Cloud Walker, All Fools' Day, Far Sunset

by Cooper, Edmund

  And there were two .45 revolvers, a small .38 and an ancient .303 rifle together with boxes of ammunition. There were also several hand-grenades and a stack of perhaps thirty five-gallon cans of petrol together with a very large drum of paraffin. There were also trousers and jackets of varying shapes and sizes, shirts, shoes, socks, bottles of beer, wine and spirits, rat traps, a tin of strychnine, a small astronomical telescope, reels of cotton, balls of wool, a few bales of printed cloth, more books, a first-aid kit and a bottle of chloroform, a sack of potatoes (some of which were sprouting), two violins, a box of soap tablets and a few tins of cigarettes.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ breathed Liz, surveying the treasures. ‘You must have had a hard job getting this lot together.’

  ‘The squirrel mentality,’ said Greville. ‘You won’t believe it, but the only thing I had to shoot anybody for was the telescope. I took it from what was left of a junk-shop in Norwich. An old man saw me and started popping off with a shotgun. I couldn’t get out of the place unless I shot back. He peppered me and it hurt so much and I got so mad that I damn near blew his head off … People die for the oddest things, you know. And the joke is I didn’t really want the telescope anyway. It was just something to carry.’

  ‘Have you ever used it?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then we shall use it some night when the sky is clear. And you’ll set it up and I can look at the moon.’

  ‘What the hell for?’

  ‘To give an old man in Norwich a reason for dying,’ she said simply.

  It did not take long to complete the tour of inspection of Greville’s cottage. Liz looked at his books and at his large collection of records and at the twelve-volt record player that had been a major prize of an early scrounging expedition.

  ‘Will it really work?’ she asked, fingering it in obvious delight.

  ‘Try it and see.’

  Liz chose a Strauss record – the Emperor Waltz – and the music seemed to fill the cottage, briefly shutting out time, transnormality and all the bitter memories of recent years. After the Strauss she tried another record, a song, this time, which she remembered having heard as a child. The name of the singer, Marlene Dietrich, meant nothing to Liz; but the song, Where Have All The Flowers Gone, brought tears to her eyes.

  Greville remained unmoved – or gave the appearance of remaining unmoved. He did not want Liz to think that he was a push-over for such sentimental nonsense.

  The morning wore on. They both became hungry. Because it was too wet to go out shooting and because there was no fresh meat or vegetables in the larder, Greville permitted himself the luxury of opening cans.

  For lunch they had soup and baked beans and pineapple. And because it was somehow a special sort of day, Greville went really reckless and opened one of his three remaining bottles of Asti Spumante.

  The wine relaxed them. Greville yawned and looked through the window at the low grey sky and the smooth curtain of rain. It fascinated him.

  ‘A raindrop,’ he said suddenly and disconcertingly, ‘is like a glass cathedral. It’s a place for worship. One ought to be small enough to walk inside and drown in liquid prayer.’

  ‘Raindrops fall,’ Liz pointed out. ‘They get destroyed.’

  Greville hiccupped and shook his head. ‘They change, that’s all. Then somehow or other they get back to the ocean and back again into the sky … Perpetual motion … Perpetual prayer … Let’s go to bed. I’m tired.’

  A flicker of apprehension passed over Liz’s face. She was remembering the soreness between her legs, and she was also remembering the previous night.

  Greville laughed. ‘Not for that,’ he said. ‘Enough is as good as a feast. We’ll be chaste little children taking our after-lunch naps. Hell, what else is there to do? We can’t bloody well go out and save the world.’

  ‘I’ll clear the table first,’ said Liz.

  ‘You’ll come to bed. Suburban efficiency doesn’t suit you.’

  ‘Do I strip?’

  ‘Do what the hell you like. I’m stripping. I feel better that way.’

  ‘Can we listen to some music?’

  ‘No. I want to sleep.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Liz, eyeing the record player. ‘I suppose there’s plenty of time.’

  Greville pretended to be irritated. ‘Put some bloody music on, then, if that’s what you want. But turn the volume down.’

  Liz looked through the records as she took off her clothes. She found the Italian Symphony and put it on. Then she went into the bedroom. Greville had already closed his eyes. But when she got into bed he put his hand on her breast and let it lie there lightly.

  ‘Maybe it’s as well I didn’t let the dogs have you,’ he murmured drowsily. ‘Just possibly you might teach me how to become human.’

  Liz said nothing. She was lost in the strangely sad gaiety of Mendelssohn. She didn’t so much listen to the music as inhale it, each breath drawing her deeper into a sea of unbeing with the insistence of an anaesthetic.

  She was asleep long before the record ended. So was Greville. Despite the rain and the proximity of each other, they both slept profoundly. Greville was the first to wake, by which time it was already growing dark. He looked at Liz in the dim light and was suddenly and unaccountably afraid. He wanted to kill her or run away from her – or both. His hand was still on her breast; but the impulse to let it slide up and fasten tightly round her neck was sudden and fierce.

  He tried to control it and couldn’t.

  Of its own volition, apparently, the hand started to move.

  Liz woke. She looked at him. The hand had already reached her neck.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said softly. ‘You can do what you like.’ There was no fear in her voice.

  Greville laughed shakily. The spell was broken. ‘It’s still raining,’ he said. ‘Damned if I can remember when it last rained as long as this … Let’s get up.’

  THIRTEEN

  The first entry in Greville’s diary was written late that evening when the rain had stopped and when Liz, having satiated herself with an orgy of music, was indulging in such domestic activities as remaking the bed and clearing away the remains of a late meal. The diary itself was an old school exercise book that Greville had found in a deserted cottage. The uneven and faded writing on the cover proclaimed it to be the English Book of one Robert Andrew Cherry, age 11. Robert Andrew Cherry, who was doubtless long since dead, had also obligingly supplied the date on which he had received his English Book: 30 April 1972.

  Whatever had happened to the boy must have happened soon afterwards for he had only managed to do three short pieces of work. One of these was an essay entitled What I want to be when I grow up. It was the essay that had made Greville want to keep the book.

  ‘When I grow up,’ Robert Cherry had written, ‘I want to be a man who writes stories. I would write good stories. I would not write children’s stories. I would write stories that would be read by lots of grown-ups. Then I would be famous. I would have a red car and a big house and my wife would be very proud because I was famous. I would write stories about spaceships and distant planets. Some of my stories would be made into films. Then I would be rich and would not have to work anymore. I would let my father live with me and look after the garden. Then he would be too busy to be unhappy because my mother is dead. I would give my father a red car, too, but he cannot drive.’

  Greville had kept the book because Robert Cherry, doubtless a victim – direct or indirect – of the Radiant Suicide, was also the ghost of Greville’s own childhood. That was how it had once been …

  Now the unused pages of Robert Cherry’s English Book were to be put to use at last. Greville considered tearing out the essay and the two spelling exercises that followed it. Then he decided against it. Instead he turned the book upside down so that it was back to front.

  He found a pencil and, after a few moments’ thought, he wrote at the top of the pages: ‘For Robert – who would hav
e known better.’

  Then he made the first entry:

  ‘8 July 1981 (give or take a little). Day Two for certain. Yesterday I kept a rendezvous – dead drunk – with Pauline on Chelsea Bridge. I also cheated the dogs of a breakfast called Liz.

  ‘The girl is good for nothing, as she puts it, but screwing. And she’s had plenty of that. But somehow she’s still oddly innocent. She wants to go looking for a twin sister; and I have an idea that I’ll do my damnedest to stop her … What was it that overrated poet once said? “Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still”.

  ‘I don’t know about sitting still, but I’d like to have the first bit. Last night I “screwed” Liz – the first in a long time. Tonight I almost killed her. Liz has life, and maybe I’m envious of life. Whatever happens to her there’s always the cheap little consolation that but for me she would have been dead anyway …

  ‘It’s been raining all day. I can’t remember when it last rained all day. And because of that I have a crazy thought at the back of my mind that history is being lost. My history. The rain has made me realise that I still have the greatest vanity. I don’t want my history to be lost. This is my bid for immortality – by courtesy of the rain and Robert Cherry. And so to bed.’

  But Greville didn’t immediately go to bed. The rain had stopped, the sky had cleared and Liz had finished her work. She wanted to go out for a breath of air. So he took her round the tiny island. And they gazed at the lake and the faint patina of stars in a high washed sky. And before they came back to the cottage he kissed her. He had screwed her already. Already he had wanted to kill her. But this was the first time he had kissed her. He was surprised to find that, oddly, it hurt like a knife.

  They went to bed chastely and lay close together with an oddly impersonal tenderness. For a time they made desultory conversation in subdued voices, almost as if they were afraid of being overheard. Greville had been troubled by that kiss. He was still troubled – so, experimentally, he tried again. And again it hurt.

  It was not so much a pain as a terrible tightness. The tightness started in his chest and seemed to wind round his body until his breathing became shallow and he could feel a faint dampness of perspiration on his head. In the darkness his thoughts began to turn to Pauline. He did not want to think of Pauline. But the struggle was a hard and conscious one; and the tightness spread from his body into the muscles of his legs and arms.

  Liz was aware of his tension but she did not remark upon it. She had been with many men who had betrayed their stresses in various ways. She prided herself on being able to take things as they came; and for the time being she had found comfort, security and companionship. There was, she felt, nothing more that one could hope for – except that whenever death came, as it inevitably would, it would be a quick and easy one.

  Presently, still holding each other, they each fell into an uneasy sleep. Liz had nightmares, and once she woke up screaming. She dreamt that she was in a cage, naked, in a large and rather foul-smelling room. She dreamt that tit-bits of food were being thrown to her between the bars and that she was given a bowl from which to drink. But when she drank the liquid burned her throat. Presently the door opened and men came into the cage. They were large and coarse and hot with lust. They began to do things to her, and the dreadful thing was that she could not struggle. And the even more dreadful thing was that she began to like it. She hated the foul breath, the grunts, the weight, the sudden spasms of pain. She hated the way her limbs were responding, the way her mouth opened, the way her breasts began to work against her like independent saboteurs. She loathed the whole horrible situation; but somehow she did not want it to end.

  And it was the feeling that there were forces making her like what she hated that caused her to scream.

  Greville shook her and slapped her. The screams dissolved into moans, and the moans became translated into an uncontrollable sobbing. Presently she felt exhausted and empty. Presently she slept once more – with Greville holding her so tight that his arms began to ache. Morning was a long time coming.

  When it came, it was as if – apart from a lingering freshness – the deluge of the previous day might never have been. The sun rose into a clear blue sky. And Day Three, as Greville later recorded in his diary, was the happiest time he had ever known in his life. Despite the years of transnormality and hardship, despite the multi-megadeath of normal man, despite the recent excursion into a London of the dead and dying, despite homicidal teenagers, humiliation and ambush, Greville felt as if he did not have a care in the world.

  After breakfast – and, as he told himself, simply to cheer Liz up – he proposed a picnic. A further extravagant onslaught was made on the wine and tinned goods. Then they rowed ashore while the sun was still low in the sky, and Greville showed Liz the churchyard where Augustus Rowley was buried.

  Together they read the inscription below the marble statue:

  To the undying memory of Augustus Rowley, visionary, philosopher and man of letters. Born 1833: died 1873 of languishment and a profound melancholy. He here awaits the vindication of time and circumstance, secure in the belief that he accurately interpreted the call of his Maker.

  Liz uncorked the wine. ‘To Augustus Rowley, guardian and patron saint of all good transies.’ She drank from the bottle and handed it to Greville.

  ‘To Augustus,’ he said, ‘without whose vision and philosophy two transies at least would have been considerably the poorer.’

  They spent the whole day in the churchyard. They read some more epitaphs and then made love in the long grasses of high summer between a tablet commemorating the interment of Abigail Sarah Busterd, gathered unto her Lord in 1909, and James Jolly, called from on high in 1923.

  Afterwards they slept peacefully and tranquilly though Greville’s hand remained at all times on his shot-gun. Then they woke, read some more epitaphs and drank some more wine. They were not disturbed, and in the heat of the afternoon they bathed in the hypnotic glare of the sun and talked happily and freely of a world that each of them found difficult to remember. Finally, and as if to celebrate the continued absence of disaster, they made love yet again in the late afternoon before making their way back to the lake and its island citadel.

  It was a golden day. They saw no one. They were threatened by no predators, human or animal. They could have been alone in the country in an entirely normal world – except that there were no planes to cut the blue sky into slices with their vapour trails and penetrating wedges of noise. Nor were there any cars to transform the weed-covered roads into battlegrounds. Nor were there any sane specimens of officialdom to object to the joyful and carefree desecration of holy ground.

  Before they left the churchyard, Liz made a garland of buttercups and daisies to hang round the marble neck of Augustus Rowley; and Greville carefully balanced the empty wine bottle on the surprisingly flat top of the statue’s head.

  FOURTEEN

  The weather remained fine. The days blended gently into each other. July seemed to have expended its total rainfall in that single downpour. Optimistically, Greville began to think that Liz would eventually lose the silly notion of going off into the deep blue yonder to look for her twin sister. But he reckoned without the nightmares. They came fairly frequently – about every two or three days.

  The girl in the cage, Liz had explained to him in a matter-of-fact way, was not really herself but Jane. Somewhere, the northerners who had stolen her from the Richmond Lot were keeping Jane and treating her on the level of an animal – an animal that was useful for entertainment only. Greville neither believed nor disbelieved in telepathy or telepathic dreams; but he displayed strong scepticism simply in order to counter the sudden fits of restlessness and depression that Liz began to experience. He had found a kind of contentment and a kind of satisfaction that he had not thought could exist. It would come to an end, as all things would come to an end, but he wanted it to last as long as possible.

  Liz was a mass of conflicts. She
was becoming accustomed to Greville. He treated her far better than she had been treated in Richmond; and she was beginning to learn how to deal with his black moods. But there was still the pull of Jane. And there were the nightmares, when, in effect and for a briefly horrible time, she became Jane, experiencing her degradation and the hopelessness of her plight.

  Greville began to devise distractions. There were only ten or twelve people still living in the village of Ambergreave, and only two who were actually dangerous. The rest, by unspoken and common consent, seemed to live on a laissez-faire basis – recognising still a basic pattern of interdependence that the disintegration of society had not wholly destroyed. Greville introduced Liz to the few people with whom he had any dealings and taught her to avoid the cottage where Big Willie Crutchley lived incestuously with his mother and on principle attempted to kill almost anything that moved.

  Big Willie was half-idiot and half-genius. Half-idiot because he only wanted to destroy, and half-genius because he had adapted almost perfectly to the new conditions. Realising that eventually there would be an end to guns and ammunition, Big Willie had taught himself to survive independent of them. He reverted to the primitive approach. For hunting and for personal defence he became expert in the use of sling and crossbow – both devised and manufactured by himself without reference to humanity’s previous experience, for Big Willie could neither read nor write. In the old days he had been inferior; but ten years of Omega radiation had placed him among the surviving élite. For large semi-wild animals such as deer, pigs and bulls, he dug pits and planted sharpened stakes in them. For small creatures such as dogs and cats he devised cunning snares.

  Big Willie and his mother would eat anything – including, so it was said, human beings. But they, too, at least partially accepted the principle of laissez-faire for they had never been known to eat anyone who lived in Ambergreave. And he only fired warning shafts from his crossbow if anybody was so careless as to come too near his pits and traps. Of course, if the warning shafts were ignored …