by James Meek
‘If you’d like to join us,’ he said.
Kellas said he would like to. Bastian lifted Naomi out of her high chair, handed her to Kellas and told him to take her outside to see her mother. Kellas did as he was asked.
Astrid had cut the deer open and gutted it. The beast’s innards glistened in white membranes in the bucket under the carcass. She was halfway through skinning it. Kellas watched while she broke the delicate legs of the deer like sticks, cut between skin and bone around the joints with the small knife, and tugged the hide off. Naomi uttered a syllable and Astrid looked round. She greeted Kellas and her daughter. ‘Hi, honey!’ she said. She looped the deerskin over the corner of the metal frame. Her hands and wrists were bloody. She came over and rubbed her nose against Naomi’s, holding her arms away, then went into the house. The head of the deer had its eyes open and they had a queer brightness to them still. Its tongue hung out of the side of its mouth. Astrid had placed it facing the frame so that it appeared to be regarding its own red, flayed body. Its eyes seemed to gaze on its corpse with the same lovely stupidity it had turned to the sun falling on the melting traces of snow in the woods not long before.
Kellas heard raised voices from the house. He couldn’t make out the words. He heard what sounded like Astrid interrupting Bastian. Bastian came out of the house, took Naomi from Kellas and returned inside. Astrid came back out a few minutes later and began fishing around in the bucket of guts.
‘Usually I’d clean the deer out there in the woods,’ she said. ‘Less weight to drag back and less chance of spoiling. Happened I made the kill close to the road, though. Bastian came up and gave me a hand. I thought, I can be home in half an hour, do it there. Now I’ve gone and got myself all mixed up. I got blood all over the hide, should have just left it on to hang.’ Astrid took two bloody dark lumps out of the bucket, trimmed them with the knife, and put them in a bowl. She moved them around with the blade, flipped them over, lifted the bowl to her nose, and sniffed.
‘Is that liver?’ said Kellas, going closer to look in the bowl.
‘The liver, and the heart,’ said Astrid. ‘You check on them to see they aren’t diseased. If it looks as though you’ve got a sick deer, you can send the organs off to the county veterinarian, and he’ll give you a new tag. Which means he’ll let you kill another one. They’re good to eat, too.’
Kellas offered to help and Astrid shook her head. She’d clean up and hang the deer in the larder. She rinsed her hands in the warm water and dried them off. ‘Naomi’s beautiful, don’t you think so?’ she said.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘I love my girl very much. She’s all there is now. I don’t want you holding her. I don’t know you well enough to let you get to know her. So don’t pick her up again.’
‘I won’t,’ said Kellas. His voice wavered and he looked down at the ground.
Astrid began taking the deer carcass down and Kellas went back to the kitchen, where Bastian had laid the table. By the time Astrid came back indoors, Bastian had put Naomi to sleep in her nursery.
‘Did you feed her?’ asked Astrid.
‘Uh-huh,’ said Bastian.
‘I’ll go and check on her.’
‘You don’t need to.’
Astrid sat down. She and Bastian talked about Naomi’s next doctor’s appointment and the need to get the chimney cleaned. Bastian set a jug of water on the table, served the food and placed his hands palms down on the table on either side of his plate. Astrid did likewise and Kellas followed. Bastian said: ‘Adam, Astrid and I, Bastian, declare our humility and gratitude that we may eat and drink well, and in kind company, in the blind glory of the world, in the short space granted to us between the unknown before our beginnings, and the unknown beyond our ends. Please, eat.’ Bastian had made venison steaks with a juniper sauce, from the last deer Astrid had killed.
‘White tail, from Assateague,’ said Bastian. ‘You can only hunt white tail there two days a year.’
‘Tastes fantastic,’ said Kellas. ‘I had venison in London – what is today? Tuesday? – on Sunday night. There weren’t any hunters at that table, I don’t believe, I imagine the meat there came from Waitrose. That’s a fancy supermarket, grocery store, in England.’
‘Sunday night,’ said Bastian. ‘So you left when?’
‘Yesterday morning. A few hours after I got what I thought was the email from Astrid.’ Kellas looked down at the food on his plate. The words were less sticky today. He liked Bastian and the stillness of his brooding encouraged the notion that stories told to him were stories safely kept and wisely used. It did not seem to matter what Astrid heard him say. ‘It was a bad evening. I lost control.’
‘Sometimes when people say that, they mean that they lost control, and sometimes they mean that they decided to switch control off,’ said Bastian.
‘I lost it,’ said Kellas. ‘I saw my closest friend cheating on his wife in front of my eyes, and her not realising. An ex-girlfriend was abusing me. One of the guests was a sociopathic, misogynist, fascist photographer. And the host was a left-wing journalist who idealises any country which opposes your country without ever putting himself and his friends through the inconvenience of living there. It was all too much together. I smashed their crockery and glassware and turned the table over and threw a bust of Lenin through their front window.’
‘I always thought the best thing when you don’t like somebody is to avoid their hospitality,’ said Bastian.
‘Wait,’ said Astrid. ‘You threw a bust of Lenin through this guy’s front window? Then what did you do?’
‘I ran away. I went to a hotel. That was where I picked up your email. Bastian’s right. I wish I hadn’t gone. I accepted Liam’s invitation because I like his wife, because my friends were going to be there, because Liam published articles of mine and, I suppose, if it came to the barricades and hard times, we’d be on the same side. He lived in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas when Reagan was giving them gyp.’
‘So he did live in one of his idealised countries,’ said Bastian.
Astrid was looking at Kellas and smiling as she had when they talked on the scraggly lawn in front of the compound in Jabal os Saraj. ‘You just ran away from all the mayhem you’d caused, read an email and jumped on a plane,’ she said.
‘The message came at a particular time. I felt free. I felt untethered,’ said Kellas. It was as he’d hoped. While he told his story it was passing into history. Crazy old Kellas! Remember him? A character, a hellraiser. ‘I had the offer of a big advance from a publisher for my next book and I’d just given up my job. I flew to New York first class. When I got there yesterday I found out that the publisher had been taken over and they weren’t going to publish it.’
Astrid laughed. ‘First class! So let me see: you’ve lost your friends, lost your job, you’ve got no money, and the love letter you were following turned out to be fake? It’s all going pretty well for you right now.’
Kellas laughed with her. Her eyes were focused on him again, with the intensity that required him to return her attention and to feel desired.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Astrid, ‘but I am going to have to take this man for a walk.’
‘You had the intention of minding Naomi while I went over to the Axiters’,’ said Bastian.
‘I’ve changed my intention.’
‘Seemed like a good intention to me.’
‘Are you counting the times I change my intention?’
‘You haven’t done it for a long time.’
‘It’s happening now.’
‘I see that it is,’ said Bastian. ‘When will you…’ he stopped. ‘It’s your choice.’ He bent his head slightly.
‘When will we be back? I don’t know.’
The bending of Bastian’s head as Astrid asserted her wants cleaved Kellas. He had seen it before, when a man yields to a woman he loves in her going with another man. He had been both men; had never noticed the gesture in himself, but had surely made it, in
voluntarily, the gesture of male deferral in the herd. He was ashamed and savagely proud to be the victor. The two, shame and pride, nestled together, mirroring in adjacent chambers of his heart.
Astrid came in wearing her too-big black anorak, the coat she’d worn in Afghanistan. She held out an army surplus parka for Kellas. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Let’s go. Bastian, see you later.’
‘Take care, sweetheart,’ said Bastian, raising his voice as Astrid went down the hall towards the front door. The intensity with which Bastian pronounced the three words moved Kellas, as if they were a code that signified a book of instructions she must carry out in order to stay alive. While he put on the parka, he asked Bastian if he wanted help with the clearing up.
‘No,’ said Bastian. ‘Just bring her back safely.’
Kellas followed Astrid out towards the road. She’d already begun walking in the direction Kellas and Bastian had driven that morning. He caught up with her and they walked without speaking for a minute. Their footfalls were softened by pine needles. It was four o’clock and the sun was already low in the west. The last traces of snow had vanished and the air was milder. It smelled of moist earth.
Kellas asked about Bastian’s grace before the meal. Astrid glanced at him and smiled, then recited the same words. She explained that Bastian didn’t believe in God, but believed the flaws and limits of man required him to have some way of filling the needs that religion otherwise supplied. These were hope, gratitude, humility, restraint, confession and atonement. He’d found such a way for himself, and it came out in his graces, his conversations and his counsel.
‘What does he mean by “blind glory”?’ asked Kellas.
‘The blind glory of the world – he means that we witness how beautiful and rich the world is, we see its glory, and it’s right that we should; but we have to understand that the world doesn’t see any glory in us.’
‘Has he written this down?’
‘He wrote most of a book once, a long time ago. A novel. But there was a weird deal when he sold it—’
‘He told me.’
‘And now he’s turned against writing down what he believes. It has to be alive, he says, and it can only be alive and true when it isn’t written down, when it doesn’t even exist as a set of words. He thinks that to write down a credo is when it goes wrong. It becomes fixed and dangerous. Every word is like a nail hammering a living thing to a fixed place.’
‘It’s a secret doctrine.’
‘Not in any way. Bastian doesn’t like secrets. He’ll tell you what he believes. But he’ll say that the describing of the belief is not the belief. He’ll describe it a different way each time. Overlapping, but different. And you’ll get a good idea, even though it won’t be the very thing itself. He’ll tell you that his ideal is for it to be impossible to distinguish what he does from what he believes.’
‘You sound like his disciple.’
Astrid laughed and linked her arm in his. ‘I’m not his disciple and he’s not trying to make converts or recruit followers. He’s a wise man trying to live out a good life.’
‘Have you slept with him?’
‘Yeah, a long time ago. I would have been about twenty-three, I guess, and he was in his late forties. Not since then, since those few times.’
‘I’m jealous.’
‘Ah, because now I’m so old!’ They reached the church and Astrid led Kellas past it, across the forecourt of the Family Dollar store and onto the road leading back downtown. He could feel the warmth of Astrid’s arms through the anorak. He and Astrid were almost exactly the same height, the two of them in their boots, both with long legs, and they walked easily in step.
‘I remembered him from when I was little,’ said Astrid. ‘He was a good friend to my father. He was loyal to him, even though when I was growing up Bastian spent a lot of time travelling. He was always moving, all over the world, and reading wherever he went. There was always this conveyor of parcels of books moving, a line of parcels on their way out to him and a line of parcels on their way back. Then I was the one who travelled. I lived in New York for a while. I studied there. That’s where I met Bastian again. We met for coffee and went back to my apartment. It seemed—’
‘I don’t want to hear any more.’
‘—the right thing to do. That’s it, there isn’t any more.’
‘You must have made a handsome couple.’
‘I don’t know that it’s such a great idea to be jealous of people’s past lives.’
‘Is he still in love with you?’
Astrid didn’t answer. She kicked a pine cone into the scruffy, leafless shrubs at the side of the road. They were passing across the marsh. The setting sun ran across the reeds and a gust of wind pushed through them like fingers through golden fur.
‘I think he is,’ said Kellas.
They were walking inside a solid white line that had been painted on either side of the road, giving a yard’s width of walking and cycling room. Every so often an SUV or a pick-up truck would drive past. Most had tinted windows, making their occupants invisible. There were buildings ahead on the far side of the reed beds but the traffic didn’t alter the impression that Astrid and Kellas were the only live humans abroad in the twilight.
‘It must be hard here with one car between the two of you,’ said Kellas.
‘I have a push bike,’ said Astrid absently. She looked at him. ‘What you mean is, what do Bastian and I do for money? That’s what you were asking, wasn’t it? Bastian was smart and lucky. He inherited money from his parents and he got the money for his book from you-know-who, and he put it in real estate. He gets rent off a couple of properties.’
‘Do you still write articles?’
‘Where would I find the time? I have a daughter.’
‘Bastian helps you.’
‘She takes all the time I have, and I don’t mind. I never wanted to have a baby but now, you know, it’s so wonderful.’ Astrid spoke half-absently; she was looking at something on the far side of the road. ‘See that building there? It’s a hotel. That two-storey wooden building at the edge of the creek. Shall we get a room?’
They crossed the road and the unpaved parking lot of a restaurant. At the back of the lot was a gap in a low wooden fence. They went through and came to the hotel, which stood under pines as tall as those around Astrid and Bastian’s house. Two sheds and a Coke machine stood in front and the hotel car park was empty. A pair of black squirrels darted around the roots of one of the trees.
‘Ask for a room upstairs,’ said Astrid. ‘Ask for an efficiency.’ She walked to a set of steps that rose to the upper floor at the near end of the building, away from the main entrance.
‘Where are you going?’
Astrid grinned, and put her finger to her lips. ‘See you up there. Say I’m your girlfriend!’
Kellas put ninety dollars on his card for a night in an efficiency, although he didn’t know what an efficiency was.
‘Two of us,’ he told the manager, a gaunt, trouble-girt woman with a bandaged foot. ‘My girlfriend will be along later.’
‘You’ve got the place to yourselves,’ she said. ‘I got duck hunters coming in tomorrow but that’s it till the weekend. You need anything, I’m at home. It’s the house on the far side of the parking lot. You have a good night, now.’
The hotel stood on piles sunk into the marsh. It projected out into the reeds, its lower floor a few feet above black, almost liquid mud. There was a single row of rooms on each floor, entered through sliding glass doors that looked out over the marsh. Between the doors and the drop to the mud was a terrace and a balustrade, made of the same solid, unpainted, greying lengths of wood. A T-shaped jetty ran out from the hotel to the edge of a little creek, about forty yards away. As Kellas climbed the open stairwell in the centre of the hotel, he saw a line of Canada geese swim up the creek past the jetty. The sun had gone down and a half moon was up over the road. Astrid was waiting for him in one of the heavy wooden garden chairs, she
athed in cracked paint the colour of rust, that stood outside each room. She was lying almost horizontal in the chair, with her feet up on the balustrade and the end of a drawstring from her anorak in her mouth. Her anorak was open. She was wearing jeans and a white vest and a dark blue sweater under the coat.
She slipped her feet down to the floor and twisted round. The restraints on Kellas’s happiness sprang apart. Astrid leaned forward to kiss him. They kissed for a long time.
He took the room key out of his pocket. They were outside that room.
‘Lucky guess,’ said Astrid.
‘I’ll bet.’ Kellas was unlocking the door and sliding it open. ‘Is this where Naomi was made?’
‘Maybe.’
‘You know the manager here.’
‘It’s a small town. You know everybody and everybody knows you. She and I don’t see eye to eye.’
An efficiency was a suite of three rooms, one with a cooker, a fridge, a table and a sofa, one the bathroom, the other the bedroom. There was a TV in each room. The walls were hung with prints of ducks and geese in flight, and a painting of a red-and-white striped lighthouse, executed on a piece of driftwood. Kellas took Astrid’s hand and tried to tug her towards the bedroom but she flopped down at the sofa and sat there, grinning up at him. Kellas shook his head in wonder. There was a place for him on this island. Three generations in one big house. He would be the bulge in the middle, until, perhaps, the base of the pyramid broadened with additional Kellas-Astridlings. It would be tough with Bastian but he would win him over. Flatter him – or better, honour him – by accepting him as a teacher. And he would follow Astrid on the hunt.