by Rodney Hall
His wife. Yes, she has been gone for years.
Can this be a life Bridget is prepared to live? Adam senses change. He knows it. She visits someone at night. That’s it. He suspects Ryan. Ryan, damn him, who is blessed with repellent good looks. But in a moment of clarity he corrects himself: what right do I have to jealousy? None. I hope she can be happy. Whoever it’s with. Sweetheart, I don’t even know if you are beautiful any more because beauty is another word for hope.
Emerging from a violent episode, the cannibal pain subsides. The dark withdraws. He looks around and sees her on the verandah sitting in his father’s wicker chair. By the way one limp hand touches the floor he guesses she is asleep, lulled by soft rain falling on the garden. With infinite care he assembles himself for action. He calls on all his skill to minimize the noise the Contraption makes as he creeps up on her.
How strange for him to be the one standing. Looking down at her. Last time he had this advantage was too long ago to be measured. He gazes at the glorious disorder of her hair, her unguarded mouth soft and closed—betraying, even so, the working of troubled thoughts. He reaches out, though not far enough. In the long-lost mythological time when she was his wife he might have woken her for his own purposes . . . one of which, in those days, was simply to take pleasure in his own quickening. Now it’s just her he cares about.
Clouds break apart to reveal yellow smudges with a purple disc suspended among thunderous silken domes. The park, with its cultivated trees, stands as a tomb of deep velvet suggestions.
Four o’clock closing already: waiters emerge at the end of the working day. They carry the outdoor stools inside and stack them, upended on the tables. The simple forest of legs is a puzzle of sprouting angles. This achieved, they bang the drops off their shoulders and comb damp hair with blunt fingers.
‘Lend us a hand here, mate.’
Together they collapse the canvas umbrellas, skipping clear as little cataracts of rainwater splash around their shoes. The fact that these old umbrellas were chosen and ordered by Adam when he managed the café—at eighteen the youngest manager they ever had—is now forgotten.
From her vantage point Bridget watches, just as she used to watch in the old days when waiting for him to come home. Beyond the small dark silhouetted figures busy with closure: and (all too soon) a sunset.
What is this new thing about Adam? Almost overnight he seems to have grown massive, prodigious. As if touched by a kind of genius he has morphed into someone unknown and far more interesting than he used to be. ‘Was Galileo. Wrong?’ he has just asked her, though maybe not expecting an answer. What a question! Bridget smiles vaguely.
‘Not often, I’d imagine,’ she answers.
Stormlight reveals the strange reality of her own garden patch. Oleanders being knocked around by the wind. Departing thunder trundles away leaving the road black, flat, wet and fixed under a snap-plastic sheen. The slicked surface sparkles darkly like a strip cut from the Milky Way. Familiar trees and flowers show themselves as unfamiliar. At her back—in her own living room, bedroom and kitchen—everything is stilled and settled as an extension of Adam’s absorption in his research. She feels as if her life has been boxed up ready for the removal van. Meanwhile next door’s roof glimmers secretively, the only sign of life being little Linda, mesmerized by repeatedly bouncing a ball against the wall of her house, which rises, locked between its corners and within its self-contained shell: Yao’s house of secrets.
The little girl looks up. There’s a woman flopping up there with lipstick on her mouth. The dropped ball rolls among dead stalks. Having the importance of a ball-bouncer she is finally ready to speak.
‘Hi,’ she pipes.
Now face to face across the open rift, with only broken stems and bobbing shrubs between, one up above and one down below, each waits to see what the other will do next. Bridget hopes for a smile, but none is offered. Contact takes its course without suspicion, without warmth and without comprehension.
‘Did you find your dog?’
This surprises Linda. She consults the dog’s image in her memory, shakes her head and looks away.
‘I’m sorry,’ Bridget offers, still languid in the wicker chair.
When the implications sink in (for a second round of reference) those dark unflinching eyes fill with tears, even while her little girl’s shoes are firmly stuck where chance has brought them. She does not retrieve her ball. Instead, she thinks. They both think. Thinking, perhaps, about the same man. And, accordingly, the door opens for him to emerge.
‘Are you okay, darling?’ Yao asks the garden with the dogless child in it—not yet noticing Bridget.
The timeless patience of his kind makes everything normal. Even this. Even his not being naked. She doesn’t need to see his luminous pale skin again to know how it affects her. His warrior face softens slowly and with gravity. Thus he confronts his failures, in particular the loss of a family pet, the deeper loss of Linda’s mother, and the risk that forever moving on may also mean moving down. Though he has made no attempt to tidy the garden, which is left as wasteland, Bridget suspects that his home is immaculate and orderly inside. The colours of sunset correct themselves for dusk to gather with benign softness. She feels her own presence as incidental—mere space junk orbiting the self-contained universe of father and daughter—an unremarkable observer lolling in idleness. Even her elevation in some way incidental.
‘I’m sorry about Baby,’ she calls, having rummaged for something neutral to claim Yao’s attention. ‘I’ll keep an eye out.’ But she scorns her own offer as superfluous. Even supposing she were to pursue the matter by asking what the animal looks like, the moment could not be fuller than it is. All information superfluous. So, now their eyes meet at last. The force-field between them has been negotiated.
Bridget’s heart drops at his composure. Her illusions crash back to earth. This is quite at odds with their encounter in the park. What foolishness led her to admit such hopes? Let alone to trespass on his privacy? Her hollow heart falters. She is finished with him. Luckily her mobile chooses this providential moment to ring. She claps it to her ear. Mutely she listens. She inclines her head to signal concentration on what she hears. She melts. She rises from the chair, leaving it to mutter and clutch at emptiness.
Escape being offered, she turns on one heel and nods a lopsided goodbye in Yao’s direction. She wanders indoors nursing the private conversation to her ear. Ryan’s voice reassures her. Yet she risks an even more problematic exposure with Adam in hearing. She takes refuge in confining herself to non-committal syllables. He has rung: therefore she matters. His tone does the trick. She carries his voice into the kitchen catching up—a beat late—with what he is actually telling her. ‘. . . now that we have the go-ahead.’ (Does he mean to sound so impersonal?) ‘Of course, we can’t rush him. He’ll need to be comfortable with the camera. And this sort of exposure is going to be pretty tough.’
‘Why’s that?’ she almost shrieks.
Bridget holds the cold fact close. Adam as pawn. Oh, this television nonsense is already out of hand. She stands, illuminated, at the open fridge. Have I said things while meaning something else? And, for a horrible moment, believes her guilty thoughts are open to be read—a suspicion reinforced when Adam himself comes into the room even while the phone (still clamped to her ear) speaks her name, ‘Bridget.’ Repeating it as a question, ‘Bridget?’
Despite her warning look Adam cannot help himself. He was never any good with subterfuge or lies.
‘Your friend? Ar. Ryan?’
She taps the screen to end the call. And then she shuts even the contents of the fridge in darkness.
‘As a matter of fact it was. He has some concern that you may need more time before coming to a decision.’
‘Con. Cern?’
‘At what the camera will show. He rang to double-check.’
‘Nice of
him. Ay? Decent guy. Ar. After all.’ He considers. ‘But it’s. Not his problem.’
‘Are you going to include me?’ And now she discovers a use for everything. ‘I mean, why would you do this? Why?’
‘I’m still in the. Fight, love. I haven’t. Ar. Given in.’
‘So, what? So you’re going to show your body in public? And talk about your life over there? And your life back here . . . with me? But I suppose my feelings don’t matter.’ The injustice ignites her. ‘Exposing all this?’ Bright with the flame of anger (immediately regretted), she opens her arms to indicate her private life as his carer. ‘For everyone to gossip about!’ Baffled yet again by the difficulty of interpreting the expression on his constructed face she feels even more piercingly left out. The lapped cheeks, padded and immobile, mask his old cheerful frankness. Yet his eyes reveal an alert mind—perhaps more alert than it ever was—and she knows he sees into her. Also that she must never admit how desperate she feels because she knows now that he might just take his own life rather than ask her to live with what she lives with.
‘A man needs. To hit back. And I’ve begun on. Line. Finding stuff out.’ He declares his hand calmly: ‘This is my. Chance to. Ar. Spill the beans.’
Bridget takes refuge in work. She fills the sink with suds and gets busy washing up. Her mind engaged. With sudden clarity everything slots into place: she accepts that he is questioning the price he has paid, and the lack of any justification for it, the magnitude and indifference of the powers-that-be, who perpetually wage war against impoverished people. Vietnam, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Congo, Angola, Afghanistan and all the rest. The signs are there that he will take it a step further, even to recognizing the dominant power of global capital as a predatory empire. She sees for herself and begins to understand why her notorious grandmother was a communist. His rage extends to the ordinary voter and the wilful ignorance of a complacent electorate. She rinses a wineglass. And driving all this is his undaunted spirit. He has the courage. If it can save others—because once he has their attention he’ll know what to say to them—he will put his mutilated repellent body on show. She is filled with pride. ‘Well, good for you,’ she says.
‘If not me. Who else?’
She seizes on his agreement with enthusiasm.
‘When you joined the army I don’t suppose you took a vow of silence!’
‘It’s hypocrisy. All of it. And there’s folk. Dying out there. Big time. I’ve seen with my. Own eyes.’
‘And tell me the rich don’t know what they’re doing!’
‘While the public. Goes on buying the. Bullshit.’
‘You know something, I love you.’
‘Thank you,’ he sighs.
‘What for?’
‘For under. Standing.’
‘Oh, I’m afraid I’m not much good. I’m far too often wrong.’
‘So it’s. Ar. Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘But there’s things you. Might not want me to say. In public. Things I have to say. Because’—and he catches the shadowy reflection of himself in the glass-fronted cabinet. ‘The nation. Owes me.’
The old impulsive Adam is behind this, but she sees how immeasurably more substantial his character has become.
‘Do it!’ she responds with spirit.
‘Then we can. Ar. Ring and tell him.’
‘Mr Smarty-pants?’
‘Mr Smarty. Pants.’
Her eyes bulge with tears as she turns her attention to withdrawing her hands from the suds and drying them on a tea towel, ready for action.
Stomping and clicking across the board floor Adam steers himself back to the task in hand. Now he has her agreement this makes all the difference. He remembers the fearless way Lloyd Farrell questioned the American major at HQ, ‘This stuff you’re doing, is any of it legal?’ That impertinent British tone. Well, to do justice to Lloyd Farrell, there can be no backing down. He has Bridget’s consent and that’s what matters. He takes a moment to contemplate the strangeness of fate: during most of his life he thought other people were pretty much the same as himself—but now he sees how different everybody is.
‘What are you reading, love?’ Bridget’s voice asks.
‘The bible.’
‘Isn’t that a bit much?’
‘May as well. Start at the top.’
‘And?’
‘God’s a. Surprise.’
‘God?’
‘Yep. One angry. Dude who. Ar. Throws his weight around.’
‘But I seem to remember he has some pretty provoking characters to deal with,’ she offers cheerfully.
‘Defaulters. You bet.’
She laughs. This she enjoys. Him sharing with her. And a beautiful ease between them.
‘Nebuchadnezzar really. Gets to me.’
‘I must look him up.’
‘Do.’
Adam will explain when he feels strong enough. And he enjoys the anticipation. The tale of a king, cast out by his people, who grazes on grass like a beast, matted body hairs wet with dew and nails grown long as claws till, driven to madness, he survives as an abomination. Having to learn who he has become since his expulsion from the normal world. Easy to feel the fellowship there.
Every now and then a shard of shattered bone, having taken years to emerge, works its way to the surface and breaks through the skin: now on the hip, now on the forearm, now under the sternum. Here a splinter pushes up through a tattooed patch of the recycled American eagle on the bridge of his foot.
I suppose you guess how I feel.
Straight after the clatter of planks is heard outside in the street, the sound of a handsaw begins. Yao: his friend Yao. He recognizes the spurt of surprise, the pleasurable reminder of life before the war. And begins the task of assembling himself to investigate. Nerve endings entangle him in a coruscating lattice of messages, but today he’ll conquer everything. The sunshine calls. A regular hammering begins. The Contraption hoists him through the door frame to where fresh air swathes him in lightness. For the sake of confirming the obvious he leans over the verandah rail to look down. Yao, in shorts, boots and gloves, raises a hand.
He knows what he’s doing, the clever fellow, the formwork already a good-looking job.
Adam adjusts his weight. He reconsiders his right leg and then his left. Crackling briars. Though the Contraption cradles him at all points he can’t get comfortable. He hopes no awkwardness shows because pity has no place in friendship. He tests the paltry strength of his hands, one against the other. Next—though with stately caution—he bends at the waist, allowing pauses for his ruined torso to interpret the risk of each instruction . . . and then further time to negotiate the hazards of compliance. That’s how it works. Out goes a thought (raise right arm) and after hesitating, message received, the arm duly cranks through ratchets of thrilled twinges and sparks. And the same again when it sinks back as instructed. The unavoidable truth is that he has been reduced to a mechanism of permanently faulty parts. Well, what the hell! He’s still ticking, isn’t he? And he hasn’t given in. He rises to the occasion and calls down.
‘Lift that. Bale.’
Sunflares of stolen thoughts (of her) burst in Yao’s mind. Grasshoppers sing. As the rhythm of work takes hold he forgets he has company. Yet this isn’t right. He feels ashamed of his health. Soon enough Bridget will find out how dull and ordinary he is. He has a poor opinion of himself. As a general rule he tends to evade problems rather than solve them. As for Linda, Linda’s little world would fall apart at the least touch of the happiness he feels himself reaching for. Linda would never recover, nor ever forgive.
He thinks of the motherless child and the mother whose continued existence in unknown whereabouts strikes him with the force of a mystery. At this very moment sitting in a train perhaps (because right now a train can be heard clat
tering across the level crossing) . . . tracking him down so she can steal a glimpse of Linda to check if her child has been cared for and how much she has grown . . .
Once the concrete mixer gets cranking all other sounds are cancelled. The putt-puttering motor punches out little fists of black smoke.
Eventually exhaustion drives Adam back indoors. Bridget is there, poking around among his things, having opened the bible at a bookmarked page. Despite himself he resents the intrusion. He reaches to take it from her and looks to see what chapter she was reading. Ah yes—interesting—Gideon’s war against the Midianites. Already familiar with Wikipedia, Adam knows the Midianites came from Babylonia which (in the fatal circular way of the world) is now Iraq. While the vast army of invaders lay asleep in the valley Gideon was told to disperse his men among the hills around them. Each man had a trumpet and, hidden inside a clay pot, a lantern. Accordingly, the time came for the signal. The sleeping army—woken by a shocking fanfare, the din of smashed pots and wild men shouting—found themselves encircled by lights. It did the trick. A bloodless victory. In panic they stampeded. If only. Sound and light would no longer cut it.
Clumsily Adam flips the bible shut. But, even as the pages flicker and settle, the word tabernacle snags his attention. Why tabernacle?
‘Beats me.’
He closes his eyes against the giddiness. Sick in the gut for having upset Bridget.
He drowses.
What was a tabernacle after all? Did it have a function? And why so important? An answer, surprising him, unfolds in mind: the tabernacle, as an acoustical device, produces unearthly spoken syllables. The priest using it must place the open end in his voice-box by half-swallowing—though it can never afterwards be dislodged—for the sacred utterance to come out right. Needless to say, the user chokes to death. Hence the mystery and the rarity of finding priests willing to try, or tabernacles slender enough to fit. But the guys remain sceptical. Now he’s back in camp he raises the issue in the Bravo Company mess, shouting to get the attention of the squaddies who are guzzling beer and popping pills. Half-swallowing. Midianites, no less . . . but the surprise turns out to be Killer, Killer, off the leash and a changed man. Hey, this is no way of treating a schooner of beer. The shock of cold froth fizzing in hair and eyebrows by way of baptism, dripping from my nose and chin. ‘Here in his skull,’ Killer roars, tapping with the inverted glass, ‘down to the last fucking faultless detail’—he taps again, harder—‘he had an escape plan. That’s what got us through . . . me and him.’ The pitiless face with its wire-brush stubble slowly breaks open as a grin. Too much the predator and far too close. ‘I love this guy,’ says Killer and demonstrates a chopping action with the thick blade of one hand against the palm of the other, ‘because he never lost his nerve.’ Aloft, the empty schooner webbed with foam. Arm over shoulder, the violence of his heat overpowering. ‘Stick with me, mate, you’ll find what Chris Fletcher’s friendship’s worth.’ Fully worked up. ‘Tell you what! We’re going to get ourselves fucking wasted tonight!’ He grins around, raw, jubilant and hostile. And slaps money on the bar. ‘What’ll we bet on? What are we, you, you, me, him, gunna bet on tonight?’ It feels like somebody’s turn to make the next move but no one knows what. And there’s a cockroach running among the puddles on the bar, too quick to catch . . .
