The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘Mind if I visit?’ Clem said.

  ‘Plenty of space. But mind your head.’ I propped my cane against the wall and sat down on the bare floorboards. It was cold. There were no pipes. The ladder creaked as Clem climbed, and when he appeared his breath steamed. He looked around and then lifted his eyebrows at me.

  ‘Heavens. He really has packed up.’

  ‘He knew he was going,’ I said. ‘Did Inti tell you the story, about how the priests always disappear?’

  ‘She did.’ He came to sit next to me on the floor. Together we looked like something from an abandoned toyshop. He was all round and gold and I had to sit with my good leg folded and the bad one crooked, like a puppet someone had dropped from a height. Listen, ‘I don’t think there are wild Indians in the woods, Em. I think there are henchmen from the quinine barons. There’ll be a semi-permanent camp out there. They feed the border myth, which is the perfect excuse for them to shoot anyone who strays in, no questions asked. We’ve been planning to go around, but we might not be able to, if Martel’s men can’t clear the snow. So Raphael’s gone in to warn them we might try to go straight through.’

  ‘But I don’t see why he would be packed up like this.’

  ‘He probably wants to get out of here as soon as his duty’s done. It must be coercion. He’s clearly not getting a cut.’

  I pushed my hand over my face. ‘But it would be dangerous to keep a camp out there. I mean maybe it is quinine men, but there are Indians round here.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Martel said it was . . .’

  ‘What if they’ve been cleared out? It’s such a good set-up. The people living here keep anyone from crossing the border because they believe it’s blasphemy. It’s self-policed; it’s brilliant. They’re not surprised if someone who crosses doesn’t come back, so there’s no murder accusation. Stop seeing the frills and look at the actual result of what’s going on. Someone inside the forest is stopping people from crossing, and killing those who do. What do we know is on the other side? Quinine. Come on, Em. Wake up.’

  I pulled my clasped hands apart and then again. It made the joints hurt but I couldn’t keep myself from it.

  ‘He could have just told us that. Don’t go in the forest here, there are quinine thugs with guns. That’s far simpler than Indians and abandoned children and walking statues. And . . . much more likely. I’d have believed that.’

  ‘Yes, but Em, what an Indian man born and raised in the middle of nowhere imagines to be likely or necessary isn’t what you or I would. I should think he didn’t think quinine men sounded frightening enough.’ He paused. ‘Look, take it from me: there’s almost no point in trying to work out why the natives do some things. Their way of thinking is so far from ours that no effort at translation will ever have more subtlety than smoke signals over a canyon. There will be factors here we don’t know, cultural, religious, all sorts. He speaks English but he thinks like a Quechua Indian, you know he does. Think about that past-in-front business. That won’t be the only difference, just the symptom of something much wider.’

  I didn’t say that I thought Clem was a bad translator, or that I didn’t believe there was any such thing as an impassable gulf in the thinking of two human beings. Of course you couldn’t translate everything, but you could damn well explicate, particularly if you both spoke such a sprawling monster of a language as English. ‘What’s gone before you, and what will come after,’ I said instead.

  ‘Beg pardon?’

  ‘The past ahead. Time is like a river and you float with the current. Your ancestors set off before you did, so they’re far ahead. Your descendants will sail it after.’

  ‘No need to nitpick, old man, you know what I mean.’

  I nodded, not wanting to have a fight under the bells. It would have resounded. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Actually, this is rather good,’ Clem said cheerfully. ‘I think we ought to seize the day, don’t you?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I can set off through the forest now, say I’m looking for Raphael if anyone tries to stop me. And I assume I won’t find him – what a shame – but we’ll have our specimens.’

  ‘Christ, Clem. If there are suppliers camped . . .’

  ‘Then I shall see them a mile away in the pollen, shan’t I?’

  ‘And they’ll see you.’

  ‘Are your tools in your bag? You know, the knife to take the cuttings, string, all that?’ He was already on his way down the ladder.

  I tagged down after him just as he emptied out the last of my pack on to the windowsill in the chapel. Inti, who had been talking to her brother by the fire, plainly hadn’t guessed what we were saying. ‘They’re in that roll. But Clem – they’re going to see you.’

  ‘From a distance a person looks like an animal in that pollen, I’m certain, and I’ll see a big group of men long before they see me. I’ll manage.’

  ‘I don’t think you will. People have disappeared; half an army battalion disappeared in these woods.’

  He came past me into the kitchen to take some food, which he did calmly and vaguely and must have looked, to Inti, as if he were only foraging for some dinner. ‘Yes, exactly. Whole expeditions, battalions, clunking about and setting off the pollen and the markayuq. Of course they were caught. One man is quite a different story. Stop fretting.’

  ‘We don’t even know how far it is. There’s no scale on that map, if it’s to scale at all—’

  ‘I’ll manage,’ he said again, with too much emphasis, like he was talking to a child. He came back with enough fruit and bread for a couple of days if he was careful.

  ‘No – Clem. Even if it’s near, you never managed to take a decent cutting on the ship. It will be wasted effort.’

  ‘Well, if I don’t try, no one will, will they,’ he snapped. ‘You can’t go and you frightened Minna off. There’s no one else to do it.’

  ‘I didn’t frighten her—’

  ‘For God’s sake, of course you did.’ He rounded on me much faster than he usually moved and pulled the chapel door closed behind him so that Inti and her brother wouldn’t hear that we were arguing. ‘You’ve been worse than useless since the start. First Minna, and then you had one thing to do, one: convince anyone we ran into we were here for coffee. And you told Raphael we were here for quinine the second he asked. Then I said to keep an eye on him and what did you do? You upset him so much he’s barely spoken to you for days. Of course he’s gone to tell the quinine men that we’re here. You can’t pretend you’ve been anything less than a catastrophic influence on this expedition. Much as I love you, get out of my way, calm down, and see if you can’t think of something to say to anyone who asks where I am, if they notice. Can you manage that?’

  ‘Clem, wait. What if you’re wrong? What if there’s something to these stories—’

  He smacked me with the roll of tools he was holding. It snapped my head sideways and made me see stars.

  ‘You’re hysterical,’ he said. ‘Local priests are not spirited away by elves or fairies or whatever, and for God’s sake, Occam’s razor. What’s the simplest explanation for this border? An Inca-related culture so advanced they built clockwork statues in the whateverteenth century and still police a hundred-mile stretch of border watching over their rejected and less holy children, or some men guarding the quinine woods and feeding some old origin story from years ago, with the sense to order in a few Spanish church marvels and tell everyone they’re local miracles?’

  ‘I’m not saying elves,’ I said, slowly, because it was shocking how much it hurt to be hit in the face without having expected it, and on top of the old bruise. ‘I’m saying, what if there’s someone there? Organised people, not necessarily advanced, but organised. We saw those terraces in Sandia; there’s nothing like that even in Rome and I wouldn’t want to take on Romans. If this is their place, if they do watch the border – they’ll find you a hell of a lot faster than a few quinine men.’

 
‘Look, I know you had an impoverished education, but I’m telling you, categorically, the border is a piece of staged rubbish by people who know the locals are superstitious.’

  ‘I didn’t have an impoverished education.’

  ‘Yes, I expect the Bristol naval academy was very thorough—’

  ‘Hold on a minute. You didn’t go to university either. Wasn’t it some grammar school in the middle of—’

  ‘I was surrounded by people who did, always! I’ve published books, Merrick, papers. I don’t even know how many scholarly societies I belong to – look, I don’t want to go through listing everything. Just – perhaps, for once, defer to someone who might actually know what he’s talking about. I have to be honest with you, you’re bloody jumped up.’

  ‘Above my station, you mean.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but it’s true. You have a good name, and don’t get me wrong, Tremayne is a very respectable name indeed, but a name makes not a gentleman. You don’t know enough. You need to stop pretending you’re anything more than an able seaman converted into an India Office smuggler. Things will go a lot less wrong.’

  ‘You brought me because I’m qualified.’

  ‘I brought you because you can keep plants alive anywhere in the world. Of course you’re qualified for that, more than. Just let me fetch them, all right? I’m in charge of this expedition, so let me worry about the decisions. You concentrate on getting the wretched cuttings to India.’

  I stayed quiet and saw the two ways ahead as clearly as memory. Down one, I turned around to Inti and her brother and told them what he meant to do. Inti’s brother was big and between us we would be able to lock Clem in the chapel, and he would be safe until Martel arrived, although by then, if there were quinine men in the woods, the path around by the river would almost certainly have been blocked or blown up and we would go home. I’d never work again. Sing would be sent to file things in a cellar somewhere. Bedlam would stay as it was for perhaps five years, and then someone somewhere would find a reason to shell Lima until the Peruvian government agreed to let British troops into Caravaya. If there were Indians, those troops would not wait about wringing their hands. They would burn the forest.

  Down the other way, I let Clem go, and perhaps he came back with cuttings, but probably he would be caught and killed, like everyone else. There would be no cuttings, but his death would be all the reason the India Office needed to send a legion; any idiot would be able to see that. If the army’s arrival was a clear inevitability rather than a vague threat years in the future, it could be used as a bargaining chip. Someone in the supply line might let through some cuttings if the only other option were British artillery regiments camped over the Andes.

  My cheekbone still throbbed and I stood paralysed for what felt like minutes and minutes. I wished he hadn’t hit me. It was hard to see past that and hard to know if the reasons for letting him go were good ones or just an excuse for revenge.

  ‘Yes,’ I said finally. Even as I said it, I had a terrible feeling that I’d decided for no better reason than that this was what Sing had told me to do, and the mountain air had stolen any capacity I might have had to imagine not doing it. I looked without meaning to at the jagged black shape outline beyond the town in stars and had a stupid vision of a cave somewhere in those razor crags where the logic of everyone who had tried to take things from this place lay stacked in little glass boxes. ‘You’re right. You’d better go to bed for now. I’ll play cards with Inti. They can’t stay here, there’s nowhere for them to sleep. They’ll have to go eventually.’

  He let his breath out. ‘Yes. Yes, good. We’ll try and keep it a secret once I’ve got the cuttings.’

  ‘What are you two nattering about?’ Inti asked as we came through.

  ‘Gardening,’ I said. I dropped into the chair next to hers and played cards with them while Clem went to get some sleep. They lasted much longer than I’d hoped, long into the night, but eventually they went home. Before they left, Inti made me swear not to go anywhere, so I swore and then went to wake Clem.

  As he disappeared into the dark, I stood in the doorway with both hands on my cane, waiting to see the pollen flare as he went into the woods. Although I was breathing and my heart was beating, my ribs felt hollowed, like there were no organs left there, having all been scooped neatly out and left in canopic jars elsewhere. The pollen flared beyond the markayuq. I went out a little way to see the town. The last week had been like being allowed to visit somewhere imaginary. I’d thought it was imaginary: the grim forest and the glass, the man who disappeared. People sang songs and told stories I knew from being a child, echoes from that gold jumble of half-memories that were all I had from before Dad died. Inti had said, welcome home.

  I had no idea if I was helping Bedlam or if I’d just destroyed it.

  TWENTY

  India and China, 1857

  (three years earlier)

  The shelves in the Stacking Room at the Patna warehouse went up to twenty-five storeys. From the steps that zigzagged up the wall, there were gangplanks over the huge drop down to the floor. Checking crates fifty feet off the ground brought on a certain sharpness of mind that lasted for a long time afterwards. The crates were small and inside each one, the opium balls looked like rocks tucked in their sawdust, but if you cut one open, they were made of smooth, shiny gel that could be melted and smoked. I was cutting every fiftieth ball in half to check the consistency before we shipped everything down the Ganges to Calcutta, and from there, to China.

  Beyond the high windows, fields and fields of poppies made white waves as the wind came in over the mountains. They were just starting to wilt now and the petals were everywhere. Someone was brushing them into piles against the wall where they had blown inside. Keita, my interpreter, who was twelve, was playing with one of the plantation boys and there was a burst of still-baby laughter as they fell over in one of the piles. It echoed up around the warehouse and I smiled. He didn’t usually play at all, which worried me sometimes.

  It was a strange job. I had been hired originally for tea. In the forbidden districts in China, there were rare types that the East India Company wanted for its own plantations in India but the Chinese growers wouldn’t sell. When I’d first come, a year before, I’d been based in the Hong Kong office, at the mouth of the Pearl River, and had gone for weeks-long trips into the interior to steal samples. Those samples, though, had to be smuggled out and taken round to the Himalayas. We had struck an agreement with another EIC operation, who were shipping silk out of Canton – which was, if you were coming from inland China, on the way back to Hong Kong anyway. The smuggled tea went in with the silk cargoes. It had all been straightforward enough at first.

  I’d never dealt with opium before, but the poppy fields were in the same region as the tea, and Sing had pointed out in his efficient way that I might as well take the opium round to China on my way in for the tea samples. Gradually the tea side of things disappeared and orders from the Company headquarters at Hong Kong hinged around looking after the poppy crops. After six months on the job, I was nine-tenths an opium smuggler. We made a run every month, starting in India, across the South China Sea, past Hong Kong and into the Pearl River, where, after seventy miles on the strange, murky water, we arrived at the Canton wharves and the silk warehouses. By that December, we had made the journey seven times.

  The colossal distance soon seemed ordinary and easy enough, but every now and then tiredness caught up with me, which it did on the morning our steamer sighed past Hong Kong and into the massive estuary of the Pearl for the eighth time. I’d found for years that if I moved around enough and if I was tired enough, I stopped remembering how I’d got to be in a place. It felt as if I’d just appeared there. Trying to think of the voyage then, I couldn’t picture it. I felt as though one moment I’d been in the warehouse in India and the next here we were, again, on the ship, in China, three days and hundreds of miles away. It was nearly Christmas, just after
the rainy season. The river was swollen and muddy and the water was viscous as it passed through our waterwheel. Despite not being very interested in the soggy scenery, I was sitting outside on the rail. I would have had to even in the pouring rain. Any crew coming in with something illegal needed a blond person to be conspicuously British under the Jack, to keep Customs officials from searching the ship. They weren’t allowed to touch British ships.

  I watched Hong Kong go by. I could just see the office on the hill. The tripartite cross flag snapped out on the warm wind and I felt then as though I spent my life going past things and never inside. The East India Company had made me into a sort of gypsy. I didn’t dislike it, but just then, the miles I had to go before I would be able to stop seemed like too many.

  My interpreter tapped me and gave me a rice cake with honey on it.

  ‘You haven’t eaten anything,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks. Share?’

  He climbed up too. I’d found British clothes for him, so that he would obviously belong with me when we were with strangers. He wore them a lot more comfortably than port officials did and he had the knack of being always in a state of slight but not scruffy dishevelment. It implied that he had just come away from doing something useful.

  A Customs ship glided by near us and we both watched it. I never felt completely safe, although we had never been stopped. The legal way to pay for silk was silver bullion, but if the EIC kept giving them that, Sing pointed out, it would end up paying more and more in real terms as silver devalued in China and became rarer in England. Opium, though, was an endless resource, and worth a thousand dollars a crate once it was on the Chinese mainland. When I’d mumbled that maybe opium wasn’t the best thing for people to trade, Sing had told me to get it into my stupid flowery head that the effects of goods were not the Company’s business. The point was favourable trade, and not crashing the British economy, and if one in twenty Chinamen had chosen to addict himself to something so idiotic, that, thank you, was his own fault. Availability of goods never forced anyone to buy them, however Gladstone might roar in Parliament. The devil could have roared at Sing and got nothing for his trouble but a newspaper in the face and a summary of the morning stock exchange.