Breaking Light

by Karin Altenberg

‘No, I suppose not.’

  ‘Ah, I forgot – you’re the boy who doesn’t know where he is and who never knows where he’s going … Where is important to you, isn’t it?’ Rey’s voice was silken soft now.

  ‘No, I don’t care.’ Gabriel shook his head, frowning. Rey had a way of making him feel ridiculous – like a child. He didn’t want to be the kind of person who asked ‘Where?’ Not that he could see why that question was so laughable.

  ‘Well, you can decide where later on. The first thing is to get them out of here without Dr Buster noticing and picking up your trail.’

  ‘Okay; how, then?’

  Rey laughed out loud. ‘Don’t worry, Gabe; I intend to put on a show that will keep Dr Buster occupied for quite some time.’

  ‘Yeah? What about you?’

  ‘What about me? I’ll be gone soon enough.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘That question again. I’ll tell you where: into the labyrinth of life.’

  ‘How will I know when to make a run for it?’

  ‘Don’t worry; you will know.’ Rey shut the book – Troy of the Iliad: Myth or Legend – and stood up. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

  ‘What? Now? I just got back.’

  ‘Don’t be such a milksop. There’s something I want to show you.’

  *

  It was the end of summer but the evening was warm and pleasant and millions of insects swarmed over the heather as the two youths set off across the moor. They followed a stream east with the setting sun warming their necks above their collars. The sweet, resinous smell of bog myrtle was everywhere.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Gabriel asked, regretting it at once.

  Rey just pointed to a rock in the distance. ‘It’s marked on the map as St Michael’s Chapel,’ he said. ‘I was there yesterday. A brilliant place – a ruin.’

  The rock itself tore out of the heath like a canine tooth and, as he got closer, Gabriel began to distinguish the ruins of the chapel, which had been built into the granite, centuries previously, so that now it was almost indistinguishable from the rock. The sun cast long purple shadows, settling into its untidy bed. A single aperture remained in the chapel wall.

  The climb from the foot of the rock was steep; at times, they had to use their hands. Dusk had settled as he pushed through a hole in the chapel wall. It took a while for Gabriel’s eyes to get used to the gloom.

  ‘Wow, this is great.’ His voice was brittle against the compressed shadows. He held his breath and listened. The last warm rays of the setting sun moved a breeze across the moor, which sighed in the broken battlements above. For a moment, there was no other sound.

  ‘Rey?’

  ‘I’m here.’ Rey stepped out from behind a pile of fallen rubble. Part of his face was still in shadow. ‘Isn’t it marvellous?’

  ‘Yeah …’

  ‘Just imagine all the hopes and aspirations that went into building the chapel into the rock. It can’t have been easy, dragging these blocks of stone here … and for what purpose?’ He shook his head. ‘This is what humanity is about: we create things against all the odds.’

  ‘Yes, but we also destroy for no reason. This place –’ Gabriel looked at the ancient stones around him; he listened to the moor wind – ‘it reminds me of … a place up on the moors, near where I grew up. Not far from here. And of what happened there.’ He hesitated, not quite knowing how to advance across such difficult terrain. ‘I did something bad there. Something very bad.’

  The confession hung darkly between them and would not settle. Rey remained silent, so he pushed on. ‘I betrayed my only friend. My – brother.’

  ‘Gabe, we have all done bad things at some time in our lives …’

  ‘Yeah, but not like this.’

  ‘Ah –’ Rey whistled – ‘you’re talking of real shame …’

  He was. Oh, he was – the grey sludge of it and how it threatened to swallow him up, like the mire had swallowed that cow they – he and Michael – had watched as her eyes turned in the grip of death. But, if you couldn’t run away from it, you had to hide from it – always hide from it, as he did now, answering in a steady voice, ‘What are you talking about?’

  He could feel Rey’s eyes on him and stepped back into the shadows.

  ‘There’s a certain vanity in living with shame, you know. You can wrap yourself in its filthy robes and still be quite snug.’ Rey’s voice was soft but it hurt.

  Gabriel was awkwardly aware of his heart, which seemed to have grown too large for its cavity. He found it hard to breathe as he was back again at those other rocks, looking into those eyes. And Michael’s young voice: ‘Don’t let them do this!’ He swallowed and breathed again through the old betrayal.

  ‘What is it that you don’t get, Rey?’ His jaw was stiff with frustration. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ Rey tutted, shaking his head from side to side, humouring him.

  ‘Leave me alone, will you!’ What did Rey know about anything?

  Rey ignored him. ‘It’s possible to get away, you know. To shake off the filth.’

  Gabriel laughed abruptly.

  ‘Gabriel, listen to me. You’re not a bad person, all right?’

  Gabriel had withdrawn further into the shadows. He could smell the familiar rancid stench of self-loathing. Stay away from me. He took a deep breath.

  ‘Gabe?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah …’ Gabriel felt his face twitch; in the twilight, it must have looked like a grimace. He made sure his eyes were hidden in shadows.

  ‘No, listen to me: whatever you did, you’ve got to leave it behind – here, amongst these ruins.’ Rey held out his hands, palms up, in a gesture which was more. It seemed to epitomise all that exasperating, blunt human striving – all the loathsome hopes of his existence. And all the possibilities, the supplications of life.

  ‘No,’ he persisted, sternly.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Leave it. The damage is done. Who do you think you are anyway? I don’t need your bloody absolution.’

  ‘But that’s what I’m trying to tell you – it can be reversed. Doesn’t this place, these ancient man-made walls, instil you with some hope, some sense of wonder and, well, just sense?’

  At this, Gabriel felt a thickening in his throat and had to look away. He stared hard at one of the carved blocks of granite in the chapel wall. He stared, and suddenly he saw in the stone the long, steady marks of the mason’s chisel. And, as he let himself be momentarily distracted by the softness of those furrows ploughed into the stone, there was a loosening inside him, a kind of falling away, and that which had been encrusted there for so long started to disintegrate, slowly turning to silt and being carried away in his blood flow.

  Something swished overhead – a swift returning to its home in the walls, perhaps, or a bat waking up to hunt.

  ‘It’s time to get back, I think. Let’s go,’ Rey said, with unusual tenderness.

  It surprised Gabriel that night had fallen so suddenly. They must have been in the chapel for longer than he imagined. A full moon had risen over the rocks and they had no trouble finding their way down and back on to the heath. They walked in silence, the dark warm between them. When Gabriel looked back after a while, the moon had moved on and the chapel was fading into the shadows, and he suddenly knew that Rey had been saying goodbye, that their friendship would remain here, while they both moved on. It saddened him, and yet how free he felt. How light.

  *

  Sense. The concept puzzled Mr Askew as he tried to sleep at night. Yes, he had found it in those battered ashlars in the chapel on the moor. But then, afterwards? All those years in London, had he managed to hold on to it or had he stopped striving?

  You’re sometimes given a nudge – like a toy boat pushed into water – and you let the push take its course. You hope that the original energy will never run out but you know that, by the laws of physics, it might already have happened and that you will be the las
t one to know. You go on thinking that things are generally fine. And so, for years, you restrain your emotions, relying instead on the momentum of the push. You travel the same route to work, you look down at the pavement, recognising the patterns of slabs and casually accepting the irregularities of manhole covers. Habit is your friend and it closes its doors softly, gently behind you. Then, brutally, something begins to stir and come awake.

  It had been happening for some time now, he knew. The feeling was in his heart, but it was also being pumped around his whole body. Her face was the first thing that surfaced in his mind in the morning, and in the night … well.

  This was such a night. He woke early out of a dream where his eyes had been wide open. Pulling on his dressing gown, he walked downstairs, crossing the hall where the pattern of white and black guided his way, and opened the front door. He stepped outside on to the front lawn and stood still, feeling the dew settling on him like the ghost of rain. He was afraid that waking up would force him to close his eyes, that, once again, he would have to walk with his eyes closed – or blindfolded. But it did not happen. On this morning, he stayed acutely aware of the significance of things around him. It’s a long time since I have been conscious of these things, he thought. The world is making demands of me again. It is threatening to make sense.

  *

  Then there was a terrible accident. No one could claim that it was anything but an accident, but what followed seemed far from fortuitous. At least to Gabriel, who would later remember the unfolding events with eerie clarity.

  It was the end of that long summer and the winds were gathering in the west, bringing gusts of penetrating chill and rainstorms that had gathered force on their passage across the Atlantic.

  When the show finished that night, the site was a field of mud. The tear-down crew was struggling with the big top in the strong wind and the engines of the trucks revved as the wheels failed to grip in the slippery mire. Every now and again, bolts of lightning veined through the dense skin of the night, spotting men in frozen motion like searchlights over a battlefield. In the commotion, Stan was run over by one of the loading trucks. No one heard him scream, but one of the men happened to see his upper body sticking out of the mud and hurried to pull him out. But it was too late. The wheels of the truck had crushed his ribcage and, whilst this had not killed him, he had been pushed, face down, into the mud and rising water, so that he had slowly drowned in silt and his own diluted blood. Who had been driving the truck? In all the commotion, no one seemed to notice the open door of the driver’s cab stuttering in the wind. The engine was still running, the headlights sieving through the static rain, eventually dipping on to another body – a body caught in flight and felled, as if by trip wire, only there was no sign of struggle or interference. When they turned him over, out of the mud, Charlie’s suffocated face wore a ghastly expression. Afterwards, some would say that it was fear – others would describe it as surprise.

  Dr Buster, a wild, yellow glimmer in his eyes, summoned the entire troupe and crew to the food shack for a headcount. Only one other person was missing: Rey.

  ‘Where is that shifty villain, Rey? Get me the bastard, now!’ Dr Buster roared into the wild night.

  ‘His caravan is gone, sir,’ one of the men reported.

  ‘Gone? What do you mean, “gone”? He’s under contract. Where would he go?’

  There was no reply but Dr Buster bellowed on: ‘Do you hear me? Has anyone seen him tonight?’

  The assembled freaks and navvies all shook their heads – no, no one had seen him since that morning. No one, apart from Gabriel, who stayed at the back of the crowd now, slowly easing his way in a circle towards the twins, Mary and Anne. For he was sure he had seen Rey that night. Not face to face. No, nothing as manifest as that. He had glimpsed him out of the corner of his eye. Always at the edge of the light, Rey had appeared, hands deep in his pockets, one leg thrust forward, water dripping from a battered fedora, silently observing with a still smile on his face – like an admiral aboard his ship, preparing to engage.

  Suddenly, another shout rose through the night. ‘Hey, Buster, someone’s broken into the safe!’

  At that moment, Gabriel realised that he had to get out of there – fast. This was his cue. Sidling up to the twins, he whispered to Mary, ‘Let’s go.’ She looked up at him and he could see that she was frightened. Anne was looking absently into the mud that covered her satin slippers; her wet hair was pasted to her skull. Gabriel thought she looked incredibly vulnerable. ‘Come on, we’ve got to get out of here now.’ He hesitated for a moment before wheezing into Mary’s ear, ‘Rey created all this turmoil so that we could escape; he wanted you and Anne free of this, just as much as I do.’ And, at once, he realised that what he had just said was true – that Rey was somehow the instigator of the chaos. Could he even have raised the storm?

  Quickly, he put a finger to his lips and indicated to the girls to follow him. Mary hesitated at first, but then something seemed to clear in her eyes and she put an arm around Anne and started pulling her sister into the vanishing shadows of the long night.

  Behind them, Dr Buster clenched his fists and raised them towards the streaming rain. ‘Argh!’ he thundered. ‘I’ll find that bastard and kill him! We will have police crawling all over the place, now. It will be the end of the show. Where is that fiend? The trickster has escaped again to his Maleperduis.’ He flung his head back and laughed his chilly wolf laugh before suddenly composing himself and looking around the crowd with a wild gaze. ‘Perhaps we should run away too, eh? What do you say? We bury the bodies and get out before dawn.’ His voice was feverish, intense. ‘Eh? Eh? Zilda, old pal, give me a hand, will you?’ He turned to the magnificent whore, who remained silent. Turning around again, as if following his own tail, Dr Buster faced his troupe of freaks. ‘Dido, old man, you have been part of my pack for a long time; give us a hand, will you?’

  But Dido only spat on the ground and turned into the night.

  Sliding through the mud and rain, Gabriel and the twins somehow reached Maryanne’s caravan. ‘Quick – into the car!’ Gabriel shouted over the storm.

  ‘But what about our things?’ Mary cried back.

  ‘There isn’t much time – just grab the essentials and any valuables,’ Gabriel replied with his new and unusual authority, which appeared to convince.

  Someone had put a stretch of tarpaulin under the wheels of the twins’ Ford. Bending closer, Gabriel saw that it was laid out so that the car would have a fairly dry passage until it reached the gravel path, which connected with the main road. This too, he suspected, was Rey’s work. A rectangle of light fell on to him as the door of the girls’ caravan was flung open.

  ‘Could you help out here, please?’ Mary shouted from within.

  This is taking too much time, he thought to himself as he rushed up the steps and into the caravan. The girls were laden with bundles of clothes, bags of cosmetics and jewellery and even the crystal chandelier, which drooped out of their arms like a newly hauled fishing net. Annoyed, he relieved them of some of the stuff. ‘That’s enough,’ he said, with irritation in his voice. ‘Let’s go.’

  The girls seemed enthralled by his new command and followed quickly, leaving the door ajar as they bundled their belongings into the boot of the Ford. Gabriel had already got into the driver’s seat and started the engine. A dark shape, it might have been a stray dog or a fox, released itself from the shadows under the car and passed into the night with a glint of bared teeth. Mary, herding Anne ahead of her, dived into the back seat. ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘Drive.’

  Gabriel backed carefully on to the tarpaulin, remembering what Rey had taught him. Biting his lip in concentration, he somehow managed to get the car on to the track, where he accelerated so fast the tyres tore up the gravel.

  ‘There’s something in here,’ Anne protested from the back.

  Gabriel swung round to see, but it was too dark. ‘What is it?’ he asked, keeping his eyes on the r
oad, which was barely visible, like a ghostly ribbon, snaking into the blackness.

  Anne was rummaging through something. ‘It’s a backpack with some men’s clothes and a couple of books,’ she said, with something like disgust in her thin voice.

  Gabriel realised it was his belongings.

  ‘And here’s an envelope with our name on it,’ Anne continued. ‘It looks like … a wad of money.’

  Gabriel suddenly laughed out loud as he realised how Rey had planned their escape, leaving nothing to chance.

  ‘Whoa!’ Mary shouted. ‘You better keep us on the road. Why don’t you turn the bloody lights on?’ She leant across from the back seat, Anne in tow, and turned a switch so that the gravel lit up. Stunted trees, currently tortured by the storm, stretched their thin branches through the falling rain like hands clawing through metal bars, and, behind them, a darker row of hedges shook and fretted. Gabriel felt a chill run down his spine. Just then, they saw the junction with the main road a few yards ahead. It looked like they might have made it.

  It was suddenly very quiet. The inside of the car could have been a submarine, one hundred feet under water. The moment seemed to float; it was as if the three bodies in the car had somehow broken free of reality, of life, and drifted away into some other state – a dream where they were weightless and the passing of time, the idea of a past, present and a future, was inconceivable.

  Looking into the rear-view mirror at the twin pairs of eyes, hooded now in violet shadows as they stared back at him, he was not so much surprised at the fear in Mary’s eyes as by the lack of distress or alarm in Anne’s. Normally so timid, her gaze at that moment was calm and determined and there was a slight smile on her pale lips. Aware of his eyes on her, she pulled out a pocket mirror and a lipstick from a handbag in her lap and carefully, with minute precision, dabbed colour on to her parted lips. The next time he looked in the rear-view mirror, her eyes seemed to be smiling at him seductively, her lips a slit of scarlet in the flickering light. They had got away.

  If anyone back at the site had noticed the car slip away, only the departing tail-lights would be visible now – a couple of sore eyes, finally closing on that wretched night.