To Heaven by Water

by Justin Cartwright

‘Of course I believe you. Rosie, can we meet very soon?’

  ‘Yes, let’s. Come to dinner. By the way, Ed tells me you have a new boyfriend. You can bring him.’

  ‘It may be a tad early to call him a boyfriend officially. But yes, I like him and he said – he was more or less completely sober at the time – he said that he was crazy about me.’

  ‘Good start.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘I’m crazy about you, too, Lucy. You’re the best sister-in-law a girl could have.’

  ‘Rosie, Rosie, I’m touched.’

  She is: she shares Dad’s weakness for unexpected kindness and warmth. Mum saw it as a little suspect, emotional grandstanding: steadiness was her thing. Instead of heading for Grimaldi, Lucy lingers, thinking about this notion of kindness. Why do I respond to it? She and Rosalie don’t really get on, yet this declaration, wherever it comes from, is moving. It seems, she has noticed, that there are people who detect in me qualities I don’t really have. Dad once said something along these lines about himself, but he attributed it to the fact that people out there – the other side of the television screen – believe that television anchors are privy to all sorts of knowledge about the springs of life. They aren’t, of course, permitted to tell the public everything they know. But Lucy thinks her own self, that elusive creature that we keep inside us (or perhaps that keeps us), is far from fully settled. Mum’s qualities were somehow fully formed at birth. She annoyed Dad sometimes, but he seemed to need her certainties. Now, Lucy believes that Rosalie may really be pregnant; hormones are affecting her emotions to produce this unaccustomed warmth.

  Five years ago Uncle Guy said on one of his two visits to England in forty years – he wasn’t impressed – that every time he walked out into the Kalahari he saw the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit. She’s never forgotten it. He was wearing desert boots and rugby shorts in Piccadilly at the time. Not that she understood him fully, but Uncle Guy’s views, freely expressed, seemed to suggest that the spiritual life is the only one worth living. And she sees now that Uncle Guy was right: life is not a sordid practical thing to be endured, but something that should transport you. And she knows, with a sort of intuition, that she will love Nick, if she doesn’t already. Her own hormones are coursing, too. The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit: how beautiful that is. She’s smiling inanely. She feels that there has been a planetary shift. She smiles at the waitress as she leaves. They are complicit in a feminine-human understanding. She calls Rachel to tell her she will be going straight to the British Museum to finish up. Rachel is, as always, distracted, and barely listening.

  She sets off for her flat to change her clothes. All big moments in life demand a change of clothes. Her mother was a demon for clean nighties and underwear and it’s a habit she has inherited. Since her mother died, Lucy has realised that there are ritualistic aspects to her behaviour. She’s in a way still placing offerings at the family shrine. She knows that Mum would have liked Nick.

  She takes the underground; it’s the time of stupefaction after all the people with a purpose have gone and only a few seats are inhabited by vacant, exhausted people. Free newspapers lie in drifts. There are cans and bottles, reminders of the night revellers. Two Chinese nurses are sleeping, and an African is rubbing his face as if he wishes to discover what lies beneath the surface; an earnestly consulting young man and a woman, probably Romanian – the shiny, striped tracksuits are the giveaway – are trying to fill in a form with a pencil, and a large, bald man in a yellow safety jacket is reading Angling Times. He could be dreaming of tench. There is also a family of tourists, perhaps wondering about the exact nature of this city with its innumerable secrets and compromises and illusions, and one of the illusions – widely accepted – is that Londoners know something – that this city has a kind of savvy and irony and tradition, not available (or wanted) anywhere else. The air in the carriage is dead, as though it has not seen the light, ever. It is photon-free. The air in a coal mine is probably similar. But the funny thing is, it’s the neatly attired tourist family, ranging from blond to grey, most likely Danish, who look weird with their clean sneakers, pale jeans, anodyne sweatshirts, the wheeled luggage, the sensible, rolled, shortie umbrella in Mummie’s hand, the guidebook poised in Vader’s. They look like people from another planet. They are way too clean and nice for this manky rattletrap of a train. Way too naive for this city. Where they come from, people take away their cans of Red Bull – more likely lingonberry juice – and newspapers and generally do things in an orderly, rational manner.

  When she gets home and opens the communal front door on to the hall, which houses a bicycle with one wheel, six plastic containers belonging to a tenant who left some time ago without paying his rent, a huge pile of junk mail and the rubbish of four flats in brown recycling boxes, the pervading aroma is poor: it includes cooking smells, a hint of sewage and air freshener.

  But she is happy: she has Nick. She undresses quickly, leaving a carefree trail of clothes behind her. The bath runs slowly, making protesting noises which are replicated by howls and screeches way back into the walls somewhere. She takes off the remains of her make-up and gets into the water. She’s singing. Water makes her sing.

  ‘You sound happy.’

  ‘Jesus, Josh. Get out.’

  He has a pistol, which he sticks into his mouth.

  ‘No, Josh, no.’

  ‘I loved you.’

  His voice is distorted by the stubby barrel, like someone talking with their mouth full. She is about to be showered with human bits and the bath water will turn pink, as in movies, where terrible things happen to women in water.

  16

  If you saw us from a distance, David thinks, you might not realise that we were brothers.

  Guy is very tall, six foot four, but stooped, as though he has spent a lot of time in books or looking down at the ground. In truth he has done both. He wears rugby shorts of an antique design in a faded blue. His T-shirt is baggy, its tensile qualities long gone, and it is so worn that you can only just make out the logo of a canoeing company, with the Victoria Falls behind it. His shoes, worn with short grey nylon socks, are desert boots, which, he says, are called velskoen: they are made by craftsmen out of kudu hide. By the looks of them, that was some time ago. In television David was supplied with location wear, anoraks, hats, trekking trousers, even when he was delivering a report from the hotel grounds. Guy has no time for this kind of kit.

  David is himself almost six feet tall, but in the past ten days he has been reminded that he grew up in the penumbra of his brother’s great height. They are walking towards a jumble of immense rocks, piled by who knows what forces on top of each other. The rocks appear to be balancing precariously and improbably. At this distance, David sees that they have striations, ferrous red veins like those in a stick of Blackpool Rock. David has never seen a piece of this rock, but it’s possible to have a familiarity with things you have never seen; unread books are an example. His brother has read many books, and closely, but he doesn’t really like anything written since the end of the Great War and its immediate aftermath. He particularly loves Gerard Manley Hopkins.

  From a distance they may not look alike, but close up they have a distinct family resemblance, a misleading nobleness in their biggish, strong faces – good for television – and their blue eyes. Guy’s eyes are more or less closed against the sun, and the possibility of disappointment. He’s had a lot of both in his life, so that now he has a wary look. This trip is a tour d’horizon for Guy, a chance to show his kid brother what has preoccupied and fascinated him for the past forty-five years, and a chance for David to put a very great distance, seven thousand miles, between himself, his son and his son’s wife. Guy’s son, Frans, has told David that his father hasn’t got much time. As a consequence, David has assumed the unaccustomed role of respectful listener. Guy has said that he wants to end his days out here in the Kalahari and David wonders if this trip into
the vast nothingness is a search for a place with the suitable spiritual qualities to receive him. The shimmering middle distance which stands between them and the rock cathedral – Guy calls it an Inselberg, an island mountain – is populated by the tiny figures of springbok. The heat causes their delicate bodies to come in and out of focus; their bodies have no solidity and can easily be seen, in just the way the Bushmen painted them, to be composed of something gaseous. This is a land, despite its dryness, of fluidity: landscapes curve and disappear; rocks turn out on closer inspection to be lizards or tortoises; eagles and hawks glide in the heated air, appearing and disappearing as if they are flying through invisible smoke; whole ranges of mountains change from violet to black, and at sunset muted colours unexpectedly become vivid. At night the stars have a crystalline immediacy, which, it is easy to imagine, carries some message, like the rock paintings.

  Guy is an expert on the rock paintings of the Southern Bushmen, and he has written two, self-published, booklets on their meaning. Academics, David knows, regard them as suspect, because they are far too subjective; Guy believes the paintings reflect the thought processes of the prehistorical world, when people had psychic abilities we have lost. He sees connections with the cave paintings of bison at Lascaux. But Guy says that academics are only interested in academic theory: they seldom get to the core of things. Guy, by contrast, with the help of Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley, sees that at the core of everything lies spirituality; and he knows how to get there, although he hasn’t finally arrived.

  ‘Take the Bushman, for example. He’s out here in this vast, apparently empty, landscape. At the very edges of it, he sees the white man and the cattle-owning tribes. These people have no understanding of the delicate beauty of the Bushman cosmos. They don’t see that the Bushman in his own estimation – and mine, by the way – is part of this cosmos. He is both in and of nature. Do you follow me?’

  He doesn’t wait for an answer.

  ‘The Bushman is our link to a time when none of us could separate himself from nature. When we walked around digging for grubs and gathering berries or snaring small animals. I call this the Bushman sacrament, what Hopkins called the real presence. For Hopkins it was just as much in nature as in the traditional sacraments.’

  David tries to interrupt.

  ‘No, wait a minute, this is interesting.’

  ‘I can’t wait. There’s a yellow snake just there.’

  ‘Snake? Where?’

  ‘Just there, there, right in front of us.’

  ‘Shit. That’s a Cape cobra. That’s what killed Rusty. You bastard.’

  The snake rears up as Guy attacks it with his stick. He hits it on its olive-yellow head, and the creature lies, writhing hopelessly, its head a pulp.

  ‘Why did you kill it, Guy?’

  ‘I hate cobras. One of these bastards killed my dog. I went everywhere with Rusty for twelve years.’

  ‘What happened to the sacramental presence in nature?’

  ‘Look, I hate fucking snakes, all right?’

  David has tried to talk to his brother about his finances. Landlords, ex-wives – two of three are still alive – children, the taxman, all are after him. He needs medical care but he let his insurance lapse years ago, and his car is by now a hen coop in the town of Upington. He insisted on driving it all the way from Cape Town, about seven hundred miles, even though David offered to pay for a hire car. Some miles before Upington, in a place called, appropriately, Allesverloren – everything lost – the car stopped for ever. It was towed into Upington by a man with a pickup. He appeared to have Bushman blood himself – high cheekbones, little distinct twists of hair on his small head, and determinedly non-committal eyes, which had difficulty with short- to medium-range objects. He had two goats tethered in the back, looking calmly out, apparently suffering from déjà vu. Guy spoke to him in Afrikaans. When they got to Upington he asked David to give him some money to pay the man, whose name was Witbooi.

  ‘I’ll pay you back. But I think we should be generous. All his goats have died, except for these two.’

  Witbooi took the money silently and folded it with a certain fastidiousness. The unimpressionable goats looked on without interest.

  ‘Why don’t we just leave the car here, Guy?’

  ‘What’s with you? Are you crazy? This is a fantastic car. I’ve been to the Kunene River in it.’

  ‘It’s fucked, Guy.’

  ‘Look, my little brother, while you were trying to be an actor and then reading the news and so on, I was here, on the ground with real people. In the last more than forty years you would expect me to have picked up some knowledge of practical matters. This car is good for another ten years. It just needs a rebore.’

  David sees that Guy has a fondness for the language of the common man: rebore, pistons, drive shaft, valves, the viscosity of oil. Strangely, for such a practical man, after the car had its first puncture a few miles from Cape Town, he managed to graze his knuckles badly on the wheel rim when the wrench slipped. David had already noted that he was using the wrong attachment, but said nothing. Then the jack folded and the hub was resting on the road, bent. All the way to Upington there had been an elliptical message coming from the rear wheel. The car was declared dead by a mechanic in Upington and they now have a hired four-wheel-drive Toyota Land Cruiser. Guy said that it was rubbish, the sort of flashy affair they rented to tourists. He seems, however, to have become quite attached to it since. Yesterday he declared it a fantastic vehicle. He is very promiscuous with his affections in the mechanical world. David thinks he can see why his wives left him.

  They walk on, leaving the corpse of the snake, already under siege from lines of ants, ball-biters, according to his brother – ‘Absolutely fucking lethal if you are wearing shorts. They go straight for the nuts.’

  Opportunistic feeders – testicles one day, cobras the next.

  The unlikely pile of rocks ahead is indeed an island mountain on the flat plain, probably 1,000 feet high. The afternoon sun is losing its harsh glare, so that shadows are appearing on the striated rocks, and David can now see that the slopes below – beyond the knots of springbok, which are moving away from their line of approach, ambling with the occasional anxious glance in their direction – are covered with what looks like a forest of menorahs. In 1966 he saw a menorah on the Arch of Titus in Rome, commemorating the objects in the booty brought to Rome after the sacking of Herod’s temple in 70 ad. It struck him much later that this arch signalled a tragedy, both in the scattering of the Jewish people and in the looting and destruction of other people’s sacred objects. In Afghanistan he saw what the Taliban had done to the Buddhas of Bamiyan. In all his years as a correspondent he had never seen anything that demonstrated so depressingly a contempt for the art, culture and hopes of transcendence of others. Doomed to disappointment these hopes may be, but this longing is in the fibres of human existence.

  ‘Guy, what are those branchy plants on the hills?’

  ‘“Towery city and branchy between towers; cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed ...” That is the quiver tree or kokerboom, once the material favoured by the !Kung Bushmen for making quivers. It is actually a succulent.’

  As they trudge onwards, the mountain is beginning to take colour and now they can hear the harsh barking of baboons.

  ‘This up ahead was to Bushmen what Chartres would have been to the locals in 1220. Just wait, you will be amazed, my lad.’

  David sees that his brother lives very keenly in this world. It has come home to him in the last few days that, far from being here to save Guy from his foolishness and improvidence, he is here as a younger brother to pay his respects and learn something in the process. From Frans’s email he knows something of his brother’s financial and health problems, but not once on this trip has his brother mentioned his lack of money or his health.

  He has, however, mentioned David’s health.

  ‘You’re too thin. What happened? Cancer? Is
that why you’re here?’

  ‘No. I came to see you. We’re both getting on.’

  ‘Nothing to do with Frans, I suppose?’

  ‘No, he wrote saying we should get together.’

  ‘Before it is too late?’

  ‘Actually, that was in the back of my mind anyway.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’

  ‘Guy, I’m absolutely fine.’

  ‘Good. You walk a little slowly, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

  ‘Oh, sorry. I’ll stride out.’

  But after a few minutes he said, ‘David, I just want to say I’m very sorry I couldn’t come to Nancy’s funeral.’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  David had sent him a plane ticket, but he never used it. For the past week he has felt an obligation to stride out. Guy doesn’t believe in using the hired four-wheel drive off-road at all. He prefers to leave it at remote farms and villages where he is known. He bestows generous tips, with David’s money, on smallholders and people with no obvious activity. The recipients seem cowed and depressed. Not even the money cheers them up.

  ‘David, what you are going to see here is one of the finest examples of Bushman rock painting that I know. Not many white people have seen this.’

  The baboon protests are more frequent, but coming from a higher altitude in the mountain. David imagines a querulous rather than a nervous tone to their cries.

  ‘This is a place that all the Bushman families – I actually prefer to call them camps – for hundreds of miles around visited once a year or more. They came from hell and gone. There’s always water here. It soaks slowly down through the granite and sandstone of the Inselberg, comes out into a large underground basin, and flows through that into the sand. These families, by the way, are really groups of people who live together. They move around – less and less every year – and strangers join them. Sometimes they meet with other groups, and this place was one of their favourites. None of the Bushman camps I know remembers how to paint any longer. It’s all gone. Gone, gone, all gone. It’s a tragedy, because with it their ties to the spiritual world are going, too. And that, my bro, is terrible. A whole belief system, a complete explanation for sickness, health, fertility, hunting, the role of spirit animals has gone. And so is the urge to depict them. To me it’s just helluva depressing. Nobody really cares, except for some bullshit-invented Bushman sayings you find in safari lodges by the bed, next to the goodnight chocolate.’