Tomorrow

by Chris Beckett

  A dying ape, four fierce scavengers left over from the age of dinosaurs . . . You could give this scene a certain dark, exotic glamour if you were telling the story to someone who’s never been to a place like this, but in reality there is nothing exotic about it at all. I must try to remember that if I survive this. Real horror is just horror. Only imaginary horror is glamorous.

  I approach the ape. Its rheumy eyes look up at me. I fire a single shot and see its head instantaneously split open and its brains spatter out on the ground, while the pterosaurs flap off squawking to the safety of neighbouring trees.

  As I continue, wading along the stream now, in spite of leeches, because of the impossible vegetation along the banks, I take the little plastic disc from my pocket and look at the faces of Guinevere’s parents.

  Later I stop to eat, but what’s left of the greasy duck meat is now three days old, and has begun to taste foul, which makes me think it may have caused the diarrhoea that I’m now experiencing, so I scrape it out of my filthy backpack as best I can and fling it into the bushes, where the cooked head of the mother duck looks back at me with one shrivelled eye from beneath a large, round, glossy leaf. I eat one mint. I have tried on three occasions to shoot something fresh. I failed to hit a monkey, and a bird with a long red tail, and while I managed to hit a small deer the size of a spaniel I didn’t succeed in killing it, and it limped off into undergrowth too dense for it to be worth my while to follow it, dragging its maimed hind leg. Now I just have a single magazine of bullets, and need to keep it for my own defence.

  After another hour I find some large red fruits which I gorge on, but they seem if anything to worsen the condition of my stomach. I’m beginning to feel myself building up, slowly and steadily, towards the ghastly state that precedes convulsive vomiting, and I can imagine a time coming when I will simply be too ill to do anything but lie down on the ground and wait – a terrifying prospect, because I know that pterosaurs, or some other creature, will sooner or later find me as they found that poor ape, and won’t even wait for me to die. Yet I can already just about imagine reaching a point where even having my eyes picked out by reptiles will seem marginally more restful that continuing to slog through this endless mass of vegetation. And of course, as I regularly remind myself, I also have the option of doing to myself what I did to that ape, as long as I keep one bullet.

  I wonder now if I should have cut the creature up for meat. There would have been a lot of eating there, but just the thought of it is so utterly nauseating that I do finally throw up and afterwards can’t get out of my head the idea of biting into one of those hairy hands, or that fat hairy belly.

  The stream sinks deeper and deeper into a kind of tree-choked ravine, so now there really is no way forward except the stream itself, and even that is criss-crossed with branches, which I repeatedly have to climb over, or crawl under, or even sometimes dive under, in order to keep moving at all. I am beginning to think that I may have no choice but to abandon altogether the idea of following the stream and retrace my steps, when I realize that the ravine is opening out and that not far ahead of me is more or less uninterrupted daylight.

  I emerge into a small valley, formed at the confluence of my stream with another somewhat bigger and steeper one, which has largely been cleared of trees for fields of maize and other crops. As I step out into this new open space, I realize how much I’ve grown to hate trees. From further down the valley comes the sound of bells – cowbells or goatbells or sheepbells – though I can’t see the animals and no human beings are in sight except, maybe sixty or seventy metres away, a woman in a red dress and a blue bowler hat, working a potato patch with a hoe. She looks quite old, though it’s difficult to tell the ages of indigenous folk like her who are out in the open air so much of the time. I stand there in filthy clothes to whose mix of disgusting stains I have recently added diarrhoea, with the pack on my back that stinks of duck grease and the machine gun still hanging round my shoulders. ‘Please help me,’ I croak.

  The woman looks up, and immediately turns to run down the valley towards a group of huts, which I now notice behind some trees, shouting all the while in a language that seems to consist almost entirely of intricate clusters of consonants.

  They answer the door together. They’re older than their photograph, and the enormous weight they’re bearing is obvious at once, but both are terribly eager to make me feel welcome, and to assure me they understand the great kindness I’m doing them. ‘So grateful,’ they say, ‘so good of you . . . It must be very hard . . . it would have been perfectly understandable if you hadn’t wanted to come at all . . .’

  I tell them that it’s all absolutely fine, that I needed to do this for myself as well as for them, and that I really appreciate them letting me bring Amanda. I can be quite a nice person, for short periods at least.

  They’re very nice, too. ‘Not a problem at all ... we quite understand . . . wonderful to meet you, Amanda, and, wow, what a good friend you’ve been . . . We’ve seen you on the TV, battling away with the government . . . we said to each other, if we were in that position we’d want a friend like you . . .’

  ‘She’s been brilliant,’ I tell them, and Amanda squeezes my hand. ‘She and my parents and my Aunt Xenia. They’ve all been brilliant.’

  My parents I would have expected to fight for me, and Xenia loves a battle of any kind, but the fact that Amanda worked so very hard to keep my case on the national agenda is something I find both touching and somewhat disturbing, because I secretly very much doubt I’d have done the same if the situation had been reversed.

  ‘Oh yes, absolutely,’ the two of them agree. ‘Your family have been wonderful too, and of course your extraordinary aunt is an inspiration to all of us.’

  They have led us through to the living room, which isn’t large compared to the one in my parents’ house, but is comfortable and homely, made by knocking together two smaller rooms. There’s an upright piano with music on it, and a small TV. A whole wall is lined with books – history, sociology, psychology, music – while the wall at the back has been replaced by folding glass doors that open into a tiny but beautifully kept garden full of ferns and orchids, the kind of place that is, I suppose, in part, the basis of the romantic idea of the pristine unspoiled jungle. Both of them are eager, desperate even, for something I have that they long to ask me for, but hold back for fear of seeming selfish or pushy. And it seems to me, too, that each of them secretly longs, in the way that children long for magical impossible things, not just for the meagre something I can actually give, but for something they know I can’t give, but which they can’t help hoping for anyway.

  ‘I’m very sorry for your loss,’ I tell them, moving quickly to close off that cruel impossible hope whose existence seems to me to be confirmed by the tears that spring simultaneously into the eyes of them both. ‘If it’s any consolation, I honestly don’t think she could have suffered very much at all.’

  ‘You mean . . .’ begins the father.

  ‘I mean I saw the injury, and I can’t believe that she wouldn’t have died more or less instantaneously.’

  The mother doesn’t speak aloud but asks a question that consists simply of her touching, very gently, various parts of her head and abdomen.

  I touch the side of my head and she nods and cries.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ the father says bravely. ‘Such a relief to have that confirmed. Of course, you know they never managed to find her body.’

  ‘I gathered that,’ I say, remaining silent on the many reasons, in the form of jackals, vultures, pterosaurs, monitor lizards and even the giant ants that I observed a couple of times dismantling the rotting corpses of birds and monkeys, why there would be no body to find after a day or two.

  I glance at Amanda, who squeezes my hand reassuringly, a gesture that I find simultaneously comforting and very slightly smothering. A badly distorted blast of music blares out momentarily in the street outside and falls silent. Several people out ther
e shout and laugh.

  ‘Your daughter was a good person,’ I tell her parents.

  As happened when we first arrived, they respond to this as a kind of ragged chorus: ‘So kind of you to say so . . . after all she put you through . . . not many people would have . . .’

  ‘They did put me through hell, she and her friends.’ As I speak, I feel an angry impulse like the one that made me kick Guinevere’s poor dead body. Why should I swallow this feeling, after all that she and her friends did to me? ‘It’s pretty terrifying to come back in your boat after dark, heading towards the comforting little blue light that has always meant home and safety and rest, tying up your boat, and stepping into your cabin, only to discover that it’s not a safe place at all, and they’re waiting for you inside there, and they drag you down and kick you when you try to run, and cover your head with a prickly sack so you can only breathe hot, stale air, and tie you up with ropes that hurt, and drag you away with them, without telling you where they’re going or what they plan to do with you, and shouting at you or hitting you when you try to ask.’

  ‘We’re so sorry . . . an awful ordeal . . . no one should have to live through that . . . still can’t understand how Guinevere got herself involved in anything of that kind because it’s really not like her at all . . .’

  ‘That’s what made her a good person, though,’ I tell them. ‘She knew her instincts were flawed. She knew she’d grown up in a little cocoon, as she called it . . . by which she didn’t mean your family as such, but mine and Amanda’s too, our whole class that creates a kind of fantasy world around itself within which we can feel we are kind and good because we’re shielded from the cruelty that we’re actually complicit in, and on which our relatively comfortable lifestyle is built.’

  ‘That’s exactly what she always said,’ her mother exclaims.

  ‘It is,’ her father says, grabbing hold of his wife’s hand. ‘A cocoon. She always used that word.’

  ‘Well, she did her best to break out of that cocoon, and it was brave of her.’

  ‘Thank you,’ the mother murmurs. ‘It’s so generous of you to say that, when she . . . Well, we knew that she meant well, but it’s so wonderful to be . . .’

  ‘The faction she got in with is barely a political movement at all, and really has no coherent agenda, but I’m absolutely sure she joined them in good faith, and after that tried to be loyal to them, although I’m sure she could see their flaws, by reminding herself of the injustices her comrades had faced.’

  ‘She hated violence,’ the mother says. ‘She wouldn’t even let us kill a wasp.’

  ‘When I first met her,’ I tell them, ‘I didn’t know she was a guerrilla. I just knew her as a waitress.’

  ‘Which is what we thought she was doing,’ says her father, ‘until . . . you know . . . the police came to talk to us about . . . well . . . about your statement.’

  ‘I met her as a waitress too,’ Amanda said. ‘She sometimes brought me a coffee.’

  ‘You too!’ they exclaim, and I think for a moment it seems to them that, if only a sufficient number of witnesses could report having seen her alive, she might turn out really to be alive, for after all only one witness has seen her dead.

  ‘I thought she seemed interesting,’ Amanda says. ‘There was something about her – a certain intensity. She seemed . . . passionate.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ exclaims the father, turning in anguish to his wife. ‘She was passionate about everything.’

  ‘Anyway, this is her bag,’ I tell them, and they crane forward eagerly as I open the backpack, from which I’ve done my best to clean blood and sweat and rancid duck fat, and take out what I have left of its original contents: the cigarette lighter, the scorched biscuit tin, the knife and the little plastic disc.

  ‘Believe it or not,’ I tell them as I hand the little photograph back, ‘you were a kind of company for me, during all those days I was wandering on my own.’

  This was my old idea of forests, before my captivity: they were places where you could pass again and again from one small world to another. You could pass from here to there, and then be in a new here. And (in this romantic idea of mine) each here is new and engrossing because now you’re in a place that previously you only glimpsed – it was there but mysteriously it has become here – and yet what is best of all about being in this new place is always the new theres it opens up, for you now have glimpses of yet more places ahead of you which hitherto were completely out of sight, but have now come tantalisingly within your reach. And the places you were in before, when you look back at them, are either no longer visible at all or already becoming obscured by trees, and have now acquired almost the same mysterious glamour as the places you have yet to reach.

  But I can see now that this notion didn’t come from real forests at all, but from city parks. Places like the Botanic Gardens and Temple Park are laid out with the deliberate intention of making a limited area seem large by teasing the eye with glimpses of a seemingly endless succession of spaces beyond the one you are in, while also ensuring that they are only glimpses, or you would just see right through the park to the far side.

  But in this real forest, although the trees do create a screen that prevents me seeing clearly for more than a few metres ahead, and almost completely obscures what may be coming up even as close as ten metres away, there are no proper spaces, other than the spots where trees have fallen and the undergrowth runs rampant, which have no personality of their own. So there is no progression, just more of the same. I suppose in other circumstances, I might draw a good deal of pleasure from the stream, which is a feature of a sort, and which does from time to time widen into pools, or trickle over rocks, or even divide round a miniature island, and would certainly generate a lot of pretty pictures of ferns and so forth if you had a camera, such as you might see in a calendar or in one of my father’s programmes about the precious wilderness of our beautiful country of which so much, in spite of the depredations of loggers and mining companies and ranchers, is still almost untouched. But even there the range of permutations is limited, and soon used up.

  I wade, I pull off leeches, or I try to avoid leeches by walking along the bank and scratching myself instead on long thorns that seem to carry some kind of toxin because the scratches without exception become infected. I feel sick. All I have left to eat is some of those red fruits that make my diarrhoea worse, plus a single sardine wrapped in foil, which I saved from the tin I devoured last night. I have learnt to eat grasshoppers and preying mantises, picking off their legs and wings and scrunching down their plump abdomens, but I still can’t bring myself to eat them uncooked, so I crush the heads of any I can catch and shove them in my now stinking pack to roast when I stop for the night.

  My fingers are still raw. The skin tries to grow back but I inevitably do something that rips it off again. Some part of me is always bleeding and my nausea is constant. For some reason I can’t stop myself from thinking about that ape, and the idea of eating it. Even though it makes me want to throw up, I keep imagining myself biting through that hairy skin, and chewing on those leathery fingers.

  Something silvery glitters among the trees to my left. The stream is already beginning to descend into a ravine, but I feel the need to climb up and see what it is. I find a deflated balloon, silver and pink, tied with a white ribbon, the kind that’s released at parties. ‘Happy Anniversary’ it says. I pick it up and spend a long time looking at it, this fragment of city life that’s arrived here from beyond the forest. Sick and hungry and feverish as I am, and increasingly anticipating that maybe tomorrow or the next day, I may take the decision to blow out my brains and close this window on the world for ever, I hold this crinkly little piece of kitschy plastic and grapple with the mystery of its being here, and the way that, just by lying in this spot, it makes this particular configuration of shrubs and trees and creepers, which otherwise would be indistinguishable from the hundreds of thousands of other such configurations I’ve passed, into
something magical and unique, almost like a kind of shrine.

  It’s taken me a couple of days to relax into this place. At first I was very aware of being alone, and of the cobwebs, the bare wood, the muddy taste of the water, the absence of electric power. And also of the presence, suffusing the whole cabin, of my Great-Aunt Xenia who everyone says is so wonderful but whom, it now suddenly occurs to me, I’ve never really liked all that much. When I’m in her company, I always feel like I’m dealing with some kind of human steamroller – a bit like my father, I suppose, but more so, and without his innocence and warmth. Xenia doesn’t suffer fools or shrinking violets, as people always say of her admiringly, and that’s all very fine until you suspect that you belong, in her eyes, in at least one of those categories and probably both.

  There were still pictures of hers on the walls when I first arrived, growing mouldy round the edges: her own photographs of various places in the vicinity, and of local characters who she liked to think of as friends. I took the pictures down that first day and stowed them out of sight in a drawer. I made myself a meal on the little gas stove, and smoked some of my cool aunt’s weed, but when I climbed into bed, the mattress was damp and sagged in the middle, the air was sticky, and there was a large insect of some sort banging about in the room, even after I’d turned out the gas lamp. I was very much aware of the darkness all around me through which anyone or anything could be creeping towards me, and I thought of all the comforts of the city – air conditioning, electric light, dry sheets, my phone, decent food, my friends, securely locked front doors – and I grieved for them, really achingly grieved, even though I knew I would one day have them back, because that was far off in the future, and this was now, and this was all I was going to have for a very long time, and, even though it was my choice, it was a stupid choice based partly on a silly romantic idea of what this place would be like, and perhaps also a little bit on a mistaken desire to impress Aunt Xenia, who I suspect doesn’t really like me, though she’s always outwardly friendly in the grand manner of my grandparents’ generation, and I’m quite sure thinks of me as a bit of a lightweight and a nobody. When she was my age, after all, she already had an international reputation and had worked on three different continents.