“Why have they left us alone?” said Foxe. “We’ve been going very slowly. I’ve hardly even seen an aeroplane.”
“Hunting us over toward the Mountain, Denver said.”
“I thought that was where we were going.”
“Look like he taking us west along the ridge.” He darted off the track to scrape with his bare hands round the root of a twisting, purplish succulent. Foxe left him to it, remembering that somebody even more tired than he was must be struggling ahead with the lurching, corpse-hung bike.
The episode with the two women was the only scene from Foxe’s adventures that actually cheered him when it rose in his mind’s eye. It came often and always with the same sharpness, unlike, for instance, the apparently more impressive business of burying the dead Khandhars. They had done this that night, in the first fringes of the rain forest that covered the whole ridge of mountain twisting in an irregular S across Main Island. (The Mountain itself—Mount Trotter on maps, but never called by that name—was only the highest of several peaks, thirty miles away south east.) At dusk they dug a row of graves in the soft mould of century-rotted leaves. All night the seven bodies lay in these open graves while watch and watch about the Khandhars knelt beside them and whispered their chant. Two thunderstorms broke in the night, but the Khandhars had made their cemetery under a species of tree with large overlapping leaves which acted like roof-tiles, shedding almost all the rain that fell on them in drumming streams twenty feet from the trunk. At dawn, all chanting together, the Khandhars had tossed earth handful by handful onto their dead friends, then trampled the mounds flat and scattered the spare earth around. A patrol which Foxe had not seen depart returned, carrying in their caps what he took to be more earth, but turned out to be the crawling hearts of four ants’ nests, which they placed in holes scooped at the corners of the graverow and covered with mounds of leaves. The chant quickened, and in a few beats rose to a cracking shout. Then silence. Without a word the Khandhars collected their possessions and went on their way.
They had marched for two more days, crossing two harsh ridges between which lay a strange, wide marsh, dry on the surface but full of patches which were hot to the touch, and whose whole surface quivered with an inner vibration. There was a surprising amount to eat, mostly a cassava-like root which was poisonous raw but became edible after several boilings; also grey-and-brown grubs the size of a man’s thumb which lived under rotted bark and tasted like prawns; some savourless bracket fungi; and, once, a drift of incredibly tough-shelled nuts about the size of plums. At last they reached a series of caves that pocked a low cliff which was the inner side of the rim of this dead volcano. The Khandhars seemed to know the place well.
Here there was nothing for Foxe to do. He was like the male of some colonising insect which, in the ritual dance of that one night’s violence, had fulfilled its biological role and was thenceforth a drone, tolerated, fed, ignored. Another likeness which troubled him was that of human childbirth, with the Pit as the womb and himself as the seed, penetrating to that inner depth and fertilising the Khandhar egg, causing it to break out in bloody parturition. The idea revolted him but he couldn’t keep his mind off it, continually finding fresh details—the smother before the final outburst, the weakness immediately after, his own sense of being re-born.
His solitariness was increased by his refusal to take part in Khandhar rituals, or to have any further truck with their magical practices. These ceremonies occupied most of the time not spent in gathering food from the forest and preparing it for eating, and to the Khandhars seemed as necessary a part of life as breathing. There was little conversation or discussion. If Captain Angiah was right and they were Marxists as well as being magicians, they were unlike any brand Foxe had ever met. In some moods he might even have welcomed the tedium of Marxist indoctrination as a change from the endless chants and dances. Mercifully they didn’t try to draw him into those, but left him alone, free to wander endlessly through the mirror-maze of his own self-disgust.
He shifted his seat on the branch, making Quentin twitch into alertness at the movement before returning to his endless grooming.
“Smell of blood still in the fur?” said a voice, so hesitant that Foxe knew it was Cactus before he looked round. She was already filling out towards her natural fatness; most of the starvation-wrinkles had gone, and she looked younger and less troubled than she had in the Pit. She wore a dead man’s uniform, much too large for her, with the trouser-ends rolled up to her knees. Her feet were bare.
“I don’t know,” said Foxe. “It may be a real smell, or it may be the memory of a smell, imprinted on his brain, and he’ll go on trying to get rid of it as long as he lives.”
She sat down on a branch on the other side of the trunk, one knee drawn up under her chin, looking at Quentin. She had a sack for collecting food, but it seemed to be empty; and the Khandhars usually did their gathering in small groups. Telepathy, thought Foxe. Suppose there were anything in it … an image right outside her experience …
Deliberately he concentrated on the little cuckoo-clock in Lisa-Anna’s room, which would sometimes slip a cog so that the hands whirled round and the bird flew hysterically in and out, striking anything up to a hundred and fifty. Lisa-Anna said it was always a good omen when this happened, and would sit on the edge of her bed with her brown eyes glistening and her fingers over her small mouth as if to hide her smile of pleasure, while she counted the strikes …
“Your honey so far,” said Cactus.
“How did you know? Oh, never mind. Did you see anything else?”
Cactus shrugged.
“What her name?”
“Lisa-Anna. She’s a singer. An opera singer. Black hair. Brown eyes. Small. Clever. Very serious.”
“Why you leave her, then?”
“She left me. She went off to join a company in Denmark. She isn’t a star, but if someone in the chorus has to sing a bit of solo she usually gets that sort of part. Really she didn’t leave me just to go and sing; she wanted to get away. I didn’t care enough about anything, she thought. She told me that without my work I would be one of the walking dead.”
It seemed easier to tell her than let her unreel threads from the spindle. She looked at him, frowning, but said nothing.
“Perhaps she was right,” said Foxe. “I haven’t got any work. I’m empty.”
“You eat the salt with us.”
“What does that mean?”
“This farmer, he a rich man, he has the power. One night he go to the cemetery where three men just new buried, and he make all the sacrifice and he say all the words, and these three they come out of their graves. So he take them to his farm, working for him, no money, feed like the animals. And his wife one day when he away been making these little cakes and she see these dead men, don’ know who they are, feel sorry at them working so hard, give them all a cake. And salt in these cakes. Just soon when they taste this salt, these men remember who they be, remember they be dead. They rush from out that house, tear down that fence, they be so strong. And everybody see them rushing like that do stand out of the path, for fright of tearing to bits, they be so strong. Rush, rush, down that hill, across that forest all back to the cemetery. They dig with their hands, make new those old graves, lie down, go back to death.”
“Do you think it’s true?”
“You have eat the salt. In the Pit, in those needles, that is salt.”
“Some of it, certainly—saline solution, at least. You were in that group. But half of you got a stuff called SG 19—I don’t think that does anything to you either. I got a mixture.”
“All salt.”
“Anyway, it doesn’t stop me feeling like one of the walking dead!” snapped Foxe. “The things I’ve seen and heard—the things I’ve done myself. I don’t want to be myself any more! I don’t even want to be human!”
She nodded slowly.
“You need talk w
ith that Lisa-Anna,” she said.
“No good. She doesn’t want me. Anyway she’s probably got another bloke by now …”
He stopped and considered. This was a question his subconscious had always censored. Perhaps she hadn’t—Lisa-Anna was not at all promiscuous. She had taken a long time, almost like an old-fashioned courtship, to accept Foxe as her lover. She had shown no resentment of his previous girls, had in fact enjoyed talking about them and had sometimes suggested aspects of their natures that Foxe himself had never noticed. But she herself wanted a relationship which could take root … perhaps, Foxe now realised, this was why the courtship had taken so long—Lisa-Anna had doubted whether he was capable of such a relationship. Rightly, too.
“Besides,” he said, “it’s pie in the sky. I don’t see how I’m ever going to get off the Islands. I was arrested as a witness to a murder, and now I’ve done one myself. Several. If I show up in any of the ports …”
“Plantain get you a boat. Not just now.”
“Will he? Even then … I wonder if they could have me deported back here … The Company won’t take me back … Anyway, Doctor O’s quite capable of sending agents after me…I’ll have to change my name, start from the beginning again … I don’t even know if I want to do any of that any more … I’ve got nothing to do. Nothing to be. I’m empty.”
“You re-born, then.”
“I don’t believe any of that! Here!”
Foxe leaned forward and snatched Quentin from his perch. The rat kicked with shock, but Foxe paid no attention, twisting and reaching over towards the girl.
“You hold him,” he ordered. “He’s only a rat. That mark on his back is only the letter Q. That’s all. Everything else is rubbish.”
She had flinched from his gesture and anger, but now she held out her hands, palms cupped into a nest. He dropped the rat in.
“Your name is Lucilla Banker,” he said.
She stayed looking down at Quentin, who remained for some seconds in the awkward pose into which he had fallen. His coat was staring a little with fright at his rough treatment. Then his whiskers twitched as he investigated her wrist, and with a sleek flowing movement he darted along her left forearm, stopping to inspect the crook of her elbow with his head cooked, as though he were a well-known connoisseur of elbows who had been asked to pronounce on this specimen. Her right hand drifted across to caress his fur.
“He’s all right,” said Foxe, ashamed at having taken his unhappiness out on her in this way. “He’s a bit of a nutter, but he won’t hurt you.”
“You wanting a woman? Then you feel better?”
Both sentences were clearly questions, though spoken in a flat, almost bored voice, quite unlike the soft and stumbling tones in which she announced her insights into other people’s minds. Foxe shrugged.
“Me?” she said, still caressing Quentin’s fur as he slid towards her shoulder.
“I don’t know what I want. In any case it’s not a very practical idea, is it? I mean, you’re such a puritanical lot. The last thing I want is to start any more trouble. What would Plantain say?”
“He say OK. He say we go away from here, live in a village, and he take the others up the Mountain.”
“Do you mean he has said this, or he will say this when you ask him?”
She shrugged.
He stared at her for some time, but she didn’t look up. She had come out here to find him—that was obvious—and she wasn’t going to say whether it was her idea or part of the group will.
“You’re running ahead, my dear,” he said at last. “Listen, I’m in an emotional mess. When I say I don’t know what I want I mean just that, but at least I know I’ll only make the mess worse if I get into a sexual relationship just for the sake of taking my mind off my own troubles. I’d end up liking myself even less than I do now. If that’s possible.”
Quentin was perched on her shoulder now, sniffing at her collar as if wondering whether that was a good place to explore. She took care not to unbalance him as she slid across the trunk and sat down next to Foxe. There were few opportunities for washing in the forest, and no changes of clothes, so her smell was more than noticeable, though rounder and less assertive than the rancid smell of town poor.
“No need be scared for me,” she whispered. “I not a virgin no more.”
Foxe knew that. He had heard the tapes of the torture sessions.
“Long past,” she whispered. “This how we be living in the villages. My Momma fifteen when I be born.”
Talking with her was tricky. Even your silences were answered.
“What will you do if I say no?” said Foxe.
“Plantain don’ want me go up the Mountain with him, case of me getting caught again, but he tell me to choose. I think I choose to go with him, till you say to me my name ain’t Cactus no more. You call me my old name, so now I think I come and live in the village with you.”
“I certainly agree with Plantain that you oughtn’t to go up the Mountain, but you’d be much better living in a village by yourself. I’d be too conspicuous. Somebody’d be bound to tell the police about me.”
She put her small hand on his thigh. He covered it with his own. She was shivering as if with cold.
“Nobody in the villages go talk with the soldiers—all too scared. And plenty poor white trash living there.”
She took her hand from under his and slid it round his waist, twisting her head at last to look into his eyes. He saw now that her shudders were not of cold, or lust, or even shyness, but of real fear—and no wonder after what the soldiers had done with her. She looked as haggard again as she had in the Pit. Her greyish skin was coarsepored and her features, apart from her eyes, were too small but also too clumsily moulded to seem neat, and her teeth, though very white, were crowded and irregular—she was infinitely different from the fantasy-girl Foxe had created during the fishing-trip with Dreiser—from any man’s fantasy-girl anywhere. But Foxe found himself stirred, emotionally and then physically, by the sudden discovery of her goodness. He wondered for a moment whether it was this, rather than her telepathic gifts, that the Khandhars were so anxious to protect. She was not like Lisa-Anna, earnestly navigating the precise path of virtue all the time; this girl knew it by heart and could walk it blindfold. He found that his own arm, unwilled, had balanced the movement of hers and was round her waist, pulling her close. Quentin’s nose came twitching out between the lapels of her jacket, and Foxe lifted him clear and put him down on the tree-trunk. He slackened his arm and kissed her accurately on the forehead.
“There’s no hurry,” he said. “We can think it over. You’re scared stiff, aren’t you?”
She nodded. Tears began to stream down the sides of her small rubbery nose.
“All right,” he whispered. “Let’s leave it. You don’t …”
“No, no,” she wept. “Must begin right off. Tomorrow I be more scared.”
She twisted, levering them both off the branch, and pulled him down to the soft, crackling, insect-swarming leafage of the forest floor.
2
Foxe woke, as he often did, and lay listening to the night. Probably the clatter of big tropical rain-drops onto the palm thatch of the hut had broken into his dream. The bed, which Foxe had acquired three days ago by mending two old radios for Mr Barton, was an undulating and rickety antique but far better than the floor; he had no need to resettle pinched limbs and risk disturbing Lou. Quentin was into a bout of nocturnal activity, threshing around in his tin trunk and banging a lump of raw manioc root against its sides. The night air smelt of people, and rain-damped ashes, and cooking-oil, and (more distantly but strangely insistent, like the subliminal presence of the sea that exists for a mile or two inland from any shore-line) the sap of uprushing tropic plants. Lou’s steady breathing had the peaceful quality of very faint music.
Suppose, thought Foxe, that somebo
dy had told me six months ago that I’d now be living with a saint—I’d have laughed, of course. But suppose he’d been able to persuade me that it was true. Then I’d have been filled with a cocktail of boredom and fear—fear of moral pressure, of intrusions of alien standards into my hedged inner being—and boredom with the then totally null notion of goodness itself. I was a sort of civilised ignoramus then, a sophisticated know-nothing. It doesn’t matter that it isn’t going to last.
The impermanence of the present arrangement was essential to Foxe’s happiness, in fact. It would have been mistaken to want it to last forever. He was having a holiday of the soul, a sabbatical—not very honestly earned. He was not in love with Lou—not in the sense in which he now admitted to himself he was still in love with Lisa-Anna—but he certainly loved her. His feeling for her was something like intense love for a particular place—his grandmother’s home, for instance, by the ruined castle on the sluggish Pembrokeshire inlet, where as a boy he had had his own dinghy, his own paths along the shore, his own nooks in the gorsey hillside, his own world re-creating itself afresh every school holidays. Lou behaved like all the other women in the village outwardly, chattering and laughing as they threshed dirty clothes in the stream or calling from garden to garden as they hoed, but as far as Foxe could see none of the others were saints—he hadn’t fallen into a den of noble savages. Some of them were sulky bitches, some willfully cruel to animal or child, many permanently half drunk, all fairly stupid. Not that Lou herself was by any academic standard bright; her intelligence was to do with human behaviour, and in that field she seemed able to grasp questions of great subtlety and complexity without putting them through any kind of cerebral processing. When they were alone Foxe did most of the talking, explaining more to himself than her, all he had done with his life, all he had thought, all he had so far refused to think. Lou listened and frowned and smiled, and when she said anything it was usually a question, opening out some central relevance which Foxe had missed.
Thus, between them, they had exorcised Foxe’s self-horror. That first scene by the fallen tree had begun it, lying half-naked on the mattress of dead leaves and prickling, crackling twiglets, concentrating his whole will into helping her through her physical terror. From that point he had seemed to begin to walk away from the mirror-maze through which he had been wandering, seeing all the time vile images of nothing but himself; and once he was outside the maze he could also see that it must have existed long before the shocks and slaughters of the Pit—it had always been there, waiting inside him for something like that to open the door and draw him in.
Walking Dead Page 21
