Land of the Living

by Georgina Harding

  Come to bed, she said. It’s late.

  His hand was tight on the poker. All of him was tight, from his knuckles to his heels as he crouched. He couldn’t move. If he moved, he would raise the poker. Stand and lift the poker and smash everything, sweep everything from the mantelpiece, the clock crashing to the floor in tiny parts, hands and cogs rolling, numbers rolling on the Persian rug among the pieces of Ralph’s figurines, shepherdesses’ heads and white arms and flowered skirts and baskets – but no, they were not Ralph’s figurines, they would have been on the mantelpiece before Ralph, on the mantelpiece in the big house where the family had lived before, shepherdesses watching the men who came home so rough from their wars, silently smirking, aware of their reflections in the glass behind them, as Claire’s reflection was there now, her face wavering, losing definition – breakable, so easily breakable.

  Her voice at his shoulder. Cool as that of a shepherdess.

  Come to bed, she said again.

  That was why you had to pretend to be a hero, to keep the shepherdesses whole.

  She went out then, and when he had looked into the fire for a while longer until almost all colour had died, he put the poker down on its brass rest and stood, his body limp now, and took up the brass fireguard and placed it before the hearth, and turned off the lamps one by one, and closed the door and followed, up the stairs to where she was already in bed. He thought that she was asleep, but she wasn’t. He undressed and slipped into the bed in the dark, and she was lying awake waiting for him. She seduced him, gently in the dark, drawing him onto and into her. Her legs and hands clenched him tight and long, taking deep into her every thrust that he made, the dregs of his anger and his semen together.

  Then she slept.

  He slept for a bit, then woke in a sweat.

  Sometimes it was clear in these dreams he had, and sometimes it wasn’t, who was who. Two men clasped together. One let go, falling. Or perhaps those specific images belonged not to the dreams themselves but to the moment of waking, to memory not dream. Because the horror was in the waking as much as in the dream, the rational knowledge of what had been done. He knew in his depths that the world had been wronged. That he couldn’t put himself right in it any more.

  Only if he forgot, could he do that.

  Almost always, there was mist in the dreams. Like forgetting, but not forgetting. Sometimes the mist was thick so that he might put out his two hands to touch it, running through. He had to reach out his hands and part it before him and lift it in moist grey swags, only there were more swags beyond, one after another, soft and cold and dewy and heavy and light. The swags fell back behind him soft as curtains, feather-lead weight upon feather-lead weight of mist closing wet and cold on his shoulders and his back, pressing him to run the faster. So fast, he ran. But when at last he ran clear, the fact would still be there, exposed in the light beyond the trees, out there to be seen in the day.

  It was becoming day now. The sweat was cold on him, cold on his pillow. Claire still slept. She hadn’t woken when he had the dream. That was good. Too often when he had the dreams he disturbed her. What is it, darling, she’d say. And she’d put out an arm across him, move close, but he would lie stiff and retract inside. Let her not know these things. He would lie with open eyes and feel the softness of her beside him and he was not sure whether her presence made it better or worse.

  The light seeped in slowly, defining first the rectangles of the windows and then the room itself, until everything in it had depth and form. The wardrobe, the door, the pictures, the chair with his clothes that he’d taken off so carelessly the night before. Claire’s dressing table with the mirror above it. Claire herself. The light was enough to see her by now, if not her face then her shape as she slept on, between him and the window from which it came.

  He moved to pick himself up, heavy from the night but soft, so as not to wake her.

  Go, today, the Viking said

  The Viking’s English amounted to perhaps twenty words.

  Go. Today. Those were two.

  He said them that first night in the hut. Good morning, he had said when they met, though it was night. And put out his hand that they might shake. Later he had sat alongside him by the fire, and drank and smoked and said those other two words – Go, today – earnestly as if assured of their meaning, and he had repeated them much later when Charlie stood to go outside, by which time it might indeed have been morning so the words were accurate at last, but Charlie wasn’t to know that. Goodnight, was all he replied, with a gesture of his hand, and he went out and walked between the long dark forms of the huts which seemed to sleep beneath their thatch, and there was the whisper of the girl. He lay with her on the platform beneath the overhang of thatch. They lay there for a time warm as animals, and then she rose and went back to her sleeping place in the hut, and he remained until he grew cold, looking out to a bright strip of stars beside the black of the thatch, before he too went in. He cannot have been long in his bed before the Viking came to wake him.

  Many of the men were still asleep. The women were up, moving in the grey, stoking fires, bringing water. The girl put out some pans of food on the earth, smiling her newly blackened smile. That morning he noticed her nakedness once more, and marvelled at the ease with which she lived in her skin. She sat on her hunkers and watched while he ate, and the Viking too. Go, today, the Viking said. Again, simply that. This time it made sense.

  Goodbye was simple. So simple things were with so few words. The family lined up before the hut, shiny-eyed and smiling, happening to stand tallest to smallest and picturesque as if for some ethnographer’s group photo, a couple of small children running along in a blur beside him until they were out of the gate into the breaking mist. The descent from the village was as rapid as the climb had been steep, winding directly down, the mist spinning away from the hills in white strands. He took a last look back when they reached an exposed spur some way off. The sky and the hilltops were clear now. There were figures on the lookout platform waving, knowing that after that spur he would disappear from view.

  After that it was only the two of them, but walking all of the day without words as if they each walked alone. They walked down to where the mist still hung, into the damp green depths of a valley so deep and steep and densely grown that after half the day, having crossed the river and climbed upwards again, when they once more reached a point from which he could see out, he saw that he had come only a few hundred yards as a bird would fly it from that open spur. But they would no longer be watching. They would have turned away and gone back to their lives.

  Wave, he thought. If only he had some bright banner which he might wave, so that he might draw their attention and they might wave back, and there might be one last contact before he lost them altogether.

  Then the trees met once more over the path, and they had to climb steeply again in the trees, up to the height of the village they had left, then down again across another, smaller and roughly cultivated valley, and it was dark by the time they reached the next village where they would spend the night. This new village was a sad straggle of a dozen huts clinging to a narrow crest. They arrived, and the Viking was known there. They were offered food but there was little talk. They slept beside other men on a long bench in a men’s house where there were skulls on a shelf at the door. In the daylight next morning there was a crowd gathered to gawp at him when he came out – expressionless, these villagers, he did not know if they were friendly or hostile or just very poor – standing an uneasy few feet back to watch him as he washed, minimally, with a couple of ladlefuls of water, as he ate, adept now at taking food bunched in his fingers. Again, there was the mist breaking, and the children running through it after them as they left – and still he did not know if they might have been hostile and picked up a stone and thrown it – on past the little village’s rough defences of stone walls and thorn hedges, running along with them like strangers’ dogs as far as some indefinable point in the forest before the
y turned back, and he went on thinking as he walked, as their shrill voices receded, at what point does a territory end and a dog or a man or a child know that he has become a stranger, where does he know to turn?

  So they walked on, away from anyone’s territory, through the steep tangle of hills and razorbacks and gorges and valleys. There was no grain to this land, never a long river course or ridge to follow. The Naga god, Hussey would say to him, Hussey who studied and noted everything, the Naga god created this land in a terrible hurry, they believe, because his enemies were approaching, and he had no time to smooth it out. That was how they could stay at war for generations, warring villages separated by their knotted geography but only a few miles apart.

  A man, or a dog or a child, instinctively turns where his surroundings become alien, he thought, as the Viking led him on through the alien forest, where the sights and the smells have nothing to do with him any more. His only connection here was to the guide in front of him. Whose silence had become companionship. Whose smell he knew. In whose footsteps he walked.

  The Viking’s legs were like wood, bone and muscle shaped as if carved out of dark wood by some Gothic carver, but supple and in constant motion, moving before him. He knew the sculpted form of them, the hollow backs to the knees, sinews, calves, the long bare feet grey with old mud. The filthy khaki shorts above them. His eyes fixed on those legs ahead as he tried to keep pace, on those legs and on the ground, and the path they took, step for step. They climbed. The climbs were steep. The pace the Viking set allowed him no energy, no time to look beyond those legs. He could only follow, and see, his mind absent, aware of no more than his walking and his breathing and his sweat. The Viking did not sweat, even beneath the hot helmet. He moved with ease, laying easy sure barefoot steps along the trail, brushing undergrowth lightly aside, moving with a slow rhythm that suggested that he had always strength in reserve. At long intervals he slowed and turned to see if Charlie was still there behind, and Charlie looked up through a mist of exhaustion and met his eyes.

  He admired the fine economy in the man. When it was hot in the middle of the day, he carried his red blanket folded over a shoulder. At other times he wrapped it about him with all the style of a Roman senator in a toga. He travelled with few things apart from his clothing: dao, knife and water-gourd, strung from a belt at his waist or in an open-weave cane basket on his back. The only time he removed his helmet was to sleep.

  Sometimes there were leeches, though these were fewer since the rains had ended. The Viking flicked them off his bare legs before they took hold. It was automatic to him, to check his legs and his feet and between his toes when they had brushed through wet grasses or stood too long in any one damp place.

  There was a fellow who joined them, on the second or the third day, who came out of the forest lightly as a piece of cloud. He could not have said precisely when he had appeared, only that he had suddenly sensed a presence and found the man there beside them. He was young, lithe, light-footed, and wore a black kilt and a necklace of bright beads and tiger’s teeth. He spoke a few words to the Viking in whatever dialect they shared and walked with them a while, and when they came to a lush place beside a stream he plucked a head of scarlet poinsettia from a bush that overhung the sparkling water, and put its stem through the hole in the lobe of his ear. But perhaps their pace was too slow for him. As suddenly as he had come, he took off ahead of them and disappeared, away down the path. Fast, light-footed, graceful. A born runner, the thought came to him, like Luke, and he looked to where the man had so swiftly gone and in that instant he saw not that fellow but Luke running back towards him, out of the trees in the mist, a red bloom at the side of his face, and as he saw this his pace did not slow, as he kept pace with the Viking, as here where they were there was no mist, and the green was dense as two walls alongside the path, no space between trees in which to run.

  If the sound came, then he would stop. He told himself that. But the sound didn’t come. He knew it wouldn’t. Luke must be behind many days of walking now. He, Charlie, was walking with the Viking as if he were in a trance.

  It was the rhythm and the mindlessness, the constant pace, passing through vegetation which changed but did not change as he climbed and descended, overwhelmingly green and tropical and stifling in the gullies, thinner and darker on the windy heights, the exhaustion as he climbed and descended, his body going on as if it was linked to the Viking’s will rather than his own; the combination of these factors that separated him from his body, so that his thoughts moved of their own accord.

  Again, Luke behind him, Luke who was afraid in the battle and quiet when he was out of it. Who had volunteered for the patrol probably for no better reason than that Walter had. Luke at the rear where he might have run out of danger. Then Tommy, the sharp sense of Tommy at his back. Luke following Tommy following himself as he followed Walter, as now he followed the Viking. And that other like a shadow between them.

  Day after day they went on climbing. Never a piece of flat ground. For hours on end there was only the path and the jungle, never a view beyond, change on the heights and in the valleys no more than change in the density of the vegetation and the weight of the air – sensation, not landscape. Events were no more than the flights of birds. Scarlet bird, lemon-yellow bird. Once a hornbill, flash of pterodactyl beak and black-striped white tail. Look, Luke, look there, that way, there it goes! Then other birds heard but unseen. There was the Nagaland pheasant that didn’t chuckle like an English pheasant but only moaned. Listen to that poor bird, Walter had said when he learnt what it was. No sense of humour, d’you hear? And when they finally saw one, Well, what d’you expect? Got no tail on’t. Bloody cocks got less tail than hens.

  Walter’s chuckle then. He looked to see Walter ahead of him again, but there was only the Naga padding on. He missed the heavy tread of Walter’s boots and their imprint in the mud.

  The pheasant, Walter had said, wasn’t an English bird anyway. It had been brought from Asia for the sport. England gave it an easy life, fed it and pampered it and made it stupid, until the guns came out.

  It began to rain. The drops on the leaves drowned out Walter’s steps. But this was only a shower. The rain before had been elemental, transformative, turning air to water, path to stream. Now there was only this shower, which darkened the sky and then moved on as suddenly as it had come, and left the leaves shining the more greenly and the dark soil steaming. And there was the Viking, walking ahead through the shimmer, passing in and out of pristine beams of light, his horned helmet lit then shadowy among the lace of dripping tree ferns.

  Silence. Wet underfoot. The thought of Walter returning. Walter gone to Asia.

  A pheasant shot above a Norfolk field, tumbling to the ground. Its wings continue to twitch a last few moments after it lands.

  Walter, you damn fool, we should have left, right away. Walked on. Like this man before me, this other long steady man that I follow. What were you thinking, trying to put right what was wrong? Your English decencies don’t hold here. You should have known that, after all we had seen. The jungle takes back the dead soon enough, you know that, like any other rotting matter. However many, and whoever they bloody well are: Indian, English, Jap, monkey, all the same.

  Or again, Tommy did what he did and we all knew why. Didn’t we? Even you knew that. Our chances were better, weren’t they, when Tommy had done what he had done?

  The Viking knew where to find clean water in hollows and stems. He found fruits they could eat. Wild papayas, which he knocked down from a height with a stick. Limes, astonishingly bitter. Some other citrus, bitter and dry, but the yellow fruits big on the trees like apples in a child’s drawing. Beneath one such tree, glistening peacock-blue butterflies, wings wide as his hand. There were more butterflies close to a river, down in the cool of a ravine. They felt the cool of the water coming up to them as they descended. There was a green pool, black shade, hot sand, showers of pale butterflies flying to rocks and opening themselves to t
he sun. And further up, a series of rapids, and swallows diving low across the water.

  The river was high. There was nowhere to cross it, only bamboo posts and trailing vines where a bridge must have been washed away in the rains. They scaled a section of the ravine above the rapids and made their way precariously across rocks with the water swirling beneath them, and once they were across they had to climb higher, the sound of the rapids receding. They came to a belt of pine trees where the ground was bare beneath, and there they rested for a while. He closed his eyes and napped for a moment on the floor of brown pine needles. When he woke he looked across at the Naga in his strange outfit, the baggy shorts and the helmet and the necklace and the ivory bangles, seated with his mahogany legs folded before him and his hands loose on his knees, and saw him anew as he might have seen him once, in some illustration from an adventure story: Native guide at forest halt, and he the white explorer. Somehow in all this time he had gradually come to mislay his difference, and now it had come back to him. It was because of the pines. The smell of them had taken him home; the smell and the smooth prickle of the needle floor, and the view between the trees out to blue hills and mounting cloud, which might almost as easily have been in the English north as here. In this moment he was an Englishman again. He felt the disquiet of it.

  Up, the Viking said, unfolding himself and taking up his basket. Go. You strong?

  Yes.

  Strong enough in the body, if not in his wandering mind.

  Think nothing. Walk, breathe. Only be. Don’t think. Be, like the Naga.

  It was a steep climb. The climb was enough. The climb was all. Up through the pines and onto stony upland, slow step after slow step, head throbbing with the altitude. They must be very high. They came at last to a ridge, one of those high razor ridges, and there again the Viking let him rest, though not resting himself now, only waiting, squatting on his hunkers, blanket wrapped around him now because it was windy up there. And when he had his breath back they moved on, following the jagged ridge, the Viking ahead like a prophet with his blanket blown about him. It was hard high walking, but good because they were on top of the whole land. On top of an ocean, it seemed to him. In every direction, as far as his eyes could see, a tossing slate-blue ocean. Only the peaks of the waves did not move. The peaks were frozen as if held in a moment of storm, and it was the cloud that flowed, in the troughs between. And when they came down from the ridge they descended steeply, half scrambling, into a cleft of valley and into the flowing cloud, but within the cloud it was still. He breathed the cool and the damp of it and knew that this valley never could dry out and he had the thought that they would be held there, he and this ancient pacing man, frozen like the mountaintops and like the trees between which they passed, so encrusted with lichen and pendulous mosses that it would seem that the mist had solidified about them.