Hinterland

by Steven Lang

  ‘So you weren’t having sex with him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You can promise me that on, I don’t know … something you hold sacred?’

  ‘Of course I can. Nothing happened,’ he said. ‘I missed you. Where would you get the idea I’d been having sex with a man? You know me …’

  ‘Publishing’s a small world, Guy. Your lover has a friend. He’s been boasting about his conquest. His friend happens to be my friend, which is how I heard about it. Not that that matters, I imagine by now everyone knows, except me, of course, who’s locked in a squalid basement flat with someone who can’t even tell the truth to the one person in the world who actually loves him.’

  She was crying again. Not making any noise, just tears running down her cheeks. The room become smaller than it already was, more obviously beneath street level. She was waiting for him to speak, but the shame of what he’d done, of being caught out for doing it, was too great.

  ‘I don’t have to listen to this,’ he said. ‘I know you’re pissed off with me because I went there alone. I’m sorry about that. It wasn’t fair. I see it now. That was what I was going to tell you.’

  ‘Why don’t I believe you?’

  ‘This is just gossip. Publishing-house gossip, which is even worse. Come here to me, let me hold you.’

  Instead she let her head fall forward, putting her fingers to her temples as if to contain whatever was going on in there, to suppress it, pushing the tips hard into her skin. ‘You’re lying, Guy.’

  ‘I don’t have to listen to this,’ he said again, suddenly furious, at Edward for talking about it to some third party; at her for bringing it back to berate him with. He stormed along the hall and out the front door, up the steps onto the road where it was now dark, the orange streetlights spreading their weird glow across the bonnets of cars and pavements and onto the little hedges, the litter-strewn front yards and basement wells. The air cold. He went up to the main road, his hands in his pockets, his belly hard with the irrevocability of what he’d just done, telling himself it was for the best, that it was the clean thing to do, he didn’t have to buy into this sort of recrimination.

  At the pub on the corner he ordered a half, grateful of the coin in his pocket, for his wallet was still on the kitchen bench. His whole life back there. He took a sip of the beer, casting a glance around to see if he was being watched; if his inner turmoil had some external manifestation.

  The English never look so good when compared to Latins. There’s always a sense of disappointment arriving back on the island, coming off the ferry to fish and chips, sliced white bread, beer, a meanness to their interaction with the world, as if everyone is still on rations thirty years after the war, dependent on powdered eggs, dripping and roasted chicory when just across the Channel is a smorgasbord of wine and crisp hot bread, good coffee, of joie de vivre; a respect for their writers, well, at least when they’re dead.

  The men in the pub were old, some even wearing flat workingmen’s caps. Nursing their drinks while watching a television slung above the bar. A football game in play, Division One, between Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal, the rolling roar of the crowd picking up their team’s song as the little figures ran on the green. He liked this pub because it wasn’t one where the new young drank, it was a real pub, but right then it seemed like the last repository of the desperate and dying. It was, too, he could see this, what he was choosing.

  He put the glass down, undrunk, and went back out into the street. He’d left without his keys and was obliged to bang on the door. For a few minutes he thought that she’d already gone, that he’d left it too late, but eventually she opened it, putting on a brave face for whoever was knocking at that time of night.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s you.’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid it is. I need to talk to you. I need to come in.’

  She stood aside, closing the door behind him, waiting until he had made his way past the bedroom – her suitcase out on the bed – and along the passage to the tiny kitchen/dining/living room, with its odd collection of furniture, gathered together at local markets or off the street. The typewriter and his manuscript on the table.

  ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘I almost didn’t come to the door. I didn’t want anyone to see me like this.’

  ‘You don’t have to leave.’

  ‘Well, I do, actually, but that’s another thing. What do you want?’

  ‘I want to try to be honest with you.’

  ‘You want to try, or you want to be honest?’

  He sat on the old sofa. She stood with her back to the kitchen bench, arms crossed.

  ‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I did have sex with Ed. I didn’t mean to. He got me stoned and made a pass and I went along. I didn’t mean it to happen. It didn’t mean anything.’

  ‘Good for you,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Good for you for telling the truth, at last. Good for you for experimenting. Good for you. Bad for me.’

  He had the sense that she was finished with him, was looking for a way to dispatch him out into the world so she could get on with something more important.

  ‘What made you change your mind?’ she asked.

  ‘I love you. I went out there on the street and realised I don’t want to lose you.’

  ‘Maybe you should have thought about that in Venice.’

  ‘I mean it, I’m sorry. Really I am. I didn’t mean it to happen.’

  ‘Do you understand anything, Guy? Your books are full of such close observation, but it’s always of other people, isn’t it? It’s not of you and what you’re doing.’

  ‘That’s hardly fair …’

  ‘You’re going to talk to me about fairness? You’ve hurt me, Guy. And then lied about it. To my face. In the middle of all this … I don’t think you get it. This is about honesty, and respect and, I don’t know, fealty, being true to someone …’

  ‘I’m telling the truth.’

  ‘Are you? Bearing in mind that telling the truth isn’t the same as being true. But go on, then. Tell me. What happened?’

  ‘It’s like I said, he seduced me. He was, I don’t know, intelligent, attractive, cosmopolitan. I thought he enjoyed my company, I didn’t think it had anything to do with my body. I didn’t think it had anything to do with sex. Then he got me stoned and kissed me and … and … I didn’t think it was important. I’m sorry I lied about it. I was ashamed. I didn’t want you to know. I was acting badly before I left, I see that, I don’t want to blame my work but that was part of it, I was stuck …’

  ‘So, you’re saying this thing you … what … did, with this man Greave, it only happened once?’

  ‘Yes.’ To his surprise tears were running down his own cheeks. He wanted very much to be believed. The idea of having to confess to Helen that it had continued throughout their stay in Venice was more than anathema, it was as though all the shame he’d thought was absent when he’d been with Edward had, instead, just been piled up behind some crude obstruction in his mind, waiting there to pour out and smother him. The other things he’d done with Ed, which had seemed, he wasn’t sure what … daring, sophisticated, worldly … she would, he saw, judge as simply sordid, the activity of dirty little boys. She must not know about them or about his complicity in them. If she found out there could be no possibility of forgiveness. The weight of this feeling inexorable, all-consuming; shame as a thing in itself. Watching it envelop him, but thinking, also, in one corner of his mind, how he might use it, how it might be possible to describe this crushing sensation and his psyche’s desperate attempt to resist the onslaught, creating layer after layer of deceit in its own defence.

  ‘So, let me get this clear, just in my own mind.’ Helen still leaning against the bench, gone back to this business with the fingertips at her temples, her hair fallen across her hands. Brushing it back so that she could look at him. ‘You had some sort of sex with this man on the first night but then you
stayed with him, in the same room, for the rest of the time, for several days?’

  ‘Yes, but that was just convenience. We’d paid for a room together before any of this happened. We weren’t going to get our money back if we didn’t stay there, were we? I mean I liked him. He’s a good man, don’t get me wrong, he just happens to be, you know, like that. I simply told him it wasn’t on.’

  ‘And he accepted that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She shrugged and turned. An expression on her face of profound disappointment. In him. As if she was sad about that, sad he’d failed to live up to what she had believed him to be, what he himself had always wanted to be. He saw, also, that she was unconvinced, and would now pursue this, drag him down through the folds of his lie, bringing further and more awful revelations, one after the other, until she had exposed the full unexpurgated version of his … the word that came to mind was, of course, sin, which was outrageous, except that in some way it was correct, albeit it wasn’t sin against God or church but against her, against what she saw as the sacredness of their bond.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Really I am, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

  ‘Well you have, Guy.’

  Here it was, coming now, the attack.

  ‘Your timing, too, is impeccable,’ she said.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘You think this is all about you? I suppose you do. Everything else is, isn’t it? Well, it’s not. My mother called last night, at about three in the morning. Dad’s had some sort of heart attack.’

  ‘Oh babe,’ he said, getting up and going to her, washed by relief at the possibility that her pain wasn’t all his fault, that he might be released from the requirement to delve further; he might be able to reverse their roles and offer succour.

  She turned herself away from him.

  He stood next to her, arms ready to embrace her.

  ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, no. He’s alive, they’re going to do some sort of surgery. His health hasn’t been good these last years. He works too hard and drinks too much. I’m flying back to Australia first thing tomorrow to be with my mother.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘No. I don’t want you to do that. I’ve already booked my ticket. I don’t want you with me. I want to be by myself.’

  In the morning, after a sleepless night spent on a camp bed in the living room, standing in the awkward space of the hallway, Helen about to go out to a taxi, he asked, ‘Does this mean we’re finished? You don’t want to see me again?’

  She with her bags around her, lit by the dim glow from the high window above the door, the autumn-coloured scarf he’d given her bunched around her neck. She had never been more beautiful than at that moment; the anger and the pain and the trepidation at the coming flight had leached all colour from her face, rendering her utterly vulnerable, but, at the same time, here was the thing, self-contained, a person entirely independent of him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I need time to think things through. It’s not that I don’t love you, Guy. I do. But I don’t trust you. You’ve taken that away. Saying sorry doesn’t bring it back.’

  There is, he has often thought, a powerful hunger for End Times. Every generation spawning its own variety of threat, its own species of impending apocalypse. For several thousand years, of course, religion has been at the hard centre of this need, tapping into its possibilities, the Second Coming always imminent. But the slow adoption of the ideas of the Enlightenment and the rational – which is to say, the concept that the universe might be comprehensible to the human mind if only we were to observe it closely enough – has undermined many of religion’s peculiar concerns, making them largely irrelevant, at least in the West. Which doesn’t mean that millenarian passion is spent, only that new and present dangers have to be dreamed up as its cause.

  It might, he thinks, be possible to get a column up on the subject. End Times being no longer on the cards through Revelation and the Return of the Redeemer, he would begin, they are now to be visited on us through the agency of environmental destruction. The sins which will bring them upon us are no longer fornication, idolatry and usury, although, clearly, there’s still plenty of them to go around, but rather hubris, the crime of improving our lot, raising ourselves up to the level of the gods through ever more sophisticated technology. Everybody intrinsically understands this: we will have to be made to pay for our mastery of Nature.

  Christianity replaced by its forerunners – Pan, Demeter, Gaia – the old gods rising up in new form to destroy us. The passion for End Times arises, he supposes, out of our innate horror when faced with the meaninglessness of our existence; the ego rebels, it demands a sense of the singular in our lives, a requirement that we must be living not just at a point of significance, but at the point of significance. And what could be of more consequence than the end of things? Indeed, if we’re not living at that time, if we are, after all, not the centre of the universe, but simply particles dancing like dust motes in infinite space and time, of no particular import to anyone, then what is left to us?

  In the face of the void the hard Right’s response is entirely comprehensible: dig up some ancient prophecies from the Good Book to fill the vacuum. Or, alternatively, if you’re too smart to believe in fairytales, then call down the Wrath of Nature. Global warming. Or cancer from microwave towers. Even in a town like Winderran, where surely there is a higher than average IQ (but perhaps not, perhaps that, too, is vanity) there are as many crazy beliefs as people in the main street on this Friday morning, going about who knows what business – drinking coffee at tables outside cafés, blocking the road while they attempt reverse parks, dawdling on the pedestrian crossings – trapping him briefly in his car, the window down, looking out at them. Nobody looking back at him with anything other than casual interest, which is as it should be in one’s home town, regardless of one’s achievements. He’s never been accorded special status here. Soon, though, this will change. He will become a Senator, living on the government purse (a welcome eventuality that, after the years of slim royalties) with his own staff, an office in Canberra, a travel allowance. A person of influence.

  Out of town then, following the line of the ridges, vouchsafed glimpses of the bucolic valleys to the south, rich and verdant, with the obelisks of the mountains standing out of the plain like discarded chess pieces, while out to sea the long sand islands sleep in the late summer sun, the air crystal after all the rain, a kind of perfect day, full of its own redolent fecundity, but rich, also, with the prospect of victory; making his way to the university to do some research. A friend has found something.

  Few enough allies in the academic world, but Armistead remains true despite living like nothing so much as a cane toad in his preternaturally darkened building, a modern construction mysteriously lauded for its architectural bravery which is, in fact, no more than a prefabricated concrete and steel shed suffering from a lack of almost all amenity, the walls of Armistead’s office only partly softened by the wonderful stacks of books with which they are festooned. To enter his room from the long dim corridor is akin to slipping into an ancient secondhand bookstore at whose centre sits the febrile owner, spreading ever wider in his swivel chair.

  ‘Mr Lamprey,’ Armistead says without getting up, his slow middle-American tones softening the syllables, injecting much joviality into his tone. ‘How nice of you to grace us with your presence. I trust you were not accosted or assaulted in the corridors by any of your foes.’

  ‘No, Armistead, none at all, in fact I saw no living being in the place, not even that rare creature, a student.’

  Hot in the room, the only source of air a loud fan in the corner. One of the building’s claims was that its superior design rendered the need for air-conditioning obsolete. As a result the place is freezing in winter and stifling in summer. Armistead swathed in an old football jumper, cut like a tent, many chins emerging from the ragged collar.
An alliance between them that goes back to the time when the university was being invested. They have delivered up many favours to each other over the years. Guy takes the chair across the desk from him, the one reserved for visiting students when begging for better grades or more time with assignments. Armistead that unusual thing in Australian academia, an historian. A member of that even more curious sub-species who believe truth lies in the detail. His present project a history of nursing in Queensland. As part of his research he has access to the union’s archives, including the minutes of all meetings of hospital branches throughout the organisation’s tenure. Strictly limited to use on the university computer system, of course, which is why he’s suffered to drive down there.

  ‘You can sit here, Guy,’ Armistead says, pushing his broad office chair back so that he can get enough free space between his belly and the desk to stand. ‘I’ll take myself off to the refectory for a coffee.’ Lumbering out the door and away.

  Guy going around and inserting himself into the man’s lair, into the not entirely pleasant warmth he’s left behind, noting the discarded chocolate bar wrappers in the bin beneath the desk, the detritus gathering in and around everything not in immediate use. Dust in a workspace denotes peace, Armistead has previously said. Guy only vaguely sympathetic. His preference being for cleanliness and order. But they share a love of research, the gathering of material. The older he becomes the more he relishes it. Nothing too dry for him, not even the minutes of meetings of the Queensland Nurse’s Association branches from twelve years ago and their deliberations on Safe Workload Management. Their attempt to institute a policy that resisted pressures from employers and other staff to undertake work deemed unsafe. Unfortunately the actual conversations are not recorded, only the outcomes, but even then it is not time wasted, it gives some small insight into the character of Eugenie Lensman, albeit in an earlier iteration.

  When Armistead returns Guy gets up reluctantly. Can it be only an hour that has passed? The fat man works his way into his control centre, breathing heavily. A large number seven on the back of his yellow and white jumper. ‘You find what you wanted?’ he asks.