Moon Country

by Peter Arnott

  13.4

  Below the brothers, in the clearing by the old house, the hippies, or whatever the fuck they thought they were, all seemed to pulling on some kind of ceremonial overshirt of uniform shape, but individually decorated with paintings and embroidery. These white shirts seemed to be gathering in a circle, the people in them chattering like monkeys. Then, as Frank muttered to himself and looked up at the sky and Joe continued to search among them for their target, the dancers slowly, slowly began to move, to circle. As they did so, they fell potently silent. All around the encampment, suddenly, the birds stopped singing. Ions seemed to form in the damp, cold air, warming it eerily. The wind slackened and the quality of the light seemed to change. Everything tingled. And in the silence the brothers heard only the rhythmic shuffle and thump of feet as on every fourth step the collected boots and moccasins of the faithful beat on the ground. Everything got downright fucking spooky for a moment. You could understand how the Yellowstripes felt back in Custer’s day in the face of this kind of collective and nature-based wisdom that made nonsense of their carbines and their actuarial tables. Joe felt the tension in the air and turned to look back at his brother. His skin crawled unaccountably at the sound of a different kind of history.

  13.4.1

  The brothers nearly jumped out of their skin when Short Bull’s voice cut the air in an invocation of the sun and moon that he had learned off a CD and his precentor’s voice was echoed and enhanced by the raised answering chord of his followers. They opened up their diaphragms and bellowed the wordless response in three long, deep notes. John Wayne and his companion were now seriously unnerved at the calm rightness of the sound that echoed off the hills like the noise the winged monkeys make in The Wizard of Oz. The mere materialism of their purpose was no match for the voices that were carved from the same landscape as the horizon. There were no words to the outpouring of the multitude — they hadn’t done the studying that Short Bull and Kicking Bear put into their whoops and imprecations — but there was a simple full-throated authority to their unified voices to which the universe itself seemed to respond as the clouds thinned and parted and a shaft of sunlight fell upon the circle, warming it, lifting up its collective heart for one last, joyous defiance of the material world that was even now organising itself into raiding parties less than a mile away.

  13.5

  Tommy smelled the soup she brought him first. Then he woke and saw her. She didn’t look at him. She started talking the moment she saw he was awake, afraid, maybe, to hear his voice, afraid to be interrupted before she’d said what needed to be said, saying the things she needed to say, saying the things he needed to hear, saying who knows what because for the longest time, he couldn’t hear anything she actually said. He just hunched up on his elbows and watched her face moving, heard in the subtly changed music of her voice, saw in the now stiff and twitchy way she moved, how she had aged and suffered. He saw the light that fell on her, but he heard nothing she was trying to tell him. He just heard her voice. And felt what? After all this time what could he feel? What was it possible for him to feel other than vaguely let down?

  He was stunned that he was hearing her talk at all, I imagine, that he remembered her voice at all, even. He probably thought he recognised the timbre and rhythm of her speech, and that her choice of words, her phrasing, was unchanged. Not hearing anything she was saying still, he looked at her talking and not looking at him. He looked at her pale face, and noted, like she was some specimen served up to him, that she was wearing funny, tribal clothes. He saw how thin she was, how the skin on her cheeks was drawn tight, how big and dark her eye sockets were. The thought came to him, as she was saying something now about regret and heroin, that she seemed to have acquired, somewhere in the interim, a nervousness either that he’d never seen or never noticed in the only five or so years they’d actually spent together (and that only intermittently for one reason and another), since she’d left Gerry Docherty for him when he and Gerry and Frank and Joe and Jack had all been in Hohne together in those innocent days just after the Wall came down and before Bosnia blew up, when the world had conned us into thinking that it was about to become, albeit briefly, a safer, happier place. He looked at her. He looked at himself as he looked at her. He couldn’t have told you what he wanted to feel, what he ought to have been feeling. He couldn’t even have told you definitively that he didn’t feel it. But he didn’t. There was nothing there. After all that time and longing, he felt nothing. Not even very disappointed.

  Was he surprised? He couldn’t even say he felt surprised. Strangely, though he was happy to see her, and though he was glad she was alive and okay and everything, now, as he looked at her, he felt free of her. He felt a bit sad and wise and he felt free. He’d not been expecting that. He hadn’t ever anticipated anything even resembling that and he’d had plenty of time to anticipate most things. So while she went on about something to do with London and this really great guy she’d lived with for a while in Stockwell before he’d got lifted for trafficking, he thought about why he might be feeling slightly bored by what she was telling him.

  He’d never really thought about her, he now realised. He’d thought about “her” all the time, but he’d never really thought properly about her, about how (for instance) time was passing for her too. That he’d been away, locked away, he knew, but that she had been somewhere too, and that that away, away from him, was an inadequate description of her location. That she too had been locked up in who knows what prison of her own and her circumstance’s making, he had known in the abstract, but here she was now, in front of him, and he didn’t know her. He didn’t know her any more, and maybe he had never really known her when he was as young and stupid as he remembered now he’d been.

  And so he barely knew himself either. He had, since their rupture, defined himself entirely as the man who was looking for her, and now that he had found her he had no idea who either of them might be. He may even have concluded that he wasn’t hearing her words now precisely because he was realising, in that instantly accepting way that he had when dealing with reality, that the past and the present and the future were all unwritten. All in flux again, uncertain. That it hardly mattered what she was saying or what he was feeling because once again, as he had when he had pulled that trigger all those years ago, he was changing suddenly, but peacefully this time, into someone else, something unprecedented — that he was going to inhabit the rest of his life in yet another guise, another shape entirely, and that he had no idea yet what that might be — let alone who she was now he saw her again.

  And that he was okay about that.

  13.5.1

  What we know of the events that followed suggest to me not that he was seized by a suicidal raptus as has been suggested elsewhere, but that at that moment of all moments, Tommy Hunter was happy.

  I find that I need to believe that. I find that to be able tell the rest of this story I absolutely need to believe that Tommy really did find Janice and let her go and that this made him happy. That him letting her go was as important as finding her had been, that his insane quest had not been for nothing, even though it, like every other human enterprise, had ultimately been futile. For if the pursuit of the unattainable is not for nothing, then there is hope and there is redemption for us in this world providing only we are willing to let what we want go at the instant that we find it. I don’t know how anyone can live and not believe that.

  Don’t we need to know while our lives may well be meaningless resistances to the irresistible dissolution of the universe into a flattened soup of particles dead and expanding forever, that those same lives, that same resistance is what salvation looks like, that the only salvation we can wish for lies in both the acceptance of and resistance to the way the world is? Don’t we need to act as if we believed that there is that in us which is worth the saving and fighting for, even if it is only, inevitably, for the sake of a vanishing moment? Is it not as necessary as breath that believing in the promise of peac
e and justice at some point in the future, while not a practical ambition, is a categorical imperative in the here and now; that we can live decently in the present only when we act as if there could be a better world? That the truth that every life ends in death and that every dream dies in failure doesn’t mean we shouldn’t live or dream but rather tells us that life and dreams are exactly the business we have being here? Doesn’t everything we know about our history illustrate beyond dispute that no one ever made a better world without living as if they were already there? That no one ever gets their freedom or equality except by behaving as if they were already free and just as good as anyone else?

  That’s why Tommy’s story means so much to me. It’s not just that he is an exemplar of the failings of our social and judicial arrangements, though he is those things. It is that Tommy Hunter embodies the hope that we can become more than ourselves. That we can change. That we can be saved. That’s why I want to believe that she was there, that he found her, that they spoke, that they touched, even if it was only for a moment that, like all other moments, was immediately lost in time. Even though I am perfectly well aware that there is nothing in the public record to confirm Janice’s presence at Ossian’s Viewpoint or even her continuing existence per se, there is nothing to disprove it either, and that is going to be good enough for me.

  I insist that, at the moment she was talking to him and he wasn’t hearing her, Tommy was as content at the utter extinction of self as any man has ever been in the presence of God. It doesn’t matter whether this meeting, like meeting God, was imaginary. After all, what else could it be? What else is anything that ever happens to us but something that happens in our minds, whether or not it happens anywhere else? I would find it unbearable if that were not the world which is the case.

  13.5.1.1

  For, like the Wicked Witch of the West when Dorothy threw cold water on her, Tommy was melting, the icy purpose that had been the superstructure of his sense of self all these years was dissolving and in his transitional state between solid and liquid, between fixity of intended outcome and the uncertain joy of mere being, in that slide from being a knife that cut through the world and becoming the embodied acquiescence that flowed through it, he hardly had the mental space to listen to what she was saying. The mere fact of her, and the fact of himself being with her at this evanescent moment, were everything. He had frozen her along with him in his cell, he now realised, he’d made of her something as fixed and unchanging as the monster of focus he’d made of himself, a doll, an artefact. And now that he saw her in the fluidity of time passed and still passing, even before he heard anything she said, he was paralysed at the poverty of his own understanding, at how banal and foolish had been his imaginings of this moment, this moment whose anticipation had kept him alive, and whose realisation was now neutering, cancelling, killing him. The anticipation had been its own present tense, its own frozen continuum. Now that he was actually with her again the past anticipation that had led him here was embarrassing, risible and behind him. In this new version of time, of the eternal present, he was changed utterly again, newly born, understanding nothing once more. He was breathless, spineless, and out of ideas. He was annihilated with relief at his liberation from himself. He smiled at her and without pausing for breath in her monologue she glanced at him a moment, uncomprehending. And he forgave and pitied her like Jesus forgives and pities all of us.

  Tommy Hunter was lost now, lost forever to all that had held him to the earth, and it was good.

  13.5.2

  He relaxed. She kept talking. He lifted his hand. He stared at the sore white bulb at the end of his arm. He was bandaged. He remembered now being shot. He remembered Ronnie. He remembered the river in the dark. And now here he was in the light. With her. And she was speaking. Was she speaking? What was she saying?

  “You’ve lost a finger off of that,” she was telling him.

  He numbly believed her. But he was still feeling like a man who had gained an unexpected limb rather than one who had lost a digit.

  He sat up and swung his legs off the cot and on to the old stone floor of the dower house. She still didn’t meet his gaze but she did stop talking. He realised with a jolt that he had no idea what she was feeling, seeing him again. Let alone what he wanted to say to her, whether in fact, he had anything at all he could tell her. Had he thought of nothing to say to her in fourteen years? It would seem not.

  We can forgive him, I think. Just moments before he saw her he’d been someone else. And when he spoke to her now, at last, easily and authoritatively asking after her, it was with a strange and selfless assurance, an oddly benevolent warmth. He didn’t say anything about anything much. Or have much idea what he was saying. He had no idea where this peaceful, new mood came from any more than he had any other idea of any kind in his head. The past was gone and the future was a territory which, for either of them, he held no prior claim. He spoke entirely in the present tense. He had no prescriptions or predictions or preferences. He had no expectations any more. He held his empty hands, hand, one mutilated, towards the present only. He was suffused with contentment and holiness.

  What did he end up asking her, then? What words am I insisting that they finally exchanged?

  I think probably he just asked her how she was and she told him she was fine. He longed to know, perhaps, much more. Maybe, in a moment of need and weakness, he wanted her to tell him that she needed him. But he immediately accepted that she didn’t. It was probably harder to accept that she had never really needed him, or she’d not have left so easily, that even back then he’d been kidding himself about her, that his longing for her all those years had been so intense precisely because he’d been missing something he’d never really had, that the intensity of that longing had been inversely proportional to the feeling she had ever had for him.

  But I think he probably managed that as well, however painful it must have been. I think he must have looked at her, and that maybe she looked at him with something like pleading in her eyes; pleading for him to leave her alone, to disappear from her life again, whatever life that was. And I think he must have taken a moment to feel that loss, quietly. That he drew in a breath, and that in that single breath of his time, of his life, he mourned for her and for himself, just till he breathed out again and smiled again for her, to show her he was fine, that he was at peace with knowing he’d never get her back, and that he’d never see her again.

  “How are you?” he must have asked her again, obvious and warm, and if she had burst into tears or struck him repeatedly it wouldn’t have mattered. He wished, surely, that she’d ask him how he’d been all this time, but I’m not sure she ever did. But I’m sure he accepted that, just as he now accepted that just as he had carried an idea of her about with him that had sustained him all these years, so she’d been carrying around an idea of him, pictures of him and the children, actual photographs, in fact. But in that brief moment of their reunion in the occupied Youth Hostel at Ossian’s Viewpoint, even as he was renegotiating her presence, she was still speaking to his absence, to a picture of him that she did not want to flesh out in three dimensions. She still would not look at him. She must have been aware of his face and of things she could be asking him, but remained (as he had done all these years, perhaps, in his own way) more comfortable with the idea of him than attempting to deal with the reality. So she kept him at a distance, in the corner of her eye, as if he were a therapist and she were lying facing away from him on a couch.

  I think he must have asked her though how had she been all these years, where had she gone that night? Had she gone back to Gerry, as he’d thought? And she probably answered him truthfully. But I don’t think that even he can have had the courage to ask her then what he knew now that he had always known, that she had always been going to leave him. That leaving him had been in her mind and heart well before he’d brought on the crisis in their relationship by coming home covered with the organic remains of Colin (or Eric). Had she gone
back to Gerry, though, he must have asked? She must have looked at him warily, thinking that he was seeking a way in, a way to make some declaration of continuing love to which she would be forced to respond, and respond in the negative, hurting him in order to protect herself. But I don’t think it was like that. I don’t think he had any such thought in his head. I don’t think he was trying to get anything from her that she didn’t want to give him.

  He’d always known, he now suddenly remembered, I think, that Janice had never really committed herself to him. That Janette’s parentage had been “doubtful” as the church and the law used to say. This had not mattered to him then, and mattered less than nothing to him now. Janette, like Ronnie, was a miracle in half her genes anyway. What did it matter who her father was?

  It is evidence, perhaps, of his growth beyond his need of her perfection, that Tommy now, I think, felt an ache of pity for Janice, probably for the first time, at how insecure she must have been to have been so in need of assurance that no one could assure her, that she had never really trusted in him the way he had believed, absurdly it now seemed in retrospect, in her. It no longer hurt, even, that she had only ever accepted his love for want of something better. The pity of it was, he could tell from her now, that there was nothing better. It had turned out that nothing had been better for her. That there was no cure for the kind of pain that Janice had internalised long before he even met her. And that now, as then, there was nothing he could do about that. There was nothing either of them could really do for each other.

  He had always known it had been complicated, whatever was between them. He remembered that now. He was startled that he’d forgotten all the time he’d been away from her how difficult and stormy and unhappy they’d been together most of the time they had spent in the same room. He understood now that back then, as a young man, and one who had never known security and love and acceptance, that his epic longing for her had been a retreat from reality, a rudimentary and rather sad poeticising of who she was and what she might do for him. Now her restoration to him had made it possible to rediscover that she had never really been there for him, never really loved him, and, saddest of all, that her hurt was even deeper and more incurable than his. Now that he was free Tommy found himself entirely without hope of love and justice or anything else, and was surprised at how liberating it was, to have nothing, to hope for nothing, to be nothing. How strong it made him to accept that quietly staggered him.