The Sandpit

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  After they had eaten, Miranda’s mother touched his arm. ‘Let’s go, then. We’re ready, aren’t we?’

  While Dyer considered his reply, her hand rose to her throat and toyed, as if to see it was still there, with a thin silver chain around her neck, like his mother’s necklace that brushed his cheek when she bent to kiss him goodnight. Like Katya’s. What a disaster that had been.

  ‘I’ll fetch your tickets,’ said Miranda, playing along. She got up from the table and disappeared. When she came back, she was clutching the brown envelope that Dyer had addressed to himself, containing the eleven pages of his conversation with Marvar.

  The old lady was combing her hair in silence.

  ‘It’s all right, you don’t have to tell me,’ Miranda said, ignoring her.

  But he wanted to. ‘It’s the explanation to a problem, the background to it.’

  She looked at him diagnostically. ‘A big problem?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘An explanation that others would itch to get their hands on?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘Without which the problem stays a problem?’

  ‘Yes.’

  That was it, he realised. No one would understand the significance of Marvar’s algorithm without reading Dyer’s notes. The one depended on the other. The two documents were bound inextricably. Like Dyer and Marvar.

  ‘And who’s it for?’ she asked. ‘This explanation?’

  ‘I still haven’t made up my mind. I first wanted to check it was safe.’

  It was pitiable, he was backtracking already. Just when he’d hoped to disentangle himself by destroying his notes, Miranda showed him that this was impossible. For Dyer to wash his hands of what he had written would be to flush Marvar’s algorithm down the same sink. He would have to destroy them both. Or neither.

  She nodded at his dilemma, she saw it in his moping cod expression.

  ‘You can leave it here if you like. Until you’ve decided.’

  He was regarding her. Her tanned face was in profile. She had seemed a little dowdy, perhaps it was her hair. He was thrown off balance by her without knowing why.

  Her mother was still combing. She did not glance up or say anything when Dyer rose from the table, gathered his shoulder bag.

  Miranda opened the front door. She held his envelope in her other hand. ‘It’s here whenever you want it … Ixé oka pupé aikó’ – and after he arched an eyebrow: ‘That’s Tupi for “I am inside the house.”’ She had tracked down one of the titles on his list: ‘Rather impressively, they had it in the Oxfam bookshop.’ She had read it on her hideous balcony in Paguera. Her quick honest eyes looked at him through their polka-dot frames. When she smiled, she tilted her chin downwards slightly, giving evidence of her shyness. ‘I learned a lot. I was interested that they couldn’t pronounce the Portuguese words for “faith” or “law”, and that there’s no future tense – all Tupi sentences are either in the past or the present. But you’d know that.’

  Dyer walked away in a thoughtful, calmer mood. He had arrived an hour earlier to retrieve and rip up his interview with Marvar. He didn’t have to leave it with Miranda; it was not what he had intended.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  IT SOUNDS LIKE AN OWL calling.

  Dyer woke in the middle of the night overcome with fear, not knowing where he was, caught up in a dreadful flux of monstrous animal and human shapes. In bed with Astrud or Nissa, he didn’t have time to worry about himself. Alone, his fears gnawed vulturously on each other.

  He tensed, waiting for the call to come again, but it didn’t.

  Eyes shut, he saw letters and figures, pluses and minuses, brackets of long division, as if he were back in Slimy’s class.

  A car, driving slowly, crept along the street. He thought he heard voices speaking. With that animal impulse to seek shadow, he wanted to disappear into another world, crawl into the back of a cupboard and reappear in a third dimension, on a beach somewhere in Brazil where no European had been, no cars. There was always sun in Brazil; it fell through his window that faced the sea.

  But he couldn’t disappear. He had Leandro. They knew where he lived. They knew where he worked. They knew where he was each day at 8.30 a.m. and again at 3.30 p.m., where he took his coffee breaks. He was steeled for them to finish him off at any moment, shoot him like a kid in Rio.

  Dyer jumped out of bed and went downstairs into the kitchen, in the darkness knocking over a chair. He double-checked the front door, the locks on the French window. Then he returned upstairs, rubbing his shin.

  His head sank back, but sleep doesn’t come. He is scared, he feels his body tapping inside. He doesn’t want Leandro to hear his fear. He lies in the dark and listens to the overnight train – the sounds in the distance taking him away. He was not there. He was travelling south. He was coming into Petrópolis.

  A need to escape from himself sent Dyer back to the Taylorian next morning. This circuit to the library was his rosary, he had become locked into his telling of it.

  After his sleepless night, he felt weak, nauseated even. Continually circling and never moving forward, he trod the grey stone staircase, cold step by cold step, not noticing his surroundings.

  But he senses it like a stare from the back. He knows something is going to happen.

  In the centre of the room beneath the dome was a round table. Dyer passed the chairs of two people reading, and looked over their shoulders. The gull-faced girl, the bearded man, neither immersed in a book with wine-red covers.

  Madrugada’s monograph had disappeared from the stacks, already on its way to whoever had requested it. Conscious now of feeling paranoid, Dyer collected the calf-bound edition of facsimiles relating to Pedro Álvares Cabral’s voyage, and took it into the French and German reading room. No one had switched on the lights, but his tired eyes were grateful for the dull daylight falling through the windows. The only presences in the room were the crouching shepherd and the wounded goddess on the wall.

  In the feeble light he sees a movement in the painting, or thinks he does. They look as if they’re about to fall in love, it strikes him for the first time. That’s what they look like.

  With pounding heart, he opened the back cover to check if Marvar’s note was where he’d left it – inside a pocket sewn into the endpapers, containing a map of the Brazilian coast.

  A part of Dyer buckled to see the yellow scrap of paper. The writing on it stood out. The ink had the dark glare of something that had fallen hissing to earth. He could imagine it burning a hole in the hull of Cabral’s flagship.

  How Dyer wished – for the first time – that he had not responded to the lure of the word ‘BOOMERANG’.

  Doors opened and closed. Cars hooted. The window-fan whirred. Someone switched on the lights. He swung round; it was the gull-faced girl. He shielded his eyes. He was drowning in the brilliance, as though a hand holding a gigantic magnifying glass had focused all the sun’s beams on him and he was a bright spot curling into flame. His fingers folded the note back into the pocket and flicked through the pages to the first chapter. Dyer tried to concentrate on the words in front of him, about the admiral’s reaction to the Tupi Indians gathering on the beach, how they approached in friendliness and innocence, but when he looked at the words they went blank, until he had the impression that he was gazing through a smouldering cavity at a world that was on the verge of extinction.

  It was not yet eleven when Dyer broke his routine and left the Taylorian. The cobbles outside were dark from an earlier rain. After a warm snap, the cold weather had returned.

  He was walking along Walton Street when he sensed that someone was following him. He dashed into the Dragon Cinema, and bought a ticket to a film that had already begun. He fell asleep after ten minutes, and when he wakes up the three people in the cinema are leaving. It’s the middle of the day as he emerges. He has no memory of what he’s watched. He feels in another time zone, another country.

  In slow
steps, he headed back towards the town centre, plunged into a canal of images. The asthmatic misfire of an exhaust made his hair stiffen. His eye played tricks. He thought he saw Lorna coming out of Boswell’s, carrying a saucepan. When he looked again, she had transformed into a grey-haired old lady holding a Sainsbury’s bag.

  His fears nipping at his heels, he stumbled, caught himself, and continued walking down George Street to Gloucester Green. There was a market in the square. Cloudily, he ordered a hamburger from a van. The chips made him think longingly of cassava fries; the stalls, of the market in Belém – boxes of old comics and blue-and-white patterned teacups of the sort that his parents sipped from. He wolfed down the hamburger. He needed an astrolabe to find his bearings.

  Hunger assuaged, he struck out across the cobbles. He was letting his instincts lead him, following one of the goat paths that he had carved out with Rougetel, and behaving with the same furtive watchfulness.

  Checking over his shoulder, he left Gloucester Green, and made his way through Wellington Square to Claridge Street, in through the black-glazed door of Barico’s.

  This time, he didn’t look at the papers on the counter. The news about Iran no longer touched Dyer. His own drama consumed him.

  He ordered a caipirinha, then another, the only customer, a solitary tapir coming to drink. It wasn’t hard to imagine that he was back in Brazil. Looking out from his flaking windowsill. He felt like a car on sugar-cane alcohol. Putter putter putter. The condensation on the glass was the rain on the windscreen of the yellow Beetle taxi taking him to her funeral in Petrópolis.

  Dyer hadn’t thought about the ceremony for years, and goodness knows what prompted him to recall it now. How it came back, that humid day, and the smell of rotten mango and the spasm in his foot, and Vivien, who had flown in from Lima with Hugo. He sat by Astrud’s body for some time, and then Vivien handed him a large glass of cachaça.

  He had cast and recast over that pool in his memory. It was emptier than the flat to which he had returned in Joaquim Nabuco. Every article of clothing, every ornament and painting they had bought together, was drained of her existence. The flat reminded Vivien of a lodge in the jungle; you needed to shout and knock before a light came on. As the sun rose on Leblon, small waves broke on the sand like a cat gently rolling over a dead bird.

  Astrud would have told him what to do.

  The memory was choking him. He sat in a dazed paralysis. It infected his every bone. He couldn’t lift his glass without it trembling. The cold had finally got to him, it was in his marrow. Like Marvar.

  The Iranian scientist wasn’t someone he had met only three times; he was an illness who had come in through the cracks, to nest.

  Dyer got up from the zinc counter and went into the reeking urinal. Washing his hands, he couldn’t avoid his reflection in the mirror, with graffiti on the wall behind and a poster for an exhibition of Cézanne portraits at the Ashmolean.

  The stale cast to his face. It explains Miranda’s reaction the day before. Grey stubble ashes his cheeks. His eyes are vacant. He looks like one of his street kids, like that accordionist outside the Oxfam bookshop. He feels himself vanishing.

  A wave of panic swept through him, he was frightened by its force. He couldn’t keep his thoughts upright in his head. He had a moment of realising what a mental collapse was, the impossibility of making a decision.

  A mathematical equation is true for ever, Marvar had said. But only if you knew the equation. If, however, you got rid of it before anyone else found out, who then would know it had existed – save for the person who had come up with the equation in the first place?

  If Marvar was alive, he would be able, surely, to replicate his knowledge.

  Leaving Barico’s, Dyer turned right onto St Giles. A little dog ran up to the bars of a gate and watched him pass by. He moved as if he were taking his last steps in chains, like someone about to commit a crime. His gestures were mechanical, his strength had leeched from him. But in the urinal he had reached a decision, and his face is oddly composed as he walks past the Oxfam bookshop towards Blackfriars, in the direction of the Taylorian, once again.

  He had bottled out yesterday at Miranda’s. He is determined, this time, to see it through.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  THE OUTSIDE OF BLACKFRIARS had the look of a prison. The pavement was wider here, with benches. It was a spot favoured by Oxford’s homeless, a place for them to stretch out their legs like starfish, trip up consciences.

  On a bench near the entrance to the priory, staring ahead with an opaque expression, a smiling young woman of about twenty, frizzed blonde hair wound in plaits, sat chattering on her phone.

  Down on the damp pavement beside her, back against the railings, a man lay in a sleeping bag of a strange winter blue. He wore a sweatshirt with ‘Cambridge University’ on it, and had close-cropped sparrow-coloured hair with the glint of a tonsure. Quite unperturbed by the world rushing by, he read the New Scientist.

  Dyer flicked his eyes over him, thinking at first it was the accordionist, and feeling a pang of empathy. In the space defined by his belongings, he had distributed a Kathmandu backpack; a shallow black hat, upside down, to attract coins; a grey felt blanket with an Inca pattern on it; a KitKat wrapper; two paper cups; and a white metal rod. These were the objects that furnished his world, like the photos that lived beside Dyer’s bed. Dyer skirted past dismal stage sets of this kind every day. Not even the pile of Science et Vie magazines marked him out. To Dyer, this was standard decoy material, like the man’s sweatshirt; designed to manipulate Dyer into mistaking him for a former graduate down on his luck.

  Without knowing why, Dyer stops. It’s about his concentration. That, and the absence of a carrion smell and a bottle. He doesn’t have the sadness of a homeless person. He doesn’t look like someone who hates waking up, worrying what the day will bring, caged inside the same inescapable tune. He looks different, somehow.

  Dyer has the distraction of a man searching his pockets for money. ‘Are you enjoying that?’

  The article that he reads so attentively is headlined ‘The Dark Side of Meditation’. He finishes his paragraph and then glances up, as if Dyer were a policeman looming out of the sky to move him on.

  Their eyes clash.

  Dark, glowing out of a narrow bearded face. They pin Dyer down with the mesmerised absorption of a precocious child. Dyer has the sudden sharp sense of having met him before.

  He’s a man of about the same age, but his brown, pupil-less eyes are those of a person rising up from an immense depth. Dyer wonders for a moment if he’s blind, but he realises when the light catches the irises that they are a very deep brown. He has never seen such dark eyes, and they pull him in.

  He is gazing at Dyer as if through binoculars at a shape he isn’t quite sure of, a spectral presence.

  Then he sees who it is, and he smiles. ‘Basil?’

  Dyer’s heart thumps like a man stamping sand from his shoes. He feels the blood rushing from his face. He’s aware of how bewildered he looks, with a £5 note in his hand, how exposed, as if he’s trying to cover himself with a flannel.

  ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘You are John Dyer. Aren’t you?’

  Dyer stares at him. Bearded, older, with a dent in his chin.

  ‘Rougetel?’ is all he can stammer.

  PART FOUR

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  THE FRIZZY BLONDE YAKS AWAY on her phone as Rougetel emerges from his sleeping bag.

  Before her unseeing eyes, he stood up, rain on his shoulder, his legs thin as saplings in his black jeans. He remained invisible to her while he slipped his sockless feet into a pair of worn trainers. Nor was she distracted when he bent to roll up the sleeping bag, and strapped it – with the grey felt Inca blanket – to the underside of his backpack.

  He stuffed the New Scientist he had been reading into a side pocket, scooped up the remaining magazines, cups, chocolate wrapper, and carried t
hese over to a dustbin, dropping them in. Then he emptied into a pocket the coins from his hat and put it on.

  The only trace that he has left behind is his dry outline on the pavement.

  To Dyer, the sight of the friend he last glimpsed when he was twenty is overwhelming, a phenomenon so extraordinary that it drives all else from his mind. One look at Rougetel, he forgets Marvar’s post-it note, his scheme to eliminate it from the face of the earth.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ he asks after a silence.

  He was struggling to find Rougetel – his freckled pale face – in the dark deep-set eyes, steady and direct; the aquiline nose; the beard, one side trimmed tidier than the other. Lean, fit-looking, he wasn’t a shambles. He was quiet and watchful. They were the same height.

  Rougetel nodded. He hoisted his backpack onto his shoulders, and the two of them set off together without a word.

  They crossed the pavement where Dyer had avoided kidnap, and picked their way through the lunchtime throng of released students, who parted to let Rougetel by, gripping the white steel rod in his right hand, as if he were a blind man. His gait was loping and slow, pigeon-toed a little; his face half hidden by his shallow-brimmed hat. In the direction they were going, they walked as if on a predetermined route, up Cornmarket, through the Covered Market, past slabs heaped with whelks, into the Café Lisboa.

  The seats by the window were taken. Miguel showed them to a table set against the back wall.

  Rougetel unhitched his backpack, placed the white rod on the shiny tablecloth, and sat down.

  ‘I remember this place.’ His voice was low-pitched and flat, sanded of the middle-class accent which Dyer had largely retained. ‘It was strictly out of bounds.’

  He took off his hat and looked briefly around, his expression serious as a bird. He was struggling to tally the café with his recollection.