The Wanderer

by Timothy J. Jarvis

  ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you.’

  Grunting, he rubbed his eyes under the thick lenses.

  ‘Just got to sleep.’

  ‘Well…Sorry.’

  I backed away.

  ‘Arsehole.’

  I went on, pace brisk.

  On reaching the Nightingale, I saw fitful flickering behind the frosted panes; a fire was burning in its hearth, and I was glad, because of the cold, the gusting wind, and because it would make the place even snugger. The pub’s board, a painting of the songbird it was named for, squalled as it swung restlessly back and forth. I went inside, looked about. Many of the pub’s appointments dated back to when it first opened, the late- Victorian period. The space was partitioned, by wooden screens inset with panels of etched glass, into a public bar and saloon at the rear; the island bar was mahogany with a pine counter, and had a canopy carved with a row of leering heads, Green Men, foliage sprouting from their mouths, wreathing their faces; and the walls were decorated with a lapis-tile dado and hung with fly-spotted mirrors in tarnished gilt frames. Apart from the wavering glow of the fire, the only source of light was a motley array of standard and table lamps, dim bulbs, but the effect was cosy, not dismal. There were Christmas decorations up: paper chains, swags of ivy, sprigs of mistletoe, and a tree hung with silver baubles and clumps of angel hair, but they were muted, sparse, didn’t irk me.

  I’d told the others to carry a copy of The Sphinx of the Ice-Fields,6 as if we were a book group meeting to discuss it; I knew them, by this token, by the volumes laid out on the table. They sat in slightly strained silence, by the fireplace, in the saloon. I’d meant to be early, but the truculent youth at Highbury Corner and the traffic in the City had delayed me, and it was already five past the hour, and, seemingly, I was the last but one to arrive. I joined them.

  We began by, in turn, giving our names and occupations, that ritual of first gatherings. As I’d stipulated replies to my classified should be anonymous, provide no identifying personal details, it was the first time I learnt anything about those I’d invited to attend. A young man wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a suit jacket introduced himself first. He was William Adams, a graphic designer. A woman in her late twenties, strikingly pretty, dark complexioned, long dark hair, spoke up next; Rashmi Natarajan, a legal secretary hailing from Edinburgh. Then came Elliot Wainwright, a pensioner from Norwich, with a cheery lined face, shock of white hair, and white tufty eyebrows. The stylishly dressed middle-aged woman sat next to him seemed familiar to me. Her name was Jane Ellis. She described herself as a single mother of two from Blackheath, but, as she was speaking, recognizing her brittle accents, I realized why I knew her: she was the author of a number of historical romances, one of which, The Feminine Monarchie, a fictionalization of a love affair early in the life of Charles Butler, the, till the book’s publication, relatively obscure seventeenth-century musician, grammarian, and apiarist, the ‘Father of English Beekeeping’, had sold very well and been adapted into a Hollywood film. Jane had been quite a bit in the public eye till about four years before, when it had been announced she was retiring from writing. She was followed by Duncan Wolfe, a butcher from Glasgow, a sullen man whom I judged to be in his mid-twenties. His mien suggested one who’d seen and endured much: he’d a wearied air, sallow skin, drained blue eyes, his long, tangled beard and close-cropped hair were dredged with grey, and he was missing an arm, the right, severed quite high, near the shoulder, the sleeve of the old-fashioned, worsted suit he wore was pinned across his chest. I was the last to give my name, tell of my job.

  Once this rite was over, and I’d told how there was one still to come and that I felt we should wait a bit, at least, I offered to get a round of drinks in. There were nods and thanks. Noting we’d no spare seats, Elliot offered to grab another for the latecomer. I, after taking orders, went up to the counter; William and I wanted lagers, Elliot, a light ale, Rashmi, a vodka and lemonade, Jane, a gin and tonic, Duncan, a porter. Once the bartender had poured the drinks, William came up, tapped me on the shoulder, asked if I needed a hand with carrying. I nodded, smiled.

  We took the drinks back over, set them down. All supped. Duncan asked if anyone minded if he smoked. No one objected, so he took a briar and tobacco pouch from his shirt pocket, set about filling the pipe’s bowl, a deft feat one-handed, got it lit. Once the flames had died, and the tobacco smouldered dully, he took a long draw, roiled the smoke in his mouth, let it spill from his lips, gave a satisfied sigh.7

  At first, conversation was stilted. We were, after all, complete strangers, brought together solely by the weird things we’d undergone. As we sipped our drinks, however, it grew easier. We exchanged inanities, details of our daily lives, chattered, largely without awkwardness, till a fraught moment came, when Duncan, in what seemed a rare spell of volubility, began talking about his trade and the handling of meat, subjects clearly near to his heart, not noticing that Rashmi, who’d already announced she was vegetarian, looked sickened. Jane diffused the tension by gently interrupting the dour Glaswegian to enquire about the last member of the group, the person whose arrival we awaited. I explained that, I knew almost nothing about him or her, that all I could say for sure was that he or she wrote in a crabbed scrawl and probably, based on the postmark on the envelope the response came in, lived in north London. Jane nodded.

  Talk then turned to a scandal that had recently provoked the outrage of the tabloids: a well-known television host, thought a paragon, had been involved in an orgy in a London hotel room during which a prostitute had died of an overdose.

  ‘I think he’s pure stupit,’ Rashmi said, after we’d been discussing the issue for some time.

  Taking a paper out of her bag, she opened it to an article discussing the affair.

  ‘Says here, was a set-up gone wrong. The hookers paid for by one of the other red tops. Imagine falling for that! I don’t feel any sympathy.’

  Jane, her head canted to one side, frowned.

  ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Think about it. His life is ruined. And due to a tragic accident, something not really his fault. And the journalists behind it all won’t suffer, though they’re also partly to blame. I feel sorriest for the wife, though. Imagine being married to someone for years and then…But it must be hard to be scrutinized all the time.’

  ‘I still think he’s an idiot, but.’

  William drummed his fingers on the table.

  ‘It just sickens me that such sordid ephemera displaces war, famine, and genocide from the front pages.’

  Elliot pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.

  ‘In my day you could look up to stars. They were decent, moral people.’

  ‘No they weren’t,’ William snapped back. ‘Their indiscretions were mostly kept secret or ignored is all. Everyone colluded in that. Today’s celebrity culture may be cruel, but it is more honest.’ He paused, then said, in a tone more contemplative, ‘Except stars are now adept at manipulating their own disgrace for gain. There may be something more disconcerting…Perhaps it’s that nothing’s really at stake anymore, everything’s such a sham.’

  During the discussion, Duncan and I sat in silence, but, while I followed it with lively interest, seeking insights into my companions’ characters, he sat staring down at his pint, grimacing. But he interjected then, saying solemnly, shaking his head, ‘Aye. All’s going to Hell, right enough.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ William came back. ‘I didn’t mean that. I don’t think people are actually any worse now than they’ve ever been.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean, really. Something else. What you said afore…’ Duncan trailed off, shrugged.

  ‘Things are worse,’ Elliot mused, after a moment’s silence. ‘When I was a boy you could leave your front door unlocked and not worry yourself about it.’

  ‘But people had less money, and less access to medical care, education, and so on,’ Jane replied.

  ‘Aye right,’ Rashmi said. ‘This count
ry’s going tae shite.’

  Jane frowned. Elliot grimaced. Then nodded.

  ‘I don’t like your language, but you are right. Too many foreigners, too many scroungers…’

  Groaning, William slammed down his pint glass, reached into his pocket, took out a pack of cigarettes, lit one, drawing the smoke deep into his lungs. The tobacco glowed, ireful.

  ‘Too many old fucking pricks…’ he muttered, under his breath, but not quite quiet enough.

  Rashmi turned to Elliot.

  ‘Foreigners,’ she said, glaring. ‘You mean like me?’

  ‘No, indeed, young lady. I mean this new influx, not the good old colonials. These Romanians and what have you.’

  Rashmi gave him a look, wrinkled her nose.

  ‘No, no,’ Duncan said, pulling on his pipe. ‘You’ve all misunderstood. It’s newspapers, television, and such. Not an ethical decline. To do with language, things.’

  He exhaled a plume of fragrant smoke.

  William reached out and, with two fingers, slid a glass ashtray towards him across the table, looking through it at the grain of the wood beneath, jerking it from side to side, as if it were a ouija board’s planchette, and he, feigning it moving according to the whims of a spirit. Then, he put down his cigarette, looked up at the butcher.

  ‘Hmm. Language, things,’ he said. ‘I think you’re right. It’s to do with the way the self-appointed guardians of morality abuse their power, the way the cultural images we’re surrounded by work to subjugate us. No one is free, not even in their leisure time.’

  ‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ Jane said, leaning forwards, ‘but what sort of graphic designer are you? Aren’t those images your stock in trade?’

  ‘Well…’ William began, then shrugged, drank a draught of his beer, took up his cigarette again.

  I turned to him, spoke up.

  ‘I don’t think you’re getting what Duncan means. It’s got nothing to do with ethics or politics. With ideology. Or only tangentially.’

  ‘No? Then what?’ William demanded.

  ‘Like he said, it’s to do with language, things. Simulation and abstraction. The proliferation of dissolute signs.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Rashmi asked, squinting at me.

  ‘Increasingly representation doesn’t refer to anything. Reality is being hollowed out from the inside. The fabric of the world has been rent, and through these tears creep things that come from some alterior, some other place.’

  Elliot smiled. ‘Cuckoo,’ he said, tapping his head with a forefinger.

  Jane fixed me with a glare.

  ‘Nonsense,’ she snapped.

  ‘Is it?’ I replied. ‘We’ve all seen that other place, haven’t we?’

  ‘Aye, pal,’ said Duncan, patting his stump with his left hand. ‘That we have.’

  We chatted a little while longer, then Jane, glancing down at her watch, interrupted to remark we were in danger of losing sight of why we’d gathered. The other respondent had clearly decided against coming, she said, and there was no point delaying longer. A murmur of assent from the rest. Elliot argued, though, that we should hold on to the empty seat, just in case. Jane proposed, that I, as the organizer of the meeting, tell my story first. I protested, but the others gently insisted, and, looking round at their expectant faces, I realized I’d no choice.

  ‘This all happened about two and a half years ago, now,’ I began. ‘As it had been a long and tiresome day, I went for a pint in the Saracen’s Head after work. The evening was cold…’

  III

  As I type this, I can hear wheezing breaths and the odd low moan from the Ark’s wheelhouse. I have solitude no longer. I’ve propped the wheelhouse door open, and inside, in the gloom, I can just make her out, slumbering fitfully on my pallet.

  I will tell all. But now I feel it’s time for a brief sketch of the ways I’ve spent my diuturnity.

  At first, for a short time after I learnt of my fate, though in hiding, I attempted, so far as possible, to live in company, as I had before, forming friendships, taking lovers, staying in contact with my family, and so forth. But it proved too difficult. After a while, people would find it suspect I didn’t age, and the deaths of the very few I could take into my confidence caused great heartache; it’s hard to know you’ll outlive everyone you love. Finally, I resolved my life should be solitary and sought solace in learning, skills. But given endless life there’s no sense of accomplishment in mastery. Still, reading and playing musical instruments went on affording me some distraction. For a time, I was also still quickened by wallowing in the fleshly, and, wary of forming any attachments, took my pleasures with prostitutes. In the end, though, even this no longer enticed me. I felt I’d exhausted all life’s possibilities, well, those I could morally countenance, and, truth be told, quite a few I could not, and listlessness set in.

  Apprehension of death, as ineluctable and imminent, is vital to being; deprived of a looming end, I ceased to be fully human (though I knew I’d be found eventually, I also thought, as my pursuer had others to seek and seemed to wish for a cruel protraction of the chase, to torment with tedium, the dark day could be eluded, perhaps even till aeon’s end if I was canny, which has, of course, proved true). I also found it wretched I didn’t age; it’s from observing their own decay people derive their sense there is change in the world; I, staying the same, see only stagnation.

  For centuries, I drifted from place to place, earning enough through casual labour to pay for necessities: food, clothing, accommodation. Reclusive, I spent most of my spare hours buried in books. Though I read diversely, my tastes favoured texts written before my cursing, which, perused still by scholars, could be acquired from museums and libraries. Later on, this inclination of mine was reinforced; after the torches of civilization burnt out, and the power went down, once and for all, I could read nothing but printed books, which, having ceded to various electronic formats around the time I learnt of my fate, mostly predated it. It was still possible to obtain them, for many places of learning had housed the large part of their catalogues in underground depositories. These stores had been built to protect their contents against the depredations of time and, having entrances that were difficult to force and often concealed beneath the rubble of the buildings, torn down by suspicious barbarians, that had once stood above them, were safe from sack.

  During my relative youth (my flesh does not wither, but I still feel the years score me) there was much talk of travel to far-flung planets, something that would have provided escape from the mundane. But it never came to pass. Neither have beings from alien worlds visited Earth. Either this sphere is alone in being able to support life, or the societies of all populated worlds have, as those of this, always fallen into decadence before attaining the technologies that would enable venturing into the void. (As an aside, I now feel sure humankind had aspired and failed, but nearly, to kick loose of the Earth in eras prior to that of my birth, that some myths of the age, such as my own native culture’s tale of the death of Bladud, or the stories of the confounding of the builders of Nimrod’s great tower, the crash of Kay Kāvus’s flying throne, and Phaëton’s and Icarus’s falls, were weak, distorted recollections of foundered space flight. Indeed, I’m now convinced all legends are faint memories of violent events of previous epochs.)

  In the end, the entire globe fell into darkness, once and for all, or so it would seem; there do not appear to be any embers of civilization still smouldering from which it could be rekindled. Folk went back to a nomadic life, and the cities, which, till then, had afforded me throngs to lose myself in, were abandoned. I travelled to the Himalayas, hoping to find refuge in loneliness and harsh steeps instead.

  As I’ve already described, my existence there, aside from some years spent living with natives, was that of a hermit. But it was ascetic in its externals merely: thought is a great and complex pleasure, and I surrendered myself to it. I also had my books, of course; I replenished their stock when needful through tr
ips to archives located in former seats of culture, fraught, but worth it. I was sore drouthy after knowledge, but not just knowledge, for stories too. Aside from my eyes, that gulped the words, and my hands, that turned the pages, my body, at times, seemed an encumbrance: an old nag which, despite its usefulness having passed, must still be sheltered, fed, and watered. On occasion, though, a shock would restore me to the world of things; my days were not solely spent in contemplation and reading. Once I’d got used to the thin air, I spent some time climbing in the mountains. Not till I finally die (should that release ever be afforded me) will the memory of the prospects to be had from the higher peaks cease to inspire awe. But the place is calm, too. If I felt agitated, I could go and sit by a mountain lake, gaze at the reflections of the green firs lining its shores, which danced on days when wind stirred the branches and roiled the waters, or, if it was overcast, I could climb above the clouds, feel the sun on my face, look down on the vapours, a seeming plain of ice and snow. Though I did little during my age-long stay, I never felt tedium; strange, since I’d always preferred the bustle of a city.

  I’d just completed my account of the gathering of the party on that fateful night in the Nightingale, when I fell ill. For two days, I lay on my blankets in the dark, agued, delusional, aching in marrow and muscle. I soiled myself in my torment, guts clenching, finally shat blood, hawked up grumous dark matter, could not get my breath. I was tormented by febrile visions: Rachel knelt by my pallet, but, when I reached out to her, recoiled and spat; I heard, again and again, the screech of a swazzle, saw Punch gyring, beating his stick in time to an off-key dirge; Colin Elton stood before me, dug in his eyesockets with his fingers, plucked out the glaucous balls, proffered them, cupped in his palms; and a figure, swathed in shadow, leered over me, bellowed, ‘The others are dead, you’re the only one left. I’m coming for you, remorseless cruel.’

  I thrashed, writhed, moaned, sweated, then, this morning, the sickness loosed its grip. I sprawled, fatigued, on a bed become a sty. The first thing I did, when enough strength returned to me, was stagger down the Ark’s gangplank and across the estuary mud to the river’s edge, hauling my bedding, to wash some of the filth from it and from my clothes. But first, I wished to bathe. I stripped, waded out a little distance, crouched down; the water was cool, I ducked my head. The sun, low in the sky, diffused by a haze, was ochre, the sky, pale blue, wholesome colours, rare these days, the Earth’s last. I began to feel myself again, traces of the sickness waned. I turned my back to the shore, looked out across the broad reach, cupped brine to my face, sluiced away the bile dried in my beard.