The Sandpit

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Dyer reminded him: ‘We used to sit against this wall in case Slimy spotted us.’

  Rougetel flicked his glance through the glass pane to the passage.

  ‘But he never caught us, did he, Slimy?’ he murmured with a note of pride. ‘He’d have whacked us for sure.’

  He went on staring at the window with a concentrated gaze as if it reflected back those years and the shadow of his younger head, the smells of Player’s cigarettes and fried bread. He smiled as if he was no longer afraid.

  Those boundaries they had crossed at school, his smile seemed to say, they were rehearsals for future transgressions and explorations. Once you had played truant by going to the Lisboa or the St Giles Café, no place would ever feel off-limits again.

  ‘What do you want to eat?’ said Dyer.

  Rougetel read his menu, but he was not seeing the dishes. The food had changed since he last sat opposite Dyer, possibly at this table, devouring a forbidden egg on toast (while explaining with a waxy face why he had taken the train on his own to Paddington). It wasn’t what he was used to.

  ‘Why don’t you choose for me?’ he said, and closed the menu.

  Miguel returned. Dyer ordered two dishes of the day. The slow roast pork for himself, a vegetarian falafel for Rougetel, and apple juices for both.

  Scraping forward his chair, Dyer bumped his knees against the table, dislodging the rod.

  ‘What’s this for?’ retrieving it from the floor.

  Rougetel tipped his head. ‘In case I’m attacked.’

  In a convulsive movement, he brought his arms up from his lap, stretched them out.

  Dyer had forgotten how unexpected he could be.

  He looked at the backs of Rougetel’s hands and saw that they were bruised: the mauve marks – like Ribena stains – still angry from where some drunks had stamped on his wrists two nights before, snarling ‘Vagrant!’ while he lay on the pavement outside Balliol, having fallen asleep. This was the first time he’d been assaulted. He normally slept in Iffley, he said.

  Dyer fell silent. He didn’t know how Rougetel wanted him to react. There was a curious pleading expression in his face. It threaded Dyer’s glance back to the bathroom mirror in which their eyes had met, a floor that stank of disinfectant, a dormitory of pinch-faced boys who had buried Dyer’s model aeroplane in the sandpit, and the occasion when Rougetel, in a quiet serious voice, after Dyer thanked him for saying where the Boomerang was hidden, revealed that he came from Pluto, and Dyer wasn’t to tell.

  La Paz is what Dyer understood Rougetel to have meant, but when Dyer thought about it later he was not so certain. Rougetel wasn’t a joker. Maybe his mind had slipped. Maybe he was an unstable fantasist. Or maybe he had been telling the truth, he did come from outer space, and all other people on earth were the aliens.

  At any rate, he still had a look of great sincerity, he hadn’t lost that. His need to know what was true, what was not, had been a permanent crease in his character, like the dent in his chin. Rougetel’s hankering to get to the nub was the quality that had attracted Dyer and soldered their friendship. They had forged something between them at the Phoenix, an understanding, the kind that trained its compass points on worlds yet to be encountered.

  Their meals arrived, and Dyer lost what he was going to say.

  Across the table, Rougetel ate with his fingers, in haste. He was not ashamed of his hunger. His teeth were yellow, uneven.

  Dyer felt self-conscious, picking up a knife and fork. He had become aware of a queer smell – not urine or body odour, but musty, vegetably, and overlaid with a powerful lemony scent. It was the smell, he realised abruptly, of someone who slept in the open.

  He lifted his head very slightly to observe Rougetel swallowing down his food. He wasn’t dressed like other homeless men in Oxford, as though in the uniform of a defeated army. His clothes were clean; not ironed, but clean. Even so, he looked grindingly poor.

  The canvas oilcloth stretched tight over the table.

  Dyer said: ‘I last saw you—’

  ‘On the river bank near Hampton Court,’ said Rougetel. His tongue was creamy with falafel. ‘You’d been rowing.’

  ‘I used to row with the Molesey Boat Club in the long vac.’

  In the slightly guarded and watchful way that was part of his character now, Rougetel peered into Dyer’s face.

  ‘What did you do after university?’

  Dyer wanted to tell him: how he had abandoned a doctorate, become a cub reporter, then a special foreign correspondent in Latin America, back in the day when Rio was still. His decision to take the job in Brazil, at the time warmly supported by Vivien, was the fruit of a wild seed that Rougetel himself might have planted, with his vivid schoolboy descriptions, spiced with Spanish and Aymara, of the Andes, the native communities on the Altiplano, and the orange-roofed villa in the Achumani district of La Paz where the Rougetels lived.

  ‘I did try and look you up,’ Dyer needed him to know. In his second year in Brazil, his newspaper had sent Dyer to the Bolivian capital for an article on the Dia de los Muertos. Yet no Rougetel was listed in the telephone directory. ‘No one at the Embassy had an address for you.’

  Rougetel’s fingers closed around his glass. ‘What kind of stuff did you write?’

  ‘News items, features.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘Politicians, revolutionaries, current affairs. Their impact on people.’

  A man at the table next to them yawned.

  ‘And what makes an impact … in your opinion?’

  ‘Well, no doubt if I was to do a story right now, you’d be reading me on the Iran nuclear deal.’

  Rougetel looked puzzled, as if he had been told his jersey was on back to front. Dyer could immediately see in his expression that he wasn’t involved or concerned about Iran.

  ‘This nuclear deal … you’re not writing about it then?’

  ‘I gave up journalism long ago.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, there was a story – my best, I feel – which I decided not to file.’

  Rougetel nodded. He didn’t ask why Dyer might have spiked it or what the story had been about. Instead, he wanted to know, ‘Was that a crashing point for you?’

  Dyer considered before answering. The last person who made him reflect in this way was Rustum Marvar. ‘One of them, I suppose.’

  The door opened, bringing in a smell of fresh-ground coffee from Cardew’s. It triggered an instinctive memory. And another and another. Dyer in Rio in a newspaper office, Dyer in the favela, Dyer the husband, the widower, the father, the author.

  He glanced once again at Rougetel. His reappearance, wildly unexpected, but also natural somehow, even inevitable, had come as a colossal relief. Rougetel was so much more than a distraction from what preoccupied Dyer. He was a lightning rod that took Dyer back to his schooldays, and also, by dint of Rougetel’s upbringing in Latin America, to the years in between.

  Dyer had an urge to tell Rougetel about Astrud. How if their daughter had lived, they’d have called her Xuxa. He longed to tell him about Nissa, Leandro, the book he was writing, Marvar and the post-it note – he kept thinking of Marvar, although he would rather not – but it was too soon to begin that sort of conversation, and anyway nothing insisted on being talked about more than the crashing points, as he had called them, of the person seated opposite.

  He hadn’t heard anything of Rougetel, not since Trundle’s putative sighting in Benin.

  ‘And you, what became of you?’ Dyer asked. ‘When I met you in Greece, you were about to go up to Cambridge.’

  There was a tension in the hand which picked up his glass.

  ‘What became of me?’ his voice tightening. Something was frostbitten in the numbed way his throat closed on the words. He wiped his mouth with the back of his other hand and gulped his apple juice.

  Until that moment, Dyer had failed to appreciate how disturbing it was for Rougetel to be recognised or asked about himself. It was only w
ith a deliberate effort that he had enquired into Dyer’s life. Already, his eyes were blurred with the memories stirred up.

  ‘Yes,’ Dyer insisted, ‘what on earth happened to you?’ His surprise was there in his question, as pointed and sharp as the white steel rod. How Rougetel had changed, how he had adapted himself to a different life, and lost the canon of his background and class, and discovered other aspirations and beliefs, perhaps.

  Thrust into seeing himself through Dyer’s eyes, Rougetel said nothing. He was having to unthaw memories that he had put into cold storage, and it wasn’t comfortable. The table, his empty plate, the chat of Miguel behind them – these seemed to be answering for him.

  He scratched his thin ankle. He opened his mouth. He tried to speak, stopped, then tried to speak again.

  Rougetel began so hesitantly that Dyer had to crane forward. At first, he sounded like someone braced for the majority voice to stamp on his wrists and laugh at him with derision. He wasn’t so self-absorbed that he couldn’t see how his story might strike the ear of a former foreign correspondent. But once he observed the intent way that Dyer was drinking in his every quiet word, he spoke with less reticence, no longer like a man trying to read without his glasses.

  He had always been honest, and nothing had changed. They had known one another before their characters solidified. It was to this person – trustworthy, unjudgemental, his first real friend – that Dyer listened with total concentration.

  The years were gone and they were back at the same table, as Rougetel explained what had launched him on a path that diverged in such a radical way from Dyer’s, and from the trajectories of virtually everyone else with whom they’d been at school.

  This time he didn’t stop.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  IN SUBSTANCE, IF NOT IN these words, this was the story that Rougetel told:

  ‘If you were to take a Ladybird Book look at my life, you’d start on December the 3rd, 1980.’

  Rougetel was in his first term at Cambridge when there arrived in his cubbyhole a telegram from his father’s telephone company in La Paz to say that his parents had died in a road accident. Driving at night from Cochabamba along a narrow mountain pass, their car had rounded a corner and met a local bus with a defective headlight. It had begun to rain. The dirt track was not cantilevered. The valley lay five thousand feet below. Rougetel’s father pumped his foot on the brake, but his white Range Rover continued on its inexorable slide. The police laid a felt blanket over the couple’s faces. Rougetel had been their only child.

  When your parents vanish like that, nothing else is very serious. About six weeks after receiving the telegram, hungover and without a family, save for a grandmother in Scotland, Rougetel was walking beside the Cam to a lecture when he fell into conversation with a smiling Frenchman with a long grey motorcyclist’s beard. Henri Lemoine was a missionary who had lived in India and had found ‘realisation’ using Eastern contemplative practices. Long before they reached the Sidgwick Site, Lemoine had gauged Rougetel’s terrible loneliness, and recognised in the heartbroken young fresher someone who might benefit from his heterodox ‘fusion religion’. On the banks of the Cam, he introduced Rougetel to its four noble truths:

  Nothing is

  Nothing is not

  Nor is it neither

  Nor is it both

  Lemoine was a disciple of the French swami Marc Chaduc, and had come to Cambridge on a visiting fellowship after Chaduc, or Saraswati as he became known, disappeared from his hut in Kaudiyala in April 1977. Chaduc’s glasses without which he was blind were discovered in the hut, but no one had seen him since; Lemoine believed that he had given himself up to the Holy Ganges.

  ‘I am not here!’ Rougetel cried when Lemoine knocked at his door next day. Another week passed before he accepted an invitation to Lemoine’s second-floor rooms at Westcott House. The French priest sat Rougetel cross-legged on a purple foam mat and instructed him to close his eyes and hum, and then to breathe in and out from the pit of his chest.

  To begin with, Lemoine’s Buddhist-based meditation eased Rougetel’s depression. It reduced his anxiety and stress, he felt more energetic. He was not seeking any mysterious communion with the depths of his soul; he wanted to lose himself, that was all. His application of Lemoine’s methods to access his ‘inner sound and light’ by pressing his eyeballs hard and inserting his thumbs in his ears had no effect other than to give Rougetel spells of dizziness and a blocked ear-duct.

  Then two months later, it happened; inside his head something snapped. Suddenly, the whole of him was flowing out in a constant stream, not diminishing, but surging through him in a tremendous rush of energy with a sense of unending expansion, stretching into infinity as far as light and words could reach.

  The very nature of language is linear and follows a straight line to a destination. Rougetel’s mystical revelation was as hard to describe as to follow. But language was the only tool that Rougetel possessed. What transformative experience Rougetel passed through in his badly heated room in Thompson’s Lane – the radiance that engulfed him, his unparalleled exhilaration – Dyer had to approximate rather than comprehend.

  Already several times at Cambridge, Rougetel had got drunk, and was repelled by the conceited and scornful person alcohol turned him into.

  This was the opposite.

  He had been subsumed into an oval of light, white, brilliant. It was like an internal sun glowing in his head, very clear and bright, without proportion or edge. He felt an effortless stillness, as if he were at the centre of the cosmos, inseparable from it, a child back in the proverbial womb, in a peaceful bliss of nothingness that extended out into the actual sun and stars.

  ‘If someone shines a torch in your eye, you look into the dazzle and see light and colours, and then, if you go on staring, you can start to penetrate into a cascade of thoughts and feelings, like superfast broadband.’

  In that brief intense flash, the future didn’t exist, nor the past. He was fully sober to the moment. He felt as if he had located his heart, mind, character in the source of all nature. He was composed of the energy which is the essence of life, his brain made up of the atoms and neutrons that generated the sun, part of the same infinite process.

  Superfast broadband, an absolute whiteness – Rougetel had tumbled in language, but this was the best he could do. Dyer had to stamp on the same strong urge to laugh in an embarrassed way that he had felt with Marvar.

  Rougetel looked at him with his startling pupils. He said that before the whiteness dissolved there appeared at its centre a dark disc like an eye. The sole occasion that he had seen something comparable was in the Byzantine chapel on Kythera when, observed by Dyer, he had held a candle to a blistered wall and touched a white mark painted on it.

  In common with Dyer, Rougetel had been raised in the Church of England. His dramatic experience now made him take seriously the existence of another world view. All religions, it appeared to Rougetel, whether Protestant, Catholic, Byzantine, Eastern, Andean or Amazonian, were a quest for matches with different-coloured heads, when the flame was the thing. They were imperfect constructions of the human intellect in its search for what transcended it. They formed different paths up the same mountain, towards a summit which towered beyond any man-made religion.

  That inner sun was the entrance to his path. He never achieved a further vision of it, but he had felt the intimacy of its embrace, and it was very powerful, nothing could displace it. He missed it with an intensity that astonished him and had never abandoned him. He believed that he had glimpsed the best of himself, of what he could be. From this moment on, he wanted to be that person as often as it was possible, a receptive void disengaged from the intricacies of living.

  Outstanding at mathematics as at English, Rougetel might have pursued a prodigious career as an academic or as a communications whizz-kid, or made his mark in government. But at the end of his first year at Cambridge, less than a month after he encountered Dyer on the tow
path outside the Molesey Boat Club, he went on his long vac to Bolivia and failed to return. In his parents’ empty bedroom in La Paz, he lay with his eyes wide open in the dark and realised he had made his decision. That autumn, living off the proceeds from the sale of their house in Achumani, and off the rind of an insurance policy, he set out on the road that he had been treading ever since.

  ‘How to describe it? You could say it began as a Western interpretation of Eastern religions – the world is in yourself and also a reflection of what is in you.’ But quite a lot of it, Rougetel had come to realise, speaking now to Dyer, was a continuation of what they had been taught at the Phoenix.

  Rougetel sucked his fingers clean. He was still hungry. Dyer ordered two rice cakes. Despite all the questions that he itched to ask, he said nothing else, he wanted Rougetel to continue, as once he had longed for Rejas to go on speaking, and more recently, Marvar. To interrupt at this point would be fatal.

  The cakes arrived on a tray as Rougetel filled in the years:

  The start of the Michaelmas term found him in the Arctic Archipelago. ‘I wanted to go as far as possible from everything I knew.’ Yielding to a similar impulse, he had run away from the Phoenix in his first term, disappearing on himself like an anorexic girl.

  If you wish to look hard at your life, Father Lemoine had said, you must vacate it. Through a contact of Lemoine’s in the Oblate Fathers, who had a mission on King William Island, Rougetel lived two winters in a rancid-smelling igloo with Netsilik seal-hunters. Here he was released from the complications of the world that he had grown up in. The horizonless topography spoke to him of the early simplicity of the universe. He was shorn of possessions, not even the cut snow that formed his home of ice was his own. His deprivations taught him the skills which allowed him to survive on any roadside thereafter. No night had a chill after the extreme temperatures of the glacial ocean. No taste was too revolting after he drank tepid seal blood out of a caribou skull. He would rarely again experience anything quite so extreme.