The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

  When I moved my sketchbook, the letter in the back fell out. I was about to tuck it back in again when I realised it didn’t belong there any more. It came to me slowly, because it was the first time we had been sitting quietly without a baby or other things to do, and because it had slipped so far from the front of my mind that he was the priest at New Bethlehem. When Caroline had said the letter was for the priest, I’d imagined a tiny old Spaniard in a broad hat.

  ‘Oh. I forgot,’ I said into the quiet. ‘My grandfather wrote a letter. It’s for your uncle, I think.’ I hesitated. ‘But I said I would deliver it, so if I could just give it to you I can say to my mother that I did.’

  ‘Let’s see, then.’

  I held it out.

  He let the knots fall over the edge of the table, where they looked like nothing more literary than a tassel, and scissored the letter between his first two fingers. Having held the seal to the fire to give the wax some flex, he eased it up with the edge of a knife without breaking it.

  I watched him unfold the thick paper, much thicker than Charles would ever have bought now. When the stove light seeped through it, there was only a line or so of text, written in the middle and ordinarily sized despite its isolation, but I couldn’t make out what it was. He turned the paper around for me to see.

  Raphael

  I find that I cannot come myself as I promised, and so I send you my son, who looks very like me, in the hope that he might stand in.

  All my love,

  Harry

  ‘Family name?’ I said.

  ‘What? Oh. Yes.’ He set the letter on his knees and seemed to struggle with something. I was nearly sure it was the idea of asking anything. It was too close to asking for something. ‘What . . . happened to him, do you know? Your grandfather.’

  ‘He was shot in India somewhere before I was born. I’m sorry, I don’t really know. I think he was caught in one of the rebellions.’

  His shoulders stiffened as though that was a horrible thing to hear. I had been going to guess at dates, but I stopped, uncomfortable and suddenly not sure if the friends of older relatives here had an importance they didn’t to me. He didn’t explain why he was interested and only sat looking down at the letter for long enough to have read it twice more. Instead of throwing it in the fire, he folded it up again along its old lines and then once more, to make it small enough, and put it into his breast pocket.

  ‘Is it important?’ I said. ‘I could find out what happened to him exactly, when I get back.’

  ‘No. None of my business, sorry.’ He flicked open his book again and wound up a pollen lamp to sit on the opposite page, then the new one, the one made from the clocks I’d bought, to hold like a torch. The clockwork was loud in the quiet. His sight must have been bad, because on a white page the two lamps together were almost too strong.

  ‘I’ll go to bed,’ I concluded, too tired to think in a straight line any more, never mind around intergenerational connections across the Atlantic. There was no need for any more hot water, but he put another log on the fire.

  I pulled the chapel door to behind me but not shut, because the latch was rusty. Through the glass pipe that came up just beside the frame, a little translucent salamander glided by on the current, smiling, then disappeared into the dark further along the wall where the pipes were only a gleam. In the kitchen, Raphael was leaning forward, watching the fire with his wrists hanging from his knees. Where I was standing to change into my night things, as close to the pipes as I could get without burning myself, I could still see him, just through the half-inch gap between the door and the wall. He took out the letter again and I thought he would burn it, but he only sat holding it open. Abruptly he held it wide of himself. I didn’t understand until he set it down and pressed his hand over his mouth so that he could cry without making any sound. I tipped the door open, just enough to make it creak. It made him jump. I put my hand out to say I hadn’t meant it to.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Aren’t you going to bed?’

  ‘Not now, no.’ I went back to sit with him, then put my arm across him when he tried to get up. ‘If you say you’re going out for firewood or something I’ll follow you, so don’t, my leg hurts and I still can’t breathe properly.’

  He looked like he might argue, but didn’t. I leaned both hands on the hook of my cane.

  ‘Have you been to India?’ he asked after a while. The grit and the broken stones in his voice were gone. He sounded much younger. The fire clicked.

  ‘I have. I used to live there. I was an opium smuggler.’

  ‘You were a what? I thought you were in the Navy?’

  ‘I grew up in the Navy. But the family have always been gardeners and I was sharked quite young by the East India Company and their expeditionary arm. But India, yes. For about a year. I used to oversee a poppy plantation and then take the opium to China. It’s nice there. Hot, but nice.’

  ‘Is it common, then, to . . .’

  ‘To live in India, very. Part of the Empire. Everyone speaks English, so it’s an easy place to live.’ I hadn’t meant to say any more, but he scanned the cinders for something else to ask, so I tried to sift through some memories of it. ‘Most people go in through Malabar. Which is . . . the army garrison, so every second white man is in a red coat. It’s bloody odd, it feels like being on a battlefield, but there’s no fighting there now. And there are lovely guesthouses and hotels everywhere, for all the East India Company clerks. It’s rich, because everyone from abroad spends their money there. I think it’s the best place I’ve ever lived. The first week, before I moved north, I had to wait for my manager at a hotel, and there was a swimming pool. In the room. And they had a tame tiger in the foyer. It was a sort of joke on new people. Everyone thinks it’s a rug and then it sits up and answers to Gregory.’

  He smiled. ‘Is there such a thing as a tame tiger?’

  ‘Tame or stupid, I don’t know. It liked it when guests gave it wool to play with. And then if it got used to you, you’d open your door in the morning and outside would be a hug from an unexpected tiger.’ I paused, feeling strange, because I’d never told anyone about it. There had been no one to tell. Charles hated that I’d left the Navy and wouldn’t hear a word about the EIC, and Clem and Minna knew it all already, because they had travelled even as children and had no sense of the exotic, only the less worn-out. ‘I’ve forgotten a lot. If you go somewhere . . . very different to home, even for a long time, the memory feels like a dream when you get back. But the general impression is hot and flowers everywhere.’

  In the time I’d been talking, his breath had evened out again but there was, like the stacks, a brittleness in him and a glass core. I didn’t ask him again what was wrong. It was none of my business. He twisted his wrist to move the cross on his rosary out of the way, then pushed his abused fingers together, slowly. I didn’t think he was praying.

  ‘All right?’ I said, even though I knew he wasn’t.

  ‘Mm. See you in the morning.’

  EIGHTEEN

  He didn’t see me in the morning. For the next few days, he was already out before I was up, and still out well after I’d gone to bed. The snow stayed. Each morning, the top layer was crackly where it was frozen fresh and the only evidence I was sharing the church with anyone at all was the single line of footprints that went out to the forest and, sometimes, if the wind fell, his pollen wake weaving between the trees on his way to the markayuq. I wanted to ask if he was avoiding me, but it was a stupid question, because he was, and he was straight enough to say yes and keep on doing it.

  I was avoiding dark windows but I had to look at myself shaving. There were marks on my neck, bruises like I’d expected, but there were grazes too. Whoever had caught me had been wearing something rough over their hands. The bruises down my ribs were nearly black in places, deep, though the ache was a clean sort and I didn’t think anything was broken. Having spent my twenties perpetually battered and flung about it made me
feel more like myself again, but the feeling of being watched kept coming back when I went outside in the mornings. I didn’t go near the border again. Instead I went to see Inti. When I asked her to speak some easy Quechua for me, we were both surprised to find that I understood. I couldn’t have produced it, but in the last few days of hearing it here and there, something in my mind had clicked back into place. Dad had told all his fairytales in Quechua. I’d forgotten that, even if I’d remembered the stories. Hearing it aloud after so many years felt like organ music coming up through the glass deep under my feet.

  There was a lot of milking of goats too, not just Inti’s. There weren’t many other people about during the day who were healthy enough to do it. Apart from the fishermen, most of the fitter people worked on Martel’s farm, the produce of which fed the village; all except for the cocoa, which was shipped downriver to Azangaro and sold for five English pounds per stone and a half. Three or four farmers took care to confirm the numbers, as though it was a fortune, which it wasn’t. Sometimes I saw Raphael in gardens, with laundry or broken crockery, or stitching tipped towards the sun in a way that made me sure he was quite near-sighted. And always, in the end, back to the endless waxing of the statues. If I’d been braver I might have gone to find him, but whenever I thought about it, I got one of his thousand-yard stares. It made me very glad of Inti. Without her, those days would have been a bubble of isolated silence. Everyone else was too busy or shy to talk to me and I was too feeble to help with any proper work.

  I’d almost convinced myself that Clem wouldn’t come back. When he did, early on the fifth morning and completely without fanfare, having slept the previous night in one of the warm salt caves about a mile upriver, I was so surprised I dropped the cup I was holding. He laughed and hugged me. There was frost on the lining of his hood that crackled when I squeezed him.

  ‘Em! I was sure he would have murdered you by now.’

  ‘I was sure you’d have been eaten by a bear. How was it? Are you all right?’

  ‘Oh, fine, but I do smell. Sorry.’

  I put him in a chair and ran a bowl of hot water for him from the stove as he started to peel off his coat, then had to start the long process of easing down onto my knees to pick up the pieces of the cup. I found the biggest and collected the rest up into it. ‘Did you manage to see Martel?’

  ‘I did. He seemed very surprised to see me; I think he was convinced Raphael would do us in too. Anyway, I wanted to come straight back, but he shouldn’t be far behind me. Two days or so. He’s bringing men.’

  ‘Oh, thank God.’

  ‘Snow’s still here, I see,’ he said, nodding towards the woods.

  ‘Never warmed up once.’ I paused, stuck, because I had a handful of glass and I needed both hands to push myself up again. I had to stretch to put the glass on the worktop beside the stove. The floor, I noticed, was scoured clean.

  ‘Where’s himself?’

  ‘Out. I don’t know. I upset him. I haven’t seen him properly for days.’

  He snorted. ‘Only you. Only you would manage to upset someone you’re supposed to be charming into not shooting you. Nicely done.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, feeling inept. I managed finally to get myself into the chair next to his. ‘But he hasn’t shot me, at least.’

  ‘Right, but let’s say the jury’s still out on that one?’

  ‘Probably.’ The joy at seeing him had deflated. He was right. It had been abundantly stupid. I wanted to say it wasn’t my fault that a letter for a relative Raphael could barely have known had upset him so much, but it was the kind of thing I should have guessed. Family in places like this was important. There was so little else.

  ‘Oh, it’s so warm,’ he said happily. ‘God, I love this place. I wish Minna were here.’

  I looked away. Something else he thought was my fault. He was annoyed about having had to go by himself. I didn’t point out that he had wanted to, at the time. It never helped, to quote his own motives back at him.

  ‘Listen – give me an hour to sit down, but then take me on a tour, yes? Say you’ve explored the town, Merrick,’ he said when I hesitated.

  ‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘Of course I have.’

  The first stop was Inti, and I was relieved when she seemed just as pleased with Clem as she had been with me. She was soon telling stories and, unlike me, he knew what to ask. Over fresh coffee, without milk because I couldn’t chase down the goat this time, she explained how the village had come to be here. One of the markayuq, the eldest, was supposed to have conquered it from some wildmen who had lived here before, then petrified to watch over the spot. I would have taken it at face value, but Clem was keen to unearth a hitherto unknown pre-Inca culture. He found a likely looking place in the steep public garden on the second stack and set to digging a trench to see if he could uncover any older walls. It was bitter in the snow, but the children loved it, and the dig soon became a sort of show to watch while people ate their pineapple and drank their coffee. He dug deep, in steps, right down to the glass stratum about eight feet under the surface. Towards noon he found the corners of an old building, but it was from Inca times. He showed the children, and me, how the bricks had been worked into the bedrock, just like they had at the church.

  ‘Typically Incan,’ he explained. ‘Look at that. Marvellous. The skill it would have needed.’

  ‘What was the point of building like this?’ I asked. ‘It would have been easier to cut the rock away.’

  ‘Because the bedrock is alive,’ he said. ‘You don’t know who you’re chiselling into, do you? You heard Raphael talk about the mountain. It’s alive, the markayuq are alive, the creation story is that people were made of rock, not clay; it’s all the same thing. Stone lives.’

  A small rock we had already put aside fell back into the pit and he leaned down to move it, but there was a murmur above us and one of the children, a little girl with unevenly arranged limbs, hurried to take it from him. She showed it to Inti.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Clem called up.

  ‘It could be a living stone. It fell on you twice,’ Inti explained. She held it up to the light to see.

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘They’re very white. Yes, check with Father Raphael,’ she added to the girl. Some of the other children darted off after her, as if a little rock were the most fascinating thing they had found all year.

  ‘See?’ Clem said to me.

  The tiny tremor, which I hadn’t even realised was a tremor, that had disturbed the white rock before, became the rumble of a real earthquake right in the bones of the mountain. They made a sound, a kind of mechanical thrum. Stones tumbled on the mountainside and a sheet of snow swept towards the river, where it waterfalled off the edge of the cliff. A few people made a bow towards the peak and crossed themselves.

  ‘No wonder they think it’s alive,’ I said.

  Clem’s spade chinked. ‘I’m at the glass,’ he said. ‘I don’t think anyone could have built much on that. There’s nothing but plant matter caught in it, no sign of habitation. Shame. I wanted some pre-Incan wildmen. Hard to tell what’s a story and what’s not, isn’t it? I wish they’d stick to the facts. Still,’ he said suddenly, frowning, ‘it’s interesting, isn’t it. That the markayuq . . . change the history of the place they watch over.’

  ‘Is it?’ I said, because I was freezing.

  ‘Yes. Think about it. Everyone here agrees with Inti; this ground was conquered, even though it demonstrably, archaeologically wasn’t. The man who did it is right over there; they think he turned to stone to memorialise the occasion. The statues are little loci of local history, but it’s false history. So in the moment a markayuq is made, your history changes. There’s more importance to a place. Important things happened there. Even if they . . . didn’t. A markayuq is a desirable thing partly because having one means you’re entitled to a more glorious past. History is malleable here.’

  ‘Or when you live in the middle of bloody nowhere with not
hing except pineapples, “I came, I saw, I conquered” is a much more interesting story to tell your children than “I came, I thought it would more or less do, settled down”,’ I said. ‘Can we go inside?’

  ‘No, no, you must draw the dendrographs for me, before it gets dark.’

  ‘Clem, I might die of cold,’ I said. I hadn’t told him what had happened to me the last time I had tried to draw the carvings on the border. Having offended Raphael was bad enough. I wasn’t sure I could cope with looking any more useless.

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly. It won’t take you half an hour,’ he said. ‘Besides, you shoved me in the river and then you made me go back to Azangaro by myself. Consider this penance.’

  I stayed quiet about the second part. I was too tired to fall out again. Once we had climbed out of the trench and I started for the border, I stopped when Clem didn’t come. ‘Are you . . .?’

  ‘I’m staying here,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Inti’s giving me a Quechua lesson.’

  ‘So I go out to the border in the freezing cold to draw your dendrographs while you sit and learn Quechua in the warm?’

  ‘Come on, old man, we might be off any day, and it would be such a waste not to have some record of them. I’ve already used my daguerreotype slides. And I’ve a singular resistance to drawing lessons.’

  Raphael would be on the border. I wondered if I could finish my original drawing from memory, or through some binoculars.

  ‘All right,’ I said, but paused as the children came running back. They all climbed straight down into the pit to start sifting through the soil at the bottom in a clatter of sharp happy Quechua. They were looking for more of the white stones, and one of them said something about pieces of an old markayuq. One of the girls held up a piece to her ear in the way I’d listened to shells when I was that age. I watched them, full of the feeling that Raphael had told them it was something interesting so that it would be a good afternoon for them.