Tomorrow

by Chris Beckett

  ‘You go that way,’ he says, pointing not down the valley where I’d been headed, but up, along the course of the other stream.

  ‘No. I want to get back to the river.’

  He shrugs. ‘River that way.’ And again points up the valley of the second stream.

  ‘No. I don’t want to go uphill.’

  Again he shrugs. ‘Down there FRENALAT. Understand? FRE-NA-LAT. You like that? Okay, fine.’

  FRENALAT is the alliance of guerrilla armies to which Carlo’s outfit belongs.

  ‘So you’re saying I can reach the river by going up and over the top?’

  ‘Yes. And God people up there.’ He makes the sign of the cross. ‘God people. Understand? They give food. They show way.’

  I remember that cult that Amanda and I talked about, those foreigners and their charismatic leader. This is the first time since I was taken from the cabin that I have any sense at all of where I am, and it feels a bit like seeing, far off in the distance, that little blue light on my veranda.

  ‘I understand,’ I tell him. ‘They have a holy cup, yes?’

  He frowns.

  ‘A mug,’ I say, making a gesture of drinking. ‘A special Jesus mug.’

  He laughs in recognition. ‘A Jesus mug. Yes. It’s true.’

  He takes a bag of tobacco from his pocket, tugs out enough for a cigarette, and offers the bag to me. As I roll up, he watches my hands with their weeping sores. He stands up, walks to a bush nearby and picks off a twig, indicating by gesture that I should rub the leaves on my wounds to soothe them.

  ‘You don’t like FRENALAT, then?’ I say.

  He shrugs, makes the side-to-side gesture of equivocation and then, to my surprise, he launches into a story. It’s laboriously slow because of his very limited vocabulary, requiring a lot of guesswork, and gestures, and going back and forth, to establish each element of the narrative, and there are parts of what he says that I have to pretend to understand just so as to move things forward, but the gist is that FRENALAT came to the village some while ago, even though no one ever came to their village. The guerrillas ran up their flag, called the whole village together to tell them that they’d been liberated from tyranny, and dispensed various medicines and tools, and bottles of spirits with which to make merry. Several young people were persuaded to join them, and off they went. ‘Keep the flag flying!’ they told the villagers. ‘You’re free now. No more tyranny. We’ll come back soon with more stuff.’

  He looks at me. ‘Understand?’ he asks, and it occurs to me that it must be quite lonely being the village head up here, with no peers to talk to, and that he’s taking the opportunity to get something off his chest.

  A few weeks later the army arrived. The rebel flag was still flying and the soldiers were angry. They questioned every single adult, and every child who might just about be old enough to understand, to find out who had welcomed the rebels or cooperated with them. After that they’d called everyone together, and singled out a small group of people including the head man himself and the parents of the children who’d joined the rebels, saying they were terrorist sympathizers and traitors to their country, and would be shot. He’d managed to talk them out of it, and reassure them that he and the others were loyal patriots who’d only acted under duress. In the end, he’d got away with a public beating in front of everyone, and a warning never to do it again. The parents whose children had joined the rebels had their huts destroyed, and their goats and chickens seized. He was told to fly the chequerboard flag in place of the rebel one, and never to take it down.

  ‘Understand?’ he says. I assure him I do, and so he carries on to tell me how a few weeks later, FRENALAT came back, found the national flag flying and promptly did exactly the same as the army, interviewing every villager, including the children, to discover who in the village had offered friendship to the oppressor and betrayed the revolution. And, as before, someone must have cracked and told them something, because once again the head man and four or five others were paraded in front of the village and threatened with execution, though again he managed to talk them out of it.

  ‘But no more,’ he says and then conveys, mainly in gestures, the discord and distrust that these events have caused in their tiny village, and the constant fear. ‘No more army. No more FRENALAT. No more no one. If you come near, we tell you go, or we shoot. We tell everyone go.’

  He rolls two more cigarettes, lights them both, and passes one to me as he stands up. He gestures once again at the stream that will lead me to the God people. ‘You go see mountain up there,’ he says, making a steep cone with his hands. ‘Go mountain, and then this way.’ He places the imaginary cone away from himself, and draws a path in the air that veers to its left and then drops down. Then he shrugs, absolving himself of further responsibility for what happens to me, and picks up his rifle.

  I don’t want him to go. ‘But I haven’t even told you who I am,’ I say. ‘I’m—’

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘Army showed us picture. FRENALAT showed us picture. You trouble, friend. You more trouble even than flags. No come back, understand?’ He shakes his gun in warning. ‘No. Come. Back.’

  I watch him through narrowed eyes. He’s not a bad man. He knows how much danger I’m in, and it bothers him to turn his back on me. ‘I need a coat,’ I tell him flatly. ‘Give me your coat. It will be cold up there at night. Give me your coat and your tobacco and I’ll go.’

  It’s all a little awkward. We’re sitting at the dining table in my old flat with Jezebel and Rémy and their new flatmate Estela, who has the room that used to be mine. Jez and Rémy seem smaller than I’d remembered them, and I’m reminded of a recurring dream of mine in which I find myself back at school and yet am uneasily aware that I’m far too old for it. Estela, who is a few years younger than the others, seems even smaller. The three of them are not sure whether or not to ask me about my ordeal. It seems obvious that they don’t really want to.

  But it’s not just my recent experience that stands between us, it’s also theirs. During the months of my absence, the conversation has moved on – the general conversation, I mean, that takes place both in actual physical gatherings and on the various online platforms to which everyone of our kind subscribes. There have been scandals, and changes in the government, and new laws passed, and various outrageous acts and utterances. There have also been new movies, a TV series that everyone had looked forward to, and enjoyed at first, but is now increasingly seen as shallow, exploitative and politically regressive to the point that there is now a campaign on social media for it to be taken off air. If I wasn’t in the room, it would be these events that everyone would come back to for replenishment whenever there was a lull in the conversation, but my presence inhibits them, and Jez and Rémy fall back on talking about old times, like when I got Jez to help me climb into the Botanic Gardens, or Rémy spilled a casserole on the carpet that was meant to last us all a whole week. As they describe these rather trivial events to Estela, and to Amanda who’s sitting beside me, I notice how they exaggerate and mythologize them to make them seem more colourful and exciting than they really were. I am supposed to have almost impaled myself on the spikes of the fence, for instance, which wasn’t really the case, and the casserole is supposed to have stunk out the flat for several months rather than for the day or two that I actually recall. I guess in the past I would have joined in with that.

  And then, too, there is the fact that, although I haven’t been part of that general conversation, I have myself been a topic in it, as has Amanda: me as the famous captive in the jungle, Amanda as the loyal friend whose indefatigable campaigning got her interviewed on many occasions on TV and in national newspapers. Rémy, Jez and Estela must be uncomfortably aware that the general conversation included a fair amount of hostility, directed to some extent at myself, as I discovered when I went into work, but also at Amanda, for the jealous emotion is always roused by someone presented in the media as heroic or good.

  ‘It’s just
a shame we don’t see the same kind of campaign when some indigenous person is kidnapped,’ Estela is finally unable to stop herself from saying.

  The implication is unmistakable, as far as I’m concerned, even though it isn’t said out loud: Amanda was at fault in writing all those emails, raising those funds, and starting that nationwide petition, when they were only directed at getting something done for me. But Amanda herself is surprisingly unruffled. ‘That’s quite true,’ she says, somehow avoiding any of the bitterness that would have crept into my voice if it had been me. ‘There should be a wider campaign. In fact, you ought to start one, Estela. But I warn you, a thing like that’s an awful lot of work.’ She touches my arm. ‘And we’re not even sure it made any difference to what actually happened.’

  ‘I think I’ll go and have a smoke,’ I say abruptly, standing up. But it’s too late; I’ve already passed the point where I could have kept quiet. ‘I’ll tell you what’s a fucking shame, Estela. It’s a shame that people can’t just be pleased for me that I escaped from a fucking cage, and that Amanda did her best to help me, without some little prig chipping in to say that someone else deserved the help much more than I did. I mean, Amanda’s quite right, what are you doing? What are you fucking doing to help anyone at all?’

  In the stunned silence, I stalk out on to the balcony and light a cigarette. Everything’s exactly the same as it was when I used to smoke out here every night. (Well, why wouldn’t it be? It was less than a year ago.) The pedestrians pass by below me as before, in pairs and little groups in the warm night. The same old indigenous guy in the same blue cap still sits in his little kiosk on the corner, walled in by cigarettes, and magazines, and cheap plastic toys. The cars still growl and snap at one another. The trees are still dark beyond their spiked fence (which really is much less formidable than it sounded in Jez’s story), with only the outer leaves and branches catching the street lamps.

  It’s all the same, but it’s no longer possible to play that game I used to play here. As I lean on the railing and draw in smoke, I look across at the trees but, no matter how I try, I can’t make them into an imaginative portal to anywhere, least of all to a realm that is wilder, and more dangerous, and more sexy, than our well-lit city. I’ve been to the place I used to stand here and dream of, and I know that it’s just another place. My world is both much larger than it was and much smaller.

  Estela comes out on to the balcony. She’s pink with embarrassment. ‘Listen, I’m so sorry about what I said.’ And she turns instantly from the unattractive little prig she’d seemed as I left the room, into a quite likeable, slightly fragile young woman with rather graceful hands and a pleasing freckled nose. ‘You were this famous person and I was racking my brains for something interesting to say – you know how it is? – and it just came out before I realized how critical and uncaring it would sound.’

  I take her hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ I tell her. ‘Really don’t worry. Don’t think any more about it.’

  I’m in a high, flat desert that resembles Mars. I’ve passed through the upper edge of the forest, where beards of lichen hang from the trees to drink in the warm mist, and into a region of ferns and moss and low shrubs, and then through an ascending series of meadows criss-crossed by little branching streams, where I stopped in the middle of the afternoon to eat some more bread and cheese, outside a solitary shepherd’s hut, with nothing inside it but a cold black metal stove made out of an old oil drum, a few planks to sleep on, and a yellowing postcard of the Virgin Mary.

  After that I passed several small lakes, and then walked for a while along a dry ravine, climbing all the time, emerging again and again into entirely new landscapes whose presence couldn’t even be guessed at from below, and leaving each one behind me in turn, so that it too became just one more layer in a stack of fading memories going all the way down to the village that wouldn’t let me in. But that steady succession of worlds is over now because I’ve reached the top, and the Mars-like desert stretches away into the distance, completely flat, until it reaches a distant volcano, capped with snow, that rises up from the horizon, and is obviously the mountain that the village headman told me about.

  The baked red earth is punctuated by nine or ten different kinds of middle-sized plants that are completely unlike any that grew on the slopes or the forest below, some of them with thick, green, almost luminous, stems and fleshy leaves, some with no leaves at all, but simply spines and large white flowers. And there is another kind of plant, taller than the rest and without any kind of external features, just green columns standing a metre or two higher than the rest of the vegetation, almost as if they once supported some kind of roof.

  A strange, sharp, but oddly leaden light falls on all of this, both unreal and super-real, terribly dreary in a way and yet also so strange that it’s hard to believe it exists at all, turning the entire landscape into a spectacular stage set on which no play will ever be performed. The plants stand motionless, their nine or ten varieties evenly distributed and evenly spaced all the way from here to the horizon in front of that distant peak, each one picked out very clearly and sharply by that slow, grey, dreamlike light.

  It’s cooler up here. At night it’ll be very cold indeed. I pull tight the old jacket that I coaxed off the village headman, and start to walk, as briskly as I think I can sustain, in the direction of the volcano.

  *

  Two kilometres upstream from my cabin, I turn off the outboard motor and drift. The sudden quietness is wonderful. There’s no sound but the soft caresses of the water against my boat, and occasional hoots and squawks from the banks that seem very far away from where I am. Above the river, large, complicated structures of clouds both white and grey are simultaneously assembling and dismantling themselves.

  I’m a little sleepy. I was awake for a long time last night, worrying as usual that I was frittering away a unique opportunity to build a new life for myself, but, also as usual, I feel differently now in the daylight, and am stubbornly resistant to the idea that I should subordinate my preferences to the needs of my notional future self. I mean, isn’t it middle-aged people who always tell you when you’re young to think about your career, and save up for a house, and isn’t it the case that what they’re really saying is that middle-aged life is more important than young life, which of course they would think because young life is no longer available to them, buried as it is layers and layers beneath them in the distant past? Why is my present age not an equally valid viewpoint, when middle age is still many layers above me, and impossible to see, and quite possibly may never arrive, because after all accidents happen, even to younger adults, and so do fatal illnesses? And, leaving aside this whole generational question, does it make sense at any age to be constantly deferring the present moment for some putative future that may never arrive?

  Having finished my single-skinned joint and tossed the butt into the water, I lie back in the boat and look up at the clouds. Would it not be a sufficient achievement for one day to imagine – to make real in my mind, not just as a schoolbook diagram but as an actual fact – the process by which those clouds, as they drift over the mountains of the Western Spine, will release so much water that gravity drags it downhill through the sodden ground until it forms rivulets, and those rivulets come together in streams, and the streams combine into larger streams that, reaching the lower country, merge into tributary rivers that nurture the forest and, combining again many times, and topped up by the rain that the forest itself engenders, eventually become this enormous waterway on which I’m drifting now, that flows all the way to the sea, a thousand kilometres away?

  But even with the help of the drug, I can’t quite get there. The future is nagging at me. I’m aware that, after all, it’s not just middle-aged me that has a stake in this, but even me in a matter of months, to all intents the same age as I am now, who will have to return to a life as a minor academic, which now seems almost unbearably small and narrow, and also somewhat deluded, since it involves purs
uing a kind of phantom that can never really be reached, and feels from my present perspective to be almost completely irrelevant to anything important at all.

  *

  ‘Hey,’ says Rémy, ‘why don’t we all go down to the Jungle Club?’

  We’ve had quite a bit more to drink as we smoothed things over after my outburst, and in my case the alcohol seems to have rubbed away that edge of jealousy or fastidiousness, which, I now realize, has probably been my problem in these encounters at least as much as anyone else’s, though it’s impossible, of course, to ever completely separate my own projections from what really comes from those other universes that my mind can’t reach. And, from this new and more relaxed position, I can also see that some of the problem, on both sides, has just been a matter of not quite knowing the rules, as in the awkwardness that people with no experience of death often feel about how to approach a recently bereaved person.

  ‘Oh yes, let’s!’ I exclaim. ‘The Jungle Club! Great idea! Have you been there yet, Estela?’

  ‘No I haven’t. Jez’s been telling me about it. I’d love to go!’

  Her eyes are full of smiles for me. We’ve gone from her apology, to me accepting her apology, to her being grateful that the famous recently returned captive has accepted her apology, to me being flattered by the extent of her gratitude, to her realizing that she’s pleased me and seeking to please me more, to me realizing belatedly that actually from the beginning she has been both impressed and daunted by the experience of struggle and danger that I carry inside my head, which is so completely beyond anything she’s ever known . . . So now positive regard is fairly bouncing back and forth between us, like the metal ball in one of those old pinball machines that’s found the sweet spot where it seems to be able to go on for ever, its momentum recharged by every impact.

  I turn to Amanda, realizing that she’s quite probably never been to the Jungle Club either, and also, rather guiltily, that I’ve been neglecting her somewhat for the past half-hour or more. ‘You up for that, or are you too tired? It’s really nothing special, just a little music club, but it’s just round the corner. The three of us used to go down there in the old days, when we wanted to let off steam.’