Tomorrow

by Chris Beckett

  Already at the foot of the steps and heading for the building site next door, the electrician looks round with a frown as I kiss Ham on the cheek.

  I can almost see the burden lifting from his shoulders.

  ‘I like you too,’ he says. ‘You take care of yourself.’

  We go down the steps, and then with a momentary touch of my hand, he turns right towards the harbour and I turn left and up the hill that leads back into the oddly desolate streets of the town centre.

  Guinevere has been silent for several seconds.

  ‘All right,’ she says, ‘so you’re saying that the world can’t really get any better than it already is, and, however shitty and unfair, this is just the way things are?’

  The last of the bats has left the cave now, and there’s almost no sound except for our breathing and the hissing of the gas lamp a few metres away.

  ‘I’m afraid I do tend to think that.’

  ‘I don’t agree, but let’s suppose you’re right, and everything is just the way it has to be and everything that happens is just what needs to happen.’

  ‘Okay, and . . .?’

  ‘That would mean, wouldn’t it, that what I’m doing is just as important as what anyone else does? The insurrection is necessary. It’s a part of the way things have to be as well.’

  I’m about to answer her, but a series of loud, thunder-like noises come echoing down the cave. They’re so distorted that at first I don’t recognize them at all, but Guinevere clearly does because she jumps up straight away to grab her gun.

  ‘See you,’ she calls back as she runs towards the cave mouth to help fight off the attack.

  ‘You’re being very frank with me,’ I say, ‘considering that we’ve only just met.’

  The Mason shrugs, legs dangling from his altar. ‘I’m frank with everyone. I never pretend to be more than I actually am, or to know more than I really know.’

  ‘Really? Even about—’

  ‘Ha! About this, you mean?’ He reaches behind himself for something and tosses it across to me.

  Taken by surprise, I fumble the catch and nearly drop whatever it is he’s thrown at me. It’s conical in shape, quite small, but heavy, made of what looks like pewter. At the pointed bottom end, there are three small prongs to allow it to be set down on a table.

  The Mason laughs at my surprise and shock. ‘If you’d made an appointment, I could have put on a show for you. I would have told you to come after dark. The stairs would have been lit with candles, and, when you opened the door to this room, that cup would be on the altar, with only a single small candle next to it to show it off. But I’m afraid if you will just barge in when I’m taking a nap, you only get the unadorned version.’

  I turn the cup in my hand. ‘And this is the thing you’ve told them all is the Holy Grail?’

  ‘The Holy Chalice. Yes. Why do you look so surprised? What sort of cup did you think they’d have two thousand years ago in a rented room above a pub? Some gold monstrosity studded with diamonds?’

  ‘From what I’ve read, you persuaded all these people to give up their old lives in the northern countries and come out here on the basis that this is the cup that was used at the Last Supper?’

  ‘I thought it would be a focal point. I’ve never liked the cross.’

  ‘But your people back there across the lake, they don’t just see this as a symbol, they see it as the actual—’

  ‘Well, I believe it is! No one can be certain of anything, of course, but I think there’s reasonable evidence for it. It would be boring to tell you the whole story of how I got hold of it, but it had been passed down through a family who themselves assumed it was a fake. It was inside a leather bag that had dried hard around it, and when I cut it open there was a folded piece of papyrus inside with an inscription in first-century Aramaic. I had it translated and it read, This is the cup my master Yeshua had us share, that last time we ate together. I cut off a piece of the leather and a piece of the papyrus and had them tested in a lab. I didn’t say what they came from, obviously – the last thing that thing needs is to be the centre of a media frenzy – but I was told the leather, the papyrus and the ink were all about two thousand years old. You can’t do a carbon test on metal, I’m afraid, but I took the cup to a very famous museum, without mentioning the story that was told about it, and the people there said it was a drinking vessel of a type you find in the period and in the part of the world that the story claimed for it. Put all that together. What would you think, if it was you?’

  I remember the painting in the village church: that epochal moment, like an explosion caught in its first few nanoseconds, when the blast wave has barely begun to radiate outward, and I feel light-headed, almost as if I’m about to faint. ‘Jesus!’ I mutter.

  The Mason laughs, watching me with amusement from under his patriarch brows. ‘That’s the man! He once drank from that very cup you’re holding. Think about it for a moment. Put aside any doubts you may have, just for a minute, and tell me how it makes you feel?’

  ‘It feels . . . I don’t know. It feels magical.’

  ‘Of course it does. It’s a relic. Relics are powerful. Back in medieval times they couldn’t get enough of them: real physical objects right here in the present that come from the story-world of the past.’

  He’s still watching me closely as I feel the weight of the cup in my hands, this clever, energetic, desperately lonely man, who is slowly retreating towards the sky. It’s not that the people in the village aren’t allowed to argue with him, I realize, it’s more that they don’t want to. Sensible people that they are, they’re happy to leave him to it, wrestling on their behalf with meaning and doubt.

  ‘Mind you,’ he says, and he’s clearly very used to arguing with himself, ‘all this is predicated on the assumption that something magical really did happen in the past. If you take the view that the Last Supper was simply an office party, which it very probably was, the value of that thing there begins to fall.’

  I take the cup across to him and place it carefully in his hands, uncomfortable with holding it any longer.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ I tell him. ‘I was struck by your story about the two people who need to stay apart even though they also need to be together. I suppose anything is magical that makes you feel like it’s possible to have here and there at the same time.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ he says.

  And he smiles as he looks down at his precious cup, apparently genuinely relieved by what I said.

  Now this really is the tree. I was mistaken about the last tree, and about the one before, but this is definitely that tall tree on the final bend, the one that leans a little to the left. I can only just make it out against the sky, but all the same I’ve got no doubt at all that I’m right. One more corner and there will be the little blue light of my cabin to welcome me home.

  I’ve been through a lot of stages on this journey. I began in a state of shame, convinced that Amanda was made so uncomfortable by my note that she chose not to come and meet me in the café. But as I continued up the river, the less likely that seemed to be.

  At the second village, there were a few people sitting by the riverbank. They didn’t have electric light, but they had a little fire going where they were cooking something fatty and pungent, and I could see a dozen grown-ups squatting round it, smoking and talking in its light, while a group of kids played what looked like a board game of some kind. I waved, but no one bothered to wave back. They must have heard my outboard motor, but they perhaps couldn’t see me at all.

  Whatever her feelings about the note, I decided, Amanda would have come to meet me if she’d known I was waiting for her, or phoned me at the very least. She wasn’t the sort to let someone down just to avoid feeling uncomfortable. And, after all, however clumsy and florid, the note was an apology, and a declaration of how much I liked her. She might have been embarrassed by it, but it was a compliment to her, and you really couldn’t say there was an
ything unpleasant about it. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that the reason she didn’t turn up must have been something completely unrelated to my note. A problem might have cropped up at school, for instance – some disciplinary problem that had to be sorted out, perhaps, or a staff meeting, or even a parents’ evening if they had such things – and she just hadn’t got home yet by the time I gave up waiting.

  I came to the third village. There was no sign of any life there at all, other than little slivers of yellow gaslight showing through cracks in some of the huts, and the blinking red light at the end of the jetty that all the villages had to prevent boats from crashing in the dark. Half a kilometre on, I passed a boat with one of those big gas lamps the locals used at night to attract certain kinds of fish. There were three people in the boat, two men and a small boy. They had an outboard motor, but they were just drifting on the water with their net trailing behind. They peered at me as I passed through the outer edge of their little patch of light, and the boy shouted something that made the two men laugh, though I couldn’t make out what he said above the sound of my motor, and it was probably in one of the local languages.

  She might have arranged to meet a friend at the cinema, I thought, and gone there straight from school. She’d once mentioned that was something she did from time to time. She didn’t answer my text, it’s true, but it was entirely possible that she ran out of charge, or simply forgot to turn on her phone again at the end of the school day.

  This scenario seemed a lot more plausible than the idea that I’d embarrassed her so much that she couldn’t bring herself to meet me, and I felt so reassured by this thought that I was able to think about other things until the fourth and final village, where there were a few people sitting by the water, next to a gas lamp. Still rather ashamed of having frightened those little children, I made sure to steer towards the middle of the river where they wouldn’t be able to see who I was. But I didn’t worry too much about that either. Those children gave me a fright, that was all, and it’s not as if I hurt them. I began to relax into the night, enjoying the cool air, and the feeling of being far out on the quiet cool water with nothing and no one to bother me.

  And now here I am, after several times feeling certain that I’ve spotted the tall tree that marks the final bend, knowing without any doubt that this time it really is the one.

  Perhaps when she finds the note, she’ll be pleased, I think. That surely is at least possible? That was my original intention, after all: to please her, and to reassure her that my prickliness was not in any way a judgement on her, because she’s every bit as lovable as her name suggests. And she seems to like me well enough – she went to all the trouble of hiring a boat, didn’t she, and travelled twelve kilometres just to see me? So why on earth would she object to my telling her I liked her? If anything, I should be worried that she might read too much into my note, and imagine . . .

  But I’m turning the corner now. My blue light appears in the distance on the right-hand bank, showing me my way home.

  From the Freedom Fortress a couple of kilometres away comes the sound of a twenty-one-gun salute, one explosion for each of the twenty provinces and one for the Federation itself. Seconds later, a number of rockets go off, even though it’s the middle of a sunny morning, and splatter the sky with patriotic colours: yellow, red and blue. We can hear the cheering of the crowd over there that’s gathered to watch the pageantry.

  We’ve been here half an hour. The foreign couple with the little girl headed off some time ago and, as far as we can see, we have the whole park to ourselves.

  ‘Let’s go up to the temple,’ I say.

  Since the indigenous people never, to our knowledge, constructed anything in stone, the Temple of Tanit is the oldest masonry structure on our entire continent, built, as the information boards are keen to tell us, a millennium and a half before the next wave of settlers arrived from across the sea. There isn’t much of the temple left, apart from the foundations, the stumps of a few columns, and the artificial hill on which it stands, and it’s never really caught my imagination. Over the years I’ve laid my hands many times on the remains of those columns and tried to enthuse myself with the idea that these very stones could have been touched all those years ago by the priests and priestesses of the moon goddess, yet for some reason they’ve always stubbornly insisted on just being stones. But it’s a pleasant spot from which to view the rest of the park, with its artful landscaping, its miniature gorge full of jungle plants that delighted me as a child, and its various statues and fountains.

  Of course, the centrepiece of the temple is the large and ornate tomb of the novelist Mago Barca. It has all the usual columns and weeping cherubim and other gewgaws that are so characteristic of the heavy ‘Punic’ style of the late nineteenth century, including the inevitable personifications in stone of the Five Civilized Nations, and, on the top of this whole elaborate confection, Barca himself reclines on a black obsidian slab. He is twice his natural size, carved in white marble in the imagined garb of one of the virile Carthaginian adventurers he believed to be the founders of our civilization, and gazing sternly out into a future where he fondly imagines he will always be seen as a kind of giant. The marble is somewhat tarnished now by soot and lichen, and by the carved initials of scores of visitors.

  ‘Have you ever read anything he wrote?’ Amanda asks.

  ‘Only for research purposes, and only as an artefact of the Punic Revival. No one reads his stuff for pleasure, do they? It’s almost unreadable. He thought he was saying such profound and important things, but it’s just his prejudices and fantasies, dressed up in a lot of pompous nineteenth-century waffle as if they were eternal verities.’

  We look up at him reclining complacently there, above that great fancy pile of symbols.

  ‘He reminds me of the Mason,’ I say, ‘resting on his altar at the top of his spiky tower.’

  ‘Up there by the volcano with the God people?’

  ‘That’s the one. He was so different from the rest of them. They were so determinedly jolly and positive, and he was so complicated and full of doubt, and yet he’d brought them there, and somehow it was his job to sustain them.’

  ‘From what you’ve said, they’ll do perfectly well when he’s gone.’

  ‘I don’t know. I think they do need him in a way. He adds another dimension to their tiny world, makes it more spacious, perhaps, maybe even makes it bearable.’

  ‘Maybe he can carry on doing that when he’s dead.’

  ‘True. Dead prophets are sometimes preferable to live ones, aren’t they? And his stories were taking a very dark turn. Poor Helga must really struggle to extract something positive from them.’

  We’re still looking up at Barca as if he were the man we’re talking about, and I start to tell Amanda about the nothingness that’s more solid than rock, and the solitary being trapped in that tiny bubble from which there’s no possibility of escape. I suppose this sets off all the fears from the period of my captivity, and in the jungle, and up on that high desert where I thought I would freeze to death, because, although I began telling the story in a purely factual way, I rapidly find myself becoming quite distressed by it.

  ‘It’s the reality behind everything,’ I tell her. ‘That’s what he said. We only imagine there’s a world out there, beyond the wall of our single self. But really there’s only one self in existence, all alone for ever, not even able to die, and there’s nothing beyond the wall at all.’

  I walk away from the monument, to the edge of the flattened top of the artificial hill on which the moon goddess’s temple was built. Amanda follows me.

  ‘But that’s just silly!’ she says, slipping her arm round my waist. ‘If we’re going to buy the idea that everything we’re looking at doesn’t really exist, even though we can see it and feel it and touch it, then why on earth should we take seriously the fantasy of a lonely and narcissistic old man, far far away from here, and all by himself at
the top of a tower he’s built to hide in?’

  I laugh, and then, while still laughing, I begin to weep. I had no idea up to this moment how much I’d been haunted by that story, but I feel she’s freed me from it. I turn towards her and, for the first time, we really kiss.

  I’m at the top of the escarpment. I’ve been walking for many hours since the first light of day, and I’m looking down from a desert into a small but fertile valley where at one end of a lake, a little village clusters around a church, surrounded by green fields. I notice the tower, on its own bare promontory at the far end of the lake where the ground is stony and uncultivated. It’s a strange structure, and rather striking, with its spikes and its lighthouse-like windows, and I think to myself that maybe that’s where they keep the Holy Grail. But of course it’s the village I aim for as I begin to descend the slope.

  Charity finds me in my chair and tells me off. ‘Why didn’t you ask me to help you? You’ve been very silly and I’m very cross. You could have fallen and broken your leg! You could have been lying there for hours.’

  ‘I know, but it did feel good.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to come in here and find you dead on the floor.’

  She gives me my drugs though the needle in my arm, and changes me, and feeds me, and helps me back to my bed.

  ‘If you want to sit in your chair again, or go out on the balcony, that’s absolutely fine,’ she tells me, ‘but for goodness’ sake, do it when one of us is here to help you.’

  ‘I’ve got a favour to ask you. I’ve written a letter. It’s in the bag on my frame. I just tore some pages out of my notebook, so it’s not very neat, but I’d like you to post it. It’s to an old friend. I don’t think she’s as decrepit as I am, and I’d very much like her to come and see me.’

  ‘I’ll do that for you certainly. I’ll do it tonight on my way home.’

  ‘You won’t forget, will you? You know what you’re like.’