Some Here Among Us

by Peter Walker

‘It’s more than that,’ said Candy. ‘It’s like a myth.’

  A jet went high overhead, making a hard solid sound in the sky like a marble rolling over slate.

  ‘Israelis,’ said Race, looking up at the clouds. ‘They watch this place like hawks, according to Chadwick. They probably know exactly who’s in this vehicle, right now.’

  ‘Do you think he remembered her?’ said Candy.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Race. ‘Maybe she remembered him.’

  ‘What do you think, Toby?’ said Candy.

  ‘I don’t know, Ma,’ said Toby.

  ‘I think they recognised each other,’ said Candy, ‘in their hearts.’

  The Palmyra hotel, half-hidden by vines and palms, was just across the road from the Roman ruins on the outskirts of Baalbek. ‘The Palmyra,’ Candy read aloud from a brochure she found in the mini-bus just as they were arriving, ‘is famous for its air of faded grandeur and the ghosts of its illustrious guests, from Cocteau to the Kaiser, from Gertrude Bell to the Empress of Abyssinia, who still roam its lofty rooms.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Toby.

  ‘Don’t, Toby,’ said Candy crossly.

  ‘Well, anyway, you’re there now,’ said Toby. ‘You don’t read brochures when you’re there. You read them when you’re not there.’

  ‘I read them just exactly where I please,’ said Candy, but she put the brochure back in the seat-netting and climbed out of the bus and followed Race and Toby into the hotel. Toby carried Candy’s luggage. After checking in, Candy hurried to the bar to see who was there. Race and Toby crossed the road to look at the ruins, but they found that they were fenced all round, and the entrance was locked.

  ‘Five o’clock,’ said Toby, reading a sign. ‘They’re closed. Three thousand years old and they close at five.’

  He and his father walked along the highway into the town. It was only a little place but a maelstrom of traffic whirled through the central square – carts, motorbikes, motorised carts, scooters, sedans, jalopy trucks.

  ‘It’s drive-time, baby,’ said Toby, gazing around.

  ‘What do we want?’ said Race.

  ‘I should buy something,’ said Toby. ‘I haven’t bought anything since I got to Lebanon. I’ve just been banqueting.’

  ‘Buy something,’ said Race. ‘As your father I advise it.’

  ‘I don’t know what,’ said Toby. ‘Oranges? Light bulbs? Baby formula?’

  He scanned the market’s offerings.

  ‘Shoelaces!’ he said. ‘I need some laces.’

  He stepped into a little cavern and selected a pair of brown laces from a vertical tray on the counter.

  The door darkened and Jojo and the English film director came in.

  ‘Jojo,’ said Race.

  ‘Toby!’ said Jojo. ‘We’ve been here three days and I haven’t even seen you. This is ridiculous.’

  ‘Sorry, excuse me, I’m just buying laces,’ said Toby.

  ‘Have you met Joachim?’ said Jojo.

  Toby and Joachim shook hands wordlessly.

  ‘I just, excuse me, have to buy these laces,’ said Toby.

  ‘Souvenir?’ said Jojo.

  ‘No. I need laces,’ said Toby.

  ‘These ones?’ said Jojo, picking up a pair from the vertical tray.

  ‘Yes,’ said Toby.

  ‘Don’t buy these, Toby,’ said Jojo. She ran the laces between her finger and thumb.

  ‘Why?’ said Toby.

  ‘They won’t work.’

  ‘Jojo, they’re shoelaces,’ said Toby.

  ‘They won’t knot,’ said Jojo.

  ‘Not what?’

  ‘Stop,’ said Race to Toby.

  ‘They’re the wrong material,’ said Jojo.

  ‘Come on, darling,’ said Joachim.

  ‘One pair of shoelaces, please,’ said Toby, handing them to the shop-keeper.

  ‘They won’t work, Toby,’ said Jojo, laughing. ‘They’ll slide past each other.’

  ‘Great. Sorry, I mean. See you again,’ said Toby. ‘Real soon.’

  Jojo and Joachim went out the door. Jojo was still smiling, but Race saw a sadness slant on her like rain. Then she straightened and walked on.

  3

  So this was it, the high point of the wedding! After three days of nuptial celebrations, you couldn’t say that there’d been a real climax. Neither Gilly and Maro were believers, so the marriage service – a restrained transaction in the Protestant hill-top chapel – didn’t really rate. And since they’d been living together for nearly a year, no one could pretend that the wedding-night itself was some big deal. But this was different. This was the moment, everyone felt it. The buses were outside the Palmyra hotel, the morning sun was shining, the guests came forth in their finery, they gazed in wonder at their transport and then climbed aboard. These were not the fussy little mini-buses of Beirut but local vehicles from the wild east, from Baalbek town and the gorges, much battered by calamity – here a bullet-hole in a window, there the upholstery stripped to bare metal. The door closed; the brigand at the wheel hit the sound system and accelerator; Arabian music – wild, aggrieved – filled the bus like the sunlight, and out they shot into the traffic and away across the floor of the valley. The wedding feast was not, in fact, to be held in the famous ruins of Baalbek. Even Maro’s family, with all the strings they could pull, could not pull the one that might spread out a banquet on the porch of the temple of Bacchus or on the great platform of Baal-Jupiter. Earlier that morning, Race and Toby had gone for a jog through the ruins, but they were in a hurry and the precincts were too big to make much sense of in the time at their disposal. They themselves were busy, in any case, with other matters.

  ‘You’re going to have to make your mind up,’ said Race. ‘Do you want to end up alone?’

  ‘You live alone.’

  ‘Well, only after – I mean, I had you two first, didn’t I?’

  ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘I think Jojo loves you.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? What about Joachim?’

  ‘Joachim! She just brought him along as someone to bring along. She doesn’t care about Joachim. She loves you, Toby.’

  ‘That’s not the problem. I don’t think I love her. I don’t know if I can love anyone. Something stops me.’

  ‘What stops you?’

  ‘I don’t know what it is. When I’m with her, the self I want to be – I can’t find him. And then I feel afraid.’

  ‘Everyone feels afraid sometimes.’

  ‘Not when they’re in love. Some Frenchman said people fall in love only because they’ve read about it in books. It’s the opposite with me. I can’t fall in love because I’ve read about it in books. I feel worried. It’s like I’m sitting the exam.’

  ‘Does that matter?’

  ‘Of course it matters. You loved Ma.’

  ‘Well . . .’ said Race.

  They stopped jogging and Race stood there, panting, but speaking carefully.

  ‘In point of fact,’ he said, ‘I was in love with someone else.’

  ‘Really?’ said Toby. ‘Who?’

  ‘Just someone. And Candy was in love with someone else as well.’

  ‘Really?’ said Toby. ‘Who?’

  ‘Someone. Doesn’t matter now. Anyway – both those arrangements fell apart, and then we sort of just ended up together instead.’

  ‘Instead,’ said Toby, trying to take this in. ‘I don’t think I want “instead”.’

  ‘But you aren’t in love with someone else. I think Jojo’s the one for you. And you’re the one for her.’

  Toby looked worried.

  ‘We’d better get going,’ he said. ‘We better get changed.’ He was now in his own running gear. His luggage had arrived in the course of the night by unseen agency. When he woke up, his old tartan suitcase, mute and much travelled, was in his room as if it had found its own way. He and Race ran on through the stony courts and the pillared wastes and back across the road and up to their rooms.
Toby re-appeared outside the hotel in a dark suit of light-weight cotton. His English shoes, dark brown, were polished. He noticed, with an odd intensity of interest, as he stepped on the bus, that the laces had come undone. He stooped and did them up. He was thinking about what Race had told him. His father and mother had never been in love! Did that make a difference to him, his character, his nature?

  He and Race were the last on board and went down the aisle of the bus. By now, on their fourth or fifth day together, the wedding guests were getting used to this – meeting in a different place every morning, feasting together, travelling on together, a pod of unrelated fish. Here now were the rich São Paulistas, dressed up as for an exclusive nightclub, and here were the English in crumpled linen, as for a picnic on a heath. Even Toby’s South African foe stretched his lips and nodded his head as evidence of goodwill when Toby came past. Then the doors closed, the Arabian music wailed and out they shot into the local traffic and headed across the plain.

  ‘Wheeeee!’ cried Candy. They were leaving the borders at that moment, she felt, not only of what she knew but of what she had ever foreseen.

  And there, right on cue, just out the window was a fleet of Syrian tanks parked in a field, muzzles pointing high to the east and to the south. Some soldiers, sallow kids in trousers and skimpy vests, were washing their clothes. Grey underwear was strung on lines between the gun barrels. For a moment they saw one another, the children of Adam, with fleeting recognition – the wedding guests in linen and silk, the skinny conscripts in their vests – and then parted for ever.

  ‘Where are we off to?’ cried Candy in a tone of joy.

  ‘That’s Mount Lebanon,’ said Chadwick, pointing ahead. A grey and rumpled moor filled the windscreen, daubed here and there with streaks of snow.

  ‘Mount Lebanon!’ said Candy. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Bernard! He wanted to come so much. Poor darling! He said he’d always wanted to see the cedars on Mount Lebanon.’

  Bernard had died three months before, at night, in his sleep.

  ‘We thought of it. We thought of bringing him, although he could barely cross the room,’ said Candy.

  ‘He would never have managed the trip,’ said Laura Chadwick.

  ‘He never recovered from the fall he had,’ said Candy.

  ‘He would simply never have managed the trip,’ said Laura Chadwick, as if she would brook no argument.

  The bus slowed and turned and went down a pot-holed lane lined with poplars. Then they passed a wide pond in a bed of shingle and a grove of willows and came to an open meadow. The bus stopped. Everyone looked out the windows.

  ‘My God,’ said Joachim, his voice ringing out down the bus. ‘The tents of the patriarchs.’

  They climbed down and stood looking at the scene. A line of low Bedouin tents, open on three sides, richly carpeted and pillowed within, stood on the margins of the field. In the centre, under linen awnings, seven long tables were set with flowers, silver- and glass-ware.

  ‘Too good for the working-classes, hey hey?’ said Joachim.

  A jet went whistling overhead, almost out of sight in the cirrus.

  ‘Israeli,’ said Chadwick.

  ‘Lucky for us,’ said Joachim. ‘If it was the Americans up there now – well, no wedding party is safe!’

  Chadwick set his jaw.

  ‘Just kidding,’ said Joachim.

  ‘Unfortunately –’ said Chadwick.

  ‘Here comes champagne,’ said Joachim. ‘My God, is that arak they’re making over there? And a sheep on a spit! It’s Deuteronomy, baby.’

  Candy had set off far away to the tables to read the place-cards. She made some brisk changes and then came back, wobbling as her heels sank a little in the turf. She took a glass of champagne. Far to the south stood Mount Hermon, gleaming with snow.

  ‘I see it now!’ said Race after a glass and a half of champagne. Mount Hermon shone in the south. Mount Lebanon rose only a mile or two to the west. Race thought of the hall of some old farmhouse, with a grandfather clock ticking. The Israeli jet, almost invisible, went back again in the cirrus.

  ‘Arabs and Jews,’ said Race. ‘All this fuss. It’s just an old family row over the will. Who gets the farm? Who gets the grandfather clock?’

  ‘Not bad,’ said Chadwick, nodding his head.

  Everyone was circulating, walking around, looking into the tents. Some guests, the clubbers from São Paulo, the Madrilenas and Madrilenos, had already gone in and were lying back on the couches, as far, amid the pillows, from sunlight as was possible under the circumstances. Race went looking for Toby. He found him watching the patriarchs roasting sheep on spits. Some boys from the neighbourhood had climbed up the poplars along the lane and were watching the proceedings as well. There was a heady banter – the old men roasting the sheep and the boys in the trees were shouting harshly back and forth at one another, but whether in anger or play was hard to tell.

  ‘I had the same problem as you once,’ said Race. ‘I thought I couldn’t love anyone again. I was kind of worried about that at one time, but it turned out all right.’

  ‘You fell in love.’

  ‘I did fall in love.’

  ‘But not with Candy?’

  ‘This was before I married Candy,’ said Race, speaking with care.

  ‘The other woman,’ said Toby.

  ‘It was, in fact, yes, another woman,’ said Race evenly.

  ‘He’s tougher than I thought,’ thought Toby.

  They turned away from the roasting spit and walked across the field.

  ‘Who was she?’ said Toby.

  ‘Just someone. Well, she was someone called Sandra.’

  ‘Sandra,’ said Toby. ‘Sandra who?’

  ‘Isbister.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘I lost touch.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  ‘I was in love so I can’t really describe her.’

  ‘Is-bis-ter,’ said Toby.

  ‘Sandra Isbister,’ said Race as if to himself.

  ‘Silly sort of name,’ said Toby carelessly.

  ‘She’s your mother,’ said Race.

  He stared at his son, amazed. He had spoken on an impulse so thoroughly controlled for twenty years that he never imagined it would defeat him.

  ‘My – mother,’ said Toby.

  ‘She is your mother,’ said Race.

  Toby stared back at him.

  ‘You never told me,’ he said.

  ‘I just told you then,’ said Race.

  He had that same tough look again, which Toby had very rarely seen in his life. Toby was not, in other words, at that moment, permitted to complain.

  ‘My mother?’ he said again. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I told you. I lost touch.’

  ‘You lost touch?’ said Toby. ‘With my mother?’

  Race shook his head, not meaning that he hadn’t but that there’d been no choice.

  ‘Sandra was – wild,’ he said. ‘She ran away. She always ran away, from everyone.’

  ‘Why?’ said Toby.

  ‘I don’t know . . . She had this power over men that she didn’t really want. She didn’t even approve of it. But she enjoyed it too. And so she was confused, and off she went.’

  Toby nodded. He felt that he somehow knew all that already. They had reached the edge of the field and they stopped at the gate and looked down the lane at the wide shingle pond.

  ‘Who’d have thought it?’ Toby said. ‘Coming all the way here, to hear this. Does Candy know?’

  ‘Does she know she’s not your mother?’ said Race.

  ‘Dad,’ said Toby.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Race.

  ‘Does she know you were going to tell me?’

  ‘I didn’t know myself. We used to debate it once upon a time, but then there didn’t seem to be any obvious point.’

  ‘Why now?’

  ‘I didn’t plan it now.’

  ‘But you did it.’

  ‘Maybe you nee
d something.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘A jolt,’ said Race.

  ‘How did I happen?’ said Toby.

  ‘Sandra and I were together a year or two. We had you. Then she took off. She ran. Sandra loved running off. And there I was, with a one-year-old. And Candy was free. She was on her own, I mean. So we just – tried it out.’

  ‘Candy!’ said Toby.

  He gave a little laugh, perhaps comprised fractionally of a sob.

  ‘She’s been a very good mother to me,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t say anything to her,’ said Race. ‘Not yet anyway.’

  ‘I won’t say anything,’ said Toby.

  ‘Do up your laces,’ said Race.

  Toby crouched. Then they went away to the feast in the middle of the field.

  4

  ‘The thing is,’ said Joachim, squinting at the sun that was hanging in empty space above Mount Lebanon, and then holding up his thumb and forefinger to make a half-square and squinting again in a way that indicated he was now looking through an imaginary lens or viewfinder, managing further to irritate Toby who, nevertheless, was on his best behaviour considering the place and the occasion, and the state of his thoughts, but who still couldn’t understand how Joachim and Jojo had happened to end up at this table, right on top of him so to speak – which was in fact Candy’s doing – ‘the thing is,’ said Joachim, ‘if you look at that mountain there and – now – you see those sort of odd streaks of snow–?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Candy, looking at the mountain.

  ‘Well, don’t you think – I mean don’t you actually think – that they look like a script, a sort of proto-script, a kind of proto-Arabic you might say? Don’t you think so?’

  ‘They do!’ said Candy. ‘They look exactly like a script. How brilliant of you!’

  ‘Then the question is, my darling,’ said Joachim, holding out his wine-glass to be re-filled, ‘what is the script saying?’

  ‘“Fuck off, Joachim”, probably,’ said Toby in an undertone.

  ‘Now,’ said Chadwick.

  ‘What was that?’ said Joachim. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Fuck off, Israel,’ said Toby. ‘Obviously. Fuck off, Israeli Air Force.’

  ‘No, my dear chap,’ said Joachim. ‘What I think it’s saying is this: “Fuck the Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland.” ’