels inevitable.

  Even as she arrives at a decision she knows that any such promise will cancel the rest of her life. She must. Yet she cannot. She strokes his claw. She closes her eyes to help the right words come. She prays, though she hasn’t thought of God since she was a child. When next she looks up, choosing what she needs to say, he is asleep. He groans at the edge of consciousness, on the brink of a perpetual emergency. His fragile sleep disturbed by tremors. She leans close, striving to accept the dreadful scars as some sort of normality. To become used to them. His ear stands out, a buckled sickle in the night light. Cheeks draw the slack from lashless eyelids. An alien. The longer she stares at that ear and those eyelids the less she recognizes her husband. She tucks the blanket around his shoulders, closes his laptop, pulls down the blinds and climbs the stairs to bed.

  Late at night, still wide awake, Bridget worries her conscience. Deep tectonic plates fracture. To this all else must adjust. She needs air. She gets up to walk off the agitation. In slippers and dressing-gown she glides downstairs. She feels she is being followed by some sort of threatening presence plodding behind her, slow and clumsy as a junkie. She needs to get away. She checks on Adam. Drenched blue, he lies half-propped up, asleep. This time he has not kicked the bedclothes off. ‘Adam,’ she speaks softly. He does not stir. She interprets this as licence and lets herself out, easing the front door closed.

  She is gone.

  The suburb leaps alive with cold clarity. Invisible breezes soothe her. Already she’s on the steps, down between the rocks and away. The moon—a small white sun—glorifies every leaf and gutter pipe. The deeps of the park envelop her in jumbled patterns of crisp curves and angles. Black trees rise up, colossally ornate. The grass is green under a spangled sky and way over at the lakeside velvet water laps the concrete wall leaving a wet band stained indigo. In one of those periodic conspiracies of the elements (or, as her Grannie would say, ‘an angel passing’) the insomniac city ceases tossing and moaning under the sheets. She hears the universal hush and belatedly wonders if the click of the latch disturbed Adam. She imagines him lying wakeful, coping with anxiety—from time to time fear passing behind his eyes—and shudders with guilt. Unavoidably imagining Ryan, too, supine in luxury, cognac in hand, cocooned in soft music. Nor can she endure this. She imagines the third man, the newcomer. Though she has no intimate experience to fall back on she feels him and, right now, his thoughts reach out to her in return. All three males, unlike the sleepless millions of others, are troubled on her account. Though what has she done? She is honest with Adam (as honest as protecting him will allow), she does not mislead Ryan, and she has hardly spoken a word to Yao. How can she be blamed? Desire is not her chosen torture. She wanders down the slope where dense trees interlock in the dark suspense of sleeping birds. She feels the grass yield softly through the soles of her flimsy slippers.

  One step then another, she proceeds through a moonbright glistening world. Lampposts intrude here and there among old barky trunks, each pole crowned with a pair of luminous glob
es around which insects oscillate like planets. Up on the road a car approaches—she hears the tyres grip—and then, in transit, the discreet hum of power passing. What possessed her to leave the house unlocked, Adam unprotected and unattended? Suppose he has an episode or a fall? She needs to get back to him. She must head home. Right now. No excuse. But the lake obstructs her, its evil glossy tongue insinuated the length of a long hollow and silenced by lawns. She is on the wrong side of the water. And the sheer pointlessness of being out at all jolts her fully awake. I am not to blame, she cries in her mind: not for Adam’s helplessness, nor for Ryan’s functional sex, nor for Yao being left without a partner.

  Nor, she adds as an almost humorous afterthought, for the lost dog, Baby.

  She emerges from under the trees. The flat suburban houses along the street fold out like shutters. Peace and tranquillity as far as the eye can see. He will be okay, so she’s okay too. Yet her feet find their unerring way to the wrong address. And, not content with the error, they lead her up the garden path. Clogged with overgrowth the forbidden thicket drinks the moonlight deeply. Someone else’s garden. His garden. Night-flowering pittosporums open in celebration. A leaky tap drips into the puddle it has gouged in the soil. She controls her galloping heart and creeps around the side of the house to where a single light burns. One brilliant room in an otherwise dark neighbourhood. Herself looking in. Definitely and fixedly looking. Because she can never have enough of what she sees there.

  In the luminous capsule of light her neighbour stretches and turns—naked—exercising every aspect of his flexibility. He gyrates through slow-motion inscriptions of the possible, utterly inturned and oblivious. These instant images pack Bridget’s memory bank. The ordinariness of his body beautiful. Ordinary, yes, though does any other male boast such hairless skin? She registers ‘clean’ as her word for his two-dimensional chest and white knees cut from paper. Ah, her troubled observant apprehensive silence. Only his face, neck, hands and wrists are sun-browned and disturbingly shadowed. The rest is chaste and perfect, folding and unfolding. She has ample leisure to decipher the calligraphy of tendons. Cursives. Tai chi spelling out the very message she most desperately needs to interpret. His movements flow one into another so naturally that he hovers. She corrects her first impression: adding hairs to armpits and genitals. He drifts, suspended in some clear element denser than air, evidently intent on displaying every hollow and plane of his body: a flange of the half-turned back, shoulders, the clefts and ridges of equal thighs, and a furrow between secretive buttocks. Her blade etches his outline on the glass between them. All but his head—now he turns—because she dare not risk his eyes. His hardened young warrior aspect ‘belonging with the tiger’, as she thinks (dredging the idea from who knows where?) is shaggy as a heraldic mask. She breathes the perfume of wild trees at night.