Tomorrow

by Chris Beckett

  More trees, more creepers, another shrub with huge leaves, and then the same again, and again, and again. I try to kick a hole in a termite mound but it’s too hard and my feet too sore. My fingers are red and inflamed all the way along their length, and their tips are sticky and raw. I try not to think too hard about the fact that the destination I’m slogging my way towards is at best a stream bed in a landscape that’s almost certainly identical to this in every other respect, and is, for all I know, a hundred kilometres or more from anything remotely different, such as a human settlement, or a river, or some open country where I might be able to travel at a rate faster than one kilometre an hour. I don’t panic only because I can see panic would be entirely pointless, but at the same time I feel no hope. I just keep pushing slowly forward, thirsty, hungry, itching all over, with sharp stabbing pains from all my fingers. I try to remind myself that at least I’m free, I’m no longer in a cage and Carlo and his friends are no longer in control of me, but I also wonder whether I should just have waited for them. I wouldn’t have injured my fingers then, and they did at least give me a place to sleep that was away from the worst of the biting insects, and pretty much enough to eat, and very possibly they would in due course have come to some deal that would have resulted in my safe return to the city.

  More monkey-like creatures are hooting in the trees above me, peering urgently down at me. They’d provide some meat, but I daren’t waste any more bullets. I may need these rounds to protect me against leopards and snakes, even if not human beings. I sit for a rest on a huge fallen tree that’s opened up a gap in the canopy above it and allow myself a biscuit, a mint and a swig of water. I debate whether I should open the sardines when I stop tonight. Perhaps I could just drink off the oil – a prospect that seems utterly delicious – and wrap up the fish themselves in the silver foil for later. The ground is very damp. I decide to dig into it with my hands to see if I can find water, but when I try it makes me yelp with pain, so instead I awkwardly poke out a hole with the knife before kneeling down, putting my mouth to the ground and sucking what moisture I can from the spongy peat.

  An enormous centipede the length of my arm crawls out from under the dead tree, and, knowing these things can give a lethal bite, I abandon my rest and continue to shove and hack my way through the vegetation. The huge, sensual flowers and giant leaves would, in the Botanic Gardens, have represented a strange alluring unattainable place where death and desire, horror and beauty, were intoxicatingly entwined as in those famous paintings by that customs officer who never actually saw a jungle, but here in reality they are simply reminders of how nothing around me is changing, and I’m seeing essentially the same thing, over and over again, with the same thorns, the same biting insects, the same constant barriers of creepers and undergrowth to overcome. Perhaps it’ll be night before I reach anywhere at all, even a stream, and I’ll have to try to lie down right here in this nothing place where all the insects can find me, and wait out the hours of darkness with no sense of being anywhere at all.

  I try to think about other things and places. The cabin by the river seems very small and remote, and so does the me sitting outside it, like a figure in the street below seen from the top of a tower. Even myself earlier today, sitting at the summit of that rock, feeling contented and almost cheerful, seems entirely remote and separate from me. But even then I knew it would be like this, I remind myself, and soon this too will be in the past and I’ll be in another place again. Another room, you could say. But there isn’t much comfort in this since it seems quite likely that this other room will be exactly the same as the one I’m in now – the same plants, the same insects – except that I’ll be delirious and burning up with septicaemia and thirst, and the larger forest creatures will be beginning to discover that, if they fancy tearing off a bite of me, I’m too weak to fight them off.

  A flying creature squawks as it alights on a tree above me. It’s a pterosaur of some kind, with spiny teeth and a long leathery tail. I think about Amanda. It’s been my hope all along that she’ll have realized I’ve gone missing, and will have notified the army or the police so they can search for me, but, even assuming that was true, it would be no use now, since even from a helicopter passing directly overhead, no one could possibly tell that I was here. Perhaps I should light a fire? But I can’t keep lighting fires just on the off-chance that someone in an aircraft will see me, given that I haven’t heard a single aircraft in the whole time since I came out of the cave and found Guinevere’s body, which must have been at least seven hours ago, I think, though it’s hard to tell, and if I do hear a plane or helicopter there won’t be anything like enough time to make a fire before they’ve disappeared again. Besides, if an army helicopter saw a fire they might assume it was terrorists and drop napalm on me, or a cluster bomb or something. Everyone knows they’re very trigger-happy out here, deliberately goaded as they are by the rebels who lay traps for them such as pits with sharpened stakes at the bottom or foot-sized holes with downward-pointing spikes, which dig deeper and deeper into your flesh the more you try to free yourself.

  Oh Christ, I might stumble into one of those, or into one of those rope traps that whisk you off the ground and leave you hanging helplessly until you die.

  But as the day starts to fade I can tell the ground is beginning to slope downwards a little and I come at last to a small stream, which in other circumstances might strike me as exquisitely beautiful, with its overhanging ferns and miniature waterfalls, but is now just a resource. I’m about to run down to one of the pools to drink and cool myself and wash my raw burning fingers when I notice a group of ducks down there. Out on the water is what, from his colourful plumage, I take to be the male, while on the far bank is the plump brown mother duck, clucking softly as she encourages her three small ducklings to follow her to a little hollow that she’s lined with feathers, and get them to snuggle up safely under her wings as she settles down to sleep. Cluck cluck cluck. There we are, darlings; Mummy’s got you safe, and Daddy will keep a watch out for danger.

  I lift my machine gun, flipping the catch back to automatic, for this is worth a few rounds, and blow the mother duck almost in half with bullets that have clearly been expressly designed to do the maximum internal damage. The male duck rises, flapping and squawking into the air, and I shoot him, too, emptying the magazine. He drops back on to the water and lies shuddering on the surface, while two of the ducklings emerge from beneath their mother’s mangled corpse and run squeaking in terror down to the water, and the third flops about helplessly, apparently with one missing leg. In a single swoop I run down the slope and through the pool, snatching up the babies, and then stamping on them and their injured sibling on the far bank.

  All five! How about that? I got all five!

  I make a fire. I empty the first-aid stuff out of the biscuit tin into my backpack and use it as a kind of frying pan to cook the right leg, half of the breast, and some of the organs of the mother duck, poking the whole thing off the heat with a stick when the meat begins to char. It’s exquisite, the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted. I allow myself one biscuit for dessert, and then, on the basis that cooked meat probably lasts longer than raw, I pull apart the rest of the mother along with her babies and mate, and fry the whole mess in batches until darkness has fallen and the only light comes from my fire. I shove all the cooked meat into the backpack after removing the spare magazines, the last few mints, the hunting knife, the cigarette lighter, the cigarettes, the tampons, the phone, and stowing them, along with my playing cards, in the various pockets of the filthy shorts that I’ve been wearing continuously since I was captured. Then I treat myself to a cigarette to celebrate my hunting prowess.

  I finally wrote that letter. It took me six days to get around to it but late last night, admittedly not completely drug free but not too much off my head, I wrote it. And now it’s morning, I carry the outboard motor down to my boat, top it up with fuel, and, bringing my notebook and my playing cards, head off
downriver to the town, thinking to spend the whole day there, and allowing myself a single small joint to make the journey a little more interesting, given that it will be many hours before Amanda’s working day is over and – as I’m fairly certain she will – she comes to meet me at the designated café, so there’s plenty of time to come back down. There’s a refreshing coolness over the water, and a patchy mist that you quite often get in the early morning, in some places barely visible but in others quite thick, which makes both banks seem more remote than usual, and therefore pleasantly mysterious.

  It occurs to me that I seem very much to like my immediate surroundings to present themselves to me in a way that makes them feel remote and far away, and that I like this because I can then reimagine them as part of an alien and unreachable place like something from a dream. When I think about it, this is quite perverse, but in my defence, it isn’t just escapism, because these kinds of effects serve to defamiliarize space, by which I mean that, ordinarily, and assuming myself not to be unique in this respect, we don’t think very much about the strangeness of there being something called ‘here’ and something else called ‘there’, with ourselves always here (except in certain odd states, which I have experienced from time to time, when we feel separated even from ourselves) and everything else being to varying degrees there, like those trees along the bank, some of which the light-filled mist turns into silhouettes, while others share in that light so that they appear in luminous colour, with the intensified three-dimensionality of a 3D film. And to add to the strangeness, there is also the fact that each individual sentient creature – that fish jumping out of the water ahead of me; those three green parrots, squawking and shrieking to each other as they fly along the right-hand bank – has his, her, their, or its own here, from which my here is a mysterious and misty there like those trees along the bank. People often express surprise at the passing of time – ‘I remember it as if it was yesterday,’ you hear people say, but also sometimes the exact opposite, ‘it was only last week but it seems like a lifetime ago’, in both cases expressing the unravellable strangeness of something that was present no longer being so – but it seems to me we rarely notice that space is equally mysterious.

  I throw the butt end into the green water. Soon I’m passing my nearest village; as usual, a few people pause by their huts to watch me pass. No one waves, though, even when I wave across at them, and I can’t help thinking that perhaps word has got round of my unkind and unnecessary treatment of those three little children, so that now the whole village is angry with me. I’m angry with myself about that incident. I wince with shame every time I think of it – it’s a terrible, wicked, devastating thing to crush the optimism of a child – but God knows, the people in the village had plenty of reasons to be angry with me even before that happened. My airfare alone, from the capital to the provincial town, was more than any of them earn in a year, and that’s not to mention the cost of the boat, and all the supplies I consume while sitting there day after day, week after week, doing no useful work at all. On one visit to the village I saw a woman who was completely blinded by cataracts, which – and I happen to know this because my mother had to have it done – could be removed for less than a quarter of the cost of my flight. Such a small thing for me, such a big thing for her, but, though I gave her a few coins, I certainly didn’t pay for the operation.

  Anyway, I’m past the village now and I can relax and enjoy the morning.

  One of those white creatures, those naiads, surfaces with a deep gasp, and I turn quickly away so as not to risk seeing that sad, reproachful face.

  When we’ve finished our steaks, Ham suggests a walk to the harbour. We’ve got on well, and we’ve had a fair amount to drink. Although it’s ten o’clock at night now, there is still some light because we’re so far south. Ham says I should come down here sometime around the New Year, when it never gets dark at all, and even at two at the morning the streets and buildings are eerily lit up by bright cold daylight.

  Moored boats creak and rock beside the dock and out along the jetty that divides the harbour in two. There are two tug-like tenders that Ham’s company uses to ferry men and equipment back and forth from the construction site and another small ship shaped like an oil tanker, which they use to bring the enormous towers and rotors down the coast from the factory near the capital where they’re built, and there’s a very specialist boat with an enormous drum at its heart, which is used to lay out cable. Ham explains all this with the boyish enthusiasm that his work seems to awake in him, and which I find for some reason very endearing.

  We stand side by side at the end of the jetty, wrapped up in our coats, and watch the red lights along the horizon blinking on and off in the dusk, each with its own slightly different rhythm.

  ‘Do you want another drink?’ Ham asks. ‘The bars are a bit rough down here, but I know a couple that aren’t too bad.’

  ‘It’s tempting,’ I say, ‘but I think I’ve probably had enough of a skinful.’

  ‘Me too, actually.’ He turns towards me. ‘Well, it’s been an honour meeting a famous person like you. I’m sorry if I’ve bored you with all my engineering crap.’

  ‘You haven’t bored me at all.’

  ‘Oh yes, I was forgetting the poetry of it all.’

  ‘Poetry indeed. It’s been a lovely evening, Ham, and so much nicer and less lonely than the evening I expected to have.’

  ‘Same for me. I’m so pleased you enjoyed it. Um, the apartment my company rents for me is pretty near here. I don’t suppose . . . I don’t mean to be forward, but I don’t suppose you’d like to come there with me, and—’

  I smile and touch his arm. ‘No, I don’t think so, Ham, but it’s a lovely offer.’

  And it really is! It would postpone loneliness and grief and regret, very possibly all the way through to the morning.

  Ham is very embarrassed. ‘I’m so sorry. You did say your ex was a woman, so I should have . . . But for some reason I felt . . . Well, I was obviously mistaken. I hope I haven’t offended you.’

  I look him steadily in the eyes. ‘You weren’t mistaken, Ham, I think you’re very attractive, and I’m genuinely tempted. I’ve never understood those people who treat being gay or straight as if they were like football clubs that once you’ve picked one, you have to go on supporting it until you die.’

  ‘Ha. Same. It does seem a bit daft, doesn’t it?’

  I study his face. Admittedly I’m drunk, but I feel I do quite genuinely like him very much. ‘We don’t have very much in common,’ I say, ‘but I think we do have something in common – something quite deep – and it was lovely to have a chance to find that out. But I’m not sure that you and I—’

  He laughs. ‘Well, I wasn’t proposing marriage.’

  ‘I know. But even so, I feel . . . well, I’ve just split up with . . . with my partner . . . and I feel it might be awkward in the morning.’

  ‘It might. Though . . . you know . . . sometimes it’s good to let tomorrow look after itself, don’t you think? Otherwise . . . otherwise you’re always—’

  ‘Otherwise you’re always missing out on now?’

  ‘Yes, exactly. There you go, look! You’re a writer. You know how to find the words.’

  I find Amanda’s name in a bank of rusty mailboxes, but hesitate before dropping in my letter. I fear that I’ve been too voluble, allowed myself to get carried away, said things that I might later want to take back. There were times on the journey down when I thought I should tear this one up and write another much shorter and more carefully worded note. But dammit I’ve spent too much time on this already. I drop the letter into the box where I can no longer recover it.

  And that actually feels good, as it turns out. There’s only so long you can stare at the chessboard, trying to work out all the possible configurations of the pieces in one, two, three or four moves’ time. There has to be a point when you make a move and see what happens.

  I head to the café on the promenade
where I’ve said I’ll meet her. It’s the place we’ve been for breakfast each time I’ve stayed over in her apartment. I order a coffee and a pastry, and sit and watch the fountains and the people passing by. After a time I take out my notebook, telling myself that now is as good a time as any to start my novel, but it still won’t come, not from lack of ideas or a plan but because of the superfluity of ideas and plans that now fill up several whole notebooks back in the cabin, quite possibly approaching the word count of a novel in themselves.

  Never mind. It doesn’t work if you try to force it. I feel I’m getting closer, and that’s progress. Maybe tomorrow or in a week’s time it will finally begin to flow. I like to imagine it bursting out of me like an oil strike, or bubbling and boiling away like that hot pool Amanda and I climbed up to, seething and spitting as it came spurting out of the rock. Wouldn’t that be great?

  It’s good to be away from the cabin and the weed.

  ‘I’m looking forward very much to seeing Amanda,’ I write. ‘It’s funny how I hadn’t quite noticed that until now. I mean, I knew I liked her but all the same it felt more like a duty, to write the letter and come to see her. But I wish now I’d done it straight away like I originally planned and not put it off. It would have felt more generous, more committed. It would have been a real apology. She would have appreciated that and I would have very much enjoyed her appreciating it. I like her a lot. Unlike me, she actually is like a character in a novel in the sense that she does stuff that you could write about and turn into a story. Whereas in my case, well, “Looks at river, rolls joint, has thoughts, makes a coffee, looks at river some more, shoots unsuspecting and blameless river animal for no good reason at all, rolls another joint . . .” What kind of story is that? But Amanda meets people, she interacts with them, she asks things of them – like she did of me – and lets them ask things of her and challenge her – as she allowed me to do – refusing to be deflected by . . . whatever the name is of that unpleasant emotion that so often gets in the way of my relationships with others. What would you call that feeling? It’s a bit like jealousy, yet without actual envy of any specific thing. It feels grudging but also over-fastidious and embarrassed. It can easily turn to spite, or to prickliness or surliness – which I’m afraid it nearly did with me that time – but I guess it often comes over to others simply as nothing more than inhibitedness or standoffishness or stiffness. I guess it is jealousy in a way. I think it comes from feeling required to make compromises, to surrender your own viewpoint in order to embrace or accommodate the view of another. Perhaps it’s the jealousy a child feels when asked to share the attention of their parents. But it’s also the jealousy that comes from knowing that, just by being them and not me, other people are in a place where I can never go.’