After a while he sat on a rock. Its coldness was indistinguishable from his own stony chill. He must go down shortly. He gazed out for a last view. The hills looked smooth, alluringly gentle; valleys were trickles of rock. He held up his finger for a red bus to crawl along. Closer to him, red dots were scurrying; ladybirds, condemned to explore the maze of grass-blades, to change course at each intersection. Their mindless urgency dismayed him.
They drew his gaze to the heather. He gazed deep into a tangled clump, at the breathtaking variety of colours, the intricacies of growth. As many must be hidden in each patch of heather: depths empty of meaning, and intended for no eye. All around him plants reproduced shapes endlessly: striving for perfection, or compelled to repeat themselves without end? If his gaze had been microscopic, he would have seen the repetitions of atomic particles, mindlessly clinging and building, possessed by the compulsion of matter to form patterns.
Suddenly it frightened him—he couldn’t tell why. He felt unsafe. Perhaps it was the mass of cloud that had closed overhead like a stone lid. The colours of the summit had turned lurid, threatening. He headed back towards the wood. The faces of sheep gleamed like bone—he had never noticed before how they resembled munching skulls. A group of heads, chewing mechanically, glared white against the sky and kept their gaze on him.
He was glad to cross the stream, though he couldn’t feel the water. He must hurry down before he grew colder. The hush of the woods embraced him. Had a sheep followed him? No, it was only the cry of a decaying trunk. He slipped quickly down the path, which his feet seemed hardly to touch.
The movement of silver-green lattices caged him. Branches and shadows swayed everywhere, entangled. The tips of some of the firs were luminously new. Winds stalked the depths of the forest, great vague forms on creaking stilts. Scents of growth and decay accompanied him. When he grabbed a branch to make sure of his footing, it broke, scattering flakes of lichen.
Again the forest grew too vivid; the trees seemed victims of the processes of growth, sucked dry by the lichen that simultaneously lent them an elaborate patina of life. Wherever he looked, the forest seemed unbearably intricate. How, among all that, could he glimpse initials? Somehow they had seized his attention before he knew what they were. They were carved on a cracked and wrinkled tree: Wendy’s initials, and the man’s.
Or were they? Perhaps they were only cracks in the bark. Of course she and the man might well have climbed up here—but the more Knox squinted, the less clear the letters seemed. He couldn’t recapture the angle of vision at which they had looked unmistakable.
He was still pacing back and forth before the trunk, as though trapped in a ritual, when stealthy movement made him turn. Was it the shifting of grey trees beneath the lowering largely unseen sky? No—it was a cloud or mist, descending swiftly from the summit, through the woods.
He glanced ahead for the path—and, with a shock that seemed to leave him hollow, realised that it was not there. Nor was it visible behind him as far back as the wall of mist. His reluctant fascination with the forest had lured him astray.
He strode back towards the mist, hushing his doubts. Surely the path couldn’t be far. But the mist felt thick as icy water, and blinded him. He found himself slithering on decay towards a fall that, though invisible, threatened to be steep. A grab at a crumbling trunk saved him; but when he’d struggled onto safer ground, he could only retreat towards the tree which he had thought was inscribed.
He must press on, outdistancing the mist, and try to head downwards. Wasn’t there a forest road below, quite close? But whenever he found an easy slope, it would become abruptly dangerous, often blocked by treacherous splintered logs. He was approaching panic. As much as anything, the hollow at the centre of himself dismayed him. He had tended to welcome it when it had grown there, in his marriage and afterwards; it had seemed safe, invulnerable. Now he found he had few inner resources with which to sustain himself.
The mist was only yards away. It had swallowed all the faint sounds of the wood. If he could only hear the stream, or better still a human voice, a vehicle on the forest road—if only he had gone back to the hotel for his whistle and compass— But there was a sound. Something was blundering towards him. Why was he indefinably distressed, rather than heartened?
Perhaps because the mist obscured it as it scuttled down the slope towards him; perhaps because it sounded too small for an adult human being, too swift, too lopsided. He thought of a child stumbling blindly down the decayed slope. But what child would be so voiceless? As it tumbled limping through the mist, Knox suppressed an urge to flee. He saw the object stagger against a misty root, and collapse there. Before he had ventured forward he saw that it was only a rucksack.
Yet he couldn’t quite feel relieved. The rucksack was old, discoloured and patched with decay; mist drained it of colour. Where had it come from? Who had abandoned it, and why? It still moved feebly, as though inhabited. Of course there was a wind: the mist was billowing. Nevertheless he preferred not to go closer. The blurred tentative movements of the overgrown sack were unpleasant, somehow.
Still, perhaps the incident was opportune. It had made him glance upwards for an explanation. He found none—but he caught sight of a summit against the clouds. It wasn’t Barf, for between the confusion of trees he could just distinguish two cairns, set close together. If he could reach them, he ought to be able to see his way more clearly. Was he hearing muffled voices up there? He hoped so, but hadn’t time to listen.
He wasn’t safe yet. The mist had slowed, but was still pursuing him. The slope above him was too steep to climb. He retreated between the trees, avoiding slippery roots that glistened dull silver, glancing upwards constantly for signs of a path. For a while he lost sight of the unknown summit. Only a glimpse of the cairns against the darkening sky mitigated his panic. Were they cairns, or figures sitting together? No, they were the wrong colour for people.
Above him the slope grew steeper. Worse, twilight was settling like mist into the woods. He glared downhill, but the fall was dim and precipitous; there was no sign of a road, only the grey web of innumerable branches. He groped onwards, careless of his footing, desperate to glimpse a way. Surely a path must lead to the cairns. But would he reach it before dark? Could he heave himself up the slope now, using trees for handholds? Wait: wasn’t that a path ahead, trailing down between the firs? He stumbled forward, afraid to run in case he slipped. He reached out to grab a tree, to lever himself past its trap of roots. But his fingers recoiled—the encrusted glimmering bark looked unnervingly like a face.
He refused to be reminded of anyone. He clung to the hollow within himself and fought off memories. Yet as he passed close to the next tree, he seemed to glimpse the hint of a face composed of cracks in the bark, and of twilight. His imagination was conspiring with the dimness, that was all—but why, as he grasped a trunk to thrust himself onward, did each patch of lichen seem to suggest a face? The more closely he peered, enraged by his fears, the smaller and more numerous the swarming faces seemed. Were there many different faces, or many versions of a couple? Their expressions, though vague, seemed numerous and disturbing.
For a moment he was sure that he couldn’t back away—that he must watch until the light was entirely gone, must glimpse faces yet smaller and clearer and more numerous. Panic hurled him away from the lichen and sent him scrabbling upwards. His fingers dug into decay; ferns writhed and snapped when he grabbed them; the surrounding dimness teemed with faces. He kicked himself footholds, gouged the earth with his heels. He clutched at roots, which flaked, moist and chill. More than once he slithered back into the massing darkness. But his panic refused to be defeated. At last, as twilight merged the forest into an indistinguishable crowd of dimness, he scrambled up a slope that had commenced to be gentle, to the edge of the trees.
As soon as he had done so, his triumph collapsed beneath dismay. Even if he glimpsed a path from the summit, night would engulf it before he could make his way down. The
sky was blackening. Against it loomed two hunched forms, heads turned to him. Suddenly joy seized him. He could hear voices—surely the sound was more than the muttering of wind. The two forms were human. They must know their way down, and he could join them.
He scrambled upwards. Beyond the trees, the slope grew steep again; but the heather provided easy holds, though his clambering felt almost vertical. The voices had ceased; perhaps they had heard him. But when he glanced up, the figures hadn’t moved. A foot higher, and he saw that the faces turned to him were patches of moss; the figures were grey, composed roughly of fragments of slate. They were cairns, after all. It didn’t matter: companionship waited at the summit; he’d heard voices, he was sure that he’d heard them, please let him have done so. And indeed, as he struggled up the last yards of the slope, the two grey figures rose with a squeaking and rattling of slate, and advanced heavily towards him.
Baby
When the old woman reached the shops Dutton began to lag farther behind. Though his hands were as deep in his pockets as they could go, they were shaking. It’s all right, he told himself, stay behind. The last thing you want is for her to notice you now. But he knew he’d fallen behind because he was losing his nerve.
The November wind blundered out of the side streets and shook him. As he hurried across each intersection, head trembling deep in his collar, he couldn’t help searching the doorways for Tommy, Maud, even old Frank, anyone with a bottle. But nobody sat against the dull paint of the doors, beneath the bricked-up windows; nothing moved except tangles of sodden paper and leaves. No, he thought, trying to seize his mind before it began to shake like his body. He hadn’t stayed sober for so long to lapse now, when he was so close to what he’d stayed sober for.
She’d drawn ahead; he was four blocks behind now. Not far enough behind. He’d better dodge into the next side street before she looked back and saw him. But then one of the shopkeepers might see him hiding and call the police. Or she might turn somewhere while he was hiding, and he would lose her. The stubble on his cheeks crawled with sweat, which clung to the whole of his body; he couldn’t tell if it was boiling or frozen. For a couple of steps he limped rapidly to catch up with the old woman, then he held himself back. She was about to look at him.
Fear flashed through him as if his sweat were charged. He made himself gaze at the shops, at the stalls outside: water chestnuts, capsicums, aubergines, dhal—the little notices on sticks said so, but they were alien to him; they didn’t help him hold on to his mind. Their price flags fluttered, tiny and nerve-racking as the prickling of his cheeks.
Then he heard the pram. Its sound was deep in the blustering of the wind, but it was unmistakable. He’d heard it too often, coming towards the house, fading into the room below his. It sounded like the start of a rusty metal yawn, abruptly interrupted by a brief squeal, over and over. It was the sound of his goal, of the reason why he’d stayed sober all night. He brought the pockets of his coat together, propping the iron bar more securely against his chest inside the coat.
She had reached the maze of marshy ground and broken houses beyond the shops. At last, Dutton thought, and began to run. The bar thumped his chest until it bruised. His trousers chafed his thighs like sandpaper, his calves throbbed, but he ran stumbling past the morose shoppers, the defiantly cheerful shopkeepers, the continuing almost ghostly trade of the street. As soon as she was out of sight of the shops, near one of the dilapidated houses, he would have her. At once he halted, drenched in sweat. He couldn’t do it.
He stood laughing mirthlessly at himself as newspapers swooped at him. He was going to kill the old woman, was he? Him, who hadn’t been able to keep a job for more than a week for years? Him, who had known he wasn’t going to keep a job before he started working at it, until the social security had reluctantly agreed with him? Him, who could boast of nothing but the book he cashed weekly at the post office? He was going to kill her?
His mind sounded like his mother. Too much so to dishearten him entirely: it wasn’t him, he could answer back. He remembered when he’d started drinking seriously. He’d felt then that if the social security took an interest in him he would be able to hold down a job; but they hadn’t bothered to conceal their indifference, and soon after that they’d given him his book. But now it was different. He didn’t need anyone’s encouragement. He’d proved that by not touching a drink since yesterday afternoon. If he could do that, he could do anything.
He shoved past a woman wheeling a pramful of groceries, and ran faster to outdistance the trembling that spread through his body. His shoes crackled faintly with the plastic bags in which his feet were wrapped. He was going to kill her, because of the contemptuous way she’d looked at him in the hall, exactly as his mother had used to; because while he was suffering poverty, she had chosen worse and flaunted her happiness; because, although her coat had acquired a thick hem of mud from trailing, though the coat gaped like frayed lips between her shoulders, she was always smiling secretly, unassailably. He let the thoughts seep through his mind, gathering darkly and heavily in the depths. He was going to kill her—because she looked too old for life, too ugly and wizened to live; because she walked as if to do so were a punishment; because her smile must be a paralysed grimace of pain, after all; because her tuneless crooning often kept him awake half the night, though he stamped on her ceiling; because he needed her secret wealth. She had turned and was coming back towards him, past the shops.
His face huddled into his collar as he stumbled away, across the road. That was enough. He’d tried, he couldn’t do more. If circumstances hadn’t saved him he would have failed. He would have been arrested, and for nothing. He shifted the bar uneasily within his coat, anxious to be rid of it. He gazed at the burst husk of a premature firework, lying trampled on the pavement. It reminded him of himself. He turned hastily as the old woman came opposite him, and stared in a toy-shop window.
An orange baby with fat wrinkled dusty joints stared back at him. Beside it, reflected in a dark gap among the early Christmas toys and fireworks for tomorrow night, he saw the old woman. She had pushed her pram alongside the greengrocer’s stall; now she let it go. Dutton peered closer, frowning.
He was sure she hadn’t pushed the pram before letting go. Yet it had sped away, past the greengrocer’s stall, then halted suddenly. He was still peering when she wheeled it out of the reflection, into the depths full of toys. He began to follow her at once, hardly shaking. Even if he hadn’t needed her wealth to give him a chance in life, he had to know what was in that pram.
What wealth? How did he know about it? He struggled to remember. Betty, no, Maud had told him, the day she hadn’t drunk too much to recall. She’d read about the old woman in the paper years ago: about how she’d been swindled by a man whom nobody could trace. She’d given the man her money, her jewels, her house, and her relatives had set the police on him. But then she had been in the paper herself, saying she hadn’t been swindled at all, that it was none of their business what she’d gained from the trade; and Maud supposed they’d believed her, because that was the last she had seen of the woman in the paper.
But soon after that Maud had seen her in town, wheeling her pram and smiling to herself. She’d often seen her in the crowds, and then the old woman had moved into the room beneath Dutton, older and wearier now but still smiling. “That shows she got something out of it,” Maud said. “What else has she got to smile about? But where she keeps it, that’s the thing.” She’d shown Dutton a bit she had kept of the paper, and it did look like the old woman, smiling up from a blot of fluff and sweat.
The old woman had nearly reached home now. Dutton stumbled over a paving stone that had cracked and collapsed like ice on a pool. The iron bar nudged his chest impatiently, tearing his skin. Nearly there now. He had to remember why he was doing this. If he could hold all that in his mind he would be able to kill her. He muttered; his furred tongue crawled in his mouth like a dying caterpillar. He must remember.
He’d gone into her room one day. A month ago, two? Never mind! he thought viciously. He’d been drunk enough to take the risk, not too drunk to make sense of what he’d found. He’d staggered into the house and straight into her room. Since he knew she didn’t lock the door, he’d expected to find nothing; yet he was astonished to find so little. In the strained light through the encrusted window, stained patches of wallpaper slumped and bulged. The bed knelt at one corner, for a leg had given way; the dirty sheets had slipped down to conceal the damage. Otherwise the room was bare, no sign even of the pram. The pram. Of course.
He had tried to glimpse what was in the pram. He’d pressed his cheek against his window whenever he heard her approaching, but each time the pram’s hood was in the way. Once he’d run downstairs and peered into the pram as she opened her door, but she had pulled the pram away like a chair in a practical joke, and gazed at him with amazement, amusement, profound contempt.
And last week, in the street, he’d been so drunk he had reeled at her and wrenched the pram’s handle from her grasp. He’d staggered around to look beneath the hood—but she had already kicked the pram, sending it sailing down a canted side road, and had flown screaming at him, her nails aimed straight for his eyes. When he’d fallen in the gutter she had turned away, laughing with the crowd. As he had pushed himself unsteadily to his feet, his hand deep in sodden litter, he was sure he’d glimpsed the pram halting inches short of crashing into a wall, apparently by itself.
He had decided then, as his hand slithered in the pulp. In his mind she’d joined the people who were laughing inwardly at him: the social security, the clerks in the post office. Only she was laughing aloud, encouraging the crowd to laugh. He would kill her for that. He’d persuaded himself for days that he would. She’d soon have no reason to laugh at his poverty, at the book he hid crumpled in his hand as he waited in the post office. And last night, writhing on his bed amid the darkly crawling walls, listening to her incessant contented wailing, he’d known that he would kill her.
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