To Heaven by Water

by Justin Cartwright

  He attempts a mellifluous, persuasive voice.

  ‘“This lodge honours the Kagalagadi family of !Kung who lived here for thousands of years. When you sleep, remember this saying, that night is just a blink in the great hunt of life. Sweet dreams.” All crap. All the locals were bought off with a little money, lots of drink and the promise of jobs. But of course the jobs went to others.’

  They have now reached the forest of quiver trees, which have a subdued baize sheen, not unlike the colour of the deceased cobra. Some of the trees are 20 or 30 feet high. Each tree maintains a distinct distance from its neighbours, so that they look as if they have been placed deliberately in the landscape. David’s idea of landscape has changed over the past weeks. Following his brother’s lead, he looks forward to every new vista, every pile of distant rocks, every dry watercourse, as though they have an obligation to record, for unknown purposes, a mental map. And perhaps, David thinks, people go to art galleries out of the same impulse, to see and to assimilate unique and possibly significant images. As they walk up the slope and enter the quiver-tree forest, the forest made of green menorahs, he can see why this could well have been a place of special importance to wandering Bushmen, stepping ever so lightly on the vast plains, where not a single road or building had ever existed. Even now there are miles and miles of nothing, and it is this nullity in which David is happily losing himself with his crazy brother, who seems saner with every passing day.

  Beyond the quiver trees the rocks, which at a distance seemed to have been dumped at random on to the plain, rise way above them. Close to, he sees that they are minutely pitted and coloured. They remind David of urns in country-house gardens, as though lichens have colonised them. But the colours seem to contain particles of brown quartz and red pimento and fragments of coral; in other places they look like Turkish delight, with embedded pistachio nuts. The Bushmen knew how to make their paints out of ferrous oxide and ochre, says Guy. Some of the rocks have the geological version of the noble rot you see on French cheese, little veins and squiggles, and Roquefort-blue lines, like veins in an old man’s legs. Like the veins, in fact, on the inside of Guy’s sturdy, indefatigable calves.

  They stride up the slope. Above them the baboons have become derisive: they can see what they are up against and it’s no great shakes, just two old men, unarmed, harmless. A mass attack by baboons would be terrifying, but Guy says they are impressed by height. He has in mind, of course, his own impressive stature. He’s the deterrent. Throughout his life his size has given him an unearned distinction, which at last David doesn’t begrudge him.

  Now they are passing between two piles of enormous rocks and into a narrow valley between cliffs, which seem to have been neatly sliced on their facing surfaces. The air in here is much cooler. Guy says that this is the nave. He clearly sets some store by the cathedral comparison, as if to say look, it’s not just in Europe that true spiritual values can be found. One side of the rock cleft is in deep shadow. The further in they go, the cooler it becomes. At the end of this corridor into the mountains is the entrance of a huge cave, curving away upwards, like the lip of an enormous oyster shell.

  ‘This is the choir, I like to think. That’s where they painted and made their fires. When I first came here, shit, twenty, thirty years ago, I found a small group camped. There is no sign that anyone has been here recently.’

  Ahead of them is a pool of water, extending into the cave.

  ‘We have to wade through it. Keep those fancy boots on.’

  The water is very cold. Pairs of small frogs float on the dusty surface, locked in loveless sexual embraces. There is a piano sonata accompaniment of dripping water. On the other side of the water, they climb out on to a large, flat rock surface with an overhanging roof. The roof is decorated with hundreds of figures of animals: eland, in white and brown, springbok and kudu, says Guy.

  ‘Leave your pack here.’

  Guy gets a flashlight out and leads his brother deeper into the cave. He shines the light high on to the wall above them and reveals a scene of astonishing beauty and poignancy: a figure lies dying – Guy says – his cloak, properly called a kaross, spread out around him, while a medicine man, blood streaming from his nose, sings to him to activate his spirit. Around these two central figures is a group of men and women dancing. This is a trance dance. Some of the men wear cloaks and headdresses and at the bottom of this extraordinary scene is a huge white-and-brown picture of an eland, the biggest antelope in Africa. It has white legs and a pendulous dewlap, also white.

  ‘Every time I see this, it gets me,’ says Guy. Sometimes when he recites from Hopkins or Eliot, his eyes also fill and his voice chokes.

  ‘Did you find this, Guy?’

  ‘No, Dr Bleek’s daughter, Dorothea, came here in 1921, but it’s still not properly recorded.’

  Guy has told him about Bleek and his daughter, who made it their life’s work to record Bushman language and legends and to produce the first account of Bushman folklore, as well as a dictionary of sorts.

  ‘There’s a great story about Dorothea Bleek in her old age. An owl came and hooted outside her window. A Bushman friend she told this to said that it was Dr Bleek visiting his children. Isn’t that great? Actually, many African tribes, not just Bushmen, believe that owls have special knowledge. If they hear owls at night they get the elders together to decide what the message is. Why are owls so wise in so many cultures?’

  ‘Perhaps because they look sort of dignified. Scholarly.’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe.’

  But he’s not really interested in David’s opinion. He gazes, with his half-closed eyes, at the vast rock face.

  ‘It cracks me up,’ he says.

  David sees again that his life is an intense search for spiritual, perhaps mystic, experience. He wonders if he should tell him about interviewing the Dalai Lama, for MidWeek Special Report, but he suspects that his brother would not listen. Often when he pretends out of courtesy to listen to David’s stories, his eyes are shifting as if they can’t bear to be detained. It’s a strange, feral look, a wild animal in a box, as though it is unbearable to be confined by someone else’s anecdotes or theories. Most of the world, he says, is drowning in crap. And David thinks that this is certainly a concise summary of the world of television. When David does offer an opinion, Guy usually interrupts to say, ‘But the interesting thing is ...’ before launching into one of his speeches about Hopkins or Bushmen. David has come to think that what his brother is looking for, what he is tormented by, is the grand unified theory that will explain everything in spiritual terms. He’s some way off.

  ‘The interesting thing is that the Bushmen of this area love the eland above all animals. It’s their spirit animal. Animals to them are not a lesser form of life; in fact they think animals evolved from humans. They love animals and respect them. They are actually tender towards prey animals. Just like the American Indians.’ (Guy hasn’t yet caught up with the terms ‘Native Americans’ or ‘First Nation’.) ‘This is why the West thinks it loves the Bushman, because he seems to represent something in tune with nature, part of it, rather than dominating it. The great fucking joke is that it is the same people who pretend to love the Bushman and Chief Joseph and so on who are despoiling the earth. When the American Indian says, “Humankind has not woven the web of life, we are just one thread within it,” I think of Hopkins: “How all’s to one thing wrought.” In fact sometimes it drives me mad, because I see connections everywhere.’

  He does, and he tries to share them with his brother, the lackey of the international media, in the vain hope of redeeming him. Out here, Guy says he sees poor, suffering people praying in simple tin-roofed churches, and he believes that they are closer to God, a lot closer than he will ever be; there’s a turmoil in his heart, and it is the turmoil of the religious person who cannot quite locate God. It’s become more and more obvious to David as they walk, apparently sightseeing on a grand spiritual-artistic tour, that their true purpose is to
tie the loose threads in his brother’s world view. It’s hopeless, but elevating.

  The paintings are astonishing, but David wonders, although he doesn’t say it, if they don’t just record hunts and trance dances and prey animals, something like the visitors’ and fishing books that posh people keep on the hall table: Catch: 2 x brown trout (1lb 6 oz, and 1lb 10 oz) on Priory Beat. Fly: Grey Wulff 14. Rods: Joanna and Roger Milford. Comments: Marvellous fishing and delicious food, as ever. Totally idyllic. Tons of love. Joanna and Rog.

  Yet his mind, far from being cramped by the solitary and elemental nature of their odyssey, has been freed. It’s not always in tune with his brother’s ramblings, but it is steadily ridding itself of anxieties and trivia. Even small tasks like getting the kettle going in the morning give him great satisfaction. As Guy tells him of the huge snake that was reputed to live in the pool of water, David does not ask if it a real snake or a spirit snake. The categories of the real and the imaginary seem to have collapsed. When Guy says it was a shaman’s spirit creature, for some reason he thinks of Rosalie, naked, fervid, in his bed. He sees already, after their ten days of wandering, that there are deep and enduring longings that defy logic; in his brother’s terms, Rosalie’s longing for a child is surely the closest you can come to the sacramental: tiny cells producing a fully formed human being. When he left London he was planning to hide away for some months but now he sees the situation in a different light: if he has been the catalyst for a baby, he has only been the intermediary – the shaman – interceding for Rosalie with the spirits. This would be a difficult concept to explain to Ed – or to anybody else – but his anxiety and guilt have gone. What happened that night was for the best. And it is certainly true that what happened passed in something of a trance.

  ‘The spirit animals, like the rain creatures, are often depicted in fantastical ways; look at this huge python.’

  On and on he goes, and David encourages him because his brother doesn’t have much time to discover the wellsprings of all life.

  Rosalie sat astride him and her long, balletic hair fell all over his face when she kissed him – he was conscious of his expensive dental work, which has been going on for decades – and her exquisite and lively tongue entered his mouth avidly, as though she was seeking every possible connection in the creation of a child. Make me immortal with a kiss. She was Helen to his Faustus. Elizabeth to his Richard. His brother has reminded him that Richard and Elizabeth – ‘your pals that you never stopped talking about’ – remarried at a safari lodge some way north of here. The marriage didn’t last.

  As Guy outlines the role of the shaman, it is to achieve a kind of power, an out-of-body state, in order to help others. When David thinks about Rosalie that night – how much of the night she was there he never discovered – it seems to have become just that, an out-of-body experience, although he can’t pretend that his intentions were selfless at the time. He hopes that Rosalie, too, sees it as having no reality in the material world, and he remembers what she said: ‘It will be our secret. It will have to be, don’t you think?’ He didn’t try to call her in the morning. An icy, constricting guilt had seized him and he had no difficulty denying himself.

  Guy says that they should make a fire here. There is no fuel but they have carried some small sections of ironwood with them from the ramshackle farm ten miles off. After all these years, Guy is as strangely inept with fire-making as he is with mechanics. David has to collect more dried grass – ‘I thought I told you exactly what to get the first time’ – and eventually Guy gets a bright clear fire going, which gives off a surprising heat, but very little smoke. They grill some frozen kudu sausages from the butcher in Upington, a temple of meat, and drink brandy from a small bottle. The sun is going down, luridly and defiantly; it appears to hover indecisively for a moment on the low endless horizon ahead of them before dipping and sending a golden halation back as a reminder of its pomp.

  ‘Shall we have some dagga?’

  ‘Marijuana?’

  ‘Weed. Boom. Durban Poison.’

  ‘OK.’

  Under the heaventree of stars they smoke dope around their small clear fire.

  ‘David, my bro, do you want to go and see the desert elephants?’

  ‘Why not? Where are they?’

  ‘It’s a day’s drive. Maybe two if we go via the salt flats.’

  ‘That is fine by me, bro. Where you lead, I follow. As your pal Hopkins says, I am in my ecstasy.’

  Way above them in the boulders of unexplained provenance, the baboons are complaining. For some reason they become restless as night is falling. Down below, speaking more slowly now, Guy explains that the desert elephants are not a separate species, merely elephants whose emigration routes were cut fifty years ago by farming concessions, and so had to adapt to the desert. David is hardly listening; with the encouragement of the Oude Meester brandy and the Durban Poison, he finds himself back in Rome and he experiences again the kind of ecstasy, the wild joy of possibility, the sense he had then that transcendence is the only purpose of life. He remembers Richard Burton fondly, reverentially, and he sees his ambivalent gaze at Elizabeth, the impossible prize for which he sold his Welsh village soul.

  ‘Have you ever seen anything so lovely, so otherworldly, boy?’ Burton asked, and he hadn’t.

  ‘Guy.’

  Guy breaks off, startled to find he has company.

  ‘Oh, David. Ja?’

  ‘I haven’t been this happy for forty years.’

  ‘I’ll roll another one. You’ll be even happier.’

  ‘No, it’s not the dope, Guy.’

  They have a second joint; each draw reaches deep down.

  ‘Good shit, man,’ David says, only half ironically.

  He sees a connection of his own between Faustus’ necromancy and the Bushman shaman. Now he feels the urge to explain it to Guy: both are medicine men trying to escape the restraints of the physical world. It’s a universal theme. But he’s too late. Guy is talking about the cave paintings of Lascaux, which he wants to see one day.

  And David thinks again, with powerful clarity, of the day when Nancy was led down the corridor to the scanner in a blue gown that fastened at the back, and as the gown parted for a moment he saw her utterly defenceless bottom in white pants. He knew then that it was going to be a death sentence.

  ‘I loved her.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sorry, I was mumbling.’

  ‘You’re crying.’

  ‘It’s the paintings.’

  ‘What a pair of silly bloody arses we are.’

  ‘True. Total arses.’

  I loved Nancy, and I had to come and sit in a bloody cave to know it.

  He laughs, and Guy joins him.

  ‘What a pair of silly, fucking arses.’

  Behind them, the light of their fire falls on spirit animals, shamans and Bushmen, causing them to dance.

  17

  Josh has been admitted to a psychiatric unit as a suicide risk. Ed doesn’t believe he will kill himself, although he thinks that it would be a lot neater for all if he did.

  Yesterday when he rushed to Lucy’s flat, Ed found her shaking violently. He gave her tea with sugar, the British remedy for shock, and put her to bed. She didn’t want a doctor but she wanted him to stay as long as he could. Ed gave the police a name and a description and they had him in custody within an hour. He was in his local, drunk, behaving strangely, with the pistol – a replica – still in his pocket. The landlord had also called the police.

  Lucy said, ‘Ed, how did I get involved in something like this?’

  ‘It’s my fault if it’s anybody’s. I introduced you to Josh, who I really didn’t know that well. And I should have got an order on him the first time.’

  ‘I mean, what have I done to lose my mother, be terrorised by Josh and have my father hide in the Kalahari? Have I done something?’

  It wasn’t rhetorical; she was genuinely puzzled. Under other circumstances this his
tory could have sounded comical, but his sister, lying in her bed, was in deep distress. The skin around her mouth had a purplish hue, the colour of a very new bruise, and the rest of her face was bloodless. He lay on the bed next to her, as if to share some of his surplus body heat, but in fact he too has found the sudden acceleration of their lives into chaos – Alice, Josh, Geneva, Rosalie’s phantom pregnancy – deeply troubling.

  Lucy said, ‘Can you try to speak to Dad?’

  ‘Dad? Dad’s phone doesn’t work in the desert, apparently. Look, Luce, the police will need to speak to you. Are you OK with that? I’ll be with you.’

  ‘I suppose I’ve got to do it.’

  ‘They will want to press charges.’

  ‘Of what? Pretending to kill himself?’

  ‘No, it will be for harassment and possession of a weapon.’

  ‘OK, but you will be here?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Within an hour a woman constable arrived, with a male colleague in body armour, to take a statement. She wanted to know if Josh had threatened her. No. He threatened to kill himself. He put the gun in his mouth. He had harassed her for weeks. The policewoman was thorough and reassuring. She wrote laboriously.

  ‘We’ll get the police surgeon to look at him. He’ll probably section him. He’ll be kept for observation and assessment. Don’t worry, love, sign here.’

  She handed over her card and mobile number.

  ‘Call whenever you like.’

  After they had gone, Lucy asked him to speak to Nick and tell him what had happened.