Tomorrow

by Chris Beckett

  She smiles. She’s had a hard day at school, I know, but she always tries to be up for things. ‘Sure. Let’s go. It’ll be fun.’

  We grab coats and bags. All together in the old brass lift, we descend to the street, the electric light, the mild night air wafting warm incense across from the Botanic Gardens, the cars that, after months of my never seeing the things, now seem to me a distinct lifeform, divided into many species, and each individual with its own personality. Rémy and Jez walk in front, hand in hand. Amanda takes my arm. Little Estela walks beside me, enthusing about how great it is to live in this part of the city and wanting to know what had been my other favourite places. We file past the big foreign bouncers in their black suits, descend into a cave of pulsing sound, and Rémy buys a round of drinks while the rest of us rush on to the dancefloor. The DJ is playing the song ‘Our Lost Atlantis’, that ecstatic hymn to our vast city, ‘with all its darkness and glorious light’, described in the past tense as if it has already sunk beneath the waves. It’s one of the songs that makes me feel like I’m sixteen again, bursting out of the confines of childhood, and I throw myself at once into the tide of the famous melody that soars so triumphantly above the constant pulsing beat. ‘God, I’ve missed dancing!’ I tell Estela, but she can’t hear me so I have to lean forward and yell it into her sweet pink ear. ‘Oh I love dancing,’ she shouts back. ‘I could happily dance all night long.’

  After the third or fourth song, Amanda takes a break from the dancefloor with Jez and Rémy, but I feel I’m just getting into my stride, and Estela stays dancing with me. That metal ball is still bouncing back and forth between us and it feels as if each time it breaks down another wall or door, so that we are seeing further and further inside one another. I’m quite aware that I’m drunk and allowing the music to carry me away and that this is all just a game, but it feels, at least a little, as if very soon there’ll be no doors or walls at all, only a shining highway to a place of magic and delight.

  Amanda is on the gallery above the dancefloor, leaning by herself on the banister, watching us. Jez and Rémy beside her are temporarily engrossed in a conversation of their own. Her face is very obviously tired, and I know she was at her school until seven o’clock this evening, dealing with a difficult disciplinary problem raised by one of the children in her class whose parents are constantly undermining her authority, but she smiles at me, and makes a kind of encouraging gesture to say not to worry about her, I should keep going as long as I like, too generous, perhaps, even to notice that glow between myself and Estela, or more likely too generous to worry or sulk about it.

  I feel ashamed, but that makes me sulky and defensive. Estela hardly knows me at all, I understand that, and of course I know that whatever she is currently imagining she sees in me isn’t really what is actually here, but an illusion created by my recent celebrity. And I’m perfectly aware, too, that, although what I’m seeing in her now includes a certain delicate beauty, that certainly didn’t strike me when I first met her, when she seemed a rather ordinary type, not very grown up, not at all an original thinker, and a bit of a herd animal. But I’m enjoying the game we’re playing, and I know I’d be free to play it out all the way to whatever disappointing or uncomfortable conclusion it would no doubt ultimately reach, if it wasn’t for the fact that returning to the city and finding out how Amanda has fought for me so loyally over all these months has somehow bound me to the friend I made in the Upper River in a way that I didn’t plan, and (or so I now feel) wouldn’t have sought if I’d been able to think about it in advance.

  But still, I am bound to her, at least for the present, so I lean forward to Estela, point to Amanda, tell her that my friend has had a hard day and I really ought to be taking her home. Estela looks gratifyingly crestfallen.

  ‘It was great to meet you,’ she shouts back into my ear, ‘I really hope we’ll meet again.’

  We fall away from each other laughing, so that we can lie back on our own pillows to enjoy the release and its afterglow. The morning sun streams through the open window, the gauzy white curtains blow in the ocean breeze.

  I reach out for her hand. ‘This is so lovely. This is exactly what I’ve always wanted.’

  Amanda laughs. ‘Well, that’s nice to know, because there was a time when I certainly wouldn’t have guessed it. You were always so gruff and reserved, and if I tried to hint that we might go this way, you always drew a line so firmly, like in my flat making it clear that you would take the sofa bed before I’d even said anything. I thought perhaps I’d made a mistake in thinking you were into women at all.’

  ‘Hinting? You call that hinting? A few minutes after we met, you were suggesting we strip naked.’

  Laughing, she covers her face in pretence of shame. ‘Oh, don’t! I was so embarrassed about that afterwards. It was just . . . well, you seemed so unconventional and interesting and bold, with your cabin on the river and your talk about Eden and forgetting the city. I was afraid you’d see me as this dull, dutiful schoolteacher, so I wanted to show you I could be wild and reckless too. And I thought that’s how it would be in Eden, before anyone had eaten from the tree. I mean, there was no right or wrong, was there? If you felt like doing a thing, you’d just say so.’

  ‘You would. You were quite right. And . . . well, you outrecklessed me, I have to admit. To be honest, I was very tempted, but . . . you know, I wasn’t sure what you meant by it. You seemed so sorted and so wholesome, and of course I didn’t know if you were into . . . I mean, I thought maybe you were just thinking about it in a back-to-nature, outdoorsy, naturist sort of way, but I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t know how to . . .’

  ‘You didn’t know how to what?’

  ‘Oh never mind, what does it matter anyway? We’re here now. We’re naked now. Do you want a coffee?’

  ‘I’d love one.’

  The hotel is very beautiful and very comfortable, and it provides in every room one of those coffee machines that work with little metal capsules, which at other times might make me think about all that ore dug up by indigenous miners in dusty stifling tunnels, and then the heat and labour and mechanical work involved in grinding up the ore, and extracting the metal, and blending metals together, and making the resulting alloy into ingots, and beating them out into sheets, and moulding those sheets into these little containers that we use just once and then throw away, to be collected up by men in trucks and taken out to one of those vast tips you see outside cities, where more trucks with spiky wheels crush them down to make room for tomorrow’s load, and slum kids search for things to eat or sell . . .

  But fuck all that! I don’t give a damn. Not one single damn. From now on, nothing is going to disturb my happiness. I make us two delicious little cups of coffee, and crossing the marble floor of our large, white room, with the sea breeze playing with the gossamer curtains, I give one to Amanda with a kiss before returning to my own side of the bed.

  ‘You know what?’ I tell her. ‘Actually, I did know that what you were offering was intimacy. I knew it, but I wasn’t ready for it.’

  ‘Well, that’s not surprising. We had only just met. It was basically, Hi, what’s your name, where to do you come from, what do you do for a living, shall we get naked? All I can say in my defence is that it seemed a good idea at the time.’

  ‘It was a good idea, like all your ideas, and I wish I’d just gone along with it, because I did want to, but . . . but I always have this fear of being trapped, gobbled up. It’s silly really. I miss out on so much. I guess that was why I felt myself to be so contented all by myself in my cabin on the river. No complications. No one asking anything of me, no one telling me what I should do or think. I didn’t want to spoil that.’

  ‘Well, that was fair enough. You were trying to stick to the project you’d set yourself. Quite right too.’

  ‘My book, eh? My famous book that was going to be my alibi for everything.’

  ‘Oh, come on, it’s still in you! You’re going to write it one day. I
want you to write it.’

  I lean across to kiss her again. ‘I’ll finish this book about my captivity. That’s my project now. It’ll get the whole business off my chest, and let’s face it, it looks like making me a ton of money. I mean, I’ve already made a fair amount before I’ve even written it – and now they’re talking about doing this movie, and . . . well . . . if that happens, we’re going to be rich. But that novel, that novel that’s not going to have a plot, or a beginning or an end, and isn’t going to pretend to be in the real world but is real all the same, and may perhaps take the form of a fairy-tale forest or maybe a stained-glass window . . . I don’t know why I keep going on about it, as if it was the whole point of my life. This is the point of life. Being happy. I mean, no one even asks what the point is unless they’re unhappy, do they? And I’m completely happy now here with you. I honestly don’t know why I’d ever want to do anything else but this.’

  ‘That’s lovely to hear. But it won’t last for ever.’

  Her saying this alarms me enough for it to be visible on my face. Amanda laughs. ‘I didn’t mean you and me! I hope that does last. I really do. I meant this, this honeymoon feeling. We know that doesn’t go on for ever.’

  ‘I suppose. But, at the same time I can’t see why, if we want it to go on, it shouldn’t?’

  She puts her finger on my lips, as I once did to her, I suddenly remember, back by the lake in the forest. So, although I always think of it as being her, it was actually me that made the first bold intimate move.

  ‘Shush,’ she says. ‘We’re in it now. That’s what matters.’

  We put down our cups and kiss some more, and then I throw on the white silk robe that the hotel provides, and cross those cool marble tiles again to go out on to the balcony for a cigarette. One of those pretty whitewashed west-coast towns is laid out on the slopes around us, the sky is immaculately blue and, a short way out into the bay, two holidaymakers are playing in a little white dinghy with beautiful rust-red sails. Further out, there’s a small island surrounded by sparkling sea, with its own church spire and jetty and a lighthouse painted in stripes of red and white, and, between the island and the dinghy with the rust-coloured sails, a fisherman and his young son are hauling in nets, picking out one by one the silver squirming fish to toss them into the bottom of their tough old boat, while seagulls wheel hopefully around them.

  I light up. The world feels so peaceful and benign that it’s hard to believe that only a few months ago I was alone, and sick, and being eaten by insects, in that suffocating forest that made every metre of progress a struggle, which is interesting because sometimes, even now, the reverse is true, and it’s hard to believe I’m not still there.

  I exhale. It occurs to me that if I was one of those fish in the bottom of that boat, this wouldn’t be a peaceful moment at all. I’d be literally suffocating. I’d be in a place where I couldn’t breathe, but was impossible to escape from and completely beyond my comprehension, thrashing about in terror and pain.

  Too bad, I think. It’s their turn. And I look instead at the boat with the pretty red sails. A kind of force field surrounds me, thrumming and fizzing as it holds at bay my past and my future, and the suffering of the world, and my many doubts and fears about me and Amanda and life in general, to create this little perfect bubble of happiness.

  Amanda has put on her own silk robe to join me. She slips her arm round my waist and pulls me against her so our hips and thighs are touching. I rest my head on her shoulder. She’s taller than me, and sometimes I like the feeling that can give me of me being a child and her the grown-up, while at other times I resent it. Right now, it’s just that she happens to be taller.

  After walking for a while, I feel as if I’ve been here for ever. In fact, I feel as if there might in reality be no other place but this, and that all my recollections of that tangled forest, or the cage, or the river, or the city where I grew up, are nothing more than dreams. It seems so orderly and calm here with these evenly spaced plants in their nine or ten varieties, laid out as if by the landscape-generating function of some computer game whose simple rule is that there must be at least one of each kind in each five-metre square of a grid, and that the gap between any two plants should never be less than one and a half metres, and never more than two. The sun is sinking to my right – it seems I’m walking south – and each plant is throwing out its own long lengthening shadow, in parallel with all the others, neatly and precisely, on the hard, bare ground. You could make a computer program do that too. The only thing that tells me this won’t go on for ever, and won’t simply be generated in front of me as long as I choose to walk, is that volcano in the distance.

  At least it’s not difficult to walk here. There’s nothing to trip me up, nothing I need to hack my way through, nothing trying to suck my blood or burrow under my skin. But I’m becoming aware that, all the same, there’s a threat here more deadly than anything I’ve yet had to face. I can feel the warmth of the day radiating upwards from the ground beneath me as it pours out from the Earth into that leaden, empty sky, and I know that in a few hours there’ll be none of it left.

  I hear a woody cracking sound. It comes from behind me but when I look round, there’s nothing to see. Then I hear it again to my right. And then in front of me. And then from several directions at once. It comes from the top of those columns that stand out above the other plants, and soon the source of it becomes visible. Feather-like structures are starting to unfurl, two or three of them from the top of each one, very stiffly at first, like the wings of a butterfly just out of the chrysalis, but loosening as they extend to their full three-metre length. And now they begin to move. In a series of slow sweeping motions, like languid oars through water, they reach back, creaking a little and occasionally making a small sharp snapping sound, and then, cupping themselves slightly like a hand, they sweep forward with a soft whoosh. And, though each one has a different rhythm, every single one of them sweeps in the direction of the volcano, as if they are feeding it air. Soon the entire landscape that has been so still and silent is full of their creaking and whooshing sounds, their occasional sharp woody snaps, which merge in the distance into a kind of soft waterfall roar. Wherever I look those same feathery shapes are slowly and steadily raking the air, yet their motion is so regular and constant, and so apparently unresponsive to anything except the fact of the fading light, that it is in itself like a kind of absence, like the ticking of a clock in an empty room.

  I’m limping and very tired but I walk quickly because I’m more and more worried about the cold. I have nothing more than the village headman’s jacket to keep me warm, and there’s nowhere to shelter, and nothing out of which a shelter could be built, at least not without a spade and an axe and many hours of daylight. It’s hard to believe that I could ever have minded the heat of the forest, which is so obviously preferable to the freezing cold that lies ahead of me and is already beginning to creep towards my bones, that I can only think of it as comforting and benign. A few stars appear, and the occasional small bat swoops and swerves between the darkening shapes of the plants. I keep walking. Whoosh, whoosh, go the giant feathers above my head. I guess they must bring up moist air from the slopes below that will condense as frost and melt in the morning into dew.

  Soon the sky has filled with the brightest firmament I have ever seen, the Milky Way streaming across it all, and while this is certainly extraordinarily beautiful, it’s also terrifying because I know just enough about the atmosphere to understand that the shutters of the sky have been flung wide open to the coldness of space, without even a curtain of cloud to hold it at bay. The moving feathers are just shadows now against the stars, steadily working away in the darkness like a clockwork mechanism beneath a blazing universe that itself is a mechanism of wheels, and wheels within wheels, and wheels within wheels within wheels. I wonder if it would be safer to go back, but realize I’ve left it too late. I’d have to go a long way back down the slope to reach anywhere warmer, and on
ce I got off this plateau I would be attempting to walk on rough and stony ground in almost pitch darkness. I could have stayed in that shepherd’s hut with a fire in the stove to keep me warm, and set off again in the morning. It was an obvious, stupid mistake to climb so high when most of the day was already gone, but it’s done and I can’t undo it. There’s no way now that I could hope to find that cosy hut.

  ‘So this may well be the night l die,’ I say out loud. It’s a lonely thought, not so much because of the absence of companions at the end, but because, if I die, everything that I have experienced since Amanda failed to show up at the café will disappear with me. No one will know about the little family of ducks, or the dying ape, or the ants and grasshoppers I had to eat. No one will know what I thought about, or what I felt, or how I kept myself going. The only person I’ve had any sort of conversation with in all that time is Guinevere and she is dead herself, and probably nothing more by now than a few bones scattered over several kilometres of forest. The villagers who drove me away will remember my existence for a while, and the headman will remember how I wheedled the coat off his back, but they know nothing about me, and in any case, no one will ever think to ask them. Carlo, Jaco, Rubia, and the various other guerrillas who came and went, will, if they’re still alive, remember a few things I said and did, but they never asked me anything about myself. Carlo just lectured me and, though Jaco would sometimes talk to me, it was only because he liked to hear about the city and about things like the sea, which he’d heard of but never seen. And no one will ask Jaco about me either.

  Someone will probably eventually find the notebooks I left in Aunt Xenia’s cabin, but everything that’s happened since will be a mystery, like some interstellar rock that once passed close enough to Earth to be glimpsed through telescopes but then disappeared again into the darkness beyond the orbit of Pluto.