Tomorrow

by Chris Beckett

  ‘Well, it’s a movie. That’s sort of how movies work. And what are you saying? Are you saying you didn’t have those expressions on your face?’

  ‘I’ve no idea what my face was doing. But that’s my point. No one was watching me, were they? I didn’t really have a face, never mind expressions. I just had this . . . well, this hole, I suppose you’d call it, that we all look out of. On the one hand, there was the world, on the other my thoughts and feelings, and there was nothing in between them. Really it’s always like that – it’s only other people that have faces – but in this case the situation was particularly extreme because, once I’d escaped from my cage, there were days and days when, not only did I feel faceless to myself, but no one else saw my face either. The face you see in the film just didn’t exist.’

  ‘So, it shouldn’t have been a film at all?’

  I shrug. ‘This is a problem I think about a lot when it comes to my novel, actually. Should it be first person or third person. I’m always changing my mind.’

  She cuts a piece off her fish and puts it in her mouth. I know what she’s thinking. She’s thinking, Here we go again.

  ‘Okay,’ I tell her, ‘I know my novel bugs you because I’m always talking about it, but I never actually write it. Fair enough. But it’s an interesting question in general, don’t you think? In a play, or a film, or a third-person novel, you don’t get to see that the entire world is experienced by people who don’t have faces, looking out at others who apparently do. That’s why . . . I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but if you read a first-person novel, or even an autobiography, and the narrator tells you about some new friendship or new romance, you can see why they like the other person, no problem there, because you can see the other person’s face – not literally, obviously, but still, in some way, you can see it – and you can also see the narrator’s thoughts. But it’s much harder to see why the other person likes the narrator because you can’t see their thoughts, and you can’t see the narrator’s face. And the truth is no one falls in love with the absence of a face. We fall in love with faces . . . not looks, necessarily; I don’t mean looks, but faces. We fall in love with the way people seem from outside.’

  ‘I’ll have to think about that,’ she says, taking a sip of her white wine.

  I feel like I’m trying my best to have a conversation, but she’s refusing to play along.

  ‘This bores you, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say it bores me, but . . . you know . . . it’s your field and not mine. I guess you might have the same problem if I went on too much about the kids in my class.’

  ‘And anyway, I’m chasing a mirage, aren’t I?’

  ‘That came out wrong. I didn’t mean to disrespect what you’re trying to do. It’s just that you seem to expend so much energy on it, and yet you’ve set the bar so high, and made so many rules for yourself, and seem to forbid yourself every possible way of actually going ahead and doing it, that I can’t help wondering if it’s even possible.’

  ‘It doesn’t help that you’re constantly needling me with these doubts.’

  ‘Constantly? Oh, come on. That’s hardly fair.’

  ‘Not out loud, perhaps, but I can see them in your face all the time.’

  ‘I worry for you sometimes, that’s all. I worry that you might be missing out on other things you could put your energies into that might turn out to be more satisfying.’

  ‘This is the only thing that matters to me.’

  Amanda sighs. We’re very close to the big row that we’ve been building towards throughout this trip. We both know that. And we both know it will be essentially the same row that we’ve been having over and over for many months, but this time more final, because, without ever actually saying it out loud, we’ve somehow tacitly agreed that there is a desperate, last-chance, final-throw-of-the-dice quality to this whole holiday. ‘So you keep saying,’ she says. ‘And of course, you also keep reminding me that you couldn’t possibly do something like being a teacher because ultimately a job like mine makes no difference to anything at all, which I must admit doesn’t make me feel very valued.’

  ‘I’ve never said my book was the only thing that matters for anyone else, but I wish you’d respect the fact that it matters to me.’

  ‘I do respect that! God knows I listen to you talking about it often enough.’

  ‘But it feels like it’s something you have to put up with. Something you have to humour.’

  Amanda is always slow to anger and, when she does get angry, it often starts, not with actual crying – she seldom cries – but with tears welling up in her eyes. There are tears there now. ‘That’s really not true. It’s just that you never write the book, and yet it stops you from doing so many other things, and I worry that—’

  ‘Well, maybe if you supported me a bit more. Maybe if you actually made me feel that what I was doing wasn’t just a waste of time, then perhaps I might make a bit more progress.’

  One of her tears has accumulated enough mass to trickle down her cheek. She wipes it away. A woman is glancing furtively across at us from another table. ‘I don’t see why it should all be my fault when you yourself are constantly sabotaging your own project.’

  ‘What in God’s name do you mean by that?’

  ‘Surely you must have noticed how you’re always making impossible rules and conditions for yourself. It’s rather like how you constantly go on about your precious Guinevere back in your cave, and how right she was about the uselessness of pretty well everything that people like us normally value, and yet you’re equally scathing about what she chose to do about it, which is also useless apparently, just like what I do, and just like what everyone else does, including every novelist who has ever lived. You make it impossible for yourself to actually do anything at all.’

  ‘You and I really shouldn’t be together. You’re a wonderful person, I’m not denying that, but you don’t get me and you never will. The truth is I knew that pretty much from the moment I first met you. In fact, that’s the real reason I didn’t go for your nudie high jinks in the jungle, and that’s why I didn’t look very pleased when you came to visit me. It wasn’t that I didn’t like you – of course I bloody like you: everyone likes you! – it was that I could see you weren’t going to be the kind of person I needed in my life. The only pity is that I felt so guilty about having those thoughts, and so surprised and grateful that you liked me, that I didn’t have the heart to say no to you.’

  Amanda pushes away her plate. She’s become very quiet and cold. ‘Okay, well, by my reckoning that’s about the eighth time in the last few months that you’ve told me you wish you’d never met me. So I think perhaps it’s time I took you at your word, don’t you? Especially if I put what you keep saying together with the things you do, like these endless little flirtations with people who apparently give you something I’m unable to give: Estela, Hugh, Izabel . . . I dare say there are more I don’t know about. I’ve been trying to persuade myself otherwise, but I have to admit it all adds up to a pretty consistent message.’ She looks at her watch. ‘You know what? If I get a move on, I can probably make the overnight train back to the city.’

  I’m not quite sure if she’s bluffing, but I very much think that this time she isn’t – and that really terrifies me. Yet for some reason I don’t fully understand, I’ve put on a kind of painted mask of bitterness, and even though I know that mask isn’t really me, and I know that if I wanted to, I could take it off, and just be myself again – the ordinary self that both of us like – and, even though actually I want to take it off because if I did, we could be friends again, perhaps even in a matter of minutes, enjoying our time in a strange and remote part of our country, which a few years ago we would have found quite fascinating, nevertheless for some reason I’m not prepared to do it.

  ‘Okay,’ I tell her. ‘You go, and tomorrow I’ll start writing my novel. My real novel. Not just another of these pieces of crap I’ve been turning out.’r />
  She stands up. ‘Okay. But we both need to understand that this is really it. I’m not just giving you the rest of this week to start your book. I’m freeing you from me completely – and me from you. You went to the Upper River to write your book, you met me, and you’ve written eight books in the eight years from that day to now, which a lot of people would have been very satisfied with, but apparently none of them matter because you’ve never even started the one you really wanted to write, and, according to you, that’s because of me. Well, who knows? Maybe you’re right. Maybe it is me that’s stifling your inner life and your precious book. There’s only one way to find out.’

  I long to end this ridiculous hostility. All I need to do is admit I’m in the wrong and that blaming her for my failure to write my book is on a par with the anger I might feel at the idiot who left the brick on the floor on which I stubbed my toe, in the very brief moment before I realize that the idiot was me. But, though I know that’s the case, for some reason I don’t feel able to say so.

  ‘Okay,’ I tell her. ‘We’re done, then. That’s absolutely fine with me.’

  3 THE TOWER

  I’m walking along the lake. The water is to my right, the steep escarpment to my left, and the village behind me with all its fields and orchards. When I turn and look back, the houses and the church already look very small beneath the volcano from whose flank this entire valley seems to have been scooped out. My legs are weary from my many days of walking, and my progress is slow and a little painful, but it’s a relief to be on my own again for a while, and not to have to maintain a face, or to edit the jumble of my thoughts and feelings into some kind of coherent shape in order to let the people here feel they’re getting to know me. And it’s good to be away from their exhausting kindness and hospitality.

  I’m tempted to stop for a rest and a smoke, for there’s no longer any urgency about anything. The air is neither too hot nor too cold, my belly is full, and the people in the village will look after me for however long it takes someone to come to the observatory to fix the damage and find the note I left there. In fact, even if no one does come, the villagers assure me there’s nothing to worry about, because they can if necessary take me down to the river themselves. They may have withdrawn from the world but they do occasionally return to it for a variety of reasons, and they’d happily do so to help me out.

  So there’s nothing I need to do. I could just lie here in the grass and smoke and sleep, leaving the tower and its mason for another day. It’s really not far to walk there, it’s true, but why walk at all, when my legs are bruised and blistered and weary? Why give myself the challenge of another human encounter, when I could simply doze here until I begin to feel hungry, and then go back to the village and help myself to cheese and bread and beer from the storehouse, which I’ve been told I’m free to do at any time.

  But somehow the tower ahead of me, spiky and hard on its rocky promontory, reproaches my idle inclinations. So much hard work must have gone into it, with so few people to do it, so little in the way of mechanical help – and a strange, prickly intelligence seems to animate it, challenging me not to turn away.

  ‘Can you manage?’ asks the taxi driver. She’s opened the door for me and is offering her hand. It’s the first time that’s ever happened, and I wish she’d stayed in her seat, because I can cope perfectly well on my own. But still, she’s trying to be kind and the truth is that it is a bit of struggle these days to get out of a car, as she’d be able to see for herself if I were to decline her help. So I accept her hand and climb out on to the street. She reaches in for my stick and the little canvas bag I use to carry my sandwiches, my flask of coffee and my notebook.

  I ask her to pick me up in two hours’ time and, as the taxi moves off, I stare up at the apartment buildings across the road, scanning those familiar walls of brick until I find the balcony of the apartment I used to share with Jezebel and Rémy, back in the days when I was a young assistant lecturer. They say that at regular intervals – it’s every year, I believe – every single atom in your body will have been completely replaced, so that the past selves we remember from many years back do not actually contain a single speck of the matter that now makes up our bodies. But bricks aren’t like that. If I were to go up to that apartment and walk out on to the balcony, I could touch bricks that had already been there for a century when I lived there, and are still there now, still made of the exact same matter, as they will be for many years to come. It would be the same if I put my hands on the railing. Barring perhaps a few coats of paint, it would be the same metal that I used to lean on when I slipped outside of an evening for a puff of weed.

  I haven’t smoked that stuff for years. I wonder what it would feel like now. I used to enjoy the way it broke down boundaries between one thought and the next and gave me a sense of all the world as a kind of single vast organic thing, a forest, as I’d sometimes picture it, but a forest in many dimensions, so that it extended up and down as well as around. I used to like that very much.

  If I had some weed now, I’d smoke it in the hope it would bring me closer to that old past self. But these days I don’t even smoke tobacco.

  I turn in the other direction and look through the metal railings of the Botanic Gardens. These railings too, I suppose, are the same ones that were there before, though no doubt also repainted a few times, because pretty much as soon as they apply another coat, the paint seems to bubble and flake. The trees will have grown and no doubt some have been replaced, but my memory isn’t good enough to be able to tell how they’ve changed. The only thing I notice is that the whole place seems surprisingly small.

  ‘Excuse me,’ says a young woman who’s pushing two children along in a contraption that carries them side by side. I smile at the children and would love to talk to them. They’re extraordinarily sweet, and remind me of my nieces and nephews when they were small. I feel a wave of sadness washing over me at the thought that, apart from Christmas and birthday cards, we somehow lost touch. But the woman is looking cross, and I realize I’ve been blocking a busy pavement.

  I move to the side, and continue on my way to the park gate. I move more slowly than I used to but once I get going my limbs loosen up and I really don’t need the stick. I carry it more for reassurance than anything because my balance isn’t as good as it was and sometimes I feel myself toppling for no apparent reason. It’s a strange thing to be old, and to be seen as old by people around me. That young mother, for instance, probably thought to herself that I was a silly confused old fool, standing there grinning at her babies as if I had no idea of the nuisance I was causing.

  Yet this is only the beginning, that’s the odd part. I can delay things to some extent, I can take exercise, I can eat a good diet, I can get myself checked over regularly by my doctor, but all the same this can only go in one direction. There will be a day, if I live that long, when I look back on my present self as being wonderfully youthful and mobile, in the way that I now look back at my sixty-year-old self, never mind that young thing with curly jet-black hair that used to lean over that balcony there to smoke.

  I pass through the gate, and now I’m among the trees that I once liked to imagine as some kind of jungle, back when I’d never actually been in a jungle and thought of them as dangerous and glamorous places, as in the paintings of that chap – what was his name? – that foreign chap who was a tax collector or some such and had never himself been to the tropics at all.

  Yes, and why not? After my encounter with the real forest, I used to feel vaguely embarrassed about the naivety of those fantasies, but I really don’t see why. The real forest is just a place, after all, but what I’d been reaching for was something else entirely.

  Anyway, here I am, so let me just enjoy it: the lavish orchids, the cool green ferns, the trees with their enormous fleshy leaves. And also the mynah birds with their golden crests, the little children running around, the young mothers chatting on the benches, the business people speaking very earnest
ly into apparently empty air. ‘Can you get Tamsin in on this one?’ a smart young woman is saying. ‘Thanks, that would be great . . . I’m not happy with the quality of it, to be honest . . . I think we should probably make a fuss, don’t you? . . . No, and it’s not as though it was cheap . . . Get Tamsin on to it, will you, and let me know what she says.’

  I walk to the far end of the park and then back again. That’s my exercise for the day done, so now I make my way to the small pond next to the fence to sit on the bench there and eat my sandwiches, from time to time throwing a little piece of crust to the miniature ducks that I suppose may perhaps be the great-great-grandchildren of the ones I watched that night when the whole park was empty except for me – the great-great-grandchildren and their children, I should say, for, as well as the two adults, there are two charming little ducklings covered in fluffy yellow down.

  When I’ve finished eating and dusted off the crumbs, I open my flask, pour myself a cup of strong dark coffee and take out my notebook, but I don’t immediately begin to write. I take my time over things these days, even more than I used to, and even though I’m increasingly aware that I’m going to have to crack on with it if there’s to be any chance at all of my ever writing the novel that hovers there tantalisingly at the edge of my field of vision.

  Nothing much will happen in it, that’s how I feel about it now. Most books are crammed with things happening, but all that busy stuff is just a distraction in my opinion, in books as it is in life. All these busy people throughout history, invading countries, building cities, inventing alphabets, imposing new and more enlightened religions, cutting down forests, discovering things – but then replanting forests again, and discarding those same religions, and telling everyone to get up to date and follow instead the latest new ideas that one day will be discarded too . . . And where has all this busyness got us? They say that by the end of the century everything will have gone to pot. And okay, I’m sure that old people have always said that, but these days the young people are saying it even more than us old ones, because it’s not a question of manners or mores any more, it’s about the material conditions of life itself, and it’s them that are going to have to deal with it.