Adrian’s small figure reached the bottom lid of the eye; he turned and waved as he stepped through. The two girls hung about in the entrance, and then hailed and view-hallooed us before they went in after him. Their cries trailed wide, like singing in an amphitheatre so large the sound goes out of sync with the stage.
The waiting for the group to re-emerge grew heavier, and Brendan began to make conversation.
‘Oh, I do very little these days!’ I replied to his question. I took another square of chocolate. ‘I’m surprising myself here: it’s a stimulus. One does become rather stuck in a familiar routine. Like a cat and the favourite spot on the radiator? One’s own mug at breakfast – in my case, the one with the corporate arms of Weston-super-Mare. Nothing of any seriousness reaches me much any more – except when Radio Three keeps changing the times of programmes. But none of this will mean much to you.’
With the group vanished into the cave, the disturbed ground of the slope quietened.
Looking away from the mountain, Brendan protested. He’d been at Leeds, in the Seventies, doing an M.Litt. He loved Jazz Record Requests.
‘A very good egg, that Peter Clayton,’ I said. ‘That’s another friend down – in his case, cancer.’
‘Whoooaaargh!’ The noise slammed down the rise as the climbers fell out of the mouth of the cave; one by one they exploded out of its blank eye, roaring, battering the ground with their boots and whirling their arms as they hurled themselves down the mountain, dry-skiing. The scree rose in puffs under their heels, and their cries hung for a while above in the air, like seagulls holding on to the tail of a ferry. The tracks of their flight scored deep long tears under the eye of the cave.
They flung themselves down one by one beside us. They were flushed and dusty and didn’t utter, but seized on the rest of the provisions.
‘It was weird in there, wild and weird.’ Matt finally spoke, and shook his head. ‘The silence had a kind of smell, I swear.’
‘I felt I just had to get out, it was really really oppressive – and I thought the bats’d start roosting in my hair.’ Liesl shook out her fair hair with her fingers. ‘Yuck, I’m glad to be out of there.’
Adrian had bright spots in his cheeks. Cindy held out a water bottle and he tipped it into his open mouth.
‘Any ghosts?’ I asked.
‘Just bats, I guess,’ said Adrian, swallowing and wiping his lips. ‘They stink – like old cunt.’ He grinned.
Everyone began handing round snacks rather quickly at that.
Then Brendan said, as the students lay about, still panting from their flight, ‘I thought I said it was a holy place. Fun and games like that aren’t appropriate behaviour.’
‘Oh, the natives never had any laughs, I suppose,’ Adrian cut in. ‘That’s such a big old cliché. Granite-faced sages deeply scored by time spewing out solemn stuff about Mother Nature and Big Father Mountain.’ But he was pulling off his light hooded windbreaker as he did so, and the words were harsher than the expression in his muffled voice.
‘You shouldn’t …’ Cindy began mocking Adrian. ‘He always knows different – right? He’s Mr Cool – Mr Super Cool!’
Brendan waved a hand at the view. ‘These valleys were inhabited thousands of years: people moved here, survived here, with knowledge of every stone, every blade, every stream. Now we – our cowboys, our oilmen, our pioneers of the new frontier, our agro and tourist businesses – have turned the landscape to …’ – he waved at the blind eye of the cave – ‘what? Desert. A mudslide, a robbed tomb, a dry-ski slope. You should – no sorry, Adrian, we should – show more respect.’
The speech hung; the group stared at their drinks and chocolate, silent, uncomfortable, under the dumb blank dead eye.
Adrian at last responded. ‘All I meant was that for some reason when we talk Injun talk we drop the’s and a’s and lower-case words and begin intoning everything in caps, to make them sound like real ancient, real primitive old-time folk. You know: Big Stick Brendan, Deep Dark Purple Sound Jon Shepton. It’s a way of pushing people aside, of making history into legend and that makes it a helluva lot easier to spirit them away. Ha! At least that’s how I figure it.’
‘But they do have spiritual wisdom,’ Liesl objected. ‘That Jeff yesterday, when we were all in the tepee, he was something, he was like so still and slow and well, grand.’
‘But he was teaching his kid to smoke,’ Cindy cried.
‘They’re human beings, for Christ’s sake,’ interrupted Adrian. ‘They’re no different, hell. No different from you and me. Except that they don’t have the bread. Or perhaps I should say, they don’t have ways of getting at the bread. That’s probably why Jeff has to put on this dumb kind of “I’m a wise old Native Canadian” show.’
‘You should write this, Adrian, since it gets you so stirred up.’ Brendan’s eloquence turned from rebuking him to coaxing. ‘Not that other stuff.’
‘But I’m a magazine writer,’ Adrian replied. ‘I don’t write op ed pieces for the Globe. I write reality colour pieces for men’s mags – that’s what I’m good at, and what I like doing.’
‘Such as?’ I asked.
The T-shirt Adrian was wearing now that he had removed his windbreaker had a logo. He tapped the sign on his chest. Then with a flourish, turned, and showed the larger legend on his back.
‘I Am a Worm,’ it declared.
‘It’s a men’s movement,’ said Adrian. ‘It’s a crusade. I joined. I am a worm, fully enrolled and paid up.
‘You cry out, “Lord, I’m a Worm! Save me! Train me!”’
‘And you went and did them over, of course you did.’ The girl Cindy was blazing at him.
Adrian looked thoughtful. ‘Hell, no, I rose in the hierarchy. I became a wrangler, a senior wrangler – I help other worms do their thing. I make a great worm. So, I got promoted.’
He paused, and through his laughter, added, ‘Yeah, I do feel bad. Sometimes. I cross guys in the street and if I’m wearing the shirt, they give me a sign. “Hey man! Yeah, I’m a worm too!” But, you know, it was great.’ He looked at me. ‘It was so fun, you know, shouting and wailing about your sins with all these sinners.’ He laughed with genuine gaiety, and I couldn’t help chuckling in response.
Cindy tugged at my sleeve: ‘You should read what he wrote about the sex encounter group he got into – weird stuff, really weird. Doing disgusting things to one another nobody’s ever heard of.’
‘Come on now, I just replied to one of those small ads that fill the back pages of papers everywhere.’ Adrian’s eyes were dancing. ‘I’d been real curious about them for so long. Aren’t you? I replied to the one that went like this: “Come free the Kundalini serpent in you!” Then in the small print: “Are you satisfying your partner? Have you developed your full sexual potential? Tantric Yoga is the key to happiness. Licensed teachers. Strictly confidential. Only couples need apply.”’
‘It’s wild stuff,’ said Cindy. ‘Wild,’ she repeated; on her face a scared look fought with the sarcasm. ‘And he’s had a ring put in his penis …’
Adrian’s head dipped, and he laughed, showing that small row of teeth: ‘Now that’s a story I haven’t written up, so perhaps it’s a rumour, eh, Cindy? Put about by certain people … ?’
She twisted her mouth and stuck out her lip at him. He didn’t respond in play to her, but began gathering himself together with the others to start back down the trail.
I was walking just behind Cindy on the track when we set out for the camp. Later, when I thought back over the events of that day, the accident happened very abruptly: one moment all was fine, we were making our way in the cool of the late afternoon, with the dappled pebbles in the dry creek underfoot; the next moment, the creek was a gulf, the dry stones were knives. She was lagging behind with me and we were picking our way even more carefully on the way down, because I for one am not
used to so much high-octane mountain air, and I was tired. Brendan, cheerily, was setting the pace ahead, and I felt my irritation with him begin to mount. Why had he dreamed up this difficult trek, instead of a charming stroll somewhere scenic?
But I did know why: they’re pampered youth, these big kids doing summer camp studies, and Brendan wanted to put them to some kind of test.
Cindy was looking back at the weeping eye in the mountain face, and, I realised, propelling herself into a different moral position, saying something about Adrian and his sick mind when she slithered on the loose stones of the arid creek; one of them, like a flat missile in a game of ducks and drakes, skimmed across the ground under her left foot and brought her down, very hard, on her right; there was, I heard, a crack, a kind of percussive major chord, very clear, very dry.
Her face went red then white; she was instantly in terrible pain, I could see that, and when I tried to touch her ankle just lightly, with two fingers, she flinched as if they were torturer’s prods.
She couldn’t speak; she was clamping her jaws tight shut not to cry out. She nodded, and her fervent eyes shone more brightly than before.
It soon became clear that some of us would have to carry her.
Adrian began carrying Cindy piggyback, as she suggested. But he soon had to set her down. So then they tried a kind of three-legged race, with Cindy hitched between Adrian on one side and Brendan on the other. She tried to hop, skip, and jump, but the dry bed of the path proved too narrow and the ground too uneven. Adrian then cut poles from saplings along the ravine with his Swiss Army knife and threaded them through the sleeves of Brendan’s finest quality fleece-lined mountain climbing jacket to make a stretcher. The others took it in turns at the corners. Liesl said the army had trained her knew how to carry stuff. Every now and then they stopped and changed sides. Slowly, stumbling on the pebbles underfoot with their burden wincing in her litter at every bump and jolt, they made their way down to the Center.
I came up behind, carrying the rucksacks. I was the eldest by some way, and it was agreed that I couldn’t help with Cindy and put that degree of strain on my shoulders, not the night before a gig. It proved an ordeal, just bringing up the rear with the baggage.
Later that evening, sitting with a whey-faced Brendan in the bar, I learned that Cindy had presented her ballet libretto to the class that morning, and ‘she’d been taken apart’ by the others, including Adrian. Brendan shook his head over his third bourbon and spread his hands: ‘There really was little else to say, except go back and start afresh and – think it through. Some of these kids on computers think they can just let the words run through their fingers and it all makes sense, because it looks nice and tidy. But Dance isn’t for the birds.’ He paused, rubbed his neck muscles, and dipped his head round and round to ease the soreness.
‘They’re a difficult year,’ he sighed.
‘How did it happen?’ someone asked, coming up to the group, flopped down in armchairs around another table in the bar.
‘He saw, he was walking next to her.’ The speaker pointed at me.
‘She merely slipped on loose gravel. It’s easy to do,’ I said.
But the strange thing – I did not say this though – is that after she’d fallen and was squealing with the agony of it, and I was asking her what had happened, I glimpsed something in her face and eyes, something wild and radiant and rather wonderful, a kind of passion I hadn’t thought her capable of.
‘I wonder,’ said Brendan.
‘Sacred places and all that?’ someone proposed, catching his drift.
‘But Cindy didn’t go up there,’ objected another.
‘She was the most vulnerable, you know. All that negativity – it imploded on her.’
I said nothing.
They could make out a divine plan if they chose; they could imagine a revenge on the blasphemers. Those fellows in the tepee were there to make them feel better about being here at all. No doubt ascribing them magic forces to turn ankles on ancestral mountain paths would soothe pangs of guilt. Make the poor buggers seem more equal in power. I drank some more to stop my tiredness feeding my hostility towards them. It’s so good, I was thinking, that England is done for and we don’t have to put on this silly show of respect for our forebears. In some ways, we have fallen into the past with them. At least in relation to this gleaming fountainhead of oil and gold and glass and steel. The point of it all is, I kept on thinking secretly, savagely, is that nothing adds up – it wasn’t the witchiness of the place or its sacred history. It wasn’t even the girl’s hysteria, that blaze of fulfilment I saw for a moment in her eyes when she was in pain. Not even that. There’s nothing that means anything behind the random pattern of events.
Everything is a mess: a mess brought about by chance. And by stupidity and chance mixed together, that deadly cocktail. Nothing more, nothing less.
Or is it so? There was perhaps something besides, something with genuine power, flowing between her and that young man, which shattered against him and turned back on her, making her clumsy, causing her to stumble. Yes, perhaps.
At the same moment, someone asked, ‘So where’s Adrian?’
‘He’s called it a day,’ said Brendan. ‘Some day. He’s good friends with Cindy. It was hard on him, too, to see her hurting so hard. He felt responsible, after that class.’ He bent his head to my ear, and murmured, ‘I must apologise, Jon, for what turned out not at all to be the interesting and pleasant outing I’d had in mind. You’ve been very uncomplaining about it.’
‘My dear Brendan,’ I replied. ‘On the contrary, I’ve had a most interesting time.’
Two days later, after my concert – which went as well as I could have hoped – I was leaving for the airport. When I gave my name at reception to settle the extras – telephone, mini-bar – I was handed a large brown envelope on which the name Adrian Schilling was crossed out and in the large, unpractised letters of a hand formed in the computer age, my own substituted – with the added words, ‘Artist Supreme!’ The receptionist smiled:
‘This was left for you – Adrian said to tell you he’s sorry not to see you to say goodbye, but he had to go to the hospital.’ Her voice rose at the end of the phrase, as if she were making a series of proposals which needed confirmation.
There was a note inside.
Hi, Jon! It was great meeting you. You are a true hero to my generation. If you know any editors in England who might like my stuff, don’t hesitate to pass it on.
Best, Adrian
PS Saw you liked the T-shirt, so, here it is (I can get another, no big deal).
The T-shirt with ‘I Am a Worm’ written on the back was wrapped around two magazine articles.
On the plane, I took out the one with the heading, ‘Come Free Your Kundalini Serpent!’ ‘I’d only met Misri two weeks before,’ it began. ‘And every time I saw her for a date, she was so beautiful my heart jumped inside me and I felt my excitement rising hot and irresistible and melting me to the core, and I wanted more than anything to make her feel the same about me. And I didn’t want to make a mess of it (I know just how bad we men can be). So we still hadn’t been the whole way together when I asked her if she would like to come with me to some Tantric Yoga classes …’
The lessons took place fully clothed, the article continued. The participants lay on the carpet in a house in the suburbs and their teacher showed them techniques. It was against the law for them to do anything, but they were encouraged to go home and practise the routines. Take it slowly, don’t rush it. Explore, stroke, and tickle – all of it slowly. Take your time, the teacher said. Lots of foam baths, lots of scented oils; hand holds, caressing zones, finger insertion points, were sedulously mapped.
The results, Adrian concluded, several pages later, were terrific. Misri had nothing to complain about after they finally went the whole way, and neither did he, of course. He closed on a note
of whole-hearted recommendation.
Cindy had said she thought such acts were weird. How curiously inexperienced even today’s young can be, I thought, as I folded away the article and pulled the face mask over my eyes to try and get some sleep. That had been the trouble from the start of the walk, I now knew. She didn’t know what she was feeling, about that Adrian. She thought he was her friend, but … And they’d tried to leave her behind and she’d caught them and joined the walk.
I remembered the scene when Adrian was telling them about his exploits, teasing and laughing. Then I thought, Had there been time to wash the T-shirt? I felt like taking it out – now – from my bag in the compartment above. But it could wait.
Meanwhile, as I sat in seat 25K, a soft tongue of Kundalini fire began licking at my withered core, forking through in the hardened channels of my blood. It spread, warming me through and through. Worm wrangling could wait. Instead, I could smell silvery young saliva, feel passages slippery and narrow, the intimate scrape of a nail, the yield of fleshy softnesses, hear murmurs, sighs and grunts.
After the Fox
THE HOLE APPEARED under the twisting stems of the wisteria on the south wall of Judith’s garden. It gaped too large and too deep for a vole or a rat: Judith knew the size of their runnels from the banks of the canal two streets away, and when she’d had the outside lavatory at the back demolished, small neat tunnel heads soon dotted the mud where the builder had trodden the old lawn. When she managed to call him back again, he kicked at the holes, and asked her for empties. Taking three wine bottles from her recycling, he dropped them into a bin liner, hammered them thoroughly till the plastic slumped like a sand bag, and then dug down into the old waste stack and stuffed it.
‘They’ll not make their way up through cullet,’ he said.
She remembered the word: so satisfying in its finality.
But this hole was wider than a rat hole, bigger even than a cat flap; this visitor was no small burrower.
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