Tomorrow

by Chris Beckett

  ‘Unfortunately I can’t text her in advance when I come down here because there’s no signal further up the river, but, yes, I did text her when I arrived in the town.’ Being alone for long periods does tend to make you lay out your own trivial thoughts in rather unnecessary detail. ‘But she doesn’t look at her phone at all when she’s at work and it looks as though perhaps something’s cropped up and she’s still there now.’

  ‘So you’ll be going back upriver tonight, then?’

  ‘I guess so. Pretty soon. I’ll give her another fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Good plan,’ the waitress says and then she walks straight out into the square again to make another call.

  ‘You’re busy on the phone tonight,’ I say, as she comes back to the café.

  ‘Yeah,’ she says, walking past, and then seems to think I am owed an explanation and stops. ‘It’s . . . it’s my boyfriend back home in the city. He’s having a rough time.’

  Which is odd, because they didn’t look like those kinds of calls.

  2 THE CITY

  The TV is a mass of flags. Dad is standing, as he always does, just a metre from the screen in bathrobe and slippers, his hair still damp and tousled from the shower, munching a large bowl of whole-grain breakfast cereal with yogurt, fruit and honey, and consuming the cereal and the TV news alike with the same . . . What is the word? I was going to say innocence, but that would be a very odd way of putting it, and Dad is very much a man of the world, known as both a consummate networker and a tough negotiator, on top of being a brilliant communicator. What I mean is that no one ever seems to have told Dad that appetites can be wrong, or unhealthy, or obsessive, or excessive, or anything other than wholesome. What comes his way he happily consumes – or so in this moment it seems to me – with great enthusiasm, without the slightest feeling or guilt or doubt, and without developing any sort of addictive craving for any particular source of pleasure.

  There are still flags on the TV: flags held by children, flags in the shanty towns, flags along the beaches. Noticing me for the first time, Dad waves his spoon at me in humorous greeting. The TV is talking about preparations for the morning’s Confederation Day parade of soldiers, brass bands, drum majorettes, veterans in wheelchairs, indigenous folk in traditional costume, which is why the screen is full of our chequerboard flag, whose twenty red and gold squares represent the twenty provinces that came together on this very day a century and a half ago to unite our continent into a single nation – or so it’s always said: they were, in fact, intended to represent the twenty articles of a now-defunct constitution written at a time when there were only eighteen provinces – and whose blue border, so we are usually told, represents the sea that surrounds and protects us, though the flag’s designer didn’t actually have the sea in mind at all, and intended the blue to symbolize the Christian faith that he hoped would bind together those twenty provinces in spite of their disparate origins. People assign all kinds of meanings to the flag. For instance, a now quite fashionable story asserts, inaccurately – for its sole basis is the fact that the novelist, Mago Barca, proposed it retrospectively in his novel Atlantis Rises, some forty years after the flag’s adoption – that the five columns of the chequerboard pattern specifically represent the five ‘civilized nations’ from which the founders of the Confederation came, and the four rows the four ‘respectable’ classes, from landowner to artisan to whom, at the time, the franchise was limited. But anyway, in spite of the lack of agreement about what it represents, there the flag is on the TV – red, yellow, blue – hanging from windows in provincial towns, fluttering from the aerials of vans whose drivers give a cheerful thumbs-up to the camera, and flapping lazily on those white poles that line Confederation Avenue all the way to the Unity Arch, which itself is topped by two rows of little red, yellow and blue flags around the giant statues of Mago Barca and the rest of the national pantheon. Traffic has been shut out of the city centre, and the TV cameras show us metal barriers being assembled to hold back the crowds that are already beginning to gather under the palm trees along the processional route.

  ‘Absolutely lovely to have you back safely, my dear!’ my father declares warmly, holding out his arms, spoon in one hand, bowl in the other, so I can come and give him a hug. ‘Still can’t quite believe we’ve got you all in one piece!’

  ‘Well, more or less,’ I tell him.

  ‘I know, I know. Bruised and battered in body and soul. Of course you are, you poor old thing. But mending all the time!’

  My beautiful mother sits with me as I eat my breakfast chocolate roll at the kitchen table. (Outside of the glass sliding doors, old Uncle Hector, our gardener, is setting out sprinklers to give our lawns their morning watering.) She wants to know how I am, and how I feel right now about the visit I’ll be making in a couple of hours’ time, and am I sure I’m okay about it. ‘It does seem terribly early days,’ she says. She is as energetic as my father, and with equal appetites, but she likes to demonstrate her sensitivity with displays of deep concern and, quite frequently, guilt, as in ‘Of course one does feel terribly guilty about all these wonderful foreign trips’, though whether you can really call it guilt when you are proud of feeling it is, I think, an interesting question.

  The doorbell chimes, and our maid Natalie shows Amanda into the kitchen. Amanda is wearing a rather lovely pale green linen dress, although her cheerfulness, her unselfconscious athleticism and her mannish height always seem to me, in the most charming way, to subvert her attempts at elegance. My mother greets her warmly with a hug and kisses. That Amanda and my parents became friends during my captivity still seems odd to me because, after all, I’m the link between them, yet I wasn’t there when they met and wasn’t even aware at the time that they’d done so. Mum calls out to my father, ‘Alex! Amanda’s here!’ and Dad comes shambling amiably through from the living room, large and unshaven, with his abundant grey chest hairs bursting out of the open top of his bathrobe: ‘Amanda darling, absolutely lovely to see you!’

  Presently, I pick up my backpack and Amanda and I emerge into a bright day with a pleasant breeze blowing up from the sea. My parents’ house sits right on the edge of the ridge from which the entire city descends to the glittering bay dotted with brightly coloured sails and stitched all over with dazzling sequins of light, each one the reflection of the same single object, the sun, on the surface of a ripple or a wave that happens briefly to be angled towards us. All along the street, with its palm trees and bougainvillea, people are emerging from large white houses, the adults carrying picnics, the children clutching chequerboard flags. From the space below us, church bells are ringing in the city’s many towers, while seagulls shriek in the enormous bowl of sunlit air above the sparkling bay. Here and there, little yellow sky-monkeys, with their tiny fierce faces, watch the unusual human activity from the rooftops, assaying the risks and possibilities.

  Amanda squeezes my hand. ‘Still want to walk?’

  ‘Certainly. Why not? It’s a lovely day for it. And it’ll give me time to collect my thoughts.’

  We descend from the more prosperous suburbs into more modest ones. Down here, red, gold and blue bunting is stretched across the streets and preparations are underway for local events, with stalls and even little makeshift bandstands draped in red, gold and blue flags. Someone has been foolish enough to leave a cake unattended on a table, and a sky-monkey swoops down, steering itself expertly, with its gliding membrane stretched out tight, to alight right next to the cake, and cram into its mouth as much as it can before someone sees it and shouts, and it scampers to safety up a tree.

  As the gradient of the slope becomes shallower towards the bottom we reach a street of solid terraced grey-brick houses, which I guess, when they were built a hundred years or so ago, would have housed members of the skilled working class. There are flags here too but not so many, and nearly half of them are not in the national colours, but rather the rainbow colours of the so-called Indigenous Flag, something that became popula
r, it seems, when I was still living in the Upper River and is now often displayed, not only by folk in indigenous neighbourhoods, but also by people who are not themselves indigenous, partly as a result of that unfounded but widespread belief that the five columns of the chequerboard represent the ‘civilized nations’ and specifically exclude indigenes, but also to make the more general point that the Confederation we are supposed to be celebrating was in fact built on conquest, expropriation and enslavement, with many documented instances of actual genocidal slaughter. ‘A hundred and fifty years of murder, rape and theft should NOT be the cause of rejoicing’ someone has written on a large sign displayed in their front window, though in this case, the accompanying flag is neither the national chequerboard nor the Indigenous Flag, but a third design – plain white except for a grid of empty squares outlined in black, the idea being that the colours of a new and truly inclusive flag have yet to be decided – which is displayed by a small but significant minority of households along the street, on the basis, I believe (for I’m still not fully up to date with the latest trends), that the use of the Indigenous Flag by non-indigenous people is itself an act of appropriation, and indeed of what we academic types like to call ‘erasure’.

  As we walk along this street, we pass people who look very like my own friends and Amanda’s, though ten or twenty years older: professional people, teachers, software developers. They’re setting up trestle tables, hanging up bunting in one or other of the various alternative colour schemes, and setting out food, and potted plants, and handmade knitwear to be sold in aid of various local projects and campaigning organizations. Several men are cheerfully engaged in the business of spreading an enormous banner between two houses on opposite sides of the street, which reads ‘Party for Tomorrow’. For that’s a much more positive thing to celebrate, right, than a mythologized and tainted past?

  ‘Babies,’ I murmur, and I stop dead in the middle of the street.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Amanda asks me.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ I tell her, but although it is now some days since my return to the city, there are still moments when I find myself doubting that I’m really here at all. It’s as if all this benign, generous, unshowy prosperity, this colourful optimism, is something I’m just imagining, and behind it still lies the forest – the real forest, I mean, not the exotic unreachable forest of imagination, but the airless tangled ruthless place where I thought I was going to die.

  ‘Well, when you’re ready,’ says Amanda, ‘this is the house right here, look.’

  Confederation Day seems an odd day to have chosen for my visit, with all this jollity going on in the street, and someone even now testing out the sound system with a burst of loud and cheerful, if rather crackly, dance music. But to be honest, when I made the call, and the father asked me eagerly when I’d like to visit, I heard the desperation in his voice and just blurted out, ‘Tomorrow, if you like,’ without even remembering that it would be our national holiday. And he was just grateful for whatever I felt able to offer.

  After a brisk walk along a cold black beach, we’re having a lukewarm and rather greasy lunch in a small and almost deserted café. We have been finding it difficult to have fun in this austere place, way down in the south where winds blow up from the Antarctic ice. Even the wine is sour. And conversation, which used to tumble so easily from us, feels like pushing some heavy wheel-less object up a hill. But right now, we are at least enjoying the pleasure of agreeing about something.

  Amanda is talking about books she’s recently read by currently fashionable writers who don’t divide their books up into chapters, or ‘parts’, or even paragraphs, with some of them also eschewing punctuation marks, or declining to use capital letters, on the basis that (a) these formalities get in the way of authenticity and fail to represent the fluidity of human consciousness, and (b) there is something hierarchical and exclusionary about such conventions, as there is about any set of rules that require the outlay of time and money if they are to be mastered.

  ‘It seems a bit silly,’ she says. ‘They’re just so hard to read.’

  ‘Exactly. Which is far more exclusionary than normally punctuated text. In fact, you have to be very smart and literate to read them, which, of course, is actually the point. They’re written to admit only those who are worthy.’

  ‘Unlike your famous novel,’ Amanda says, glancing up at me with a slightly weary smile, ‘which is going to have none of these flaws, right, and yet be nothing like any novel ever written.’

  I am stung. ‘You see right through me, dear,’ I tell her, and a wave of sadness and defeat sweeps over me.

  ‘I’m only teasing,’ she says.

  ‘I know, but it’s a fair point. I’m sure I’m as bad as everyone else, but I’m going at least to avoid the faux radicalism of gimmicks like unpunctuated and undivided text.’

  ‘Sounds good to me.’

  ‘But there are a couple of things I do want to do,’ I say. ‘One is to write in the present tense.’

  ‘Not like your other novels, then.’

  ‘No. The trouble with the past tense is that it’s a lie. Okay, it’s only a conventional lie, because we all know that it’s fiction we’re reading, but still, it’s pretending that these things actually took place somewhere other than in the book itself. The present tense states the actual case, which is that the only place the events are happening is in the mind of whoever is going through the book at that particular moment. I might include imaginary animals from time to time, just as a reminder of that, or set it in a country that can’t actually be found on the map.’

  ‘Which also saves on research, I guess.’

  ‘Ha! True.’ Again, I feel stung, because, although I know this was only meant as a joke, I can’t deny the fact of my own lethargy, which Amanda has seen for herself, and my no doubt narcissistic difficulty with engaging for any length of time with the products of minds other than my own, but would still like to feel that, flawed as it is, there is at least something about my approach that is honest and good. I would very much like Amanda to feel that too.

  Why did we come to this dismal place?

  ‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘what do you think? My latest thoughts on my famous novel! I feel I’m making some progress. What do you reckon?’

  She looks at me intently for at least three seconds, and then reaches out to put her hand over mine. ‘If you really want the truth, I worry that you’re chasing a mirage.’

  I think quite a bit about my novel as I make my way very slowly and painfully along that small stream, not with enthusiasm, not with any belief that it is something worthwhile or valuable, or even something that I am ever going to complete, but surprisingly I do still think about it. I’d have assumed that I wouldn’t think about such things at all, because I’ve always had the uneasy feeling that most of the self-important chit-chat that people like me engage in, both inside our heads and between one another, really only happens because of the absence, in comfortable professional metropolitan life, of real existential challenges. We play with symbols, I’ve always thought, because we need something to play with, and our status absolves us from dealing with the material world.

  But it turns out that when, metre by metre, you are slowly cutting your way through the material world in the form of thick, tough and sometimes spiny vegetation, you do need something to think about. And what I think about my proposed book is how twee the whole thing is, though I want so badly for it to be deep and wise. It seems to me that what I’ve really had in mind all this time is a kind of model railway layout, a safe little miniature landscape in which suffering and fear are carefully managed so as not to spoil the essential tranquillity of the overall design, and everything is motionless except for the little train running along its track, over bridges, through stations and (my favourite part) in and out of little tunnels, in order to impart a certain liveliness to an otherwise static scene. I’ve always been sniffy and superior about books that contrive to wrap everything up neatly,
and bring the main protagonists to a happy ending, or to important life lessons at least, and yet my own idea serves essentially the same purpose of prettifying existence, and deflecting attention away from the fact that life has no particular direction and can for long periods be simply grim and meaningless, or even a kind of torture in that you have no control over when or if the suffering will end.

  So, I do think about my book as I hack away at twigs and creepers and duck beneath branches and wade through water, and I think too about my life in the world outside, and my friends, my brothers and my parents, and the complicated combinations of feelings that I have about each one of them. They aren’t comforting thoughts, they only exist to fill up a vacuum, because whatever I choose to think about is coloured a kind of nauseous yellowy green by my current bodily sensations. I feel slightly sick all the time, and feverish, and continually, maddeningly itchy, as well as chronically in pain from my raw fingers, and the blisters on my feet inside their sodden shoes, and the many scratches and scrapes I’ve sustained, and the insect bites, as well as the ugly lesions, many of them now infected, that are left behind by the huge brown leeches that I am constantly having to remove from myself. Sometimes rain falls and completely drenches my filthy clothes that are otherwise caked and stiff with blood, pus, sweat, dirt and squashed insects but do confer at least some protection against the numerous creatures that are constantly trying to suck my blood, or lick my sweat, or burrow under my skin. The rest of the time I’m trapped in a stifling treacly heat that feels almost impossible to bear, and perhaps might actually defeat me if I couldn’t get a few minutes’ respite occasionally by dousing myself in stream water.

  In one of those small openings in the forest left by falling trees, four pterosaurs are stalking back and forth around some large dark object. The object twitches and groans. It’s the still living body of a fat old ape, which has fallen from a tree and broken its back. One of them jabs at it tentatively and the ape flaps weakly at it with one arm, making the reptile and its three companions squawk and flutter back a metre, before resuming their implacable vigil, watching, without a trace of empathy, for the moment the ape becomes too weak to push them away.