In any case, Guinevere is very aware of me watching her – I feel quite sure of this – and is barely taking in anything at all.
‘I could do with some conversation,’ I say.
She glances across at me, then turns back to her book and doggedly continues to pretend to read.
‘Interesting book?’ I ask her.
She looks at me, lips pursed. After a few seconds she makes a decision and, putting down the book, she comes over to stand beside my cage.
‘Listen,’ she says, and then pauses before suddenly bursting out: ‘I thought about what you said. About me being just as middle class as you, and only doing this because it makes me feel good.’
‘Well,’ I tell her, ‘you’ve got to allow for the fact that you’ve got me locked up in a chicken coop, Guinevere. It does make a person a bit sour. I dare say—’
‘No, you were right. That is why I did it, because it makes me feel good. But—’
‘But what’s the alternative, right? Doing things we think are wrong, just so as no one can accuse us of having questionable motives?’
‘Exactly.’
She is very young. She still has the soft skin of a child. She’s left her gun over by the lamp and is fiddling nervously with something in her hand, a plastic disc of the kind you sometimes see hanging from the driver’s mirror in a taxi, with a picture of St Christopher or Mother Mary.
‘Sit down, won’t you?’ I say. ‘You’re making me nervous.’
She squats down.
‘Tell me something,’ I say.
‘I can’t tell you anything about . . . your case.’
‘I know. I didn’t mean that. Tell me anything you like.’
She studies my face. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ve found out about power. It turns you into a baby.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Powerful people think they’re the big grown-up ones, looking down on ordinary folk, like the statues in the government quarter back in the city – all those bearded men with their stern, patriarch faces. But people like that are just grown-up babies. They have people running round doing things for them and making sure they’re comfortable, people shielding them from things that upset them, people telling them how great they are, and how brilliant and how important. “Oh, you clever boy! Oh, aren’t you strong! Look how big you are on your great big horse!”’
‘We want power because it gives us a second chance at being a child? There’s something in that. Look at Carlo, for instance.’
‘I’m not talking about Carlo. I’m talking about me, and you, and my parents . . .’ She glances down at her plastic disc and shoves it back into her pocket. ‘And your parents. Your famous dad. All that love he gets from everyone!’
‘Ha! He laps it up, it’s true. His generosity of spirit! His energy! His ability to communicate! He positively basks in it, the old bastard.’
In spite of herself, she smiles, and I smile back encouragingly, because I feel it would do her good to lighten up. The poor girl is so painfully earnest.
‘To be honest,’ I say, ‘the rest of the family find it a bit hard to take, when we know what a crabby old sod he can be at home. So yes, you’re right, he is a pampered child in many ways. But I wouldn’t call him powerful.’
‘Of course he’s powerful! And so are my parents. You just don’t notice the power because you’re used to it.’
‘Are your parents famous, too? You’ve kept that quiet!’
‘They’re not famous at all. Just average middle-class folk. And they think they’re just ordinary, because that’s what they and their friends tell each other. They compare themselves with the rich people in the big houses up on the ridge, and think they’re just ordinary downtrodden decent folk standing up to power as best they can. They’ve got two cars, live in a house with two spare rooms, go on a foreign holiday every year, have a cleaner who comes in once a week, and when they go to the supermarket they buy whatever they feel like buying, but that’s how their friends live too, and though they know they’re privileged, and like to say they feel badly about it – well, they really do feel badly sometimes, I suppose – they don’t quite get that this places them among the powerful. I didn’t either, not clearly, but I kind of glimpsed it. And then one day I really saw it. My phone was affordable because of the shit pay of the people who made it. My foreign holidays were affordable because I went to picturesquely poor places. I was living at the expense of other people, but I was being protected against knowing that fact. And my family’s benign stance of being allies of the poor and the oppressed was part of that protective screen. We were the good guys. It was those others who were greedy and bad. We told ourselves that was so, even though we actually had enough spare wealth to feed many starving people every year, or cure many blind people, or heal many sick people, and even though we spent the vast majority of that wealth on our own comforts and pleasures – like those sliding glass doors we had put in to make our living room open out into the garden, or that foreign tour we went on – because we knew our hearts were warm, and we worked with people less fortunate than us, and we experienced compassion when we saw the suffering of others.’
She has taken that bit of plastic out again, and is rolling it around almost violently in her hand. I feel that she’s close to tears but I’m not sure why.
‘And you didn’t want to perpetuate that.’
‘Exactly. I didn’t want to be a baby all my life. I wanted to break out of that cocoon and be with the people on the outside of it. People like Carlo and Rubia and Jaco, who dropped out of school at fourteen, and grew up in one-room shacks, and still had to toil away half the week to pay the rent to a landlord who lived in a ranch with servants and guards, surrounded by electric fences and CCTV. They know how the world really works because they can see it right there in front of them.’
‘Hmmm. And yet there are people from that sort of background who make it big – footballers from the slums, pop stars from—Ha! I was about to say from here, but I don’t know where I am, do I! They flash their money around, they buy big mansions with beautiful swimming pools shaped like hearts, and they have servants, and personal security guards, and chauffeurs in pink livery to drive them around – but poor people adore them! They pin their pictures to the walls of their huts. They pack the streets to catch a glimpse of them. They worship them almost like gods!’
She stops playing with the disc and looks up at me. ‘Of course they do,’ she snaps, ‘because every poor person in this shitty country has been brainwashed from early childhood to dream of winning the lottery and becoming rich, which makes them complicit in wealth because they’ve admitted to themselves that, if they had money, they’d keep it to themselves as well. And that stops them thinking about the oppression – the obscene oppression – that holds them down.’
‘Poor people are in a cocoon too, then? So who’s left outside to see the world as it really is?’
She squeezes the disc so tightly in her hand that it seems to me, even in the gaslight, I can see her knuckles whiten. ‘I’m trying, all right? I’m trying my best.’
‘Funnily enough, I believe you.’
She looks at me. ‘I’m sorry this means you have to be in a cage,’ she says with an effort.
I ache for her, for some reason, I feel protective towards her even, and I feel a bizarre impulse to reassure her that she mustn’t worry about my captivity and that I quite understand. But then I remember that what she’s actually chosen to do is futile and indulgent, and that her little guerrilla faction has no hope whatsoever of changing anything, so that this is all just theatre, and, what’s even worse, it’s theatre that barely even has an audience. I remain silent.
She glances down at the disc and then puts it back into her pocket.
‘Am I going to get a walk today?’ I ask her.
‘Not when there’s no one but me here. Sorry. Carlo and Jaco should be back in a few hours.’
‘Can we talk about something pleas
ant, then?’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Places we remember in the city? Places we had fun? What was your favourite outing when you were a child? I used to love the cathedral tower.’
She looks up at me, anguished. Her eyes are pale green, the beautiful skin around them free of any kind of wrinkle or blemish, her pale brown brows sweet and soft. Everything about her is soft and young. It’s obvious that she’d absolutely love to answer my question, go back to her childhood for a little while, chat about her favourite places.
But she says, ‘I try to put all that behind me. All of it was tainted. All of it was stolen goods. I have no right to look back on it with pleasure.’
‘How can anyone ever be happy if we see every pleasure as being stolen from those who are suffering?’
Again she seems close to tears, but there’s no chance that she’ll let them out. ‘I think I’ll carry on reading my book now, if you don’t mind.’
*
I make a coffee and carry it out on to the veranda. On the far bank of the river, the sun is still rising from behind the trees. A large fish jumps out of the water, and the back of a big pale head appears, then sinks back down into the translucent green. I open one of my notebooks and leaf through my notes and scribbled diagrams till I get to a clean page. I feel fresh and alive after my morning swim.
‘Dear Amanda,’ I write. ‘I just wanted to say I’m sorry that I didn’t make you feel more welcome when you very kindly took the trouble to come and see me. I . . .’
No, that sounds too formal. I turn to another page and pause to sip my coffee, mulling over what I want to say to her and how best to put it, so that it won’t come across as holding back, but at the same time won’t seem to offer something that I’m not sure I want to give. This is a difficult line to walk and I’ve purposely not rolled myself a joint in order to keep my mind clear, and to stay in the kind of state that (I’m pretty sure) Amanda thinks minds ought to stay in. (I think she’s right, at that. I’ve become over-dependent on the stuff here. It makes me lazy and greedy, and often deceives me into thinking I’m seeing something important when I’m not really seeing anything much at all.) I flip idly back through the pages of the notebook as I think and sip. I find a page where I’ve done a very rough pencil sketch of a stained-glass window, with notes on the various scenes I might include in its thirteen panels, six down each side and one at the top in the lozenge shape under the window’s pointed arch. Stupid idea. Why those thirteen, for one thing? Out of all the things I could include why that meagre, arbitrary thirteen? The truth is that there’s no better reason for that particular choice than the fact that they happened to be things that came into my stoned and befuddled mind on that particular day. And the whole window idea was half-arsed anyway, to be honest. It doesn’t get you away from plot, and, since you can’t cast your eyes over the entire content of a book at once, it doesn’t even get you past the limitations of a narrative arranged in a line. Also a window is flat. Two-dimensional, like a cartoon. And reality doesn’t feel like that. I need something more dynamic and three-dimensional.
Still there is something about those windows, with their bold outlines and bright colours, especially those deep rich reds and blues. In my mind they’re connected with a sort of chivalric place that comes from childhood stories: Camelot, Logres, knights searching for the Grail through a mysterious forest, strange encounters in unexpected clearings with unknown foes who refuse even to lift their visors, a wounded king sitting fishing by himself in the middle of a dead and empty marsh, boats gliding across the water with no one in them . . . I do retain a certain grudging and slightly embarrassed attachment to all that – it’s very definitely not hip or cool – and sometimes still toy with the idea of my novel drawing on images of that kind.
I did become somewhat disenchanted, though, when I studied history, and learnt that those stories were originally written for knights as well as about them. And when I came across the stories in the original, rather than in the sanitized versions written for children, I realized how full of knightly bling they were – golden candlesticks, swords with rubies set into the pommel – and how much they bigged up those wealthy and privileged men as good and noble and Christian and brave, when in fact they belonged to the class that went on crusades and killed and raped and plundered. And then that made me think how modern novels are written to flatter, and now they, too, valorize whatever class of people is their intended audience. Often they let the readers see themselves in a mirror that makes their personal struggles into something heroic. The more ‘literary’ ones flatter their readers by being clever and ‘difficult’ and full of allusions, so that it feels rather clever and refined, or maybe ‘edgy’ and up to date, just to be able to read the book and get the references.
But still there’s something in those old stories that I like, and maybe the idea of openings in a forest is the way to . . . Oh no, actually, even better, the idea of rooms in an enchanted or haunted castle . . . That’s just the effect I want because life really is like that, isn’t it? We don’t experience it whole. Each episode in our lives, each day – even each second in a way – is its own room, and each room is haunted by its own ghosts. Most of the rooms we can’t see at all and even the ones we’ve visited are separated from us by walls and floors, and other rooms. There are stairwells here and there, where we can pause to look down and get a glimpse of doors we once passed through long ago, or look up and see floors whose rooms are still mysterious and unopened. We climb to the next floor and move from room to room. Some are occupied and others empty, some beautifully furnished and others bare, and some, perhaps, contain a strange cup and a spear, which drips continuously with shining red blood that disappears as it strikes the ground. Except not that, obviously, because that’s someone else’s story and I need to fill my rooms with things that are of my own times and not of theirs, carefully chosen so as not to flatter anyone at all. Not even me.
This is good! In fact, this is more than good. This rush is what I live for! I reach for my packet of grass and my cigarette papers. I know I said I wouldn’t but sometimes it just makes sense to loosen the imagination a little and give it its head, and there’s really no need to write to Amanda right this minute. It’s not like my behaviour was so appalling as to require an apology to be prioritized over everything else. It wasn’t even close to being that appalling. I do want to apologize – of course I do, because I know I was a little stiff and unfriendly – but, if need be, tomorrow will be every bit as good as today.
I’ll do it tomorrow; that will be fine. I light the joint, draw in smoke, and hold it in my lungs, forcing it to release its chemical magic before I let it go. Dear God, this is a strong one! I can already see those rooms and those stairwells, and all around me, the gods and spirits are stirring.
A series of loud thuds against the back of the cabin makes me jump to my feet, groping for my gun. Holding it out in front of me, the safety catch off, I rush to the back door with my heart pounding.
Three little children are there in the plot where the cannabis plants grow: three sweet little brown-eyed indigenous kids, two of them in nothing but grubby shorts, and the third, the smallest, with a bare bottom and an old T-shirt. They’ve been throwing clods of earth against my wall. Their parents are doubtless cutting firewood nearby, or doing a bit of freelance rubber harvesting. The oldest can’t be more than about five or six, the youngest more like three, and their little faces have been beaming in anticipation of my coming out and laughing with them at their joke, but are now shifting towards dismay because they can see I’m furious, and, although I can already see that my intended reaction to this intrusion is no longer appropriate, it’s too late to stop myself.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ I bellow at them, still pointing the gun, my face no doubt blotchy and red-eyed from the dope. ‘Get the fuck out of my place!’
Their faces are appalled now. The smallest one gives a little shriek of distress and all three of the
m run back into the trees.
I’m appalled too. I lower the gun. ‘Sorry, kids,’ I call after them. ‘I didn’t mean that! You just gave me a fright. I’ll make it up to you! I’ve got sweets and biscuits. You can come and draw in my notebooks!’
But none of them re-emerges from the trees beyond my plot.
The thing about the real forest is that you can’t just walk through it. You’re constantly interrupted by shrubs and creepers, some of them spiny or covered in stings, some just tough and wiry, so you have to either cut through them, a job for which Guinevere’s hunting knife isn’t ideally suited, or find a way round them, which makes progress maddeningly slow. It’s horribly hot and steamy, with no breeze to mitigate the heat, and there are biting insects of many kinds that are constantly attacking you, including enormous bluebottle flies that push big blunt hypodermic syringes through your skin to inject an instantly excruciating venom, and caterpillar-type creatures that cling to your skin with rows of little claws so you have to mash them to a pulp to stop them burrowing into you.
Kilometre after kilometre nothing changes, other than in the entirely trivial sense that each individual tree has a different arrangement of branches and any given spot has a different arrangement of the same dozen kinds of tree and creeper and shrub. I’m slimy with sweat and very thirsty, but I know that my half-bottle of water may have to last for many hours, even though the air here is at saturation point and the earth is moist as a warm wet sponge. I’m hungry but my few biscuits, my remaining mints and my single can of sardines, may have to keep me going for several days, so I can’t just scoff them down as I want to do. Some kind of monkey or lemur swings down to a branch in front of me and I fire Guinevere’s machine gun at it, but it leaps away unharmed, while I check the magazine and realize that I’ve now used up half of the twelve rounds in there, due to the gun being set on automatic fire. I try eating one of the mashed caterpillar creatures, but its disgusting yellow flesh is so rank that it makes me retch. Ants are slightly easier to swallow. I come across a column of big orange ants, and I stamp on them, snatching a handful and dodging away before too many of their friends have time to crawl up over me. They are crunchy in the mouth and have a sour acid taste, but they don’t make me want to throw up.
Tomorrow Page 8
