Tomorrow

by Chris Beckett

  To my surprise, because he looks to me like the kind of Old Testament patriarch who would happily smite down his foes, he simply shrugs. ‘Well, that’s understandable. And in your case almost justified. The rule was made for the people who live here, and was for their benefit. Because holiness is soon worn away by familiarity. I know that from my own experience, unfortunately.’ He sniffs. ‘The less they see of the cup the more precious it remains.’

  ‘So you’re the Mason?’

  ‘That’s what they call me.’

  ‘And you built this tower.’

  ‘Yes, with help from the others, of course. It was a single-storey building at first, but I felt it should stand out more, given its role in our community, so I added another storey, and then another and, as you see, now another again. I’m climbing towards the heavens, like they did in Babel. Ha! Perhaps God will send a thunderbolt and strike me down. I had plans to fill in these windows too and build a fifth storey, a sixth, a seventh, but I may not bother now. Sometimes you must settle for what you have. And it’s peaceful up here. It’s very peaceful. I’ve reached an age where I’m content to be detached from the world. My only problem is the stairs. It’s a long way up and a long way down for an arthritic old man like me. Another reason not to build any higher.’

  ‘You’re no longer very involved in the life of the village, from what I gather.’

  ‘There’s nothing particularly new about that. I figured out pretty quickly that I wasn’t cut out to be part of a community. I make things, I tell stories, but I’m not much good with latrine-cleaning rotas, or organizing activities for children, or settling disputes. And I also realized pretty early on that I needed to preserve distance if I was going to carry on playing my particular role.’ He chuckles wheezily. ‘I’m like the cup. The less they see of me, the more useful to them I am.’

  ‘You send across words of wisdom, I gather.’

  ‘Wisdom?’ He smiles, and watches me for a couple of seconds before answering. ‘Hmmm. I’m afraid you’re making fun of me. I write a few pages for them every week, so that the Preacher has something for her Sunday gatherings. I leave it to her to decide what to do with them.’

  ‘Thoughts on the Bible, I suppose?’

  ‘I don’t often bother with that these days. It was a rich seam for many years – old stories have a resonance, don’t you agree, that new ones really can’t match? – but, well, I’m sure you know how it is, any story is limiting after a while. It’s like always looking at one face of the moon. Sooner or later you wonder about the other side. So lately I’ve started writing my own stories, though I sometimes use biblical metaphors to make us feel at home. Jonah in the belly of the whale, for instance – that’s a current favourite. I mean, imagine it! You’re inside a whale’s stomach, deep within its body, and it’s under the sea, and it’s far away from the shore. You couldn’t get much more trapped than—’ He breaks off. ‘I do apologise. That was thoughtless of me, when you’ve just told me you were shut in a cage for many months.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  He examines my face, his eyes slightly narrowed. ‘I’d be extremely interested to know what that was like, if you felt like telling me.’

  ‘Well, when you actually face it, it’s unbearable, so you learn to find ways of distracting yourself. But sometimes distraction doesn’t work and then you’re in the truly awful position of being somewhere that’s unbearable and yet must be borne.’

  He leans forward, nodding emphatically, his deep eyes fixed on my face. ‘That’s very interesting. I find myself thinking about that a lot lately. Things that are unbearable and yet must be borne.’

  He’s very much enjoying this conversation, it strikes me, as if he’s been starved of this kind of talk for a very long time. I suppose if you’re a prophet, you don’t often get a chance to talk things over with people, because your whole job is to know things, and not to have any doubts.

  They’re all over me. These kind, old-fashioned people with their foreign speech came running out to greet me as I limped into the village, and now they’re very energetically looking after me.

  It’s all rather overwhelming. I’d prefer to have a bit of time just to look around, acclimatize myself to human company, and get some sort of sense of the village itself. But they’re absolutely determined to care for me. They heat up water and fill up one of a row of old tin tubs in the village bathhouse, where apparently they all bathe and wash their clothes together, and several women clean my various sores and wounds, patting them carefully dry and applying ointments and bandages, while other villagers kill and roast a calf for me and serve it up under the beautiful wooden beams of the village dining hall, with potatoes and white cabbage and hard brown bread, along with spring water to wash it down, and a kind of potent mead. The entire population of the village is there in that one room, a hundred people or so, all talking animatedly in that odd singsong accent. I recognize and understand the words when people speak to me, but still have a sense that I’m listening to a different, northern, tongue. The clothes they wear are a century out of fashion, especially the women’s long dresses and head scarves.

  All of them watch me – and particularly the children, in that sly, knowing, slightly mocking way that children have – but they know they shouldn’t crowd me, and so only the small group of adults who share my table attempt to talk to me. These include Helga, with her straw-coloured hair and her fierce grey eyes, who calls herself the Preacher and seems to be the one in charge.

  I haven’t drunk alcohol in a long while, I’m very tired, and darkness is falling. Earlier today, I spent four hours trudging across that high desert, wondering whether it was a mistake to leave the observatory at all, and whether I should go back there and wait, and then, with a much lighter heart, but much wearier legs, several more hours clambering down the steep and crumbly slope into the circular valley next to the volcano.

  ‘I think I need to sleep now,’ I tell Helga.

  ‘Of course, of course!’ They lead me out of the tiny hall into the village’s single street of bare impacted earth.

  Helga and her husband Peter insist on my taking their bed, which is built into the wall of their one-room house, a few metres away from the other large bed from which a selection of their grandchildren sit watching me in the candlelight. Helga and Peter are not young – in their sixties, I would guess – but they insist on sleeping on a rug on the floor, and in this they are backed up by the six or seven other villagers who’ve followed us into the house to ensure that I have everything I need.

  ‘Of course you must have their bed!’ they all tell me. ‘You mustn’t worry about them at all!’

  I fall asleep almost as soon as I lie down, but in the middle of the night I wake with a full bladder and go outside. The stars are as bright as they were up on the plateau. The village is silent and dark, but at the far end of the lake, the windows at the top of the tower are still glowing.

  I’m on my way now. I’m moving under my own power. It will be slow but, as long as I keep going and don’t stop altogether, I have plenty of time. In fact, I’m somewhat tempted to make a diversion to the balcony. It would be nice to look down at the cars and the people once more, but that would use up time and energy, and is certainly not without its risks, especially during the door-opening process, when I’d have to transfer some of my weight from the frame to the handle, and during that difficult transition over the ridge between the interior and the exterior floors, when I’d have to relinquish the frame entirely and reach for the railing.

  I would like to see the cars, though, two lanes of them in each direction, and the people going in and out of the shops and cafés, and that line of big squat palm trees that grow down the middle of the road, like enormous, plump pineapples. I used to enjoy looking down on all that, and it would be reassuring to see it all still there, even though it’s tomorrow down there, and I’m still in yesterday. But I remind myself I could easily get one of the foreign women to wheel me out there som
etime. All I’d need to do is pay for a bit of extra time and, let’s face it, the one thing I’m not especially short of is money. Several of them have offered to do it, actually, but a kind of stubbornness has prevented me from accepting. Spiting myself has always been a hobby of mine.

  Anyway, I forgo the balcony and the open air, and content myself with a glance through the window at the other large apartment blocks across the street before I return my attention to the task in hand. Galahad didn’t turn away from the Grail, I suppose, in order to do a spot of sightseeing. I myself wouldn’t have taken a detour when I was struggling along that stream in the forest.

  Well, not a major detour like this, anyway; though, come to think of it, I did take a small detour to put that poor animal out of its misery when the pterosaurs were trying to pick out her eyes, and also, more pleasantly, to go to . . . oh, my memory is so bad now, what was that place? I often dream about it and, whatever unpleasant scenarios my unconscious mind has been laying on for me, it always comes as such a balm. But somehow I can’t quite picture it. All I can think is that it was a kind of shrine with some kind of precious object inside it, pink and silver, very precious, which seemed to come from an entirely different world.

  But never mind that now. On a mission such as this, distractions can easily kill. Get my toe caught on a bump in the carpet and this whole wobbly clapped-out vehicle with its absurdly slow reaction times and its ridiculous glass bones could topple forward and I’d break my arm, or my jaw, or Christ knows what else. I need to keep my attention on the path ahead. My one job now is get me safely to my goal and I’m attempting to do that in a spacecraft whose responses are slow and clumsy and always overshoot, no matter how careful I try to be.

  What was that place, though? What was that beautiful shining pink thing that was so comforting because it reminded me there was a world outside?

  I realize I’m starting to feel faint. It’s my old blood pressure problem, which I’d almost forgotten about because it doesn’t intrude much when I’m lying down. But now it’s happening in the most dangerous place it could happen, halfway to the moon, with nothing within reach to hold on to. I lean forward on my walking frame in the hope that, if I do pass out, myself and the frame might form some sort of tripod.

  It takes about ten minutes before I leave the town’s lights behind me. There will still be occasional lights between here and my cabin. There are four villages along the way, and from time to time I’ll pass fisherman with gas lamps in their boats, but right now there are just the fireflies, flashing their tiny green lanterns over the river’s soft skin.

  I’m worrying now about the note I left her. I was a fool to write it when I was stoned. (And I wasn’t just stoned, to be honest, I’d had a few beers as well.) It was far too fulsome. Amanda is a lovely person, of course, but she was only looking for friendship, not some sort of declaration of love. Now I’ve probably scared her off.

  It wasn’t just the dope and the booze that made me misjudge it, though. As much as anything it was solitude. I was okay on my own – I am okay, I’m absolutely fine – but when you’ve gone without something for a while, of course it has more power than usual when it comes your way, even if you were quite happy without it. Company and companionship have become unfamiliar to me. They’ve become intense and complicated. The drug and the beer just unlocked all that.

  Her situation is completely different. She’s living in a town, she works with people all week, goes out regularly for drinks in the evenings, and has conversations with her friends and family back in the city every day via one app or another on her phone or her laptop. All I was to her was one of a number of friendships she made in this part of the country, which she was happy to foster by reciprocating my visits to her apartment by making the journey up to my cabin. Like most people, she was probably mildly curious about me because of my famous dad and my great-aunt. I doubt she was really much put out by my coolness when she came to visit. We all put up with other people’s minor foibles and moods, after all, and she knew I came here specifically to be alone. She probably just concluded that she’d picked a bad time to visit. In fact, if anything about me put her off on that occasion, it was more likely to have been the rather sordid state of the cabin and the fact that I was so obviously stoned. But I doubt if even those things were that big a deal for her.

  But now I’ve left her this letter, this ridiculous gushing letter, saying – what was it? – ‘I’m afraid I may have given you completely the wrong impression, because I think you are perfectly lovely and right now I can’t imagine anything I’d like more in the world than to have you with me on the veranda here, sitting and watching the river go by while we talk.’ And after that the self-exposure, the bit about how ‘something always makes me shrink away from people, and perhaps especially the people I’m most drawn to’. Holy God, she didn’t need that! She just wanted someone to meet for a chat, and to share our impressions as two city folk having an adventure in the backwoods of the Upper River. But following on from that was something even worse, because now came that stuff about how the whole thing would probably happen again when we next met, and she might well feel me shrinking back like I didn’t want to be with her at all, but if so, she should take no notice because those weren’t my real feelings, my real feelings were very warm and tender and entirely appreciative.

  Oh God, how could I!

  A fat beetle buzzes by, momentarily sharing with me the small intimate space around the boat, and then disappearing from my universe for good. A fish jumps. Birds call out to each other from the trees on either side of the soft dim water, though I can only just hear them over the throaty roar of my outboard motor.

  I imagine her opening my letter. I imagine her embarrassment at the assumptions I make in it. I imagine her wincing at the fantasies I have apparently projected on to our relationship, and the expectations they seem to imply. I imagine her pitying me a little for my loneliness, but wishing she didn’t have to, and wondering how to tactfully let me know that she really doesn’t think of me in that way. She mentioned once that the most tiring thing about teaching is that you have to act a part for six whole hours at a stretch and how, while everyone plays a role of course – we all monitor our tone of voice, our facial expressions and so on to be sure of giving the right impression – there was something uniquely exhausting about doing so continuously in the ruthless gaze of forty nine-year-old kids from homes that valued toughness much more than kindness, and so she liked to have a quiet hour afterwards by herself before she was ready for company again. You wouldn’t want a note like mine to come home to after a day like that, let alone want to rush straight out again to meet the person who wrote it.

  God, how embarrassing. I’d better write her another note, apologizing for the first one. I could come right back this way tomorrow and leave it for her. In fact, seeing as tomorrow is Saturday, I could probably catch her in person and apologize to her face for my clumsiness, my lack of lightness, which to be honest has always been a fault of mine, but has certainly been aggravated by solitude, as I can explain to her, and then she’ll—

  But no, actually. On second thoughts, it would not be a good idea to come back tomorrow. I mustn’t let my eagerness to clear this up make me compound my offence.

  I’ve reached the first of the four villages between the town and my cabin. There are about twenty huts there, but the only electric light, apart from the little red beacon that blinks at the end of the jetty, is a single lamp on a pole by the water’s edge. About twelve people are squatting in its light, some of them talking, others just sitting and smoking or playing with those strings of beads that most Upper River folk seem to carry around. A small radio is playing the old hit song ‘That Distant Land’, and one old man is amusing a couple of his friends by wriggling his hips in imitation of that pretty young singer they’ve seen on TV.

  I’m on their side of the river but still at the very far edge of the light cast out by their lamp, so I can’t be much more than a shado
w to them. They watch me pass, but I don’t intrude on their consciousness enough to interrupt their conversation.

  And now they’re behind me and I’m back in the dark again, with just the reflected starlight to show me where the water ends, and where the forest begins.

  I can’t see it now, but lying at the bottom of the boat is a smart blue plastic bag containing the new clothes I bought just to meet her in. I changed out of them before I set off, thinking to protect them from river water. Dear God, I even dressed up for her!

  I find the bag and fling it out into the darkness. I mean, what was I thinking?

  *

  ‘It’s a very striking picture,’ Amanda says.

  ‘So much going on,’ I say. ‘All those people, each with their own story, each with their own understanding of the world, each with their own quite different trajectory, but all momentarily finding themselves together in this one particular point in space and time. Even the following day, no two of them will remember these events in the same way, yet it just so happens that this is a moment that will be celebrated and re-enacted for thousands of years, including right here in this church. They don’t know that, though. One or two seem dimly aware they’re in the middle of a kind of . . . a kind of explosion, I guess, which is flinging out consequences so far into the future that angels have arrived to watch it happen. But look at the waiters! They haven’t noticed anything. They’re just getting on with their jobs. To them it’s just an ordinary Wednesday night.’

  ‘No. They obviously can’t see those angels.’

  ‘They had a copy of this picture in the little church up there in that village. I’m sure I told you about it. That funny little community where I was staying when the army came for me. ’

  ‘The Grail place? Of course you told me about it! You even brought me right here once, just to tell me about them. Do you not remember that? We came here specially to look at this painting!’