Tomorrow

by Chris Beckett

  The second day I was restless and uneasy. I went for a swim across the river and I won’t say I nearly drowned, but I did feel pretty scared for a while on the return trip when the current took me and I felt badly out of control and at one point inhaled some water. But now here I am, sitting on my veranda on day three, all alone and completely at peace, and it turns out that this place is like a new shoe, which feels stiff and unyielding at first, but then you get used to it, and now it feels like the most comfortable thing I’ve ever worn. I’m looking out over the river, having my evening smoke, and I feel more at home in the world than I can ever remember feeling in my life. I don’t have that longing for other places. I don’t feel the pull of those pathways disappearing off through the trees, I don’t long for a there that’s different from here. I am content to be exactly where I am. What more could anyone ask?

  Tomorrow perhaps I will start my novel. There’s so much in my head, I feel that once I get going, the thing will just pour out of me. But there’s no hurry. There’s no hurry at all.

  ‘Please don’t run away from me!’

  But the woman is still running and shouting, so I begin to follow her towards the huts.

  Soon I can hear voices. People emerge from the trees. Most of them are men, several of them have guns, and the rest are carrying sticks or hoes or knives. As soon as they see me they draw up in a line, about fifteen of them, and begin to shout at me, but they shout in the local tongue, which sounds oddly dry and papery to my ears, and in which (assuming this is the same one that they spoke in that village along the river) I’ve only learnt the words for hello, please and thank you.

  ‘Please!’ I call out to them in what most probably is not even the right language. There are, I believe, still more than ninety extant indigenous languages, many of them isolates with no known relationship with any other language at all.

  They brandish their weapons at me and shout. ‘Go away!’ they are very obviously saying, though I don’t recognize any of the words. ‘Leave us alone! We don’t want you in our village!’

  I point to my mouth. ‘Please! I just want something to eat, and some directions.’

  One of the men with guns steps forward. He seems to be their leader, and is somewhat taller than most of the others, though still about a head shorter than me.

  He gestures towards the forest I’ve just emerged from. ‘Go back,’ he says in words of my own language, which I can just about make out. ‘No come here, understand? Or we kill.’ He points his gun at me. ‘Understand? We kill.’

  I feel angry. What threat am I? They may be poor, but how could it hurt them to give me, say, a few potatoes, or a bowl of that disgusting maize porridge they eat that tastes like wallpaper paste? Such a small thing to them, and such a big thing to me.

  ‘Just something to eat,’ I persist, because, after all, if he shoots me, he’d only be doing what I’ve already begun to contemplate doing to myself. And I also sense, possibly mistakenly but with some conviction, that this is a decent man who lacks the necessary coldness to actually do it. ‘And tell me where I can go.’

  The man frowns. He points to the edge of the trees where I emerged. ‘Go there. Wait. Understand?’

  He gives instructions to one of the three women in the group, and she runs back towards the village. He gestures to me to do as I’m told.

  We stop in Temple Park. There are tree ferns here, and little streams, and picturesque rocks, and of course, on the top of its own little hill, there are the ruins of the Temple of Tanit. We find a bench to sit. Normally a place like this would be busy with mothers and young children but, because it’s Confederation Day, we have the whole place to ourselves, apart from one little fair-skinned foreign family to whom I suppose the day has no particular significance. They’re eating a small mid-morning picnic on the grass, migrant workers, I guess, who probably work in a hotel or a restaurant, making beds or washing dishes for pay and conditions even our shanty dwellers turn up their noses at: two young parents in cheap plasticky clothes, and a little toddler all wrapped up in pink, with ribbons in her wispy blonde hair.

  ‘You’ve been so supportive, Amanda. It’s incredibly kind of you, specially seeing as we . . . well, we were friends I know, but we hadn’t really seen all that much of each other. I’m not sure many people would have been so loyal.’

  What I mean, but don’t say, is that I doubt that I would have been so loyal to her.

  ‘I was very touched by your letter. It meant a lot to me.’

  She reaches for my hand and of course I let her take it but now suddenly I’m experiencing that emotion that I don’t know the name for, and I feel that I’ve allowed myself to be sucked into something that I don’t really want to be part of. I feel that, while I like Amanda, I don’t like her quite as much as she seems to think I do and that, while I know she likes me – and God knows she’s put in a huge amount of work on my behalf – the me she sees isn’t really me at all and it’ll only be a matter of time before she finds out.

  ‘You have to bear in mind,’ I tell her, trying to be light and jocular but in fact (or so it seems to me) coming over as bottled-up and taut, ‘that I’d smoked a fair amount of weed when I wrote it, so a lot of it was probably nonsense.’

  She laughs. ‘Ha! You warned me in the letter that you’d say that.’

  God! So I did. I told her in my letter that the very warm feelings I expressed there were completely real, but that I had this thing inside me – this demon of embarrassment, or jealousy, or fastidiousness, or whatever you want to call it – that would make me want to deny it as soon as I’d said it, just as I’m doing right now.

  It’s as if I’ve constructed a siege engine, and given it to Amanda to use against me. Actually, there’s no ‘as if’ about it. That’s exactly what I’ve done, and quite deliberately too, in one of those attempts we make from time to time – I’m assuming it isn’t just me – to bind our future selves to the choices we make in the present.

  I change the subject. ‘It was strange when I went into work yesterday. Everyone felt they needed to be welcoming, and someone had even baked a cake, but in fact almost all of them were noticeably prickly and awkward. It’s like—’

  The scream of jet engines makes it impossible to continue, and nine shiny blue fighters emerge over the ridge in a tight, perfectly diamond-shaped formation. There can’t be more than a few metres between them, and yet they’re hurtling along at several hundred kilometres an hour. As they pass directly overhead, five of them simultaneously release trails of smoke – red, gold, blue, gold, red– and then they all turn right together towards the city centre to fly over the Unity Arch and the Presidential Mansion. The mother and father have gathered the little girl up between then, so she is completely surrounded by their arms and bodies, and their three pale faces peer up anxiously at the sky.

  ‘It was like what?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, of course, but my hunch is that they were all very aware I’d had a certain kind of experience that probably none of them will ever have, something they were already slightly uncomfortably conscious of never having had to face. And perhaps they were even a bit ashamed of that fact, rather in the way that young men not quite old enough to fight might feel shamed by the experience of slightly older men who’d been off to war, and fought, and come back knowing things about themselves that the young men fear they’ll never have a chance to find out, though they also hope they never will. So it was a kind of jealousy, almost.’

  I haven’t changed the subject at all, I realize, with a slight feeling of panic, as if I have somehow found myself inside a kind of maze where, whichever direction you head, you always come back to the same place, for I’m actually talking about that same exact emotion that I owned up to in my letter and, to make things worse, Amanda seems to be fully aware of the fact because she’s watching me with close attention and obvious sympathy.

  ‘A kind of jealousy,’ Amanda repeats. ‘Hmmm. You mean, like a child is jealous of a sick brother
or sister, for getting all the attention?’

  How strange. She really does know what I’m talking about. ‘Well, that’s in the mix, but it’s not only that, there’s also—’

  ‘There’s also that soldier thing, yes? Their fear that you’ve grown up in a way, and that they may be doomed always to be innocent children.’

  ‘Yes, that too,’ I say, yet oddly with Amanda it’s me that feels like the innocent. She’s a teacher in one of the shanty towns now with a classful of forty kids, some of whose parents, she’s told me, can’t even point out their own country on a map of the world. I know that I lack the maturity, and the self-assurance, and the ability to set my own needs aside that would be necessary to do a job like that. It would terrify me, and the children would sense that, and they’d gobble me up and spit me out. Yet she handles it without any apparent difficulty at all.

  ‘But my sense is . . .’ I go on. ‘I could be completely wrong, obviously, and it could just be paranoia, but my sense is that none of them would have been able to own up to either of those kinds of jealousy, even to themselves, and so they had to find another way of explaining their twisty feelings, and came up as a result with something else that, in itself, they must know, is also not really fair but at least they are sort of able to talk about it.’

  ‘You mean that thing you get on social media about how lucky you were to be from a well-to-do and famous family with friends in high places, because you had all this TV coverage, and deputies making speeches in the National Assembly, and—’

  ‘And army generals giving assurances in interviews that they were combing the whole forest area of the Upper River with troops and boats and helicopters, no doubt at vast expense, and even though that same army rounds up peasants from forest villages on a daily basis and holds them without trial, and sometimes even executes them, and the TV remains almost completely silent. All of that. And yet what would they expect folk to do if it was one of them who’d been kidnapped? Are they saying they wouldn’t want their people to pull every string they could? If they happened to know someone famous, would they really prefer that person to remain silent? Would they object if, say, the principal of the university weighed in to support them?’

  ‘But you’re saying that, at bottom, it wasn’t really about that anyway?’

  ‘No. Really it was that jealousy thing – or that’s what I think – but you can’t justify that, can you? Whereas this other thing . . . well . . . one of them couldn’t even resist trying to articulate it to me. “It’s wonderful to see you, it really is,” he said. “We’re all terribly relieved you got out okay. But one only wishes that the same public outcry was generated when . . .” Well, you get the idea. His voice was kind of strangled, you know what I mean? It was all choked up because of the emotions he was trying to suppress.’

  She’s still holding my hand, and she gives it a squeeze.

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t really grown up,’ I say. ‘I think that would take a lot more than spending some time being scared and alone. But it’s true that when he said that, I looked at him and I thought, You baby! You pampered, self-righteous little baby!’

  The little family have now moved over to the pond that is the centrepiece of the park. The father is standing right at the edge of the water, pointing out fishes and ducks. The little girl is taking it all in, her mother squatted protectively beside her to keep her safe, peering into her small proud face to see how she’s reacting to this new experience.

  ‘That reminds me,’ I say. ‘The first night after I escaped, not long before dark, I came across a sweet little family of ducks. The mummy duck was looking after her babies, clucking gently away as she helped them settle down under her feathers. The daddy duck was nearby on the water, watching over them.’

  ‘And that was – what? – a comfort? Or did it make you feel even more lonely?’

  ‘I fucking killed the lot of them, didn’t I? I machine gunned the parents and I trampled the babies to death.’

  I feel myself trembling. From over towards the centre of town comes the sound of a military band.

  She puts her arm round my shoulders. ‘Well, they were just ducks, dear. You had to eat. And we eat meat. You and I ate chicken only last night.’

  Guinevere passes in my evening bowl of stew. She doesn’t meet my eye, she doesn’t smile, but she doesn’t walk away. The truth is that, though she’s tried, she can’t quite leave me alone. When Carlo is there, or Rubia, she doesn’t talk to me, but when she’s on by herself, or if, as now, it’s just her there with Jaco, that sweet peasant boy to whom I think she is a kind of goddess of unattainable beauty and sophistication, but whose company she rather obviously finds extremely dull, she just can’t help herself in the end from coming to talk with me.

  ‘I used to like going down to Trinity Bay,’ she says.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You asked me about the places I liked to go when I was a kid, right? Well, I used to like going down there. We’d spend all day on the beach, me and Mum and Dad, and whatever other kids we happened to meet. Mum would read a book while Dad helped me build huge sandcastles and rivers and dams. And then Mum would come with me to play in the surf. Every day felt like for ever, you know? The beach and the sea stretching away into the distance, the boats on the water with their coloured sails, the sun shining down on everything.’

  It’s the first time she’s ever shared anything personal with me – it’s the first time, for instance, that she’s told me she’s an only child – and I hesitate for several seconds before answering, much as I suppose my father would hesitate if some animal came up close to him for the very first time, and he was trying not to scare it away. Which is odd when you remember that I’m the one in the cage.

  ‘It is a lovely place,’ I finally say, ‘and so near to the city. We went down there sometimes, too.’

  ‘My parents had one of those cabins behind the dunes, so we went there many times a year.’

  ‘That sounds great.’

  She’s already retreating, though. ‘But I remember one year – I guess I was about eight or nine – we were driving home, and we were on that flyover – you know the one? – that goes straight over the top of the southern shanty towns, and I was looking down at all those rows of shacks with their corrugated iron roofs, and I asked my parents why people built holiday cabins there where there wasn’t a beach and there wasn’t anything nice anywhere near. And Mum said, “I’m afraid those aren’t holiday cabins, Ginny darling, they’re people’s homes, and I don’t suppose they’d live there if they could find somewhere else.” And later I found out that they didn’t have running water or electricity down in those shacks, and only one room for a whole family. Our cabin never quite seemed the same after that.’

  I sigh. It really is rather dreary when people constantly bring the subject back to social justice. ‘I think you’ve got to grow a bit of skin sometimes.’

  She shakes her head. ‘But it’s that skin that makes possible all the bad things in the world.’

  ‘I suppose so, but it’s also the thing that makes good things possible, like your blissful days on the sand.’

  She doesn’t answer me, but she’s taken out her little plastic disc and is turning it round and round between her fingers.

  ‘What is that thing?’

  ‘Oh nothing,’ she says, and shoves it back into her pocket. She turns away from me, looks up the cave to where the gas lamp is burning. ‘Hey, Jaco, do you fancy a game of cards?’

  Jaco sits up, excited as a little boy. ‘Yeah, sure, Guinevere! That would be really great.’

  I sit for a long time where the man said I should wait. The stream trickles over some stones. From behind me I can hear the sounds that have surrounded me for days, the various squawks and hoots and croaks and rattles of the jungle animals, which seemed seductive and alluring when I heard them in the distance from my cabin on the river, but now seem so dull and meaningless as to make me almost physically sick at the thought of being amon
g them once again. From down the valley, a cockerel calls. A goat appears above the bank of the other larger stream across the fields, and looks over at me, before disappearing behind the bank again. So that’s where the constant clop-clop-clop of goat bells is coming from: the green and the shade over there beside the stream. I feel slightly trembly and numb, and I have an odd and not completely unpleasant sense that I’m not really here at all. I wonder whether to have a cigarette, though there are only a few left.

  Finally, the man reappears. He’s still carrying his rifle, but also in his other hand a sack. I have no idea what he asked me to wait here for. Perhaps he intends to execute me, quietly and discreetly, away from the other villagers. For all I know, Carlo may have put a price on my head, and the sack is for the man to put it in when he’s shot me and hacked it off. I flip off the safety catch on my own gun.

  ‘Put gun down, please,’ he tells me.

  ‘Put yours down then.’

  He shrugs, sits down on a log and lays his rifle on the ground in front of him. I still hold on to mine.

  ‘What’s in the bag?’

  ‘Bread. Potato. Fruit. Cheese. Chicken. You don’t want?’ He reaches into the bag, and shows me a round flat loaf of maize bread.

  I lay the machine gun down and he flings the bag across to me. There are two whole loaves in there. I devour half of one greedily, pausing from time to time to gnaw at a chunk of hard goat cheese in my other hand. The man watches me.