by Graham Mort
Ralph paused to pull the damp shirt from his back. The path he was walking led to a ruined monastery on the hilltop opposite the town. Each year the builders renewed a tower, patched a wall or fitted windows to the stone slits. There was a museum now and a café. The route started from the neighbouring village, which lay about a mile along the road, past thickets of bamboo that grew in a lagoon of fresh water where a stream met the sea. Then past olive groves and new holiday villas with swimming pools. Then into the twisting cobbled streets of the old village that went up past a tiny chapel and cemetery and eventually became a rocky path. He’d thought about the little cemetery when in hospital. That was the worst time. After the angiogram and the bad news, but before the tests had shown he was viable. A lousy word. It had reminded him of university management-speak. Undergraduate courses and avenues of research were viable, not people.
Years ago the same village streets had practically flowed with wine. You could still see the oak barrels rotting from their hoops in dark cellars. On their first visit he and Simon had drunk a local vintage in a restaurant that overlooked the village square. It came unlabelled, amber-coloured and dry with a hint of sherry, unlike anything in the supermarket and shops. But the terraced hillsides were going back to nature now. There were just a few acres of new vines at low level. Phyloxera had done for them, then war. Then tourism had offered an easier life: jobs on the checkout in the Bonpreau, waiting on in restaurants or behind the bar in the new discotheque deep in the thicket of bamboo that grew near the beach. They’d danced there once, chest-deep in pounding bass lines, half-blinded by sweat and strobe lights. A Spanish girl with huge dark eyes and short hair cut like a boy’s had danced close to them and danced away, then moved inside again, sharing the frisson that ran between them.
The path led past the cemetery where the faces of the dead stared from ceramic plaques on the headstones. Then alongside an electricity sub-station that hummed like a wasp’s nest in the heat. A line of pylons traversed the hill ridge to his left, but the path veered right, crossing a dry stream-bed, entering a grove of dwarf trees that somehow survived by sucking moisture from the friable soil and rock. Higher up, the old vine terraces spiralled, their drystone walls falling away in landslides of dust and rubble. The strata had been warped by volcanic heat and twisted from the earth, leaving awkward ridges and loose rock. It took about an hour and a half to reach the monastery by this route and there was hardly any respite from the climb. The path went up, up, up, zigzagging through the woods, following the terraces with only a few yards of level walking between here and the summit.
In hospital he’d thought about doing this walk again. He’d thought about it through the long nights of pain and hallucination, when he could hardly get out of bed to go to the toilet. He’d thought about it when he came round from the anaesthetic and the pain in his chest was deep, like fear itself. Something you lived at the edge of, each breath taking you closer in. The pain was held back by morphine. But only just. He had a nine-inch scar down his chest, still livid through his short-sleeved shirt which was unbuttoned as far as he dared.
He’d thought about this walk when Simon was leaving and when he had, finally, left. Then sleeping alone, breakfasting alone or with Stella – which was almost the same thing since she always had a book on the go. Sometimes when driving to work or when he chatted to colleagues by the photocopier. Colleagues who asked him how he was. How he was doing. All that time, the mountain drew him. Like a pilgrimage, a vision, a penance. Something he had to prove to himself by going back to … well, maybe. He heard a grasshopper call from the dry plumed grass. It landed on the path in front of him, armoured in dusty green, its wings folded, its head a mask of otherness. Ralph stepped over it, scaring a slim lizard with a long tail and delicate stripes that sprang away then pretended to be a twig.
Things had been going wrong for a long time before he was ill. Rows, silences, a mutual sarcasm. At least Simon had had the decency to hang on for a few weeks, to make sure he was OK. Then he’d moved in with his secret lover. That rising star of Sociology, Paul Kretzinski. Twenty years younger, already a Professor. A Californian boy with a chromed motorcycle, floppy dark hair and a predatory innocence. In twenty years at the university Ralph had never made it past Senior Lecturer. He’d tried for a Readership twice but those bastards on the Faculty promotions panel had passed him over. Twice. He didn’t have the guts or the heart to go for it again. Fuck it. Fuck them. Fucked over. That’s what he’d said when he was still high on morphine, with Stella and Simon sitting anxiously beside the bed, when he’d looked down his tee shirt. Not that he remembered any of that. It had started there, the myth of his indomitable spirit. It was all bullshit. He’d felt more like Orpheus, so close to death, to the myth that would become of him.
Ralph filled his water bottle at the fountain in the village, then walked up through the last houses to the church. The oak door was locked and the rattle of the catch echoed inside. In the whitewashed porch the statue of Jesus with his crown of thorns was tilting on its pedestal. Someone had touched up his mouth with lipstick. The cemetery had a wire fence like a municipal tennis court. There was no shelter in it. Not for the living. No yew trees to offer shade like an English churchyard. Just tightly packed headstones, most bearing a ceramic disk with a photograph of the deceased. He stood by a grave where a man and wife were still dressed in the stiff clothes of the eighteen-nineties: dark cloth and winged collars and a starched white bodice. Their plump pasty faces were still alive back then, staring into the future they could never know, remnants of another age. Ralph thought of all the history that was absent from their minds. There seemed so much less to know back then, or maybe history simply seeped away into the soil.
He thought of the couple making love, their bodies still warm and moist, alive with veins and glands and pumping organs. He thought of their children fed into the new century like so much unsuspecting meat. Then he thought of the blond hairs on Simon’s neck, the curve of his chest, his shoulders, the way his buttocks met his upper thighs in a crease of smooth skin. The way he tanned so easily. His slightly crooked teeth bared in a grin. The turquoise-blue eyes that became paler as his skin darkened. And his smell, indescribably intimate and sweet, its salty tang rising after squash or tennis.
That was all too easy to imagine. Ralph stooped to tie his bootlaces, feeling that crease of pain down his chest. A reminder. A reprimand. There were still little areas without feeling where nerves had been severed. He pressed a finger to his wrist and felt the rapid pulse of his heart, blood spurting across bone. When he’d first got home his heart had beaten so hard it shook the bed and his breath had come fast and shallow. After ten days he’d made love with Simon. In retrospect that was probably some kind of betrayal on Simon’s part. Taking pity. It had been gentle and loving and he’d felt healed. Blood had seeped out afterwards, where the catheter had hurt him inside.
He’d wanted to cry then. For the first time he felt sorry for himself, for his helplessness, for not being able to put on his own slippers or dress himself. It was only when he went back for a check-up that the consultant showed him an x-ray of his collapsed lung. No one had told him and it explained a lot. He’d lain awake hallucinating from the painkillers, watching smoke billow across the bedroom ceiling, trying to catch his breath, watching Simon being caring, Stella matter-of-fact. She never minded the bodily stuff; it just had to be done. But Simon made too much of a show of it. He moved in for the first three weeks or so, then went back to his own flat when Ralph could manage things better. The worst things had been trivial: chronic constipation; seeing how thin his legs were; the support stockings that constantly fell down. Mere indignities, maybe, but they reduced him. Whereas the pain was dependable. There was dignity in pain, in withstanding it. Stella must have known that Simon was seeing someone. Ralph could understand why she hadn’t told him. Just about. It rankled. Hurt even, but life was too short to fall out with Stella.
Ralph crossed a band of exposed
rock, clambering upwards. He took a swig of water, putting the bottle back in his shoulder bag. He’d bought it as a camera bag years ago. Now it was in style as a fashion accessory. Not that he gave a shit about style any more. A partridge emerged from the undergrowth to watch him, then flew off in alarm as he moved. His leather watchstrap was dark with sweat. The scar on his left leg felt tight where they’d stripped out the vein to repair his blocked coronary vessels. At least, that was the theory. Even when he went in for the angiogram he had a secret feeling that it would all be shown up as a mistake, or at the worst they’d fit a stent. Such stupid, self-serving vanity. Odd that he wasn’t at all vain about his appearance but he was about his health. He’d lain there during the procedure with the catheter bumping inside his chest, feeling the hot flush of dye, hanging on as the x-rays were taken. It was the weirdest feeling, impossible to describe. Not painful exactly, more like an apple core bobbing inside him, but bad enough. And he was helpless. He’d lost control. He should have known then that it was serious. The doctor had shaken his head.
– I’m sorry, there’s nothing we can do for you. You’re going to need surgery.
– Surgery?
The knife. As simple as that. Fuck.
– A bypass. One artery is ninety percent blocked.
There’d been nothing to say to that. The doctor smiled and touched his arm.
– Don’t worry, you’ll be playing cricket again next year.
He was Indian, dapper and dark-skinned, his hand cool on Ralph’s arm. Ralph thought of his grandmother, the silver bangles her father had made and that his mother had kept in her chest of drawers. Surgery. So that was it – the thing he had to face – and for the first time in his life. He’d never even been in hospital before.
They kept him in and operated six days later. In many ways he’d been lucky. If they’d sent him home he’d have been walking around like a time bomb. It was bad luck/he was lucky. Which? He’d always exercised plenty, eaten properly, was only maybe half a stone too heavy. His own father had lived to be ninety-two and his mother eighty-seven. But then they’d been looking in the wrong place for a long time. Denial wasn’t just a river in Egypt, as Simon used to say.
Ralph took off his bush hat and wiped his forehead. The brim was soaked and dusky with sweat. There were white rings of salt where his sweat had dried, the tidemark of earlier walks. He was wearing shorts and hiking boots. There was the purple scar down his leg, there the scar on his chest where he was wired together with titanium. Nine months after the op, stitches still made their way to the surface and he pulled them out like stray hairs.
The path forked in front of him: the left-hand side veering over open hillside, the right-hand side entering a shady gully. He kept to the right watching blue and yellow butterflies and dark moths scatter up from pink flowers that grew beside the path. He didn’t know the names of the flowers or the butterflies. They would have names in Catalan, names in Castilian, names in French and Basque. That was how the human tongue played over things, defining them until language itself died. He couldn’t decide if it was good to be alive or not. Being close to death had brought him face to face with a vast ignorance. All the things he couldn’t name and didn’t know. The university was like that, too. What he didn’t know seemed so much bigger than what he did, which at times merely seemed a lot about a little. Contemporary literature and theory. Saying that he was a doctor but not a real doctor had been a joke. It didn’t feel like that now. Not after the real doctors had put him under the anaesthetic and renewed his heart and woken him back to life. He’d visited the underworld and returned, knocked on the downstairs door, as his friend Tariq had put it, translating from Urdu. Even his surgeon had been Greek, leading him on that journey through dark rivers where his blood pulsed and roared like a bull’s in cavernous dreams.
Somehow Simon and Stella had got him through, even though they pretty much hated each other by then. After all, Simon had put her in an impossible position. He’d given her a secret that she didn’t want and couldn’t keep. She’d told Ralph one evening, on one of the rare occasions they had dinner together. Just six months after the op and he’d been about to return to work, part-time. Simon couldn’t make it and Stella had cooked an Indian meal, which was surprisingly good. Ralph had got her to shave his head. She said he looked like Mahatma Gandhi. He’d quipped that he looked as if he’d had chemotherapy, not heart surgery. Cooking always took Stella hours and, unlike Ralph, she made meticulous reference to recipes, wore an apron that had arrived free with a case of wine, and used the kitchen scales to make exact measurements. Lamb cutlets with spiced rice and okra. Afterwards, she’d dabbed her mouth on a napkin and lit a cigarette, blowing smoke away from him.
– You know he’s gone don’t you.
– You mean to the conference?
– Don’t be stupid, Ralph.
He had known. It was true. It was like pain arriving. First it circled and then it cut you in half.
– How long have you known?
– Not known, not really. Suspected.
– How long have you suspected?
– About as long as you have.
She pulled on the cigarette.
– Don’t pretend it’s all my fault.’
She was right, she was only telling him what he knew in sheepish glances, cancelled evenings out, Simon’s hurry always to be somewhere that was somewhere else.
– I’m sorry.
She stubbed the cigarette out on a plate. A habit she knew Ralph hated.
– Shit! Now I’m really sorry.
She wiped away the ash with her finger.
– Forgot. Again…
Then, somehow they were smiling at each other. Ralph never knew how Simon found out he knew. It wasn’t easy in the Department, but the place was deserted half the time anyway with central timetabling and colleagues on sabbatical. They’d never advertised that they were an item and they never told anyone it was over. Ralph met Stella a few times more than he usually did for lunch, usually in one of the bars around the campus, but that was all. Apart from pain of a different kind that kept him awake at night now. When he went back to work there had been a colossal sense of hurt. Visceral. As if work had hurt him. The first staff meeting had been difficult, when they’d ended up sitting almost side by side, looking up from the agenda and minutes to exchange wry glances. Ralph had felt naked then. But then it became easier. It became a fact of life, a fait accomplit.
The path left the trees now and reared up into a left-hand curve where the old vine terraces began. The low walls that kept back the hillside had collapsed and he had to pick his way over scree. In a few places prickly pears had colonised the land and he scratched his leg trying to negotiate them. A trickle of bright blood ran down his right calf. He dabbed it with a tissue, but the blood kept coming. Ever since the op he’d been taking low dose aspirin to prevent clotting. But if he cut himself the blood flowed. After the angiogram a big Nigerian nurse had leaned on the wound in his femoral artery when the cannula had gone in, pressing until the bleeding stopped, telling him about her kids back in Abuja.
After the first game of tennis they’d played together, when it had all been new, Simon had licked the sweat off his chest in the shower. There seemed no going back on each other then. He had the gentlest hands of any lover Ralph had known, man or woman. Not that there had been many women. Though Stella had sometimes been a convenient front for them both. She lectured in Gothic literature and wore trademark black polo neck sweaters and slacks. On one arm she had a tattoo of a snake eating its tail in a figure of eight. That was considered pretty racy in academia, though Ralph often thought it was an image of academia. She was a Reader now, as from the last appointments round. He’d had the grace to feel glad for her. Her new book on the Brontës had been well reviewed. His own, one and only, book on the sonnet form and its links to Renaissance music had sunk like a stone into the usual dismal university libraries. No one else would want to read that. He’d be lucky
to collect half a dozen citations. The Dean was already hassling about the next research excellence thing. Exercise? Framework? He couldn’t remember. Bullshit, anyway.
Ralph was panting now. His hips and legs ached with the effort of constantly climbing. He could feel the steady bumping of his heart. There were a few yards of flat path as his route ran parallel to the hillside before climbing again. He came to a flat rock jutting out from the slope and sat down to rest. The sea seemed a vertical plane, a blue-grey veil. The town was fainter, the church a pointillist’s dab of white. Scrubby trees spread out below him, khaki green. A pigeon or dove broke from cover and crossed the valley frantically, as if a predator was patrolling the tree line. He’d seen a sparrow hawk take a blackbird like that once, almost in front of his face on the south campus. So close he’d ducked. One minute gliding from the trees, the next an airburst of feathers. Then the hawk sculling away with the dead songbird in its claws. Oddly enough he’d found that invigorating, as if he walked on into the day more alive. When in fact he was on his way to the Emily Dickinson lecture theatre to enlighten Part II students about modern forms of the sonnet. All those bleak, hungover faces lined up in semi-circles.
Ralph felt in his shoulder bag for the bottle of water. He took a long swig, spraying the last of the mouthful into the dust. A libation. Droplets sparkled, then darkened like old blood. He set off again, already scanning ahead for the next resting place, feeling balls of sweat trickle down his sides under the shirt. He remembered Simon’s tongue lapping at him the way a cat lapped a saucer of milk. For a theorist he was amazingly … well, immediate. For someone who spent his time with Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, he knew the secrets of touch. In theory, theories exist. In practice they don’t. Who was that? Latour? Ralph halted where the path widened a little, breaking some dried leaves from a sage bush and smelling his fingers. The herb was as pungent as wood smoke. He flexed his left leg and rubbed the scar where it ran deepest behind his knee. He had a little birthmark there that looked like a rabbit. Funny how those things stayed with you all your life, like having green eyes or the way your fingernails grew or the hair on your chest tapered. His chest had been parted with a saw, shaved, cranked open and then wired back together. Before the op, he’d asked the surgeon – the Greek – what the procedure would be like. Invasive, he said. Then, later with a smile: It’ll be traumatic, but don’t worry, eh? You’re going to be OK. He was right, it was like being invaded.
