by JH Fletcher
‘Where is my brother, anyway?’
‘In Paris.’
Fatal Paris.
Raised eyebrows. ‘Leaving you here by yourself?’
‘I’m perfectly safe.’ Which was not what Marge had meant. ‘I think he trusts me not to steal the spoons,’ Kathryn said.
After lunch — ‘Very nice, dear’ — Marge said she wanted to put her feet up. Kathryn went outside, hungry for air. Charles followed.
‘I’m sorry …’
She was not at all forgiving. ‘You shouldn’t have come.’
‘I came because I thought you might need me.’
Because he hoped I might need him. The idea made her furious. ‘Why should you think that?’
Charles took her hands. ‘You realise he is lost?’
Fire, then, to match the Outback’s heat. ‘If you mean he’s dead, you’re wrong.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘I know. That’s all. I know.’
‘If you say so …’
Charles’s patient expression infuriated her. ‘You don’t believe me!’
‘It’s five days, now. They’ve found no trace —’
‘They will.’ Shutting her mind to all else. ‘They will!’
‘There is a limit,’ he told her. ‘For anyone. To go on hoping —’
‘It’s not a question of hope,’ she cried at him, her own sharp-toothed doubts. ‘I know!’ She pounded her heart, extravagantly. ‘In here!’
They walked slowly, side by side.
‘The media will be after you now,’ Charles said.
‘I shall tell them the same thing.’
‘It’s the sort of story they love. Human interest —’
She saw that it was the thought of publicity that troubled him. He was afraid of embarrassment in the mid-north, a community without secrets.
‘I don’t care about the media. I don’t care about anything. Only that Cal should be safe.’ She stared at him, willing to hurt the man who by coming here had hurt her. ‘Only that Cal should be safe,’ she repeated brutally, ‘and come back to me.’
He sighed, heavily. ‘You’re right. I shouldn’t have come.’
‘No,’ she agreed, ‘you should not.’
‘I did so for you,’ he defended himself.
But she was willing to be brutal. ‘Nothing of the sort. You did it for yourself.’
Her mother, to Kathryn’s horror, was staying.
‘There is no spare room …’
‘You say Dave’s in Paris. I shall use his room, then. I’m sure he won’t object. His own sister … We shared a bed plenty of times in the past.’ A little laugh. ‘Such a ladylike brother … I knew I’d be safe.’
Marge enjoyed innuendo, but Kathryn would have none of it. ‘You saying he’s gay?’
Deftly Marge evaded the question. ‘They say your friend’s his protege, don’t they?’ Smiling, she made much of the word. ‘He’s a very good-looking man, after all.’
Kathryn went cold. ‘That’s a disgusting thing to say
‘Disgusting?’ Again the tinkling laugh. ‘My dear, I’m so sorry. I thought it was quite acceptable, these days.’
‘So it is. And not before time. Except that neither of them is like it. And you said it only because to you it is disgusting.’ She confronted her mother, who would have looked away if she could. ‘Would you like me to tell you why I know Cal isn’t gay?’
Now Mrs Fanning showed the deepest distress. ‘Kathryn, darling … I came to comfort you. To try and help.’
‘The only way you can help is by keeping quiet. I mean it. Otherwise I shall move out.’
‘My dear …’ So gently she said it. ‘You’re upset. I understand. But running away solves nothing.’
From the top of the ridge, Cal took a bearing on the far side of the valley. To allow for the compass deviation, he had to head midway between north and north-east to maintain the correct course. Assuming the magnetite was evenly distributed throughout the ranges.
If it’s concentrated more in some places than others, he thought, I have problems. Resolutely he discarded the thought. All I can do is head in the direction that seems best and hope like hell I’m right.
He trudged forward, endlessly, an ant moving in the vast and empty plain. To take his mind off the heat, the distance separating him from rescue, the near-certainty of his own extinction, he forced himself to focus upon memories.
Strolling at Kathryn’s side along a beach cooled by the white tongues of waves. Sitting with dangling feet above the peaceful immensity of the sea. It seemed to him now that the times of his greatest happiness had come in periods without rush, when he had been able to take the time to move slowly and without frenzy along the corridors of his life.
Three years before, he had gone to Malaysia, had seen upon the roads a multitude of wooden carts drawn by water buffalo. They had moved timelessly, in a dream, whereas he, in a hired car, had passed them in a blink of light, a gust of tropical air. Once, driving fast along the rifle-barrel-straight road north of Taiping, he had overtaken one of these carts, a blur of which he retained only as an impression of a hunched figure wearing a conical hat that extended almost to the shoulders, two children staring. A minute later he had passed another car heading south. Their combined speeds would have been close to three hundred kilometres an hour and when, seconds later, he looked in the mirror, the other car had already passed the cart that was now the best part of three kilometres behind him. He could see nothing of the cart’s occupants, had never at any time seen the slow revolutions of the wooden wheels, heard the steady creak, creak of the wooden frame, yet still it continued at its own pace. Somehow it had seemed to him that the slowly moving cart, the driver hunched beneath his shoulder-wide hat, the brown faces of the children, possessed a reality greater than his own, screaming towards Penang in a hired car.
Now, pacing himself step by slow step across yet another valley of stone and scrub and heat, he thought that he too had come to reality. God will decide whether I come alive out of this place, he thought. Or whether He or She or It saved me from the water only to destroy me now. If you believed in an interventionist God, one who made the rules only to break them.
Out here it was easy to believe. John the Baptist in the desert, he thought, making straight all the crooked ways. He’d have a job in the Gammon Ranges. He lived on locusts and wild honey, I recall. Not much of either around here. Maybe we can bring some in.
And screamed full-voiced, howling against the emptiness, the distances reverberating with silence, in which his scream died.
For the first time, he realised that he was beginning to lose it. It frightened him, this scream erupting from nowhere; it meant that his mind was wearing out faster than his body. Even as he thought it, he stumbled upon a loose piece of rock and fell heavily. He lay for a while with dirt in his mouth. He was not thinking, not doing anything, but lay motionless, feeling the sun’s weight through the borrowed shirt, the stiffness of his shoulders where the welts raised by the plaited reins still throbbed.
After a minute he got slowly to his feet and began to plod on. Once again he remembered the buffalo carts, the sense he had always had that they were not heading towards any specific destination but trundling with infinite slowness towards nowhere at all.
As he, now, was trundling with infinite slowness towards nowhere at all.
The foothills of the next line of ranges rose before him. They were yellow and hard, flecked with patches of green bush, with a shadow over the higher slopes where the sun had gone behind cloud. Cal looked at the height and steepness of the slopes and knew he did not have the strength to climb them. To his left the valley narrowed into a gorge running between red cliffs. As far as he could tell it headed north and, after a moment’s consideration, he decided to follow it. If it came to a dead end, too bad; he would just have to come back.
He entered a narrow tunnel where the red cliffs leaned so close on either side that the sky was almost hidden.
The bed of the tunnel consisted of yellow, rippled sand. It was obvious that after rain there would be a creek here, but there had been no rain for two days now and, for the moment, the sand was dry.
Further on, the gorge opened up a little. In place of the towering cliffs, there was now a line of contorted trees, leaning inwards, but their white branches and leathery, sage-green leaves the shape of spears gave little shade. It was very hot, the air heavy, and he fell again, twice, as he tried to force his way through the soft and clinging sand.
He knew without conscious thought that he was running out of time. Again he experienced the fatalism that he had felt in the sea, when he had nearly drowned. He was alone. There was no-one else in the world, nor could be ever again. The idea of solitude no longer worried him, because neither it nor the heat nor the impossibility of his quest mattered any longer. Even Kathryn was slipping away from him.
During the day they had spent exploring the coastline around Kidman’s Inlet, Kathryn had asked him whether he was ever afraid, whether trying always to do something new in art was not bound at times to fail.
‘Of course,’ he had told her. ‘I’ve always known that somewhere is a blank wall I won’t be able to cross. There is for all of us, the limit of what is possible. I’ve always been afraid of reaching the wall, but so far I haven’t.’
Now that he was getting very close to that wall, he discovered there had never been any reason for fear, after all. It seemed that even the wall did not matter. What would be …
Again the sides of the gorge drew in. Ahead of him a cliff, perhaps two hundred feet high, rough with protruding knuckles of stone, reached vertically skywards. Beyond, the peak of yet another mountain beckoned, but he knew he would never be able to climb up to it. On either side the cliffs’ strata ran horizontally, but with gnarled and rocky overhangs that gave no promise of handholds.
He had come into a blind valley. There was no way out. He had reached the wall, at last.
He turned to look back the way he had come. The mouth of the gorge stood open, like the mouth of a cave seen from within. It framed the distant ranges, the valley he had crossed to get here. He was surprised, mildly, to see that once again the sun was setting beyond the saw-toothed range that now stood black against the sky. It meant that what had seemed to him like no more than two or three hours had, in fact, been twelve hours, a whole day in which he had wandered and, it seemed, got nowhere.
He turned to look ahead of him at what had become his prison. Beyond the drift of sand on which he stood was an upright stone, almost two metres high and as red as fire, with the walls of the implacable gorge forming a circle beyond it.
Moses’s fossilised bush, he thought. From which — who knows? — the voice of God may speak.
He reached the rock, collapsed beside it like a rotten house. No-one, neither God nor Moses, spoke; even the silence said nothing. Only his harsh panting reverberated.
It was unbearable. He screamed again, trying desperately to people the silence with noise. Abruptly stopped. His chest heaved.
Stop it. Stop it!
Panting, panting.
The day sank, melting, along the western horizon. He turned to watch. Beyond the gorge’s dark mouth the sun hung amid the flare and spume of incandescence, then slid suddenly below the surface of the day. Its silent going filled the universe. Above Cal’s tortured eyes, the first pinpoint star.
In the darkness, swift-plunging, came reason. Now he could drink. And did so in measured gulps. One, two, three. Enough. He shook the bottle, hearing its content slosh feebly. Nearly empty, now.
He breathed the night, seeking rest.
Tomorrow would be the last day. At midday there would be no shade in these burning hills. The idea of walking by night, lying up by day — what use was that when the shattered terrain made it impossible, when there was nowhere to hide from the thunder of the sun?
He knew he had barely made it tonight, had been on the brink of defeat, despite all his brave thoughts. Beyond the limit of endurance lay the unknown. Uncharted country.
That was what life was. Standing always on the brink of the unknown. Because to know tomorrow before tomorrow came was death. Whereas the trackless deserts of the mind …
We wander, seeking, he told himself. There cannot be a road, because that would mean that someone had been there before, which would make the journey futile.
He thought, Let us go further into these ranges, then. Let us find a way up and over the wall that is facing us, let us seek out the final landscape of knowledge. Perhaps there we shall discover the answers. Or perhaps shall see only the plain unfolding its arid wings to infinity. Who knows? Because who, ultimately, can find that landscape, find the pass through the mountains that leads to truth?
That night a minister of whatever denomination, satin vest, satin voice, spoke on the box of the True Path, of those who had strayed from it and who, in their loss and isolation, were driven by dementia to summon visions of what could not be.
‘God will save those lost in the desert, as he will those lost in sin. Only God. All else is vanity. If they die, if they are already dead, that is God’s will. Before which we all must bow.’
Kathryn shoved past her mother, reaching frantically for the switch. ‘Turn that sanctimonious bastard off!’
Alone in the fifth night, Kathryn waited. The black demons came upon her. Amid the screaming night she cried to the cliffs, the clean-running seas. She knew that she was losing him, that he was fading from her, despite all her efforts.
She was angry at what was happening, would stand and curse fate before she bowed in submission. Why is it that the good and holy should be scythed down? she demanded. While the rubbish flourishes? The world does not need the knavery of Tom or Kerry, Eric or Grant or Nigel or Alan or Ingmar, of Norma and Iseult, Clarice and Lettie, Naomi, Tamsin and Oona. We shun their shabby corruption of the spirit. Yet they live and smile and do not care. We see their faces everywhere.
When Cal left, he went not into the desert only, but into fulfilment, a universe of time and space and imagination. To seek the other selves, the other places, through his journey. To reject the riffraff, those who steal our integrity by their lies, their corruption and collusion and canker. To seek truth.
At least it is true that he will live after all these others. He has already won his place in eternity. Once, the knowledge would have comforted her, but now was not enough. Oh keep him, she prayed. Let him come back to me.
All night, frightened of what she had come to believe was ending, she kept vigil. The demons howled and howled. Until, at length, the long night gave place to day. The sixth day. Beyond which all hope would be gone.
SIXTEEN
Alone before the cliff that frowned implacably through the darkness, Cal breathed the night, seeking rest. He lay on a rock ledge six metres above the creek bed. The sand would have been more comfortable, but after dark it had rained violently for a time and he was afraid the creek might come down during the night. It might not be a bad idea if it does, he thought. At least I’ll have water. But had read too much of flash floods to risk being swept away.
At length, muscles bruised and sore from the harsh rock, he saw the return of light. First came a softening of the darkness, then, far overhead, the outline of the cliff top growing steadily sharper against a sky that was grey, then silver, then flushed with rose. The light trembled, still cool, yet with the promise of implacable heat.
I wonder where it’ll happen, Cal thought. When willpower is finally overcome by the failure of muscle and blood. The ultimate experience.
He shook his bottle, hearing the feeble slosh of such water as remained. Before starting he would drink half of what was left. He knew he might as well drink all of it, but would not, unwilling even now to accept the inevitability of his own death.
The light formed a trembling meniscus upon the lip of the cliff, spilled over to run downwards until it lay all about him. Only the crevices remained in shadow.
To the right of the rock wall a small fissure disappeared around the corner of the face. He stood, making himself ready.
Now every action was fraught with significance. The last night; the last girding of the will to face the light; the last departure.
He drank half his remaining water, as planned, and pushed his way into the fissure. It continued to curve continuously to the left so that he could not see the end of it. It was no more than two feet wide, shrinking at times to half that, forcing him to fight to squeeze through at all. Underfoot were round stones, smooth as glass, over which he stumbled. It would have been water that had smoothed them, he thought, although whether ten thousand or ten million years ago there was no telling. On either side the cliffs were smooth, devoid of handholds. If a flash flood caught him here, he would drown. The idea did not trouble him. One way or another, he thought. What difference did it make?
He worked his way around another bend, found that immediately in front of him the fissure narrowed to no more than a few inches. There was no way he could get through. He stopped, panting slightly with expended effort and disappointment. Looked again.
A tree’s roots were clamped against the rock, a latticework up which it might be possible to climb.
He craned his head to stare upwards. Far above him he could see the outline of leaves against a cerulean sky. Looked again at what was before his nose. He doubted he had the strength to navigate the tangled roots but would try, refusing absolutely to consider the idea of turning back.
He wedged one foot into a gap between the roots and hauled himself up. A start, then.
Slowly he progressed. The fissure closed about him; he jammed his boots against the opposite wall and somehow kicked his way through. It opened out again and he clung to the glassy roots, hunting desperately but unsuccessfully for somewhere to rest.
He had to keep moving. Stop once, and he would never have the strength to start again. The roots thinned, his hold upon them became ever more precarious. Sweat blinded him.
