Terroir

by Graham Mort

  I got the wheelchair to the corridor, pulled myself out with my good arm, strong as anything and swung on my good leg to the door. When they looked up I was there at the top of the steps. Larry! Larry! Then me letting go, tumbling down in front of them all. To let them know that hurting pain didn’t matter. That wasn’t it. What mattered was our lives locked away. You dense cunt, Larry, I’ll fucking get you for that. But he never did. He died before he got chance. A stroke in the pub, like a stroke of lightning or stroking Jimmy’s dog or our Jack Russell or Rufus when he was little in bed and frightened. That’s what Bernard said. He died being stroked, ordering a drink. No one else knew what I’d done on purpose even though it did no good, just O’Donnell dying like that afterwards. All that time ago and me still here, watching the days go round and never ending.

  There’s Puck at the window again like every bright night, moonlight dusting his face white. Moon low on the hill. Shadows trembling. His hands flickering in the light. There’s a big star low down. A planet my dad said, Mars or Jupiter, taking me through the fields in the dark away from the fairground lights and the hurdy-gurdy music. The smells of everything. Sweet candyfloss and sick down my jumper that Mum knitted from Dad’s old one. Weeing in the field together and wetting my legs and looking at the sky all stuck with stars. Like your mum’s pin cushion Dad said, laughing and rocking on his boot heels, pissing out the sweet beer smell, spraying my legs.

  They’re talking in the office now. Smoking outside the window, smelling of ciggies and flower perfume. That’s Alice, nice Alice, her voice warm like her tits and bum and breath pressing my face as she tucks me in. O’Donnell is dead. And my mum and dad and the woman with the red mouth and black hair and gold tooth at the fair and the goldfish in the pickle jar.

  All dead. The fortune-teller and nigger boxer and the drunken boys he knocked down. And the man who came one time, all that way to tell me something not true. All gone into a place where times go and get forgotten. Where stories go. O’Donnell is dead and always unforgiven. Forever. Never to be loved. Dead today, dead tomorrow. There’s Puck, trying to catch the moon and pull it down, bleating small sounds from his mouth like bubbles. The moon bigger every night until it falls into a shadow like a voice into quietness. Then he’ll sleep, Little Puck. A sleep with no words. Blessed, they said on Sundays. Blessed sleep. Deeper because of no words.

  Come on now, Larry. You silly old bugger. That’s Alice, whispering close by, taking Puck to bed again, stroking his hair, patting my face like pastry on a board. We’re watching over you. Sleep now. Today becomes tomorrow becomes today, turning like a fairground wheel with hurdy-gurdy light bulbs, stars, coloured planets spinning in the black. Today is now and angels do that watching, if only I could say it. This is the life, eh? You’re a long time dead. A rusty old stove and the smell of newspapers and tar burning on wood. This is the life. Pigeons making that over and over noise with their throats, then their wings crackling like fire from the roof in the next plot. My leg all stiff and eyes blurry. Thinking I saw that woman’s face at the window through the cobwebs and dust, come to say something. Something important, Ted, please. Tapping on the window like birds scratching the roof to get in. But Dad wouldn’t let her. Then she was crying, her voice shaking, banging, the door locked. Then she was gone, the stove smoking in the room and Dad’s face wet like afterwards at the hospital, his arm round me tight as a barrel hoop.

  THE GLOVER

  He was woken by the sound of water. The distant thrumming of a great river and the closer, lighter sound of rain against leaves and thatch. He lay still for a moment. His pillow was soaked in sweat and he turned it over to find a dry patch, plumping it in his fists. Reaching to his right, he found a small cane table laid out with his things: spectacles, a glass of water, a torch, the pistol in its holster, a blister pack of tablets he took to keep his cholesterol down, another for malaria, a novel with a cigar wrapper as a bookmark. He’d smoked one cigar before turning in. A small vice, perhaps. He’d watched bugs circling the hurricane lamp he’d brought to the veranda, organza wings stiffening as they fell. There was something beautiful in their quest for death, for light. He took up his spectacles and sat for a moment with them in his hands. He knew all his things by touch and was fastidious by nature. Each time he laid them out in exactly the same way so that he could find them in the dark.

  When he was a small boy his nanny had been a French girl from Languedoc. She’d taught him to play chess blindfolded. He remembered their fingers touching, the faint blonde hair on her arms. She had blue eyes and small ears with jade studs, the first woman he’d loved after his mother. He swung his legs from the damp bed to face the window. He could see the outline faintly – no glazing, but steel bars and mosquito mesh. He’d been bitten on the arms yesterday as they brought him to the compound. He wore impregnated shirts that were supposed to prevent that. Now he was surrounded by the night sounds of the forest: the rubbery belching of bullfrogs, cicadas chafing, the piping of tree frogs.

  He sighed and put on the spectacles. The room brightened a little and he stood up in his boxer shorts, slipping his feet into flip-flops that lay under the bed. He slung the pistol over his shoulder and felt his way to the bathroom. No lights. He found the toilet, wrinkling his nose; sat down to pass water, never turning his back, the pistol against his thigh. He was distracted and it took a long time. Sometimes he had a stricture and sat there unable to piss, thinking things more intense than that need. He wiped himself and rinsed his fingers at the sink, finding the foot pedal that pumped water. When he returned to bed he laid the gun down and lay listening to water running outside in the forest. The bullfrogs were a macho chorus, boasting, threatening, beguiling. He thought of their throats pulsing with all that spunk, all that sex. And water, yes. That was a good metaphor for what he did – it was reassuring, essential, even beautiful, but it flowed under constant pressure. And it wore things away, imperceptibly, until they were changed or gone.

  He checked his watch. The luminous hands showed up in faint light that was gathered at the mosquito screen. Four-thirty. He was tired after the flight. The Cessna had followed the brown coils of a river into the jungle, dipping low over the trees, making him feel queasy. There were columns of blue smoke where illegal settlers were clearing the mahogany. They’d put down on an airstrip near a frontier town: corrugated iron shacks and makeshift bars. Whores by a dirt road. Trucks stacked with timber. An unmarked helicopter had taken him deeper, the pilot swearing in Greek, keeping low over the green canopy before dropping him into a clearing. Then a rutted track, the jeep jolting, wheels spurting mud, a driver who wouldn’t stop talking and two soldiers in the back: helmeted, capes and combat fatigues soaked in rain. Their faces were impassive, their rifles laid across their knees. They were mixed race. Negroes with a lot of Indian blood in them. Dark eyes, without pupils or expression. They, at least, were silent, touching their helmets in a half salute. That always surprised him. Though he was a specialist, he had no rank.

  One of the soldiers was a sergeant. Things must be changing in the army. They carried his bags to the boat for him: a canoe with an outboard motor that sputtered white smoke as it started out over the tea-coloured surface of the river. Two bright red and green parakeets hurled from the tree line, twin grenades startling him. The prow of the canoe cut a wide vee. The river was still more than a kilometre across here. Rain gathered on a leaf, dripped to another leaf then ran to the forest floor. A trickle became a rivulet, a stream a tributary, then the river was formed from many small rivers, like a language made of water. The compound lay close to the jetty, invisible from the shore. He’d been here twice before. There were other camps like it scattered across the country.

  So he was awake again in the jungle, its dark interior like past time that was gradually being eroded, revealed, civilized by the future. It was primeval. It had its own rules and outcomes. In the city, he lived in a four-bedroomed apartment with his wife, a Filipino maid, two sons. He was anxious because on
e of his sons was having trouble at school with a new teacher. Anxious because Justina, his wife, had been bleeding again and had to have some medical tests. Ultrasound and MRI scans. His own mother had a hysterectomy at the same age. She’d been a cream-skinned beauty, brought out into society in the 1950s. She’d even danced with the President before he came to power. Maybe more than danced. But she’d aged quickly after the operation, becoming grey-skinned and gaunt, spending her days ordering the cook about, staving off boredom, visiting her friends to play cribbage or bridge, drinking brandy, Crème de Menthe.

  His father had taken a mistress. That was normal at the bank. It was what they did in those days. If he even thought about that, Justina would take him to the cleaners. In any case, he still loved her and their two boys. Men of his age made themselves ridiculous with younger women. All that false masculinity. Like the bullfrogs out there, squaring up to each other with their machismo, their bullshit. He rolled over on to his side, listening to the pulsing layers of sound. They seemed to come in waves, from all sides though the humid air. It was unbearably hot, of course. It was always so. His lot was to endure the heat and humidity of places that didn’t exist. If he couldn’t settle his thoughts it was going to be a long night. And he had work tomorrow.

  He placed his spectacles back on the cane table, touching the pistol butt. It wasn’t that he fancied himself in a firefight. All logic was against that. And he was a man of imagination, not fantasy. The pistol was for himself, for his own use, as it were. On one operation, three years ago, he’d been woken by incoming fire. They’d used anti-tank rockets and mortars. The compound had boomed and flashed with exploding ordnance. Then flares going up and tracer rounds fired off into the forest, a white-hot chain falling into space. Some shell fragments had come into his room and he’d sat watching a disk of red-hot iron spin and hiss on the floorboards. He’d had to consider that. To think it through to the final consequence. As far as he knew, he was untraceable. But in that operation security had been breached and two of his patients had been liberated. The others, beyond help, had been finished by their own comrades as they crouched, praying. That was the mercy of the jungle.

  So, if they had made it out of there alive, he’d be on a list. Whether he had a name or not, he would be known. Most likely he was just a rumour. The Glover. He’d asked for the pistol the next day, after the attack. Keeping his arm steady as he squeezed the trigger, he watched each shot rip the pith out of a capirona tree. It was shocking, the kick of the gun in his hand – action here, reaction there – the sudden remote violence as bullets struck. Whenever he had to work away up-country he collected it from a safe-deposit box at the city bank, where his father had worked, where he’d been known since he was a child. There were no other traces. Not on his cellphone, not on his laptop or desktop computer. Just a pistol lying in the darkness of a steel box in a granite building with cool marble corridors and softly spoken staff to care for him. When he was needed, they sent someone in person to the Institute with a message. Then he’d meet another contact with train or air tickets, a false ID card that he destroyed as he completed the final stage of the assignment. By the time he got home he’d shed another identity to become himself again. Reborn. Born again. What was the difference?

  He lifted the glass in the dark and sipped at the tepid water. Jesus! He spat something out in disgust. A moth? He could feel it fluttering and tingling against his lips. It must have dropped into the glass when he was relieving himself. Christ, how he hated the jungle! Hated being this deep in its canopy of trees. He loathed its steaming damp, its greenness, its secrecy. Everything preying upon everything else: jaguars on monkeys, crocodiles on fish, mongoose on snakes, snakes on frogs and beetles, leeches and ticks on everything. Then there was the river, alive with unimaginable horror: a tiny translucent fish, the candiru, that could enter the body through an orifice and eat away at a man’s insides, gorging itself on shit and flesh in the dark. Pirhana could strip a horse to a skeleton in minutes. Swarming and tearing, frenzied, the water boiling with blood. He’d seen that on a film. Mindless appetite. Then crocodiles and black caiman, anaconda and coral snakes. Primitive killers that had never evolved. Above all, there was the colossal surge of insect life waiting to invade skin and clothing. He’d read his English novel under the sheets like a child for a just few minutes with the help of a torch and heard the thud of moths against the mosquito netting. He wiped the back of his hand against his mouth and a shudder passed through him, a dark current of apprehension. He needed to retire. Then none of this would not be necessary. He shifted the pillow again, feeling it damp against his nape hair. The inside of his body felt turgid, as if his bowels had filled with clay.

  Tomorrow he’d look at the prisoners through the shuttered windows of their cell doors. He’d study reports, photographs if there were any. Sometimes they were in poor condition, the prisoners. After all, army intelligence officers usually lacked intelligence. They made up for it in brutality, though: breaking teeth, collar bones, cheekbones, gouging eyes, ramming in cattle probes, burning skin with lighter fluid. When he met the prisoners, one by one, the first thing he did was offer them medical attention. He spoke to them softly, touched them solicitously. He wasn’t a doctor himself. Well, not a doctor of medicine. He had a PhD from an American University in corpus linguistics. He’d made a study of the untruths people told to maintain relationships with their partners. What was said and wasn’t said. What interested him was information and communication. Even statistics had their aesthetic. In these situations of enquiry – he’d never liked the word interrogation – information and its communication worked both ways. All that started with the body, with eye contact, with the position of the head or hands, with an unspoken dress code. Sometimes he wore casual clothes: slacks and a polo shirt. Sometimes a smart suit with a crisp shirt and cuff links. Sometimes – in the later stages – a white coat or the short jacket a dentist wears.

  And he had no name, never gave a name, never allowed a prisoner to address him in that way. They were usually stubborn. They’d had silence instilled, beaten into them, whereas it’s the natural inclination of a human being to give utterance, to speak, to communicate, to share their humanity. He could tell very quickly if the prisoners knew anything, if they were hiding anything worth knowing. That often went with rank, education, where they sat in the hierarchy. Generally speaking, he was sent for when someone important turned up. The rest could be tamed with rifle butts, bare wires and a generator. The outcome was always the same, whatever the interim situation or the nature of the enquiry. Once he had done with them, once his records were complete and his report written, they were taken away and given final treatment. That, at least, was merciful. And it was cheap. It cost the country next to nothing.

  People didn’t understand interrogation. They thought it was merely about getting prisoners to speak, asking them questions, dragging out answers at any cost, even if they were lies. For him – and he was a specialist – it began with solicitude. The medical kind came first – a plaster cast, a sterile dressing, sutures, even pain relief. Because pain drove things from a person’s head, it gave them a focus, something to fight. What he liked to work with was an open mind. Once they were more comfortable they could be more amenable. He took fingerprints, DNA samples, mug shots. It made the prisoners feel that they’d left the realm of random brutality, of arbitrary violence – things they’d shared and perpetrated, after all – and entered a rational world of lawful procedure. They didn’t know where they were, though they could guess if they lay awake listening to the night in their pitch-black cells. The trick was maintaining that darkness, never giving them quite enough to drink, keeping them on the edge of thirst and fever where their thoughts could multiply. It was he who brought them into the light, who’d order a jug of iced water and let them drink from it, though never too much at one time. That increased expectation, the thought that they might drink. Sometimes they’d ask him for water and he’d smile, solicitous again. Soon,
soon, he would say, soothing them, offering them a future.

  He spoke Portuguese of course, Spanish, was fluent in English, which he used for the educated cadres, but he also had a smattering of the hill and river dialects. It was amazing how the sound of a few words in their own language could melt a man’s tongue. Or a woman’s for that matter. He’d seen prisoners who’d been beaten almost beyond recognition and endured, cry at the sound of their own language. The language of their childhood, the language their mothers had first spoken to them. The procedure is called de-gloving, he’d say unexpectedly, softly, turning as he was leaving the room.

  He lay in the dark now, listening to the forest seethe around him. His lip was swelling. Maybe it wasn’t a moth he’d spat out. There were species in the jungle that had never even been identified. Even a venomous moth wasn’t beyond imagination. Nothing was beyond that.

  Because tomorrow was a working day, he remembered all the childhoods he’d had. A miner’s son marching with his father from the pithead to a strike meeting. A peasant farmer’s son staking out a clearing in the jungle, burning and chopping the bush to grow maize, sweet potatoes. Or his father was dead and his mother was a teacher in the village school, keeping things together, observing decency, feeding her large family of which he was the youngest. Or he’d been raised in the city in a steady family, his father working at the fuel plant, his mother a maid. Maybe he’d been rescued from the streets where an uncle had dumped him, where he’d sold himself to businessmen cruising in cars to survive. There was a web of stories, of names, locations, family members. All of them were interchangeable, all of them familiar to him, as if they’d been real. He told them about his childhood so that they would remember theirs, that was all. It was all lies, of course. Though in the wider scheme of things it was all truth. The way fiction is the ultimate truth because it is reality processed and projected by the mind. It is experience – actuality – synthesized. What led them to him was their own imagination: that ultimate instrument of consciousness. The idea of breaking them was never part of his method. That was both stupid and barbaric. It was realisation that made them talk, encouraged them to share the burden they carried.