Tomorrow

by Chris Beckett

  ‘I keep thinking about you in your cabin all by yourself,’ she says. ‘You must get lonely, surely?’

  ‘There’s a village a couple of kilometres downriver. I go there sometimes. You’ll have passed it on your way up.’

  ‘We passed a few huts.’

  ‘Well, it barely is a village, but it has a tiny church made of corrugated iron, and a shop. You know the sort of thing: a few cans of sardines on one shelf, some bags of flour on another, a pile of out-of-date copies of various celeb magazines . . . And I go down to the town every week as well.’

  ‘You’ll have to come and see me next time.’

  ‘Yeah. Sure. Of course.’

  She glances across at me, clearly noticing my lack of enthusiasm, but she doesn’t comment on it.

  ‘And your book? You said you hadn’t written a word?’

  ‘Not a single word.’

  ‘Oh well, I expect you’re working on it in your subconscious.’

  ‘God knows. I suppose my subconscious has its own agenda. Trouble is I’m not sure it’s very interested in getting published.’

  I gesture at the view in front of us, and the various rocks, flowering plants and wiry shrubs that are rather picturesquely arranged around us, as if this was a rockery in a garden. There is a cool breeze blowing up here, which is welcome after swimming and wading along a stream of hot water. ‘I want to capture the whole of life,’ I tell her. ‘I know it sounds preposterous but it’s true. And that’s my problem, because really I can’t hope to capture even a tiny part of it. I mean, look at that bush over there. Just that one bush. Words, drawings, even photographs . . . you couldn’t capture it. There’s no substitute for the thing itself. And even looking at it now, when it’s right in front of us, we’re not really taking it in.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, shut your eyes. Tell me how much of it you can remember. How many stems has it got? What shapes do they form? How many flowers are there on each stem? How many petals on each flower?’

  She consults her watch. She needs to be back in time to meet Dido’s son Harold when he comes with the boat. ‘A little further?’ she suggests. ‘I reckon I’m okay for another half-hour before I need to turn round.’ And immediately she begins to climb quickly and confidently up the rock, as if some new of kind of gravity was drawing her upwards.

  ‘Perhaps we’ll find the Grail,’ I say.

  ‘No chance.’ She speaks without pausing in her smooth ascent. ‘Those people are a long way away. It must be a day’s climb from here, just to get to the top of the—’

  But now she stops to check out a red bird sitting on an outcrop fifty metres away, which she says is a pterosaur, unique to the Upper River area and actually not a bird at all.

  ‘Looks like a bird to me,’ I say.

  She is visibly disconcerted. ‘You really don’t know about pterosaurs? I’m pretty sure your father did a whole series about them once!’

  I laugh. Pterosaurs are the last surviving relic of another entire group of flying reptiles that have claws in their wings, and jaws with teeth. Really I know that perfectly well but I like to pretend ignorance of such things, because it always shocks people who know about my famous dad.

  Amanda carries on, then suddenly yelps. ‘Fuck. I’ve twisted my ankle.’

  ‘Badly?’

  ‘Not badly, I don’t think.’

  I catch up with her. She holds out her injured foot for my inspection. It strikes me, though quite possibly completely erroneously, that you can learn a lot about a person’s history by the way they act after an injury. Amanda expects attention. I don’t mean that she makes a fuss because she really doesn’t, yet somehow it’s clear that her expectation is that, in a situation of this kind, whoever is with her will jettison whatever else is occupying them in order to look after her. This provokes a brief twinge of sibling-type jealousy – how come she gets all this attention? – which I have to overcome before I can meet her perfectly reasonable expectations and look at her ankle.

  ‘There’s nothing to see yet. I guess you may get some swelling or bruising later. Does it hurt when I do this?’

  ‘Ouch, yes. But it’s not absolutely excruciating.’

  ‘Do you reckon you can put any weight on it?’

  ‘I think so, as long as I’m careful. And once we get down, we can pretty much float back to the lake, can’t we? But we’d better head back now, if you don’t mind, because I’m definitely going to be slow.’

  ‘Of course. Let me know what I can do to help.’

  ‘When we get back to the lake, would you mind waiting there with me? I feel a bit helpless like this, you know? We could drop you off at your cabin on the way back.’

  I’m not completely happy with this plan. I can put up with the kids from the village, who come by in boats trying to sell me things – I sometimes even find them entertaining – but I don’t really want other people seeing my cabin. But once again, it’s a perfectly reasonable request.

  ‘Of course,’ I tell her. ‘I wouldn’t even think of leaving you alone.’

  *

  ‘So, am I really doing this? Am I really giving up all of that for the sake of this stupid book of mine, which I may never write?’

  Wrapped up in my raincoat, I’m walking alone along the top of a high black cliff. Far below me, grey waves smash themselves on the black rocks to become a cold white foam that runs a few metres up the lead-coloured sand, before the grey sea sucks it back again.

  The choice I’ve made seems crazy, even to me. What is so great about a book that, even if I do write it, and assuming it gets noticed at all, will soon grow old and be forgotten? It’s not as if I believe in the idea of Art or Literature, in that hushed, trembling-voiced, capital-letter sense. I know that many people live perfectly rich and interesting lives without so much as opening a book. I know plenty of people who read voraciously but still lead mean and timid lives.

  Seabirds, grey and white, wheel about below me, shrieking as they go back and forth from their colonies, and far away down there on the beach, lie hundreds of plump black seals.

  It’s not as if I haven’t written books already. The memoir of my captivity made me quite famous for a while, and pretty rich, and I’ve written seven novels since, albeit with steadily diminishing sales. But none of them is the real book. They’re all just things I turned out while I was waiting for the real book to come to me.

  And yes, very probably, she’s quite right and the real book will never come. But what she doesn’t understand is that to give up on it, to stop even trying, would be like admitting that all there was in the world was . . . well . . . this.

  What I mean by ‘this’ is represented for me just now by the line in the distance where the slate-coloured sea meets a sky whose greyness is so pale as to be almost white. Long rows of wind turbines are in the process of being assembled out there. (Towards the northern end of the array, some of them are already operational, racing round in the relentless wind, with little red lights blinking as a warning to ships and planes. Down at the southern end, they’re still just white stumps.) But it’s not the bleakness of this particular scene I really mean, for this place fits my mood in a way that some warm, jolly sunlit location wouldn’t, and that, if not exactly comforting, is almost restful, in the way that it’s sometimes restful to give up hope and just sink down to the bottom and lie there. What I mean by ‘this’ is the world itself, unadorned, without elaboration.

  For a moment I feel a fear creeping over me that began in the Tower of the Grail, the fear of waking up and discovering that—

  But let’s not go there, eh? Let’s at least not go there.

  Anyway, I suppose she’d say that I’ve got it all wrong. My problem isn’t getting that book out of myself, it’s getting myself out of the book and into the world.

  The seals laze on the beach below me as if this bitingly cold place was some sort of beach resort and they were sunning themselves in this thin and watery light.
r />   ‘I’m not giving it up,’ I mutter. ‘It’s the only handle I have on being me.’

  I turn round and go back to the town, where I order a beer and some potato chips in a bare little bar with a grey linoleum floor and no ornamentation other than a framed and signed black-and-white picture of our president. Hated by all my friends back in the city, he is a local boy here and is much admired.

  There’s only one other customer, a slight but rather good-looking man, a few years younger than myself, so we strike up a conversation. I learn that he’s called Ham, and it turns out he’s read not only my bestselling memoir of my captivity, but also one of my novels. ‘I could see it was good,’ he says, ‘but to be honest it wasn’t really my thing. I much preferred the other book. That was great. I don’t like make-believe, I guess. I prefer books set in real places, and I like them to have a good fast pace.’ I think of giving him my usual answer – that books are never set in real places, least of all books with a good fast pace – but it sounds hollow in my head, and even rather obnoxious.

  I learn that he’s an engineer and works on those giant turbines. I confess to him I have absolutely no idea how you go about building a structure like that in the open sea. ‘Writing books seems pretty trivial by comparison,’ I tell him, not being falsely modest, but really meaning it.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ he says, God bless him. He has beautiful sad brown eyes. ‘You could learn to do what I do in a few years, but never in a million years could I write a book.’

  *

  In the middle of the night, when the moonbeams slip through the cracks in my wooden walls and the insects rattle and hum along the riverbank, I think about my dad. Of all the people I know back in the city, he is the one I most dread going back to without having written my book. Because I know that if he had to spend six months in this cabin, he’d not only write a book, he’d draw and photograph each new animal he came across, he’d spend hours with botanical keys identifying every plant, and he’d learn the local indigenous language, with its incredibly complex grammar, which, so I have heard, has a different set of verb endings for each of thirteen noun classes, including ‘long objects’, ‘springy objects’, ‘objects that resemble human genitals’ and ‘animals without wings that have high-pitched cries’. He would also involve himself in some way in the village school, create his own detailed map of the area, and set about building a boat, based on the local canoes, and using only the tools that would have been available here before the conquest. I don’t like to think about telling him that I didn’t so much as start the book that was supposed to be the whole reason for my interrupting my modest academic career, didn’t keep a journal in any serious sense, didn’t make anything more than the most superficial contact with the people in the local village, didn’t even get round to discovering what kind of creature those naiads are, with their odd, sad, doughy faces, though I did manage to maim or kill one of them for no particular reason at all.

  Tomorrow, I tell myself. Tomorrow I must start that novel. Yet I know quite well that when the morning comes, I’ll toss aside these promises. I’ll say to myself that the point of life is not to notch up achievements, but to live, to experience being alive, and that this will make sense to me, though now it just seems like an excuse for indiscipline and idleness.

  My gun falls to the floor with a hollow clatter. So this is it, I’m thinking. This is how it happens. My peace is over and now the opposite of peace begins. However far you travel, wherever you go, and however you try to protect yourself, you can’t escape the worm. Whatever the place, whether it’s green and lush like this, or bleak and bare, whether it’s full of people, or lonely and isolated, whether it’s urban or rural, modern or traditional, rich or poor, the worm is always there in some form or another, gnawing away beneath the world, looking for its opportunity to sneak in.

  I dive after the gun, and this means that when the stranger speaks I’m on all fours on the wooden boards of my veranda.

  ‘Sorry, did I startle you? I called out to you from the boat, but you didn’t seem to hear me.’

  ‘Oh, hello, Amanda.’ I scramble to my feet, trying to fold the gun out of sight with my hands, though really it’s too big to hide.

  She smiles. ‘Yes, it’s just me. I thought I’d come up and see you. I hired my own self-drive boat from Dido. Good God, is that your gun? Do you have it by you all the time?’

  ‘No, I was just . . .’ I decide not to tell her about the pale animal. She’d know all about those creatures (as any normal person would), would wonder at my ignorance, and be shocked by the irresponsibility and cruelty of what I’ve done. ‘Just doing a bit of target shooting for fun and I dozed off. I smoked a bit of weed, as you may be able to tell.’

  ‘Your eyes look pretty red.’

  ‘It does that to you, I’m afraid. Not an attractive look. But, you know, I wasn’t expecting visitors.’

  She frowns, detecting a reproach. ‘Well, I couldn’t let you know I was coming, could I?’ she observes mildly, and even humorously. ‘I mean, obviously if I’m interrupting something important ...’

  ‘You’re not interrupting anything more than me taking a snooze. I’m sorry if I sounded unwelcoming. I’ve never had a visitor here before.’

  ‘I thought you might like one. I mean, you’ve visited me a couple of times, after all.’

  ‘You just startled me, that’s all.’ I’m trying my best, but I can’t quite get the resentment out of my voice, even though I know I’ve nothing to resent. ‘A combination of stoned paranoia and being fast asleep. I thought you might be a terrorist or something.’

  I lay the gun on the rickety little folding table I have on the veranda for my cigarette papers and matches and playing cards.

  She is slightly but not entirely mollified. ‘Well, it’s lucky you didn’t shoot me, then.’

  ‘The safety catch is on. No risk of that. Have a seat. It’s nice to see you. I’ll go and get another chair for myself. Can I get you a drink or something?’

  ‘A coffee would be nice.’

  ‘Okay. I should warn you I use river water, so there’s a bit of an earthy taste, but it’s all been boiled and strained.’

  Inside my dim cabin, and out of her sight, I set the kettle to boil on the gas ring and spoon ground coffee into a stained metal jug. This is how it is, I’m thinking. You meet someone by chance, you spend a few hours together, you sleep over a couple of times at his or her flat, and – bam! – it turns out that, without meaning to at all, you have become a member of a two-person entity that has rules and expectations, and within which certain behaviours are permitted, and certain attitudes, even if not actually felt, must nevertheless be expressed and acted out in order to avoid causing offence. And this, in microcosm, is how society works, and why whole tribes of people will all claim to subscribe to certain values that they manifestly don’t really follow, while others do exactly the same thing with an entirely different set of values, and also why it’s often very difficult to speak out loud what you really think, or even to know what you really think, because of the lifelong accumulation of these compromises, and the internalization from infancy of the expectations of those around you, resulting from a need to be liked and not be left on your own, so it is often easier to deny some unalterable fact about your own self – and deny it even to your own self – than it is to go against what is generally agreed to be the consensus within your own particular group, although it may in fact just be what everyone thinks they have to say, and deep down they may all agree with you.

  It’s not that I don’t like Amanda. And all she’s doing now is what most people would do if they were living in a strange place and met a reasonably attractive person of their own age and background: establish a friendship, create a routine of gettogethers and shared activities, get to know one another, visit one another’s homes, start to construct a common language. Actually, I like her very much. She’s warm and funny and – or so I sense – kind and loyal, and she’s nice to look at in a
pleasingly eccentric way. In fact, I don’t just like her, I admire her. I admire her athleticism, and even more I admire the commitment she’s made, which I’d never make myself, to the daily slog involved in teaching a class of nearly forty nine-year-old children from poor and often illiterate homes where education is not especially valued and the national language not necessarily even spoken, but the fact remains that the compromises, constraints and expectations involved even in ordinary friendship are precisely what I went to all the trouble and expense of coming to this remote little cabin to avoid, so that I could write a book that would be free from—

  ‘Bang!’ says Amanda. She’s standing in the doorway, with the light behind her, peering into the gloom at my single-roomed dwelling, with its strewn clothes and books, and its unmade bed, and she’s holding my gun with both hands and pointing it right at me.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Amanda! Never do that! Never point a gun at another person!’

  She lowers her arms but refuses to accept my rebuke. ‘Really? I thought you said it was completely safe with the catch on?’

  A car is a kind of body. It has body language. You can see tentative cars, trying to edge out into traffic but without sufficient conviction. You can see rude and pushy cars in the same situation. There are also reckless cars, timid cars and arrogant cars, and you can read off these qualities from the demeanour of the car itself, without even seeing the driver.

  Cars are bodies. I remember noticing that once and liking the idea. Of course, I don’t see cars at all these days. I could do, but to do that I’d have to drag my own battered vehicle of flesh and bones off this bed, and into a vertical position, and across the room to the window, and, being careful not to lose my balance, get the window open and my crumbly old body out on to the tiny balcony to lean it over the railing, taking care not to drop my glasses, and look down into the street four storeys below – a series of actions that makes me feel weary just thinking about it. So I don’t actually see cars any more, but I can hear them all the time, lying here, even in the middle of the night. Cars, buses, trucks, trams; I hear them snapping at each other, braking, crawling forward, grumbling, occasionally flying into rages, once colliding, constantly letting each other know they’re there with little parps and peeps, each one with its own particular sound, which is, I imagine, as distinct as the various calls of different kinds of bird, if you only take the trouble to learn them.