Wall of Days
Page 2
On the way here, a week’s sail into the trip, the sea became like glass. I looked over the edge of the raft and could see metres down.
I spent ages peering over, seeing nothing, just water. And then dark shapes appeared. I drifted across them. Some reached upwards and I could see ruins, outlines of buildings, the spaces between them. I drifted over a column that came almost to the surface. On the top of the column was a statue of a man. I reached into the water up to my shoulder, straining to touch him. He wore a hat. He had the bearing of a military man. His face was expressionless, his visage stone. My fingertips brushed the top of his head and he was gone. The ocean swallowed him. Once more, and ever more, undisturbed, unseen. I drifted onwards.
I have been left alone here. No one ventures far north or south.
Bran is to the west, Axum to the east. The borders of the two settlements, themselves islands, though much larger than this one, are not patrolled. We did not have the resources and probably do not now either and when I left there had been no intrusions into our region for years. The two factions left each other alone. We left each other to get on with it. For a time there were ambassadors sent to each other’s regions to ensure the Programme was being carried out in accordance with the terms of the peace agreement.
Gradually though, as it became apparent how well the Programme was working, how good it was for both groups, there was no need to monitor each other.
That was a long time ago. As I sit here fishing, the rain falling softly on my waterproof cover, I feel it may as well not have happened at all.
The rain on the plastic is a sound that is comforting. I am warm, I have food, I have found a way to live.
I picture myself here as if from a distance: a man crouched on a wet rock, under a yellow tarpaulin, a fishing rod reaching out into the sea.
Behind him the sand, the crumbling cliffs, grasslands and an immense expanse of grey sky. I’m standing on the cliff, looking down at me, looking out at the ocean, and this is what I see.
There is a tug on the line and I am back, flying over the edge of the cliff.
The fish is a strong one. It will be all I need for two days. I reel it in, take a rock and hit it on the head. I gut it there and then, placing my knife just below its jaw and slicing down with a single movement.
I have done this many times before. The innards I pull out with my fingers and fling to a lone seagull perched on a rock. I wash the cavity in the sea and place the fish in my bag.
As I stand up and turn towards the path leading up the cliff, something catches my eye. I see it disappear behind the ridge. For a few seconds I am startled and think I have seen a head. It doesn’t last long. I realise I am not sure what I saw, whether I saw anything in fact. There have been other times like this. I’ve seen things. They’re becoming more frequent. But it must have been grass blowing in the wind, a gull, or simply an old man’s fading eyesight. I set off up the path to the cave.
At night I think back to the creature on the ridge. It changes at night. It always does. The head becomes a face, a face with bones visible through holes in the skin and drawn teeth.
I do not sleep and wait for dawn. It is one of those mornings when it is lighter than usual. Each day is a shade of grey. It can range from near white to almost black. I have not seen the sun for ten years but every now and then I can see a flame-white disc through the clouds. Today is one of those days. I swim, I eat, I pull on my coat and head off to gather fuel.
The coat, spare clothes, a knife, a length of rope, waterproofs, fishing line and hooks, a tarpaulin used for a sail, water containers, biscuits, some twine, a spare set of boots, a spade, an axe, my writing materials, a compass and an old chart of the ocean. This is what they allowed me. This is what I brought to the island and what I have with me now, some of it repaired several times.
I had to replace the handle of my axe a few months after I arrived.
The original broke while I was chopping down a tree. It didn’t splinter.
It snapped clean in two. My hand, carried through with the movement of my arm, scraped against the broken shaft. It cut deep into the tops of my fingers. I held them up to the light and for a second could see bone before the blood came. I bled profusely and watched as it dripped into the earth. There was nothing I could do. A needle and thread were not on my list of provisions. I was surprised at how much it bled. The dark forest closed in, I smelled the damp pine needles, the fresh wood, heard my own quickened breathing, the silence, felt the warmth of the blood on my skin. There was nothing I could do to stop myself bleeding to death, nothing I could do to live. But it was a cut across the fingers and no one has ever died from that. I tore a strip of cloth from my shirt and wound it round my hand.
After the bleeding had stopped I walked to the shore and washed the wound in seawater. It stung for a bit but not much. I sat on the rocks for a long time, staring out to sea. I was thinking of how I had reacted. Even if only for a minute I was afraid. When I first set foot on this shore I set to work straight away. I knew what I had to do and I did it. I knew the island could support me and the thought of a life without other people was something I had already had some time to get used to. And I was never a sociable person. But this, now. I did not know what to think. It was then that I stopped talking to myself, then that the island became quieter. Long ago, in island time.
The handle I fashioned has worked a charm since then. It is perhaps not as smooth as the first, not as easy to grip but it is mine. It is now worn to my touch and feels right in my hand. Every time I use it though I remember the day the first one broke.
The forest is not my favourite place on the island. Everyone has a place like this in the areas in which they move. No matter how much you love where you live there is always a dark corner, always somewhere you would prefer not to go. I have my head down, breathing heavily, the thud of the axe echoing around the pines. I feel out of place. I feel surrounded. The noise of the final splintering of the trunk always takes me by surprise. I glance around whenever a tree falls as if I think someone is watching. I look up to see if there is a body in the branches. But I know there is no one to watch me. If I close my eyes in that place, shapes appear behind my eyelids. When I leave the forest and step out into the light I feel the breeze drying my sweat. It makes me shiver.
At the end of the day, I draw another line on the wall.
When I first arrived I toyed with the idea of naming the island, of putting up a sign facing out to the ocean in case someone came looking for me. But I gave up on the idea. It is better off without a name. And what would I have called it anyway? A name for a place without a history would be pointless.
It is raining heavily when I make my way down to the shore for my swim. I take nothing with me and I walk down the cliff path naked.
When I first came here I felt self-conscious about doing that. Now I don’t think much about it. It keeps my clothes dry and, besides, it is never unbearably cold here. My feet have toughened up and I don’t feel the small stones under my soles.
There is a reef about half a mile out and it is to there I swim, to where I can feel the spray from the breakers on my face. The spray and, in between, the drops of rain. The ocean is warm, the rain cold. I float in the water on my back, tasting the salt, before starting slowly back.
Today when I reach the shore and am standing catching my breath I see something further down the coast. Nothing has ever washed up here, nothing besides dead fish and birds. I can’t tell what it is but it is a dark red colour and looks out of place on the grey sand. I walk over and as I get closer I realise it is a coat, a man’s coat, soaked through, torn and covered in marine snails. I shake them off and hold it up to the light.
I go through how this could have appeared. I have gone so long without seeing anything washed up and then this, so out of place. The routes we once sailed on our way to war were far to the north and, since a couple of years after the peace, were unused. No one bothers to try to fish from boats anymore. What li
ttle fish there are gather mostly round the shorelines. A man can be in a boat for days and not catch a single fish. I was lucky to catch a few on the way over here. When I left Bran we had been talking about sending ships on exploratory voyages, looking for regions we had forgotten about, regions whose climate had changed for the better. Perhaps these have begun. But here? Sailing so close to Axum is tantamount to a declaration of war under the terms of the Peace Treaty. Perhaps a ship was lost, the crew hungry, its captain uncertain and losing influence. There was a mutiny, the captain hurled overboard, his possessions shared amongst the men. Except for the coat, lost overboard in a scuffle.
Or is this the remains of another exile? A piece of flotsam from a forgotten world.
I shiver. I look around me. I don’t know if I expect to see someone.
I think of the shadows over the horizon, the eyes staring after me. I watch the mist rolling in. A gull calls.
Suddenly I am flying again. I look down on a man clutching a red coat. I scan the island. The higher I am the more of it I can see but the less detail I can make out. Is that a rock or a man in the shadows of the cliff face? A dip in the grass or a body pressed down to avoid being seen? I cannot tell. It grows darker and the figure with the red coat on the shore fades with the mist and the last of the light.
2
In the cave I spread the coat out on a rock. I sit opposite it and pick at my food. I have not dried myself.
The coat looks like it is part of a uniform. Stained red. Metal buttons. It is not from Bran. It is not something one of my people would wear. The uniform of our soldiers was brown. It takes me back.
I remember killing a man. A man who wore a coat like this, though plainer, less well made. I remember killing many, both as soldier and later but this one in particular. We had surrounded a house in a burnt-out settlement. Whether it had burned in recent fighting or decades before I don’t know. We had tracked an enemy platoon which was taking cover in the ruins. Our orders were to storm the house where the soldiers were hiding and kill the occupants. We were not able to look after prisoners. Our charity extended to refugees but not to the enemy.
I went in through the front door, others went in through windows, through gaps in walls. They did not stand a chance. The enemy got off three shots. Three between seven of them. One was too scared to shoot. He stood in the corner, still holding his rifle but flinching at the sounds of the shots. No one but me seemed to notice him. I kept an eye on him during the few seconds of fighting. When the others were dead I shouted to stop firing. I walked up to him. He was a boy. He was not crying. His body was turned slightly away from me, fearing a strike.
He fixed his eyes on my chin. My gun was aimed at him. I flicked my head at him, meaning he should turn around. I watched his breathing slow down and he nodded. He understood. That stayed with me and I saw it many times after that. I told him to kneel. With my gun still at his head I reached down to his belt. I took his knife from him. We were not allowed to waste bullets. If you could you had to kill people in other ways. I holstered my gun. I took his forehead in my left hand.
With the knife in my right I drew a line across his throat. I did it rapidly but I felt each tendon, felt each muscle sever. He did not make a sound. I let him go and he fell to the ground. The rest may have been slightly different but the nod I remember. The moment fear turned to acceptance. I kept the knife. A lifetime later I still have it.
That was early on in the wars, which would drag on for another eleven years. By the end I was leader of the entire force: a thousand men.
The wars largely fought themselves out. We kept on killing each other, kept on dying, until our populations were reduced to a level where the land could begin to sustain us all. We negotiated a peace, the terms of which ensured sustainability. I say ‘we’; it was I who brokered the peace, along with my counterpart from the other side. It was a tense peace and not without sadness, not without consequences, but peace nonetheless. It lasted until I left and probably beyond.
I remember saying goodbye to Bran. A few people had accompanied the soldiers and me to the coast. There were a few civil servants, the judge, my neighbours and of course the new Marshal, my successor and protégé, Abel. My lover was there too, though by that stage I could not call her that.
The Marshal would not look me in the eye. Instead he looked over my shoulder. His lips were a thin line. I remember the touch of his hand as he briefly shook mine. It was soft – the grip, the skin. No doubt mine was too. The life of a Marshal in our outpost was not a physically demanding one. In years gone by we were fighters. But peace made us softer. It gave us more time for contemplation, more time to consider what we did.
I imagine the people on the mainland, those I have left behind.
They stand on the rocky beach in the sun staring out to sea, the waves lapping at their feet. I wonder what they might be thinking. I wonder, if we could see far enough, if we would wave to each other or whether we would simply stare in silence. But no one can see that far. I was on the raft for three weeks before putting to shore here.
Many of my people I can no longer picture. I have memories involving them but their figures are a blur, fading pictures, ghosts. They talk, they gesture but I cannot see their eyes.
The woman though, her I can remember. She was not particularly beautiful. She was thirty-five when I left but looked older. I think we all did. A lifetime working in the kitchens, washing up, standing for twelve hours a day had aged her. She had hands that were callused and dull skin. Her eyes though, when she looked at you, stared through you. There was no hiding from her. To have someone truly know you is to be complete no matter what it is they know, even if what they know is the darkest thing of all.
We had been seeing each other for twelve years. We would spend Wednesday nights together, her night off. That was almost the only time we could see each other. I worked during the day, she finished late at night. We missed only two Wednesdays during those years. The first time was my fault, although there was little I could do about it. I was at a peace conference with the leader of Axum – there were plenty of men there in coats like this – finalising the details of the Programme.
The second time was because of the death of her mother. She told me she needed some time alone. I did not expect to see her again. I thought that what I had done might preclude this. But the following week there was a knock at the door at seven, our time, and it was her. I could tell she was sad and she was distant from me but to see her back made my heart leap. I could not share this with her. I could not. How could I?
She stood in the doorway, would not look at me and said simply, ‘We will not talk about her.’ I nodded. And we did not.
The woman’s name was Tora. She lived in a flat close to the kitchens.
It was small, basically furnished but always clean with nothing out of place. In her bedroom there was a bed, a dark wooden wardrobe and a dresser. I do not know whether she cleaned the flat when she knew I was coming or whether it was always tidy. I suppose I will never know.
Two years into our relationship I asked her to move in with me and to make it official. She refused. I did not understand why at first. She said it was unnecessary. I never asked again and I grew to understand what she meant. We had all we needed and all we wanted. Any more would have thrown the balance out. She was a level-headed woman, a quality I admired. She did keep me at a certain distance throughout but perhaps the pressures of our time meant that very few people were capable of deep feeling.
When we were together in bed she would close her eyes and bite her lower lip. The final time I closed mine too as I could not bear to look at her, as I could not bear to look. There was a chasm between us.
I did not know for certain it would be the last time but the trial had not been going well and I was expecting it not to go my way. In the end the sentence was not death but worse. It was banishment for life, a death in life. A life in death.
And she was no longer completely with me by then.
My relationship with Tora, while not exactly frowned upon by the townspeople, was viewed as unconventional. But it did not cause many problems. The rest of my life was conventional. I performed my duties rigorously, kept in touch with my lieutenants, wore my medals on the anniversaries of key battles and the peace agreement and saw the same woman for twelve years at the same time in the same place. I had routine.
I cultivated the aloofness that people sensed. With the role I had to fill it was a necessity. Even when I ran for the position of Marshal on the back of the Programme, the big idea, and I managed to persuade three-quarters of the population to back me, I knew that it was not me they were voting for, it was not me they were following. It was the order I could bring, the promise of an end to needless killing.
I was never a man of the people. Even Abel, the person I spent most time with, I kept at a distance. I think he preferred it that way though.
He was not exactly jovial either. I went to his house a few times on social calls but not many. I introduced him to Tora. We were walking by the kitchens, Tora was outside sitting in the sun. It was early in our relationship. I went up to her and kissed her. I was uncertain what to do, I will admit, with Abel looking on. She leant away from me a little.
I introduced her to Abel and we went on our way.
Once after this he asked me if I would like to bring someone with me when I visited him. I said no. We did not mention her again.
On the beach that day I kissed her again. Everyone was watching.