Tomorrow

by Chris Beckett

  I have the same problem with life, to be perfectly honest. I find it hard to decide who to be.

  I set off for a long midday swim and this time I explore that side channel upriver that comes down from a hot spring. Reeds and lilies rise from the bottom of the almost bathwarm water in which small, iridescent fish dart back and forth between green stems cross-hatched with sunlight. The trees on either bank frequently touch one another overhead to create the effect of a tunnel, along which small flying creatures hurry back and forth, gracefully dodging the vines and dangling roots that gorge themselves on the mineral-rich stream. It’s hard work swimming upstream in warm water, so sometimes, when the water is very shallow, I stand up and wade. I suppose at some point it may become too hot to swim in, or too overgrown.

  I reach a small lake. There is something primeval about it, surrounded by banks of primitive-looking white flowers and trees with huge flat leaves. Passing just a few metres away from me, a large pale creature sticks its smooth head from the water, exhales loudly and disappears again. At the far end of the lake a woman stands up to see what the noise was. Very tall, slim and athletic-looking, with a loose, somehow masculine way of standing, she’s been sunning herself on the bank and is wearing a one-piece swimming costume. She spots me at about the same time as I spot her.

  ‘Hello there,’ I call out. ‘I’m sorry to disturb your peace.’

  ‘Hi. No worries.’

  She relaxes, reassured, I dare say, by my accent being the same as hers. I certainly would have been in her place. Is it very prejudiced of me that I would be more frightened of a local person in such a context than I would of an educated person like myself from one of the coastal cities? I don’t know. At least in part, it would simply be that I have more idea what to expect from my own kind. I sometimes visit the local village, two kilometres downstream from my cabin, and I like the people there. I like their friendliness. I like the way their kids are free to run about and have fun. I like their style and their capacity for just sitting and watching life go by in front of them. And of course, we descendants of settlers, or at least the more ‘advanced’ among us, now that our centuries-old conquest of the original inhabitants of our continent is secure and irreversible, and now that we ourselves no longer have other homelands to which we might notionally ‘return’, like to express reverence for the indigenous people of our country, their wisdom, their way of living in balance with nature, though in fact they’re very alien to us and do things of which we’d strongly disapprove in any other context. For instance, they are extravagantly religious – on Good Friday, some of their young bloods simultaneously show off their manliness and their piety by having themselves crucified with real nails – they believe in witches, they preserve gender roles of a very old-fashioned kind, they set wire traps for animals which we’d deplore as barbaric if it were done by anyone but them, and they decorate their little huts, alongside lurid religious pictures, with magazine photographs of precisely the kind of trashy ‘celebrities’ that people like me deplore, though when I see the cut-out pictures through the open doors of the huts in my local village, I make an exception in their case and interpret these pin-ups as colourful examples of the inventive way in which these folk have taken things from ‘our’ world and repurposed them for their own.

  She tells me her name – Amanda. I tell her mine. She has a cheerful, mobile face and a gruff, merry voice. I gather she’s been working as a teacher for the past six months in a poor part of the provincial capital that has a high percentage of indigenous children. She had one of Dido’s sons bring her up here in a boat, having read about the hot stream in a guidebook. He’ll come back for her later.

  ‘You hope,’ I say, laughing.

  She shrugs. ‘He’ll come. He doesn’t get his money otherwise.’

  We begin to talk. We learn that, back in the capital city, we lived in apartments separated by less than a kilometre, and that we have several acquaintances in common. We discover that her mother, like my father, was a distinguished academic – a sociologist, in fact – sufficiently eminent for me to have heard of her. (Amanda has heard of my dad, of course. Every educated person with a television has heard of him.) We are just beginning to find out also that we hold similar views on the government (it’s terrible, it’s beyond terrible, it’s positively embarrassing!), politics (liberal-leftish), religion (firmly atheist), the insurrection (quite understandable in the circumstances, even if misguided), when, somewhat boldly, I place one finger on her lips and another on mine to make this chatter stop.

  ‘Let’s not bring the city here,’ I say. ‘Doesn’t that defeat the point of coming so far? Let’s leave all that behind. Look at those giant lilies over there, listen to the quietness. We could be in Eden.’

  ‘You’re very brave, living out here by yourself,’ she says, after several seconds of silence. She herself lives near the cathedral in that town down the river, in the same street as the supermarket, in an apartment with electric power and running water, and connected to the internet so that she can keep in touch daily with her friends and family. ‘I’m not sure I—’

  I actually think she’s very brave standing in front of a class of children every day, but discussing that would take us back to city-type chatter. ‘Shhh,’ I tell her. ‘Look at the lake. Look how clear the water is, look how the trees enfold it and shield it. Nothing ever happens here. Not what the city would call “happening”. Isn’t that amazing? Really and truly, isn’t this how you imagine Eden?’

  She laughs and glances slyly at me. ‘We should really be naked then, shouldn’t we?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ A little thrown, I smile as if I thought she didn’t really mean this. The idea is appealing, but it feels too complicated and ambiguous for me to want to pursue it.

  ‘I’m not completely undefended,’ I admit after a few seconds. ‘I do have a gun back in my place. I take it out on to the veranda sometimes, so the local folk can see it when they’re passing in their boats. I want word to get out that I have the means to protect myself.’

  ‘Wow!’ She is simultaneously shocked and impressed. ‘Do you know how to use it?’

  ‘My mother taught me. She used to shoot competitively at school. One of those posh girls’ boarding schools, you know. They played lacrosse as well. They all had crushes on their PE teacher. Let’s go further upstream. Perhaps we can find the source.’

  And we half-swim, half-wade, until we reach a waterfall. She tells me that there’s a small community somewhere up on the higher ground above this waterfall, the followers of a charismatic spiritual leader.

  ‘Oh yes, I’ve heard of them. They come from the Northern Countries, right?’

  ‘That’s it. Apparently they possess the Holy Grail.’

  She laughs at this preposterous claim – she has a warm and rather delightful chuckle – and so I laugh too, though I actually find it rather fascinating.

  *

  There are times when I come to and realize that my dreams are just dreams and that in fact I’m lying in a bed, three storeys above the ground, with many kilometres of concrete and stone all around me. There is a deep stillness here. I don’t mean silence, for I can always hear the traffic in the wide and busy street below me – the impatient horns, the growl and rumble of trucks – and every three minutes, like an electric drill being forced through the dome of the sky, a jet plane passes overhead. But all that’s taking place in another world where it’s already tomorrow, and has nothing whatever to do with me or my apartment. A fly buzzing against the windowpane is an event in here; a drip falling into a coffee cup from the kitchen tap is a noteworthy occasion, like a voice crying out in a forest to remind you that you are not the only being in this world.

  I have a frame I can use for walking, a commode and rails on some of the walls to help me move about. But I keep that to a minimum, since sitting up is a major exercise requiring several minutes of planning, preparation and internal pep talks between my brain and my limbs (as in, ‘Come on now,
legs, we can do this if we all pull together, we just need to believe in ourself . . .’). There are several women, most of them foreign, who take it in turns to come in the morning, the middle of the day and the evening to clean me up, leave me food and help me do whatever else I need to do, so I tend just to wait for them. I can tell when it’s nearly time for the next visit because, about half an hour before, the pain starts to build up until, by the time they actually arrive, the ugly clamour of it is pretty much drowning out everything else, and I feel as if I’m trapped in a tiny prison cell, with walls of stone closing in. It’s horrible if they’re late for some reason, one of those things that is unbearable and yet must be borne. But when they do get here, the medicine they give me sorts everything out again almost instantly. It also makes me drowsy. As soon as they’ve gone I dive down gratefully into dreams and memories, like a fish released from a cruel hook back into the life-giving water.

  There are places, deep down in the past, that are warm and safe. We had a big garden, for instance, around the house I grew up in, maintained for us by an indigenous man my parents were rather proud of, who we called Uncle Hector. Our house sat on the edge of the ridge above the city, and the garden was in two parts: the flat part on the top of the ridge, and the part that sloped down from the ridge towards the city. The flat side was artfully divided up by shrubs, flower beds, a pond and a little grove of ornamental bamboo, into several small, intimate lawns where you felt wonderfully cut off from the rest of the garden, never mind the house and the outside world. The sloping side, laid out by the same rather well-known designer, had a small spring, from which a stream wound back and forth across the steep gradient until it disappeared through a hole in the fence at the bottom. The stream passed among outcrops of rock and ferns and trees, which Uncle Hector kept to a manageable size, and there were huge brilliantly coloured flowers that were almost pornographic in the flagrant showiness of the invitation they offered to their pollinators, along with enormous white lilies with a strange bitter scent, and giant arum flowers with a purple spike surrounded by a sheath of green. At one point the stream divided for a stretch to create a tiny island, which, to me, was the most enchanted place of all, covered in large, velvety, deep red flowers.

  I still remember the dangerous lusciousness of that red. How mysterious colour seemed back then – not just that particular red, but any colour, the more intense the better. I suppose when you’ve only been in existence a few years, you’re still getting used to things like colour, you’re still wondering what they really are. Now I’m back on the edge of existence again, I feel a certain connection with that state of mind.

  I remember saying to Dad one day when I was still very small that I wished I could see a colour that wasn’t red or blue or yellow or green, but another colour entirely. He said he was pretty sure that the people who made paints must have thought by now of every possible mixture. I told him I didn’t mean a mixture like purple or orange, but an entirely new colour, as different from all the others as red is from green or from blue. He just laughed and said that was impossible because of wavelengths and rods and cones and so on, and drew one of his helpful diagrams, as if this was one of his popular-science programmes on TV. All of which was instructive, but I still felt that he’d refused to see the real point of what I was trying to say. Which was not very imaginative of him, actually, since some animals can see ultraviolet, and presumably they see it as something distinct from any other colour. But of course we’ll never know what it looks like to them, and to my father this meant there was no point in even wondering about it. He could never see the point of questions that couldn’t be answered, just as my mother couldn’t see the point of things that served no useful purpose.

  I’d still like to see that new colour, though. It would be like being born again and seeing, for the very first time, the deep, deep red of the flowers on my little island.

  ‘So how is our hostage?’ Carlo says.

  I have been lying on my mattress, eyes closed and half-asleep, trying to find a way out of the dismal present, but now I jerk awake. Carlo hit me once, at the beginning, in that dreadful first couple of hours, when, after pleading and wheedling failed to work, I made the mistake of trying to argue with him. He would be intimidating even if he and his minions didn’t have guns, and even if I wasn’t penned in a cage. He has a certain knowingness that reminds me very much of the way the knowingness of sexually experienced people used to seem to me when I was still an anxious virgin, except that in this case the experience or lack of it is to do, not with sex, but with violence. This is a man who has been beaten and tortured, but he has also beaten others and – so I very much fear – tortured others, too. He has certainly killed. And it seems to me that his power within his little faction comes precisely from his willingness to take personal responsibility for killing and hurting people. Most people need permission for things like that. He is one of the minority of human beings who are quite prepared to give it.

  ‘I’m all right,’ I say. ‘I appreciate the trouble you and your people take for me.’

  He laughs. ‘Like fuck you do.’

  I’m actually not quite a person in his eyes. I’m the representative of an evil force. It is a common enough mistake, of course, to imagine that the line between good and evil passes neatly between ‘us’ and ‘them’, rather than winding back and forth untidily through all of us. God knows, it’s a mistake made all the time by myself and my friends back in the capital, who (laughably, as it now seems to me) imagined ourselves to be on the good side of the line, simply because we were able to feel a degree of empathy for certain downtrodden groups, and took the trouble at regular intervals to express, on social media if nowhere else, our disapproval of those who didn’t. So, yes, a common enough error, and not unique to Carlo at all. But still, it is frightening to be in the power of someone who places you firmly on the evil side.

  ‘Not so pleasant to be the one who’s a prisoner for a change, eh?’ he says.

  ‘Carlo, with all respect, I do understand your anger, I really do, but I’ve never held anyone prisoner in my life.’

  ‘Of course you haven’t. Because your lot delegate your violence to others and pretend not to know it’s happening.’

  ‘I’m not on the side of the government. I’ve never voted for that party. Nor have my parents. Nor, to my knowledge, have any of my friends. We all despise that lot.’

  ‘I know. You vote for the “nice” party, the one that does the same thing as the government but with a sigh of regret, and with a few crumbs tossed towards the poor.’

  ‘Actually, no, my parents vote for them, but I vote for—’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck who you vote for, my friend. What does it cost you to vote? Half an hour of your time, perhaps, to walk to the polling station and back once every four years. They even provide the pencil. What matters is that you lived a comfortable life on the backs of the rest of us, and knew it, and yet carried on anyway.’

  ‘May I ask if you’ve set a ransom?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you mean that you haven’t set one, or that you haven’t started negotiations?’

  ‘You said, “May I ask if you’ve set a ransom?” and the answer to that question is no. I’d have thought that was clear enough for someone with your education. Aren’t you supposed to be some kind of professor or something?’

  ‘Well, not a professor, but—’

  ‘I don’t give a shit what your job is, my friend. The only thing about you I give a shit about is that your dear pa is famous and rich.’

  ‘He’s not really rich. Unlike me, he is a professor. But that’s all he is.’

  ‘And how much does a professor earn?’

  I tell him, estimating downwards as much as I dare. He laughs. ‘And that isn’t rich? Seriously? You honestly think that isn’t rich? You do realize there are entire villages round here that see less money than that in a year? And don’t tell me your dad doesn’t rake in a whole lot more from his TV show
s.’

  I know, as a matter of fact, that my father earns considerably more from his many much-admired and frequently repeated documentary series and their spin-off books than he does from his university salary, but that seems to me irrelevant, so I don’t go into it. ‘Okay,’ I say instead, ‘but the real rich are the owning class. The billionaires, the oligarchs, the barons. I mean, I know my family is privileged, Carlo – I really do, and so do my parents – but we’re still basically workers like you, we still work for pay.’

  He affects to find this extremely funny, heaving with theatrical laughter.

  ‘You’re all the same. Just because you can point to someone even richer you think you are on the same side as the poor.’

  I don’t like plot, I think to myself, lighting a joint to have with my mid-morning coffee and drawing in the scalding smoke. The green water flows by. Many thousands of tonnes of it, I suppose, pass my veranda in every second. I feel the drug entering my blood and spreading quickly through my brain.

  Well, okay, obviously I do like plot in the sense that, back in the city, I often diverted myself with stories that set up puzzles or goals, and made you keep guessing what was going to happen until right at the very end. But this strikes me now as a rather empty pleasure, which arises from a need for neatness, a bit like completing a jigsaw puzzle, something that can also be fun, but no one would claim that doing a jigsaw of a picture is the best way of appreciating the picture itself.