The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

  *

  When I opened my eyes, it was raining under the trees: big, painfully heavy drops that felt like someone had spilled a case of bullets on me. I was half-frozen to the ground and I had to tear free to turn onto my side. The pine needles were all gullied by tiny silver streams. They didn’t look like water at all, shivering and shining as they sank into the earth. Little rivulets ran off my coat too and plinked as they hit the ground. I rubbed my eyes and winced when I felt the bruises shift over my ribs. Someone had been shouting my name for a while but it was only then that it sounded distinctly separate from a dream.

  ‘Merrick.’ It was Raphael, right next to me now. He was kneeling in the pine needles. He gave me a cigar case. It must have had embers in it, because it was hot. Pins and needles soared down my hands when I took it, and then the feeling came back. ‘Can you sit up?’ he asked. The Quechua edge that had been in his consonants yesterday night and earlier this morning was completely gone. His English was cleaner now than mine, which had brine and jetsam in it. He was concentrating, to be as clear as he could; I must have looked concussed.

  ‘Someone came up behind me. I didn’t see.’ When I was upright, my ribs panged and I had to stand with my hand pressed to them. He brushed pine needles off me. I wanted to say I was shaking because I was angry, not frightened. A few years ago no one would have been able to do that to me, nothing close, and never without my seeing. ‘Stop, I’m fine.’

  ‘They don’t want people on the border. Markham will have set them off yesterday.’ He said it softly, as if someone might overhear. The back of my neck crawled with the certainty that there was still a man behind me. I twisted around, knowing there wasn’t really. There was only the empty air, then the carvings on the border. Things moved beyond it, but only little ones with little pollen trails.

  ‘I’ve lost my sketchbook,’ I said, trying to look about, but it was difficult to turn on the spot. My leg hurt. I’d fallen awkwardly.

  ‘It’s here.’ He had found the pencil as well. He swept the moss off them both before he gave them back.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. It came out annoyed-sounding and I tipped my hand, trying to say I wasn’t angry with him. He nodded before I had to scrape together a sentence and walked slowly so that I could lean on his shoulder. At the church, he hesitated.

  ‘You’ll be better coming down to the river. It’s hot down there and the water is salt. You can go under once and you don’t have to spend half an hour cleaning every cut.’

  I wanted not to move any more. ‘Will I?’

  ‘You have to. Or you’ll have a . . .’ He sighed. ‘This is wrong; tell me what the word is.’

  ‘Say what you think?’ I said, glad to have something to think about that wasn’t a complete failure to keep myself safe.

  ‘Calenture.’

  ‘Fever. No, I know. You’re right.’

  ‘Hold on,’ he said, and went inside. He came out again straightaway with his coat. I thought he would put it on, but he took mine from me and gave me his instead. It was lined with a fine pelt which might have been sealskin or something more foresty, but it was twice as warm as mine. He had broad shoulders and I didn’t particularly, so it fitted well even though I was taller. It smelled of beeswax. I had to look behind me again. The trees were talking now that the sun had been out for a while – the green cluck of settling wood – but there was nobody there.

  ‘Mine was all right—’

  He had hung it over the woodpile, where it dripped, although I hadn’t been aware of its being wet. It was too cold. ‘There’s mercury in the pockets.’

  ‘There’s what in the pockets?’ I said, still slow anyway and not improved by the bang on the head.

  ‘M— doesn’t matter.’ He steered me towards the cliff, but away from the bridge. ‘It isn’t far. Straight down there.’ He pointed to a place just along from us where the surface caved in, into a narrow blowhole, although it couldn’t have been, there being no tide. He took me to the edge, where there was a little winch, much smaller than the main one on the last stack and perched on the cliff like a gallows. Far down below was a little loop of the river sheltered by a cave, the water turquoise and steaming. It was just shy of one of the glass shadows of the stacks; the current must have moved it just enough to cool it down.

  The winch lowered us to the rocks just by the pool. Raphael had brought a bag of laundry as well as his rifle and as soon as we were down he left me to it and went to the main river to scrub the crumpled clothes out. None of them were his. It was as much privacy as I would get. Further on from us, around the base of the second stack, there were fishermen. They threw the nets out like Scandinavians do, standing thigh deep in the water. Behind them, on the beach, the river boiled where it touched the hottest parts of the glass.

  The water was as hot as a bath. I eased down on some rocks that had been polished smooth and made into steps. It was a pool, with walls. I couldn’t tell if they were natural or not. On one side was a fine mesh to keep fish out, or perhaps something worse. The water, though, seemed mostly dead, and I wasn’t surprised. It was so salty I could feel the buoyance, and it stung, sharp and clean, in all the grazes I hadn’t known were there along my ribs.

  Quartz crystals sparkled on the rocks just next to me. They had formed in perfect cubes, slightly stuck to the rocks, but one of them came off when I pulled. It wasn’t quartz; a corner ground off easily. Salt. I’d heard of it forming that way on the banks of the Dead Sea, but not anywhere else. I took a cube back to my things to show Clem later.

  ‘What happened there?’ Raphael said suddenly. It made me jump.

  ‘Where?’ I looked around, expecting to see him pointing somewhere, but he was watching me. He spun his hand in the air to tell me to turn around again. He meant my back. I couldn’t feel the lash-scars. ‘Oh. Clem happened. We were in the Navy together.’ Looking how I did now, I heard how like a lie it sounded. I turned my arm around so that he could see the anchor tattoo over the veins between my elbow and my wrist. It had been done much better than I’d paid for and it hadn’t faded or blurred yet.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Insubordination.’

  I couldn’t remember why. It was one of those lighthouse memories around which everything else was dark. All I could remember was that it had been drizzling on the day. Clem had been new on board and I’d shouted at him about something even though he had outranked me, something that must have mattered immensely at the time – there had been a child, one of the cabin boys – but I couldn’t reach it.

  ‘And now you’re . . . best friends,’ Raphael said.

  ‘Is that strange? People who clash at first often get on later. He was always interested in Peru. Then he found out my father had come here a lot . . .’

  He watched me for what felt like a long time. ‘Places like this amplify all the things that have ever gone wrong for you. There’s no insulation, no trains or doctors or space to get away from someone. It’s bad enough with people who once fell out over late rent, but it would be dangerous to go into the woods with someone who once had you publicly flogged.’

  ‘We didn’t know each other then; it wasn’t falling out. We don’t fall out. He gets cross and then he forgets about it. He’s got a quick temper, but it’s quick in both directions. He forgives people within fifteen minutes of shouting at them. If you were to take an average he’d work out as straight as a spirit level.’

  ‘So would these mountains,’ Raphael said, with a little razor blade in the lining of his voice. I had to concentrate not to shy away from him. Having to argue had sharpened things and the memory came back. The cabin boy had stolen bread. He was meant to be whipped for it. That was the row.

  ‘If he so much as shakes his finger at you, you’re both going back to Azangaro.’

  ‘That’s not . . . he will shake his finger. He will lose his temper. That doesn’t make him bad. He’s just a bit of a Cleopatra.’ I didn’t feel too indignant. I was enjoying how much he disapp
roved.

  ‘It’s hard to trust a man in his thirties who still loses his temper.’

  ‘As opposed to one in his forties who lives in a permanent state of having already lost it,’ I said, waving at him. ‘Come on, he deserves the benefit of the doubt. You’ve only known him ten seconds and nine of those have been while he was mountain sick.’

  I thought he would be angry, but he smiled. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do. What are you worried about, anyway? That we’ll start bickering at the wrong moment and be eaten by jaguars?’

  ‘No. That there will be a moment, another one, when one of you has to help the other, and you hesitate, and I’m eaten by jaguars.’

  I laughed, because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d disagreed with someone and not offended them. ‘He’s all right. You’ll see.’

  He made a doubting sound and turned back to the washing. I dropped my head against my arms. The salt took my weight and the current tugged me gently to one side, but not enough to move me. The heat had reached my bones. I could feel all the vertebrae down my spine and they were bending more than they had for months. Like a warm pressure on the back of my neck, I could feel too that he was watching me. It snuffed out the lingering suspicion that there might be someone behind me, or at least, any sense that it would be important if there were. He would have shot anyone who was. I must have fallen asleep there, because it made me jump when he tapped my shoulder with the back of his hand. He was just in front of me on the rocks, smelling of laundry soap. He would have to take it all back up to the top to rinse it out in fresh water if he wanted to get rid of the brine, which confused me, because it would have been easier to do it in the church to begin with, until I realised he had only brought it so that he could look busy while he kept an eye on me.

  ‘I’m going back up. I’ll send the winch back down for you,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  I watched him go, then I climbed out and dried off on my shirt. The heat stayed with me even once the winch came back down and lifted me up into the cold air beyond the glass shadows. I rode sitting on the bar rather than standing, my cane over my knees and elbow locked over the rope beside me. By the time I got back to the church, Raphael had the stove built up and open. I took a bowl outside to rinse the salt off my skin and then caught sight of my reflection in the window when I turned. There was only one bruise on my face. I went back in, pleased. I could say to Clem that I’d bumped into a tree or something, if he noticed. I didn’t even want to touch the idea of telling him someone had attacked me from behind and I hadn’t seen one solitary atom of them.

  Raphael had climbed up the ladder that led up to his attic to start hanging the damp things over the rungs. There was a clothes-line too, between the side of the ladder and the nail that usually held a crucifix on the wall. The crucifix had been relegated to the top of the coffee jar now. I climbed on to a chair to help.

  ‘Get down,’ he said.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘No, it’s rude here. You let the strongest work. You shouldn’t even be making me coffee.’

  ‘I . . . don’t care if it’s rude.’ I shifted when he frowned. ‘Look, the most frightening thing I can think of isn’t losing the leg, or getting shot or beaten up by angry Indians. It’s the moment I think yes, I should be sitting down, and he should be doing everything for me.’

  He gave me some pegs. ‘By the hems.’

  ‘I know. I do it at home.’

  ‘Aren’t you rich?’

  ‘No. It’s me and my brother and a part-time kitchen maid who thinks I don’t know she calls us Walking Cain and Nearly Abel. He has polio,’ I explained.

  He nodded, then smiled. ‘You’re Abel, aren’t you?’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’

  He pegged my sleeve to the line, which made me laugh, partly because he didn’t seem at all like someone who played and it was a relief to find that he did.

  ‘Is it worth all this, for cinchona cuttings?’ he asked after a while. The bruise must have been darker by then. ‘You can just leave.’

  ‘I can’t. If I don’t do this I’ll have to rot in a parsonage in Truro. Am I in danger in here too?’

  ‘I don’t know. You should have been all right even sitting on top of the border, never mind where you were. Markham must have made them nervous.’

  ‘Well, we’ll hear if anyone breaks in.’

  He was quiet, but it was the strange hollow quiet he had when he wanted to say something. Whatever it was, he swallowed it. I thought suddenly it was lucky to the point of unlikely that he had come to find me in the twenty minutes it would have taken before I died of cold. He’d had no reason to look for me, unless he’d known something would happen. It explained why he had been so gentle when he found me. Guilt is a good propellant for kindness. But I wasn’t sure enough to accuse him. Or perhaps I wanted too much for it to be real kindness.

  SIXTEEN

  It was the tail end of the afternoon and I was starting to wonder what to do about food when I saw that Raphael was watching me again. I’d been drifting through the kitchen, trying to keep moving but near the stove at the same time, turning over the idea of pineapple versus going into town to see about fish.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said, from nowhere. ‘We’re going to see the carver.’

  ‘Carver – what?’

  ‘You’re driving me mad, get your coat. And bring that carrot.’

  Not sure what was going on, I gave him the carrot from beside the stove and then followed him out to fetch my coat off the woodpile. I had to shake the frost from it. ‘Why are we going to see the carver?’ I tried again.

  ‘To see if we can do something about that,’ he said. He swept his eyelashes down at my leg.

  ‘How?’

  He looked as if he would have explained, but his voice was fracturing, and he moved his hand to say I’d just have to trust him. He led the way out to the bridge, slowly again, so that I could keep up.

  The second stack seemed to be where most people lived. It was biggest, and all along the twisting path and the gantries that led through it was a jumble of miniature shops. None of them were anything more than canopies set up over people’s front windows, with a few upturned crates outside instead of chairs. Raphael tapped on someone’s shutter. A woman opened it and beamed when she saw us.

  ‘You must be one of his new foreigners,’ she said happily to me. A goat bleated somewhere beyond her. ‘I saw you go by yesterday, didn’t leap out at you; I hope you’re grateful. Where are you from then?’ She spoke fine clear Spanish and I relaxed into being able to understand.

  ‘England. I’m Merrick, it’s nice to meet you.’

  ‘Other hand. You won’t get much from this one.’ She only had one, her left, so I swapped over to shake that instead. It was still only partially formed. She had fingers, but not full length. ‘Merrick. Now we all used to know a marvellous man called Jack who had a little boy called Merrick. You’re not him, by any chance?’

  ‘Jack was my father.’

  ‘Good. You look just like him, but then I worried that white people might all look the same anyway, so I didn’t like to say. Welcome home, took you long enough. Come here and apologise for being away.’

  I laughed as she hugged me over the counter. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am.’

  ‘Inti, I’m Inti. I was named after your grandfather, actually,’ she said, and didn’t explain. There was no time to ask her and I was getting used to being confused and tired most of the time. It didn’t seem to be improving, even if the dull pain in my ears had gone now. All the stories we’d heard on the way about acclimatising to altitude after a few days were rubbish. ‘I shall call you . . . Merry-cha, that’s excellent I think. Oop, milk, thank you,’ she added to an invisible Raphael somewhere on her left. He had gone in through a side door while we’d been talking. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said, still laughing. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘Yes, I expect you are.’ She gave
me too much sugar, but I had a feeling that not everyone got any sugar at all.

  Raphael came back rubbing his hands dry. It was getting dark now and all around us, inside the haphazard houses and out, hanging from the eaves, were pollen lamps. The ones Raphael made were small and neat, but some of them here were much bigger. Hands from what must once have been sturdy outdoor clocks turned inside them, churning the pollen. Some had a deep ambery glow, but some had had their mechanisms altered so that they ran fast and spun much brighter light. Hanging as they were on different levels and in different sizes and shades of gold, it was like sitting in the middle of a star field. Inti put two glass cups on the counter in front of us, and a bowl of diced pineapple. I wondered who had cut it up.

  ‘Have you met the markayuq?’ Inti said, as if she were talking about local landowners whose unofficial permission I’d need in order to stay.

  ‘Yes, yesterday. They’re fantastic. I’ve never seen statues like them.’

  She laughed. ‘They’re not statues. Nobody could make anything like that. They’re people who turned to stone. Didn’t your father tell you anything?’

  Raphael didn’t see, though, because he didn’t look up.

  ‘Why would they do that?’ I said.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Turn to stone.’

  ‘Stone lasts longer than a person. They do it so they can watch over a special place. We’re extra-special. We have six.’

  ‘Did it use to be seven? I . . . know my father took one when he was here.’

  ‘Yes, yes, seven before, but St Matthew was unhappy. He wanted to go with Jack, see somewhere new, and everyone thought it was for the best.’

  ‘How could you tell, that he was unhappy?’