by Robert Edric
‘Do you wish to tell her?’ She wiped a hand over her face, as though suddenly and fleetingly weary of the great burden placed upon her. ‘You mentioned medicines,’ she said.
‘I doubt there is anything your father would not already have been familiar with thirty years ago.’
She looked into the satchel I held open, but with little enthusiasm.
‘Where they lived,’ she said, ‘my parents, it was a richer place than this. My father would say often enough in his prayers that they were caught up into Paradise and they would never leave it. I envied him his conviction then and I envy him it now.’
I recognized the phrase and sought hard to identify it.
‘Saint Paul,’ I said eventually.
‘In his letter to the Corinthians. I won’t flatter you by saying you surprise me. Look over there.’ She pointed to a rocky outcrop. ‘See? And look beneath us.’ Another exposed face rose out of the grass.
‘Do they have names?’ I asked her.
‘Can you not guess? They are known as Saint Peter’s Gates.’
‘The Gates to Heaven, to Paradise? Here?’
‘I imagine that is the interpretation many might give them. It was the name, too, remember, of the gates on Mount Purgatory, guarded by Peter’s angels.’
‘And is that how you choose to see them?’
‘My father would have told you that wide is the gate and broad the way that leadeth to destruction. Tell me, will the water rise high enough to cover them?’
‘I doubt it, no.’
‘So are we even to be denied our own Charybdis and Scylla?’
‘I doubt most days you will even have waves.’
‘And will it ever freeze completely over? Or would that be too unbearably direct a comparison?’
I did not fully understand the remark. ‘In the shallows, perhaps, or during the severest of winters.’
‘Then she and I will never see it.’
She looked again to her sister. The woman remained perfectly still, looking down over the valley. Occasionally she raised and then lowered her arm as though pointing something out to an invisible companion. She spoke, too, but her voice was carried away from us in the wind.
‘I sometimes think it is the greatest loss of all to bear,’ she said. She continued staring at her sister as she spoke. ‘To be lost in the truest sense, and yet to remain ever present, to be an ever-present reminder of that loss, the embodiment of loss.’
She paused, perhaps conscious of having told me too much, or perhaps stopped by the sweet taste so suddenly in her mouth.
Afterwards we stood together in the silence of the hills for a long while. And by silence, of course, I mean the countless small sounds other than those of our own voices, of which so-called silence is all too often composed.
Eventually, having insisted upon her accepting my medicines, I told her I would return soon, and that she was to get word to me if her sister’s health worsened. She acquiesced to all this in silence.
I raised my hand to Martha, but the woman, despite looking directly at me, gave no indication that I existed.
Later, returning home alongside the dam, I saw the other sufferers there, all of them standing with their faces turned into the wind, and all with their mouths wide open, as though the wind were indeed a proven cure and they were drinking it in.
32
Two days later I was walking on the far slope above the dam when I was alerted by a commotion below me. I heard shouting, and someone ringing a handbell, a sure sign of some alarm or other, calling the faithful to witness or to protest. A small crowd had assembled. A group of men ran across the top of the dam, leaving the sheep they had been penning to wander behind them.
I turned my attention back to the dwellings, where I saw a second group of men marching in procession towards the chapel, women and children running alongside them. Looking more closely, I saw that these men carried hammers and pickaxes, and only then did I realize that the wreckers had returned.
I hurried as best I could down the steep slope.
Arriving at the dam, I composed myself.
Someone at the far side saw me and shouted out, and those below turned to watch me come. I began to regret having been so hasty in my desire to intervene, but I felt justified in my actions by the belief that my sudden appearance might at least bring a brief stay of execution to whatever it was the wreckers were there to destroy, and that an opportunity for negotiation, however illusory, now existed.
The tolling bell fell silent, and I felt as I had felt wading into the whirlpool.
I left the dam and followed the path leading to the chapel. I knew it was unlikely that the building itself was the focus of the wreckers’ attention, and supposed that their march on it was all part of their method. I felt encouraged by the realization. I would make it the point of my intercession and divert them from it. The men and women and children parted before me.
I stopped at some distance from the wreckers, and under the pretext of taking off my pack I looked around me at all the other abandoned buildings against which their energies might be more usefully directed now that the water was so high and rising so rapidly.
It occurred to me then that they might have been sent following the departures of several days earlier; their appearance was too much of a coincidence for it to be otherwise. And realizing this, it also struck me that there must either be an informant inside the valley, or someone watching from beyond who was able to inform the Board of these opportunities. If there was some Judas within, then I was at a loss to identify him.
I looked more closely at the local men surrounding the wreckers. Many stood with lengths of wood or some implement in their hands. Few looked serious about fighting. None of the wreckers seemed in the least concerned about the outcome of the confrontation. Some of them taunted the local men. Others made less vocal suggestions to the women, and tempers rose as I made my final approach. Several of the locals fell in behind me. I wished they had stayed apart.
I came into the space in front of the chapel. I called a greeting to the wreckers, but this was received only with laughter.
One of them stepped forward. ‘I’m Tozer,’ he said. ‘These men are here under my charge on the authority of—’
‘The Water Board. I know,’ I said, hoping to deflate him. I introduced myself.
‘You’re Weightman?’ he said.
I asked him why he found that so strange.
‘We thought you were long gone,’ he said.
‘Gone?’
He was a short, heavily built man, with shoulders that hunched forwards. He held a lump hammer across his chest.
‘They told us you might still be here, but they said they couldn’t be certain. They thought you might be back in Halifax doing it all from there.’
‘They know I’m still here,’ I said. ‘So if you’ve come to—’
He turned to the others. ‘He thinks he knows best which buildings we ought to attend to.’ He made sure the watching locals heard this, perhaps hoping to suggest to them that I was the informant.
‘I make my recommendations based solely on an understanding of those buildings already long abandoned and those threatened most by the rising water,’ I said loudly, but knowing how ineffectual I sounded even before the stilted words were out. I pointed to several half-drowned structures further down the slope. ‘Some of which, I imagine, Mr Tozer, are no longer accessible even to you, unless you wish to get your feet wet.’
He turned his back on me and addressed his men. He asked them what they wanted to attack first, and they all cried, ‘The chapel,’ further convincing me that they had been primed and that this was not their true target.
One of the men ran towards the burial-ground gate and stood as though about to swing at it with his hammer. But he stopped short and his blow found no target. Tozer shouted to him to get back with the others.
I approached closer to him. ‘Played your trump card?’ I said, quietly enough for him alone to hear
.
I turned back to the watchers. ‘They have a legitimate task to perform,’ I shouted, and then waited for the chorus of disapproval to subside. ‘But they have no right, under provision made by the Board, to turn their attention to any dwelling still inhabited or in other use. Those provisions are listed under regulations—’ And here I fabricated a list of numbered clauses and sub-clauses with which to stamp my authority even harder on the proceedings. I paused, allowing the weight of my announcement to sink in. I was pleased with myself. I wondered if Tozer would call my bluff, but I saw by the way he looked from one group of men to another that this was unlikely. ‘Any contravention of the regulations,’ I said, ‘will be liable to restitution or compensation by the Board under—’ And here I scattered another crop of fictions around me.
Tozer came back to me and pushed his face close to mine. His breath smelled of tobacco.
‘They warned me you were a man clothed in writing,’ he said.
‘Then they were right,’ I said.
‘But they still think you’re back in Halifax, hidden away in some hotel or other and making it all up from there.’ He smiled broadly. ‘Tell me, why are you still here? They can’t have expected you to stay this long.’
‘My contract stipulates—’
‘They hand out their contracts like pennies to beggars.’
‘Nevertheless, they have an obligation to—’
‘An obligation they forget the minute the ink’s dry on your name. That’s it as far as they’re concerned. They obey the law as they see it. Everyone gets what they want. No one expects you to get too excited about your part in it all.’
‘Who told you to come today?’ I said, refusing to be drawn so publicly.
He looked slowly around him, pausing at the sight of a number of local men. I followed his gaze, but no one gave themselves away to me. Then he tapped his nose. ‘Why would we need someone here to tell us what to do?’
‘But there is someone,’ I said, and knew from his response that I was right.
‘Why don’t you paint a nice big black cross on the doors of all those places more worthless than the rest,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll know where to go.’ He came even closer to me. ‘But don’t worry, Mr Weightman, we’ll get to them all in time. Every single one of them. Even this ruin of a chapel. By the time we’ve finished, you won’t have the faintest idea that there was ever anything here.’
I took several paces back from him. ‘You will instruct your men to approach no closer than fifty yards to the chapel,’ I shouted.
He shook his head at the easy advantage I had taken. Then he raised up his hammer and pushed past me to a nearby sizing shed that had stood empty since my arrival. He called for the others to follow him, which they did, coming now more cautiously through the onlookers.
They set about their work on the building with a vengeance, putting on a show for the watching crowd. Tozer and several others climbed immediately on to the roof and swung their hammers into its slabs, breaking them and letting them fall into the shell beneath. There was no glass remaining in the windows and the frames were smashed in seconds. One man hammered at the chimney stack and then leaned against it until it gave way and collapsed. Few of the men took heed of their own safety amid the destruction.
And after the sizing shed they turned to other structures, splitting into smaller gangs and going in search of separate targets.
Later, I sought out Tozer before returning home. I found him sitting on a balk of timber drinking from an earthen-ware jar. He shielded his eyes at my approach and looked up at me.
‘You must have started from close by to have arrived here so early,’ I said.
‘Close enough.’
‘Is it well-paid work?’
‘It’s work.’
There were tales of some of the early wreckers having looted recently abandoned homes in which belongings had been left behind awaiting later retrieval. I guessed that these tales were as untrustworthy as any other.
He handed up the jar to me and I took it.
‘Truth is,’ he said, ‘I’m more surprised to find them here than you. They know what’s coming, so why do they cling on?’ There was no coarseness in his voice or manner now that there was no show to put on.
‘Like shipwrecked sailors to wreckage,’ I said.
‘First time we came, we had instructions to offer the wrecking work to them.’
‘To get them on your side?’
‘Who cares what side they’re on. I don’t. Do you?’
I shrugged rather than commit myself to the uncertain truth. I took a drink from the jar and gave it back to him.
‘Tell them there will be fewer reports in future,’ I said.
‘Me? Tell them? I see as much of them as you do. And, like you, I do what they tell me to do. It suits my purpose to do it, and it suits theirs to have it done a long way away from them and out of their sight. We’ve got a lot more in common, you and me, than you’d ever allow.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said.
‘You’ll no doubt want to write something about all this.’
‘What would be the point?’
‘You could tell them how efficiently the work was carried out, how courteous we were, how little disruption we caused, how vital our task was.’
‘I could even pretend to have had some important role in the proceedings myself.’
‘Why not?’ He held out the jar again. ‘I don’t know why you stay,’ he said. ‘Me, I’d have gone mad stuck up here all this time.’
‘Perhaps I have,’ I said.
‘No, you haven’t. They wouldn’t pay a madman what they pay you. Although I did once hear a tale about a member of the Board who went on being paid a good salary for a year after he’d died.’
33
After an absence of a month, my frog-man ranter returned to visit me. I was approaching my gate after a day’s work when I saw him standing there with his lean grey hounds stretched out in the grass around him. He watched me draw near, taking some pleasure, I imagine, in seeing me struggle with my cases up the final slope. Other than pausing to observe him where he stood for several seconds, I chose to ignore him. He, too, seemed unwilling to come any closer or to approach me directly.
I went inside. My hearth was cold and I rekindled a fire there, but one which would burn with little real warmth for some time yet.
He knocked at my door.
‘Stay where you are,’ I called out to him, hoping to make my feelings at seeing him again immediately clear to him.
But he pushed the door open and came in anyway. He stood for a moment on the threshold and looked around the room.
‘I imagined they might have provided better for you than this,’ he said, more amused than surprised by what he saw.
‘You and I alike,’ I said.
‘Chimney needs sweeping.’
‘I daresay.’
‘Did they truly offer you nowhere better to lodge?’
‘So, once again you have come to mock me and to no doubt disclose your own impossible plans for the future,’ I said to him. I let my hands fall to the table with a louder bang than was necessary.
‘Was I here before?’ he said.
The remark made me cautious.
‘You came days after my own arrival. You showed me your feet.’
He sat for a moment in wonder, and it occurred to me for an instant that I had mistaken his identity. He looked again around the room.
‘Was I in here?’ he said.
‘No, you did all your ranting then outside.’
‘Is that what I was?’ He seemed genuinely confused by what I said to him.
I sat opposite him at the table, and the fire slowly took hold between us.
‘Do you not remember?’ I asked him. ‘You showed me the webbing of your toes and told me about your hands.’
He held these up and examined them.
‘Did I alarm you?’
‘You seemed to alarm yourself more than you ala
rmed me.’
He laughed at this. ‘I’m beginning to remember it, flooder.’ He went to the fire and attended to it as though it were his own. He broke the peat into smaller pieces and scattered shavings from the hearth basket amid these. The flames rose fierce and crackling for an instant before dying down.
‘Were the dogs with me?’ he said.
It was clear to me by then that he truly had no recollection of that earlier visit. His entire manner was changed. The same grey hair covered his face, the same dark eyes lay in their sockets, but everything else about him was different.
‘Ought I to make my apologies?’ he said.
‘No more than a hundred others.’
‘So, they welcomed you among them as the saviour you believed yourself to be,’ he said. He locked his hands on the table and pointed his forefingers at me.
‘Except I never claimed any such thing.’ I tried hard to remember what else he might have told me, might have predicted or foreseen.
‘Perhaps not, but did no tiny part of you ever believe it?’
‘You were fond of all these riddles and sly allusions then, I remember.’
He considered this for several moments.
I felt the first feeble heat from the fire.
‘They reckon that at times I am not right in my head.’ He looked hard at me and smiled.
‘You are certainly a more acceptable proposition in this state than formerly.’
His smile became laughter. ‘What was I going to do – live in your pond like a merman?’
‘Like a giant frog,’ I said.
‘Ah, yes. I shall, of course, spare both of us that particular embarrassment.’
‘Do whatever you please,’ I told him.
He considered me closely. ‘Surely, that is not disillusion I detect. I seem to remember you all puffed up with the thing.’
‘A minute ago you did not even remember having been here.’
‘It comes and goes,’ he said, winking at me.
I took the kettle and settled it into the rising fire.
Outside, one of his dogs barked and he cocked his head to this. ‘His mother died,’ he said, and it was several seconds before I realized he was speaking about the barking dog.
