by JH Fletcher
How Hennie had walked on feet like these was beyond comprehension; he would certainly be walking on them no longer. The question was whether they would be able to save them even if they did manage to get out. Which now, with this catastrophic development, seemed less likely than ever.
‘I’m fokked,’ Hennie said again, teeth embedded like nails in the dark rictus of his mouth.
‘Not by me you’re not.’
So Cal joked, thrusting his defiance at the prostrate man, the rotten feet that threatened both of them, the menacing landscape of crags and ravines they still had to cross. He remembered another occasion when he had made such a challenge and survived:
Amid cascading spray, the sea’s violence; Stella’s bright face, denying the storm. The yacht rearing and plunging, a whirligig of will. His own voice, raised in challenge.
‘I’m taking this yacht in!’
In the extremity of near-death, he understood now that, before this new journey was finished, he might be compelled to know this broken man almost as intimately as he had the woman.
‘How much do you weigh?’
‘God knows. Too much, anyway. You won’t be able to carry me.’
‘Who said anything about carrying?’
He had hung onto his piece of aluminium in the hopes that another plane might come. All the previous day they had heard intermittently the distant sound of searching aircraft, but none had come near them and he had given up any thought of rescue. If one came, good; in the meantime, they would struggle on as best they could, alone.
Now the flattened sheet of aluminium might have another use. He picked it up. It was about two and a half feet square with rivet holes around the edge where he had managed to wrench it from the wreck.
‘You reckon you’ll be able to sit up?’
Hennie frowned. ‘What’s the game?’
‘We’re going skiing.’
Or at least tobogganing. Previously it had been Hennie who had known the answers; now it was Cal’s turn. He took off his shirt; there was danger in that, in this place of manic sun, but his skin was used to the sun. He ripped the shirt into strips that he plaited into reins. He threaded the reins through two of the holes in the aluminium, made them fast.
‘My lord,’ he said, reverting to the childish banter of the previous day to flourish defiance in the face of the dangers that faced them, ‘your carriage awaits. I’m afraid the snow conditions are not as we would wish.’
Hennie stared. ‘You planning to tow me? You got to be mad, my mate. Totally off your rocker.’
‘Like you said, if we weren’t mad, we wouldn’t be here.’
Although God knew how it would be possible to drag him across the miles of broken ground and rocks that lay between them and safety.
‘Look at it this way,’ Cal said. ‘It’s pure selfishness. If you can’t walk and I can’t carry you, how else am I going to get myself out of this mess?’
‘By leaving me here and going on by yourself.’
‘No.’
‘When you get out, you can send someone back for me —’
‘No!’
Harshly, this time; for Hennie to wave temptation in his face was too much. If Hennie had to die, at least he would not be alone.
‘Then we’ve both had it.’
‘In which case you’re going to be stuck with me for the rest of your life.’
Somehow he managed to manoeuvre Hennie’s great carcass on to the improvised sledge. Hennie sat hunched forward, hands clasped about his ankles.
‘Nice and cosy?’ Cal asked.
‘It’s impossible. You know that?’
‘Like they say, miracles we do at once. The impossible takes a little longer.’
He took up the reins and bent them as firmly as he could over his bare shoulders. They weren’t long enough but would have to do. He looked at his watch.
‘Just after seven. We’ll go till half-past. Then we’ll stop, give us both a break. In the meantime all you have to do is sit tight and think beautiful thoughts.’
He hunched his head into his shoulders and took up the strain. Step by agonising step, he began to drag them both up the slope that led to the summit.
The only way it might work, he decided, was by detaching himself completely from what was happening. Let his mind dwell on the ludicrous impracticability of what he was doing, and they would be finished. Instead he had to focus on the beautiful thoughts he had prescribed for Hennie, allow his mind somehow to waft above the tormented struggle that took them first a metre, then ten metres, a hundred, while the rocks swam in the sun, the sweat flowed down his back and chest and, somewhere in his semi-consciousness, he could hear Hennie crying beneath his breath like a wounded child.
Every few metres the sledge jammed against a rock and he had to stop to work it loose. Steep rocks over which, it seemed to him now, he had marched with minimal effort during his reconnaissance of the previous evening, were now impassable. Again and again he had to stop, to work a way around obstacles, while the distant ridge seemed to remain as far out of reach as ever, suspended against the harsh blue sky upon which the climbing sun scored its remorseless, fiery trail.
In no time Cal realised that the plaited reins were beginning to rub the skin from his shoulders. He stopped, cut two strips of cloth from the bottom of his trousers and folded them into pads that he put on his shoulders beneath the reins. For a while after that things were better, but very soon the pads became saturated with sweat and would not stay in position. Twice more he replaced them; twice more they slipped. Eventually he shut his mind to the pain and went on. Soon the soreness of the raw skin was submerged beneath a tide of other pains that grew and merged and, long before the half hour was up, threatened to overwhelm him.
I shall not stop. I shall not.
Nor did he. The hands of his watch moved with desperate slowness, the aluminium sledge scraped and thudded behind him. Inch by inch he worked his way sideways and upwards until, after what seemed an eternity, the watch indicated the half hour.
Cal stopped, let the reins fall, stood swaying. For several seconds his cramped muscles refused even to let him collapse; then all at once they let go and he was on his knees without knowing how he had got there. He drew deep breaths of blazing air into his lungs, fighting not to recognise what he had known even before they had set out, that Hennie’s feet were gangrenous, that the pilot was doomed whatever happened, that if he persisted in this imbecilic attempt to rescue a man who was beyond rescue, he would be writing his own death warrant.
The truth of all this stood over him, as deadly and unavoidable as the heat that, hours before midday, was already almost too much to bear. It was another dimension of the remorseless struggle to survive. Now he had to fight against hatred of the man whose mistake-folly-bravado had landed them in this mess, who was incapable of walking out and whose stubborn refusal to die now meant Cal’s own ruin.
He’s doomed, anyway. You could kill him. Or walk away from him. That way at least you’d have a chance.
He should have been shocked at thinking such things, but was not, too tired to worry about abstractions. He knew he was not going to do either of them.
Three choices, he thought. Kill him, abandon him or die with him. Nothing else is going to work. All the rest — this stupid, futile, fight to drag a dying man across an endless, sun-blasted landscape — is nonsense.
He eyed Hennie again. Temptation breathed, insidiously.
No, he told himself. I shall not.
But the idea had taken root and would not go away.
He rubbed his stinging shoulders and saw that his hands were red with fresh blood from the wounds that the reins had inflicted.
One more thing, to be disregarded like the rest.
He wiped his hands on his pants. ‘How you going?’
To which Hennie made no reply.
‘Nearly there,’ Cal persisted cheerily. ‘Once we’re on top, it’ll be plain sailing.’ While the ridge, remote-seeming as
ever, the memory of what lay ahead of them, mocked.
Hennie muttered something.
Cal came closer. ‘What?’
‘It hurts. It hurts. It hurts …’
On and on, a dirge of pain.
‘It hurts …’
Hennie’s eyes were fixed on madness. There was nothing, nothing that Cal could do. The endless litany was unbearable. He wanted to scream out at the hunched figure of what had been a man.
Stop it! Stop it!
Somehow, biting his lip almost through, he remained kind.
‘Let’s have a look at those feet …’
Even in half an hour, the infection had spread, visibly.
You are torturing him, a voice said. To no purpose. You have your work cut out to save yourself; to save both of you is impossible. If Hennie were in hospital at this minute, it would already be too late.
‘Go,’ Hennie said.
It took a moment for Cal to realise what he had heard.
‘We are going.’
‘We are going nowhere. You go on. Leave me one of the water bottles. I’ll come on after, at my own pace.’
Cal wished passionately that Hennie would shut up. Even the constant It hurts, it hurts would be easier to bear than this business of telling him to do what commonsense had already told him he must do.
‘Your own pace,’ he said, forcing himself to make a joke of it. ‘I bet you’d really go, at that. You’d go like a racehorse. Next thing they’ll be calling you Champion of the Gammon Stakes.’
For an instant Hennie smiled. ‘This charging about the country is hard on the bones of my arse,’ he said apologetically.
His face had relaxed a little, but now drew tight as the pain bit once more. Watching, Cal saw him age twenty years within seconds.
‘God … Liefde God!’ After so many years, Hennie had reverted to the language of his birth.
‘Stretch out a bit,’ Cal suggested desperately. ‘Get some rest.’
Hennie remained frozen, a hunched knot of appalling pain, while the devils ripped at him. Cal put his hands on his shoulders, felt the skin on fire beneath the shirt.
‘Lie back. I’ll help you.’
And Hennie screamed again. There was agony and despair in the sound, the terror of abandonment. He seized Cal’s hand in his own.
‘Don’t leave me!’
No talk of going anywhere, now. Cal tried to free his hand, but Hennie hung on, desperately. Cal turned his back on hope.
‘I’m going nowhere,’ he said. ‘What we have to do is get you into some shade.’
The only shade to be had was under the trees they had passed at the bottom of the slope. The thought of giving up all the ground they had gained that morning was appalling but, if they stayed where they were, with the sun climbing ever higher in the sky, Hennie would fry to death before the gangrene killed him.
With something like death in his own heart, Cal said, ‘Let’s get on with it, then.’
And once again took up the reins.
It was almost as hard to go back down the slope as it had been to climb it. The rocks were as difficult as ever, the heat greater; with gravity working on it, the sledge was harder to control. Despite everything, Cal persevered, the pain of his wounded shoulders so intense that it was all he could do not to cry out himself.
Much more of this, he thought, I’ll be getting gangrene, too. Steadily, perversely, he kept going, dragging Hennie and himself inch by inch over ground that had tormented them so badly on the way up. Now it was the trees that seemed frozen, constantly visible, but drawing no nearer for all his efforts, blurred in a terrible miasma of sweat and pain. All the time he heard behind him Hennie’s voice.
‘Dit maak seer … It hurts …’
Cal was on his face. He had done nothing to break his fall, but lay with his mouth in the dirt. He was half-stunned, his forehead stinging where the skin had torn. For a minute he lay still, trying to catch hold of what had caused him to fall. At last he struggled to his feet and found that one of the reins had frayed and torn away from the rivet hole to which it had been secured. Hennie had been spilled off the sledge and now lay, fat, ungainly and unmoving, upon the ground beside him.
On top of everything else they had endured, it was too much. Cal watched the tears roll silently down Hennie’s fat face; could have wept, himself, but did not. Rage against Hennie, fate, everything and everyone in the world fuelled him now, driving him to his feet, hauling the body of the pilot over his bleeding shoulder, staggering on down the hill towards the dancing blur of sage-green leaves. Twice he fell; twice struggled again to his feet, hauled Hennie once more onto his shoulder, staggered on. The impulse lasted until he reached the patchy shadow of the trees, then evaporated as quickly as it had come. Without stopping even to lower Hennie to the ground, he fell forward and was still.
That morning Marge Fanning phoned her delinquent daughter.
‘How are you, Kathryn?’
‘Good.’
‘I am very glad to hear it. We have been so worried.’
The mother was clearly willing to make an issue; Kathryn’s hackles awoke.
‘I don’t see why. You knew where I was. I left a note —’
‘Going off like that, in the middle of the night …’ Marge ventured a little laugh, making light of what her tone said was a most serious offence.
‘I needed to be here.’
Kathryn’s response would have closed the door on further discussion had Marge been prepared to be dissuaded.
‘I cannot imagine what Charles will have made of it all.’
Kathryn bit back fury. It was not her mother’s business what Charles might or might not make of her daughter’s actions, nor did she feel disposed to volunteer. To speak at all was painful, yet she ordered herself to do so, to be patient.
If I am merciful, she thought, perhaps Cal will be saved.
She said, ‘Charles and I have talked things over —’
‘I know. You told me. But —’
‘We have agreed that what we do or do not do in our lives is not the other person’s business.’
Or yours; but left that unsaid, although Marge Fanning heard the words clearly enough. A few seconds’ silence; then Marge spoke brightly, determined to make the best of a sorry situation.
‘I really don’t think you can say that, dear.’ She laughed, deliberately pressing her attack home. ‘You might as well say it is none of our business, either.’ And waited.
The opportunity to strike a mortal blow hovered, but it was a confrontation that Kathryn would not accept. She said nothing.
Mollified, Marge asked, ‘When are you coming home?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Has there been any news? About …?’ Even now she found Cal’s name difficult.
‘No.’
‘Do they still hold out any hope?’
The television had said that the fourth day would offer the last realistic chance of finding the missing men alive. Which meant tomorrow. Of course, as the commentator had said, funereally, if they had no water … Kathryn shut her mind to that. Take a deal of killing, my Cal. Em’s words kindled courage.
‘No-one’s been in touch with me.’
‘I suppose not. You could just as well wait at home,’ she suggested. With rare percipience, she added, ‘You’d be nearer to him, here.’
Physically, that was true. But Kathryn had not forgotten the loss of awareness that she had experienced at the farm, the sense that Cal had gone from her.
‘I think I’ll hang on here a bit. For a day or two, anyway.’
After which there would be no hope. Both women acknowledged the unspoken words.
Marge surrendered. ‘Whatever you think is best.’
It was so hard to know. In the end Kathryn could only allow her instincts to dictate.
She made a pilgrimage to the beach where Cal had so nearly drowned, where in losing him she might have lost what was worthwhile in her life. A cold front had arrived
from the west; it spread its fingers over her, but could not erase the terrible heat, the thirst that dried her heart and brought her almost to the point of despair. Almost, but never quite. Never. Never.
She stood at the far end of the beach, beyond the terrible place of almost-dying. About her were the rocks where she and Cal had lain in the sun. Beneath the water the anchored rocks seemed to flow with the movement of the surf. She raised her open hand, slid it beneath her shirt. Laid it against her own breast. In her touch Cal gentled her.
No, she had said when he pressed her. ‘No.’
How she wished …
Too late.
She turned abruptly, glaring at the running ocean as at an enemy, the invisible rips plotting treason.
‘It is not!’ Her raised voice challenged the screeching of the gulls. ‘It is not too late! It is not!’
For the rest of the day Cal waited. Mostly Hennie was unconscious or at least asleep, came to, briefly, from time to time. When he did, the crying started again.
‘Dit maak seer …’
How Cal welcomed the silence, when unconsciousness returned.
It was only a matter of time now, but how long it took was still critical. With every hour his own chances of survival grew less. The temptation to walk away was ever with him, but he fought it, knowing that if he did so he would never escape at all, that the image of the pilot dying, alone and abandoned in the wilderness, would reproach him forever.
So he sat in what had become a trap that, in the freedom of endless space, held him securely. He tried to think of neither the present nor the uncertain and menacing future. Instead, he thought of the past, of how he had come to find himself in this situation.
It was too simple to pin it all on Hennie, even on the storm that had struck so inopportunely. The roots of the present were buried much further back.
He had always felt the need to paint, to draw, had earned a measure of notoriety at high school by his ability to draw vulgar cartoons of teachers. Inevitably it had got him into trouble, but there was nothing new in that. As long as Cal could remember, he and trouble had shared a bed.
