There was no one on the platform to meet me when the train pulled in, but that wasn’t such a great surprise. My father would still be at work, and my mother was never on time for anything. She drove into the station car-park twenty minutes later to find me sitting on a bench, reading a book. We embraced beside the car. Taking her in my arms, I kissed her on the cheek and breathed her in—the waxy, slightly theatrical scent of her lipstick, and the rain-soaked fragrance of her dark-brown hair, which she dyed to hide the strands of silver. She was so sorry she was late, she said. Had I been waiting long? I smiled down at her.
“I just got here,” I said.
“You’ve been here for ages.” Her grin was both knowing and guilty. “I can tell.”
I put my bag in the boot and got into the car. Before she started the engine she turned in her seat so she was facing me.
“You look so well,” she said.
Her tone of voice gave something away, the feeling on her part that she had been expecting me to look otherwise, but I pretended not to notice, and, after a moment, she reached out, rubbed my shoulder affectionately, and told me how good it was to have me back.
•
My parents had been married for thirty-five years, and they were easy in each other’s company; they still made each other laugh, and still, or so I liked to think, made love. That weekend, though, I noticed a new restlessness in them. Like children at the end of a long day, they could not seem to settle. My father kept suggesting different outdoor activities—expeditions, picnics, walks—and this despite the fact that the rain was still falling, heavier than ever. It’s supposed to let up later on. Maybe then. . . . My mother rushed from room to room, as if she was permanently behind schedule—a schedule no one else could fathom. Once, just out of curiosity, I followed her. She hurried into the garage with a damp cloth and began to wipe dust off the bottles of fruit cordial she stored on the shelf above the freezer. Twenty-four hours into the visit, it occurred to me that that this might not be new at all. Pehaps they had always been like this. Perhaps I was the one who had changed. They seemed so bright-eyed, though, so tireless! They seemed constantly to be striving for an effect, and falling short.
Only on Monday, after supper, did a kind of calmness finally descend. The rain had stopped at last, and the night was warm and humid. We took chairs out to the patio behind the house and sat there drinking tea, our faces starkly lit by the fluorescent glow that radiated from the kitchen window. I leaned back, my hands behind my head, and stared up into the sky. In nine days I would be on a plane. . . . I felt no excitement, only the certain knowledge settling inside me.
“Your mother tells me that you’re going travelling,” my father said after a while.
I nodded. “That’s right.”
“Is that a good move?”
I looked across at him uncertainly.
“At this point in your career,” he said.
I had prepared for this. The story I had invented had a convincing ring to it since it was just a slightly exaggerated version of the truth.
I was thirty years old, I told him, and had to face the fact that I was coming to the end of my career—my career as a dancer, anyway. For years now I had been working twelve-hour days, week in, week out, with almost no time off. Also, I had been having back problems. I leaned forwards, knowing how my father enjoyed anything technical. I had a stiff and immobile spine, I told him. Through repeated jumping, I had developed a condition known as spondylolisthesis. In layman’s terms, this meant that one of the vertebrae in my lower back—L5, to be specific—had slipped out of position. The company physiotherapist had warned me that if I carried on dancing I would risk severe low back pain and even, possibly, disability. Thankfully, I had the choreography, though, and that would be waiting for me when I returned from my travels. It felt peculiar to say this because it was something which, until that moment, I hadn’t even begun to think about.
My father ran one hand carefully over his thinning hair.
“And Brigitte?” he said. “Is she going with you?”
Brigitte. . . . I saw her as I had seen her last, sending one wild, despairing glance around the apartment. I can’t live here, not like this.
“She’s staying in Amsterdam,” I said. “She has her dancing.”
I saw my father’s chin lift a fraction, a kind of nod, but at the same time he drew his shoulders in towards his chest, almost as if he was cold. He had thoroughly approved of Brigitte. First of all, she was half French, and my father had always loved France (most summers, during my childhood, we would take the car over on the ferry, and then drive to Brittany, or the Dordogne, or Languedoc). She was pretty too, which counted in her favour, but there was more to it than that: she had what he called “spirit,” and that made her beautiful in his eyes. I watched him reach for his cup of tea and take a sip. He would miss her, I thought.
“And where will you go?” my mother asked.
“Mexico,” I said, “to start with.”
“Mexico!” A short, delighted laugh came out of her, and she looked down into the lap of her dress and shook her head.
The people in the house next door had opened all their windows. Their TV was on with the volume turned up loud. I could hear the music that signalled the beginning of the nine o’clock news.
“You’ll take good care of yourself, won’t you,” my mother said.
“Of course.”
Staring into the darkness at the bottom of the garden, my father cleared his throat. “You see, we worry about you. . . .”
“I love you both very much,” I said.
•
Back in Holland everything speeded up. I had less than a week to prepare for my departure, and all of a sudden there were a hundred different things to do. Luckily, I had arranged my life in such a way that I didn’t have to say too many goodbyes. On the Wednesday I spoke to Isabel in Oslo and told her of my plans. She wasn’t due back until the second week in September, she said, which meant we would miss each other by a matter of days. The spare room would be there for me on my return, whenever that might be. I tried to thank her for her generosity, but, typically, she didn’t want to hear it.
“Anyone would have done the same,” she said impatiently.
It was the first time she had referred, even indirectly, to the fact that I had been in trouble.
On one of my many trips into Amsterdam I met up with Stefan Elmers. He was excited that day because he was moving to a house on Prinsengracht which his father, a property speculator, had found for him. He would rent out half the house, he said, and live in the other half for nothing. This reminded me of the last conversation I’d had with Brigitte, and the question had left my mouth before I had time to think.
“Did Brigitte ever find someone to share with her?”
Stefan’s eyes shifted sideways, and he plunged one hand into his curly dark-brown hair. “Jean-Claude’s moved in.”
Jean-Claude was a dancer at the company. And he was French too, of course, from Paris. Everything had worked out perfectly. I couldn’t understand why Stefan was looking so uneasy.
Then I understood.
“Oh,” I said. “I see.”
I stared through the café window at a woman who was chaining her bicycle to a lamp-post, but images of Jean-Claude rose up, blotting her out: the leather coat he always wore, the way his black hair seemed to accentuate the lean bones of his face, the time he did a double tour en l’air in dance class and loose change flew out of his pocket and rolled all over the studio. . . .
“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you,” Stefan said.
I turned back to him. “What? No, it’s all right.” I laughed, then swallowed suddenly and looked away.
That she should have a new man—Jean-Claude!—in her life. That I should be so easily replaced. I thought about the ballets I had made for her, and how I would have gone on making them for her, just to see her face glow when I first showed her the steps, just to see her body begin to inhabit what I
had imagined. . . . I ran my index finger along the edge of the table, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. Perhaps it was just that men took second place with her, I thought. She needed someone to be with her, someone she could rely on, but she wasn’t too bothered about who it was. Her art took precedence. It was all that mattered. Her lover could have whatever was left over.
I looked across at Stefan, saw that he felt guilty.
“It’s all right, Stefan.” I put a hand on his arm. “It’s not your fault.”
As we parted that afternoon, I promised to keep in touch with him, no matter where in the world I might be. I had just started to walk away when I heard him call my name. I stopped, turned round. He was standing on the pavement with both arms raised above his head, his jacket lifting into the air on either side of him. He looked as if he had acquired a pair of ill-fitting and ungainly wings. He was waving.
“Good luck,” he shouted. “Bon voyage!”
Then there was Paul Bouhtala. On my last night he invited me to his apartment for a farewell dinner. As he rose to serve coffee and liqueurs, I reached for the rectangular parcel I had secretly brought in with me.
“In return for all your kindness,” I said.
His eyes opened wide, and he stooped over the parcel and began to tear the wrapping off in a greedy, almost desperate way that I couldn’t have anticipated. I sat back, smiling, as his hands unearthed the atlas I had bought while passing through London the week before, the largest atlas I had been able to find.
“This is marvellous,” he enthused, turning the pages. “Such detail.”
“When I send you postcards from exotic places,” I said, “you will be able to see exactly where I am.”
He looked up, his dark eyes glittering with mischief. “And who knows,” he said, “perhaps I will even join you.”
•
My flight to Mexico City left at ten-thirty on a Wednesday morning. I had set the alarm for dawn, but I was awake before it began to ring. I stood by the bedroom window, staring out over the garden. Each branch that I could see, each leaf, each blade of grass, seemed sharply drawn, almost enhanced. Somewhere deep in the forest a bird was making a sound which it repeated at regular intervals, a single note that was exactly like the first half of a wolf-whistle. There was a feeling in my stomach that I didn’t recognise—a hollowness, a kind of grief—and I wondered if I would ever return to this house again, if I would spend another night in this room, with its powdery pale-blue walls and its monastic bed. . . .
At that point I had no aims, no real purpose. All I had was a vague itinerary, though even that could change at any time. I wasn’t looking for anything, least of all myself. I wasn’t running either. I knew I couldn’t leave my memories behind; they would come along with me, whether I liked it or not. Travel wasn’t a solution. It was just a possibility—the only possibility I could think of. And that’s what I would have said that Wednesday morning, if you had asked me. It’s possible, so I am doing it.
I don’t think I could have added much to that.
•
From Mexico I travelled overland to Guatemala. From Guatemala to Honduras. From Honduras, by steamer, to Costa Rica. Then eastwards, into Panama. While in Panama I worked as a guide, taking tourists on walks in the rain forest near Lake Alajuela. The American who had hired me called me Mark for some reason, and, finding the change of name oddly appropriate, I didn’t bother to correct him. . . . I lived in Panama City for about three months, then I moved on, into South America. I had money, after all; I just kept going.
In Venezuela I slept with a French girl called Monique. I say “slept with.” We didn’t actually make love, not even once. The first time she took off her clothes, in a hotel room in Caracas, I saw a white wall behind her, and, all of a sudden, my whole body was running with sweat, so much so that there were dark stains on the sheets. I bent over, retching.
“What’s wrong?” Her eyes had widened. “Is something wrong?”
Not wanting to offend her, I told her I’d had a sugar-cane drink with crushed ice in it that morning. The ice must have been dirty, I said. She believed me. The moment she went out to buy me some Coca-Cola, though, I packed my things and checked out of the hotel.
From then on, I avoided all such situations.
It was one of the ironies of my new existence that, despite my absolute and unprecedented freedom, I was more self-contained, more sealed off, than I had ever been before. I became a mystery to others. Where was I from? Why was I travelling alone? What did I do for money? I often had the feeling that people were making up stories about me, but I knew their stories wouldn’t have been a patch on the real one, not even close. There was a part of my mind that I kept hidden, even from myself, and they wouldn’t have been able to see into it.
They would never have guessed the truth.
Their imaginations would have failed them.
•
Three years passed. I went everywhere, as I had told Paul Bouhtala that I would. I ate fish jalfrezi in a rooftop restaurant in Zanzibar, fruit bats whirling through the darkness like dead leaves. I watched the sun setting from the deck of a cargo boat as it sailed from Ujung Pandang to Surabaya. I drank caipirinhas in a dirt-floor reggae bar in São Luis. . . . Sometimes I found myself using the name that the American had given me. It was another way of securing privacy. Also, perhaps, I had grown into it. My hair had bleached in the sunlight and salt water, and, for the first time in my life, I had a tan. I was thinner too; after repeated bouts of diarrhoea, I had shed more than a stone in weight. Every now and then I remembered how I had stood outside that bar on the day of my release, and how I had failed to recognise myself. I now thought of that as a defining moment. During my time in the white room, I had started to undergo some sort of transformation. My blond hair, my brown skin—they were just superficial changes. More significant by far was the fact that my relationship with my body had altered, and altered radically. I was still fit—I walked and swam whenever I could—but it wasn’t the exhaustive, unrelenting fitness I had been used to for so many years. My body was no longer the centre of my attention, no longer the instrument through which I expressed myself, and, as a result, my life had lost much of its focus. As I moved from place to place, I seemed to carry a peculiar, almost eerie sense of quiet about with me. I thought of ancient battlefields, and how their trenches are replaced by grass and wild flowers. I thought of abandoned factories occupied by rust and birds. You walk around, and there’s just a wind blowing gently, and a piece of metal banging somewhere, and the wide blue sky above your head. . . . There were times when I felt as if I was a stranger in my own body. As if I had been separated from myself. I would be crossing a street in broad daylight, and, although I knew I was walking, I would feel as though I was dropping through the air. The two sensations would happen simultaneously, and they would both be true. The people who passed me on the street at times like that would see a man talking to himself, making a desperate attempt to hold himself together.
•
So what do I remember of those years, the years I was away? The peaceful moments, mostly—the moments of contemplation.
The Mekong River, four-thirty in the morning. . . .
I remember waking early, dressing in the dark. The guest-house where I was staying stood on a red dirt track at the edge of a village. It was a two-storey structure made entirely of bamboo, and every time I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, the whole building seemed to shake. All around me I could hear the feathery sound of people sleeping. The darkness was soft with it. Once, the man in the next bunk took a deep breath, as if he was about to make an announcement, but then the air rushed out of him and he turned over, one arm flung out, the hand with its palm upturned, dramatic, reaching almost to the floor. I crept downstairs, each step silent, furtive, like someone leaving without paying.
Outside, light was already seeping into the sky. A pale light, milky, the colour of old-fashioned paper glue. Rolls of mist lay in
the fields or hung in ghostly suspension over the river. Trees were just beginning to detach themselves from the dark mass of the jungle; I could see their trunks—the pattern of hoops, the alternating bands of black and grey. Somewhere a cock crowed, raucous and insistent. Though I must have heard the sound in England first, or on holiday in France, perhaps, when I was young, it always reminds me of South-East Asia now, that hoarse cry somehow at odds with the dreamy sluggishness of dawn. . . . And then the smell, a kind of sweetness in the air, but thick too, cloying, like the scent of certain lilies. There’s nothing fresh, even at five in the morning, only the sense of something being brought back to life. It was always the same day, you felt—the same day endlessly reheated. . . .
The strangest feeling. As if the place was trying to speak to me. Look, it was saying. This is what you have become. And the people riding along the dirt track on their bicycles, smiling and nodding at me. . . .
I sat on the grass for at least an hour and watched the river slide from left to right. On the far bank I saw smoke rise from the jungle. That was Laos. The country was closed to foreigners that year, and it had the allure of the prohibited—that wall of undergrowth and foliage, that blue smoke rising, drifting. . . .
This is what you are.
Below me, boats had been drawn up, propped against the wet black roots of trees. The boats were thin and curved, like ancient dried-up pods, like bits of rind. The beauty of those shapes as the sky brightened and the day began to impose itself. . . .
Just then, I felt the edges of my flesh dissolving. I was the same as the wood the boats were made of, the same as the water of the river. One flowed straight into the other, with no frontiers, no distinctions. I was so wholly present that I was wholly absent. And yet, at the same time, curiously, I was able to register a feeling of relief. To be rid of myself, if only for a few moments. . . .
The Book of Revelation Page 14