by Nick Jackson
Only the other night there’d been a shout from one of the men: “A snake!” He’d surprised the creature as it crossed the road outside the guard hut. The men cudgelled it with a rifle butt—it lay twitching in the rain, writhing, catching the light of the flickering lamp, its small head darting from side to side even though the body had been crushed.
“A harmless thing,” Clavel had said, “One of those which catches rats in the roof. You shouldn’t have killed it.”
Bordón had been furious. “If the men want to kill a bloody snake then I let them. There are enough of the damned things round here.”
As he approached Clavel’s hut, Bordón heard whispers and sudden spurts of suppressed laughter. They were in there together, Clavel and the lieutenant. The night insects churred complicitly. Bordón listened; he was convinced he heard his own name. Against his thigh he felt the comforting weight of an Argentinean pistol. He ran his hand down the smooth gunmetal. The tiny ridges along the barrel had a comforting precision. He hefted the pistol in his podgy fist.
Finally he stood in the doorway of the hut, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom. Against the far wall was Clavel’s bunk and he saw two figures embracing there; two men kissing. Bordón heard the wet gulping. He didn’t wait to see more.
Bordón pushed Carvajal aside and dragged Clavel out of the hut, kicking him from behind so that he crumpled forward, unable to break his fall because his hands were tied. Bordón yanked him into a kneeling position and took the pistol, ramming it hard into Clavel’s mouth.
He thought of the young man they had executed a month before in the Sierra for passing information to a member of the National Guard: Bordón’s first execution. The lad just knelt there, as the gun was pressed to his temple; Bordón had been so focused on the moment that there had been no room for any other idea, any regret. He’d pulled the trigger, tensing his arm against the pistol’s kick and hoped that he didn’t get too much gore spattered on his uniform because there would be no chance to wash it off. Then, it was done. He felt numb with the finality of it, the noise of the shot ringing in his ears. The body fell slowly, heavily, the muscles giving way. Bordón had tried not to look in the eyes in case he recognised that look of blank indifference which was so terrifying; he’d looked away and allowed others to cart off the corpse and bury it in some hole at the side of the road, in the hope that the boys who always played by the river did not notice the shot and did not come across the evidence later.
*
The stars are sprayed like fiery droplets across the sky. There’s a cold ache in Clavel’s stomach; he tries to shift his position to relieve the sense of nausea.
“Stay still!” The shaft of the pistol jabs into the back of his throat and Clavel forces himself upright. The whine of insects resonates in the still air. The sound is drawn tight as if at any moment it will snap, exploding into a silvery kaleidoscope of silence.
His heart beats, a hollow thrum that doesn’t belong to him, or anyone.
“Goodnight,” she’d say, her hair falling softly. The taste of guavas is in his throat, almost blocking out the acrid flavour of the metal.
He takes one breath after another, drawing out the moments. There is a sudden flash, a crashing, a fracturing of the glistening night sky—all the stars rushing towards him, sucking him into their white light.
Cut Short
I am waiting to get my hair cut, leafing casually through the paper while the barber finishes off the man ahead of me, who has a full head of crisp grey hair. They are talking about sport: a remarkable wicket or some such. In the paper my eye is caught by a photograph; a blurred mug shot. The head half-turning towards us, the expression inscrutable. I look for eyes but, apart from a faint darkening and the impression of a hollow, I can see no sign of eyes. The photograph is of a dolphin, the Yangtze River dolphin.
“Would you like any gel on that?” the barber asks his customer.
Apparently scientists have spent several months searching for traces of the dolphin along the Yangtze River. I imagine the surging confluence, wider from shore to shore than the eye can see, and a lonely little boat with three men in it, trawling microphones.
The Chinese came to revere their river dolphins. In ancient times they were thought to be the reincarnations of dead princesses, but more recently the Cultural Revolution abolished the myths just as it swept away all the sacred places or allowed them to fall into decay.
The dolphin in the picture has teeth, a row of tiny juttings in its beak-shaped snout. It seems to smile. Not much like a princess, I think.
The barber is ready for me. He flicks a voluminous black nylon cape over my front as though he’s setting the table for a meal—a wake perhaps. I catch sight of myself in the mirror, my thinning hair.
Those dolphins…, I want to say, but don’t.
The cricket on the radio has finished. They’re interviewing the mother of the kidnapped child. Why, the interviewer asked, did she stay in Portugal? Because, the mother explains, she just felt it was the right thing to do. Perhaps she couldn’t bear to resume her life; it would be admitting that the child had gone. Going home to try and pick up the threads of a life unpicked, to try and weave them together again, would be hard.
The scientists who searched for the dolphin along the Yangtze had gradually lost hope, the news article said, of finding any dolphins alive. After visiting all the best locations—the hot spots—they’d reluctantly begun to lose faith in their search.
You could imagine the Chinese peasants clinging to the last traces of their beliefs, secretly visiting the shrines and temples they had visited for generations, retelling the old stories, stories of patience and endurance, of the spirits of people reincarnated in trees and rocks and dolphins.
The barber tugs at my hair. “When was it you last came? Early May?” I couldn’t quite remember when it had been, late June I thought. “These tufts have grown fast,” he says, pulling at what’s left of my hair at the sides.
My brother wrote a blog when he was in Thailand last year, in which he described a visit to a Buddhist shrine in the hills. The tourists make the pilgrimage up the rocky path in the heat along with the Thais. According to my brother, the tourists are rather cavalier in their attitude to the shrine. They complain of the heat as they toil up the path and are surprised when they reach the summit at the lack of facilities or refreshments, as if they’d expected to find a sandwich vendor or a coke machine. Westerners don’t really “do” faith, unless it’s faith in their possessions or their families.
The woman in Portugal, I’ve seen photos of her too, handing out leaflets, has a haunted look. She’s unable to admit that the search is over. She has to keep faith. She hands out photographs of her daughter to passers-by. I imagine each alleged sighting in a restaurant in Holland or Greece, is like a whisper of faith to her.
“It’s better short, isn’t it?” The barber is clipping off what’s left of my back and sides, he’s revealed the full extent of my thinning scalp. “Yes,” I agree, “it’s better.”
I saw my brother at Christmas on a web-cam from Thailand, out of synch with his voice. The image was jerky, uncharacteristic for my brother who is not given to rapid movements. He’d had all his hair shaved off and his scalp shone. He’d looked very much like one of the Buddhist monks pictured on his blog and I wondered whether he’d gone native, but he sounded the same: his northern cadences overlaid with southern vowels.
“Your head’s very shiny!” was all I’d managed to say before the web-cam crashed.
The eye of the web-cam brought me an image of my brother 7,000 miles away, about as far away as eastern China. It wasn’t a good image; it needed me to fill in all that was lacking from the grainy patchwork of pixels, to make it look like my brother. Somehow it was a disappointment, as though I’d been cheated out of something.
On my father’s windowsill there’s a picture of my mother. She’s half-turning, not looking at the camera. It was one of those pictures that I’d never really looked at when she
was alive. It wasn’t a particularly sharp image or a good portrait but after she’d died I pored over it just as I’d pored over the photo of the dolphin, seeking for something of her in its blurred lines. Was this all, I found myself wondering, that’s left? And, horrified that I might begin to forget, I began to assemble all the photos that I had, scouring my drawers for snapshots, even the bad ones, of my mother. Perhaps it’s like that for the mother of the kidnapped child, perhaps distributing the image everywhere is a way of keeping her present, of keeping faith in the possibility of her discovery.
The scientists have reluctantly pronounced the Yangtze river dolphin extinct. All that remain are photos, sound recordings, a few preserved skeletons. It’s not enough, but it’s all that’s left.
The barber holds up the mirror to show me the back of my head.
“How’s that?”
“Fine thanks.” I can see now how I’m going to look in my old age. After each visit to the barber, I look more like my father. In a few years’ time I’ll be as bald as he is.
The river dolphin has a similarly bald pate in that photo: emerging from the cloudy waters to peer at the camera lens, grinning with its comb-like teeth, an unlovely princess. I wonder, if they are now gone forever, where the souls of the dead princesses will go.
The Rabbit Keeper
It was a hot summer evening. The swifts were shrieking outside the bedroom windows and at the end of the garden, where the sun was setting, a line of poplar trees pricked the bloodied sky.
Alexander’s mother was wearing a dress that had a design of birds in ornamental cages. There was a thick black belt around her waist. She was speaking in her funny voice for visitors and he knew that Carol was coming to baby-sit.
Carol had a black and white rabbit with dark knowing eyes, like a rabbit in a picture book. It had babies nestling in the back of the hutch but you couldn’t play with them because the doe would get nervous and eat them. He imagined her, setting about them, biting off their heads.
Her father was a doctor. He had worked overseas and got some disease that had left him yellow and crumpled like a wash-leather left to dry. It was this that made him seem special—enviable even.
Carol had round brown arms that swung heavily from the sleeves of her violent pink dresses. Alexander liked it best when she told him stories of African bees as big as apricots with stings that made their victims swell up like purple balloons and die screaming.
She was going to be downstairs with Vic, and Alexander was not to create trouble.
I don’t like that man, he informed his mother.
What’s wrong with Vic? He’s a perfectly nice young man. And he has to take Carol home afterwards.
She only lives next door.
He listened in furious silence to the story his mother read to him.
...and the wolf gobbled him up. She flicked off the light.
What happened then?
The wolf ate him—that’s it.
Is that the end then?
Yes.
Did the wolf take his clothes off before he ate him?
Of course not.
Did he die?
Yes, now off to sleep with you.
Out of a dense, dark thicket the wolf loomed with his hot red mouth and his long wet tongue and glistening teeth. Alexander squirmed, feeling the fangs on his legs. Feet first he went, down into the animal’s stomach. The lolling tongue dripped saliva over him as he went.
The wolf’s breathing was loud; it seemed to come from his mother’s room. Above him the ceiling revolved slowly, a changing pattern of yellow light, as a car passed. The window frame buckled and the curtains billowed like swans flapping their wings in fury. There was a noise like an animal in pain and a man’s deep-throated laugh.
Mum, Alexander called. The laughing stopped.
Mum?
Your mother’s coming back soon. It was Carol’s voice.
There was a very long silence and then more laughter, cautious nervous gulps of suppressed hilarity.
Alexander waited a while then shouted in a louder voice: Mum!
There were sounds of feet, or sinister paws, padding across the landing carpet. Vic’s head appeared in the bedroom doorway.
If little boys call for their mothers one more time... Vic peered blindly into the darkness but Alexander could see him, outlined against the door frame with the raffia lampshade swinging behind. He shut his mouth tightly and pulled the covers over his head. The footsteps retreated.
*
It was a hot buzzing day in July. Hover-flies, cabbage whites and bees swarmed in the sunshine.
He lay in the shade of the laburnum tree, picking up the little twisted pods that were scattered across the grass. He lay back with his arms behind his head and peered at the sky through the branches of the tree. It was a cold sky, despite the warmth of the day, a hard shiny blue.
The seeds of laburnum were very poisonous. They looked innocent enough, with their green and black mottled bodies lined up in their pods like tiny bullets. Alexander plucked out one or two and tasted them. There wasn’t much to them—a slightly acrid sensation on the tongue. He decided it was best to steep the seeds in hot water to make the poison come out then mix this with orange juice which he would somehow get his victim to drink.
*
Vic was the real culprit. He had made Carol forgetful and full of a kind of soppy sadness. Alexander saw her sitting in her upstairs window or on her swing in the garden and knew that Vic had stolen her away, scooped her out and left her with nothing on the inside except pulp. He was making Carol ill and Alexander had to do something.
He ground the seeds into a paste and mixed it with orange squash. He took it next door with him. Vic was sitting on the swing with Carol on his lap. She was looking pale and unhappy.
I’ve found a nest of wood lice.
That’s nice.
Nice was for lavender bath cubes and gold doilies and caramels. This was proof that Vic had rotted her brains out.
I’ve brought us some orange squash. He held out the tray with the two cups and one glass.
What a funny kid, said Vic. We’ll get you an apron for your birthday so you can be the real lady bountiful.
But Alexander was pleased when Vic raised the glass to his lips.
I’m going into Stockport, Vic announced, to buy that new single by The Rolling Stones. I met them once you know, in a pub.
How did you know it was them? Alexander asked.
Nobody’s speaking to you, sneered Vic.
Alexander didn’t mind. It seemed only right that Vic should be nasty till the end. When he went off on his motor-bike, Alexander even waved him goodbye.
Afterwards Carol cheered up a bit and Alexander asked her to tell him about the mongooses in Africa and whether they really did kill the snakes. She said that mongooses had been a pest at her father’s hospital, that they stole the chicken eggs and made nests with the hospital sheets.
Then Carol took Alexander round the garden and showed him the snapdragons—how you could open and close their little mouths. Alexander crouched on the edge of the lawn and made dragon noises and Carol held the flower between her finger and thumb and opened and closed the flower, making it gape or purse its lips. Alexander stroked Carol’s smooth brown knees, as he had seen Vic do. But she pushed his hand away and stood up quickly, brushing down her skirt with both hands. Then he saw how desperate the situation really was, how Vic had made Carol hate him.
That night he dreamt about Vic. He dreamt that Vic was already in the coffin with his lank oily hair combed flat and his hawk’s nose sawing the air. Alexander and Carol were dressed in black and looked a handsome couple. Alexander was standing on a chair, so he could put an arm around Carol’s shoulder. Mrs. Kendal was explaining how butterfly cakes tasted so much better if you sprinkled them with icing sugar. Then the whole plate of cakes took off and began gliding about the room and the cakes unfolded like giant napkins and floated up, to dance around the light fittings. Mr
s. Kendal screamed and Alexander woke up to find his mother dusting the headboard of his bed.
There’s an ambulance next door, said his mother, glancing out of the bedroom window as she ran the duster along the sill.
*
When he arrived, breathless, at Carol’s door and she opened it, Alexander could see she’d been crying and a great lump came into his throat at the same time as his heart was thumping in his chest.
It was me! I didn’t mean it. You won’t tell the police?
What are you talking about? said Carol, as she snuffled into a handkerchief.
The poison. It was me that did it. It was in the orange squash.
I can’t talk to you at the moment, Alexander. I’m a little busy.
But the funeral.
Funeral, what funeral?
The ambulance, he stammered.
The ambulance came for my Dad. He had one of his fevers and they decided to take him into Stockport infirmary, to keep him under observation. But I don’t think it’s serious.
Vic isn’t ill?
No, he’s not ill but he’s gone to work in London. He’s got a job in a record shop. He says he’s not coming back to Stockport.
She burst into a flood of tears.
*
Alexander’s mother was sitting on the settee in the living room. On her knee lay an opened letter and he recognized the pale blue airmail envelope with the colourful stamps.
She looked up as he came in but, although she looked straight at him, she didn’t seem to see him. Her grey eyes were dry and cold.
Bastard, was all she said and she crumpled the thin sheets of paper and they fell with an almost inaudible scuffing onto the hearth rug.
He went to her and tried to climb onto her knee but she fended him off with her elbow.
Go next door and find Carol, she said. You can play round there this afternoon, can’t you?
*
After he had knocked on the front door and tried the back door and got no answer, Alexander crept into the garage next door through a broken panel he’d found. It had been so long since he had seen the rabbit that he’d forgotten the smell of it, the sweet and sour whiff of hay and urine.
