Your dad?
Aye.
Barlow slowed his breathing. Took a big gulp of lager.
He disappeared.
What, like a magic trick?
We was dealing with the aftermath. Processing prisoners and trying to get the wounded shipped out of there. And then one of his lads comes up to me and says where’s the corp? Well, we look but there’s no sign of them.
Them?
Yan, Joe, Horse Boy. Like someone’s reached down out of the sky and smudged them out.
Was there like a search for them? You know, like mountain rescue, helicopters and that?
He laughed.
Yeah, he said. We stopped the war and combed the islands for three wasters.
But they were your mates.
Look, I did me best, but the orders were to keep moving. You’ve got to do your job, blank everything else out of your mind. I thought I was doing them a favour not reporting it straight away. Give them a chance to turn up again.
But they didn’t.
Nah.
So what do you reckon happened?
He banged his fist violently on the table, face engorged with blood, and cutlery bounced into the air before clattering back onto the tablecloth. He steadied himself, breathing slow and heavy.
Your train’ll be here any minute, he said through gritted teeth. You better go.
I stood up, scared. Slung the holdall across my shoulder. He stayed there, frozen. Deflated now, his colour greyer and his belly flatter.
Charlie Fraser, he said. You go see him. He was our CO. Always kept an ear to the ground, did Charlie.
He held out his hand and I gave him the diary and he scribbled the address down and handed it back. Then he shook his head like he was shaking out a bad dream.
I better get going myself, he muttered. They might think I’m spilling the beans to someone.
9. Magellanic Penguin
(Spheniscus magellanicus)
I spilled the beans to Sarah, pretty much, them months on South Georgia. She dipped into me, unpicked my brain with her light fingers. And when I said goodbye I never heard what she said in return. The words were torn out of her mouth by the wind and thrown away and the sea was scudding and the wind was jostling. And I was going to embrace her but she offered me a hand and I shook it. Very British. Then she walked back to the huts and never give me a backward glance. Left me thinking about her eyes, fields of tundra grass dancing and rippling in the sunlight. And Horse Boy, up there. What was left of him, under the stones.
But now South Georgia’s an ocean away and Cape Horn island hovers like a thumbprint on the horizon and the radio bellows and spurges and lapses. Fabián sings along with the music gusting from the little speaker and his singing is tuneless, but at least he fills the silence.
Dave leans against the bulkhead, his big head resting on the wall. He bangs the back of his skull against the metal in time to the beat. His eyes are low slung, with big grey bags. A shapeless tee-shirt draped over his ample form.
Bad weather coming Joe hermanita, sings Fabián.
Joe wrinkles his pockmarked nose deeper into the oilskins, runs a hand over the oilslick grey hair. Says nothing.
We swing into the coast west of the Horn, seeking shelter as the weather thickens up on us, the swell growing glutinous and grey like a sago pudding. We left South Georgia in spring with the wind behind us, aiming for a landfall in Chile. We’ll need fuel soon, and supplies. Argentina is out of the question. Pinochet’s Chile isn’t much better, says Fabián. Military rule, disappearances, death squads. We’d better not draw attention to ourselves.
Islands loom in the closing visibility, some flat and stony with drifts of windswept tussac grass, others mountainous with blue glaciers high up and dark mossy forests below the tree line. There are sinuous channels branching between their shoulders and here the water is calm and desolate, sheltered from the sea. The place is crepuscular, forgotten by the sun.
Dave idles the engine as we drift close to the mountainous walls, the boat bucking like a wanton horse. Penguin colonies on the shore, acres of guano streaked across the slopes, the distant shimmering of countless bodies in motion. Joe is quiet. He looks out at the shore with a cigarette clamped between his lips. Thrusts his lower jaw out and strokes the growth of grey beard.
You know why they call this place Tierra del Fuego? says Fabián.
Volcanoes, says Joe.
Wrong.
Dave yawns, his big elephant seal yawn. The tendons in his jaw crack.
Come on Fabián, he says. I can’t stand not knowing.
Yagán people, says Fabián. Used to live here. More or less lived in their canoes, boats of skin stretched on a frame. Men, women, children, a family in each boat. Travelling the waters, a thousand islands and a thousand channels.
Uh-huh, yawns Dave.
See, the women kept the embers of the fire in the bottom of the canoe, from place to place. The fire moving through the world. Moving through the darkness. And when the Spanish came they saw the Yagán fires rising into the sky everywhere, and they called it Tierra del Fuego, land of fire.
Today’s factoid, says Dave, with a slow handclap.
These days, says Fabián, there’s no-one here to see our smoke rising.
Just as well, says Joe. Someone’s pissed on my campfire and it’s just about fucking sputtered out.
He taps out his cigarette against the bulkhead and sends the butt arcing into the sea.
What happened to the Yagán? I ask, knowing the answer already.
Epidemics, suicides, low birth rate, he says. Native people were surprisingly resigned to extinction, almost like they chose not to carry on. Smelled the modern world coming, far off, and saw there was no part in it for them.
Collective suicide, says Dave, shuffling a layer of blubber. Now that’s a new one on me. Personally I like the modern world. It has whisky and pizza and fat whores. No suicide for me.
Sea spray is beaded in his floppy hair, dampening it and pulling the fringe down over his eyes.
Fabián grins.
You’d never make a Yagán anyway, he says. They would harpoon you and eat you.
We find a channel running north between islands and follow it, the bucking of the boat becoming calmer away from the open sea. Come about beyond a rocky headland and make anchor, chain clattering down to the seabed. And mist descends over us with soft chewed fingertips, wet and insistent, and the islands become a dark bulk, sensed rather than seen, like great whales calling just beyond the limits of the ear. We cluster in the wheelhouse and drink hot coffee, fountains of steam grazing the windows.
There’s a man in a canoe, says Joe Fish, matter-of-fact. He’s paddling north. We look out and see nothing. An expanse of dark sea shifting listlessly, shreds of mist lifting and falling like litter on the wind.
Your mind is playing tricks Joe hermanita, says Fabián. It’s the mist, shapes in the mist.
I saw him, says Joe.
Dave is asleep on the bench seat, mouth sagging open.
Somebody stick a sweaty sock in that fucker’s gob, says Joe.
I put my finger under Dave’s chin and gently raise the lower jaw. He sucks and swallows without waking. Joe gets up slowly and stumps out of the wheelhouse, the door clanging behind him. The coffee works in the pit of my stomach, brutally hot. I get up and walk outside, the deck beneath me performing the constant tilting, shuffling, realignment that becomes part of life at sea, however calm the water. Eventually you don’t even notice, but the body is always adjusting to allow for the fidgeting of the boat, some primal part of the brain always awake, calculating the mathematics of balance. I move over to Joe, hunched over the gunwale, looking into the mist.
There he is, says Joe.
I peer into the shapelessness and at the limit of vision there is something. Something darker than the mist but paler than the water. The mist has clamped down on the world of sound. Everything muffled, as if beneath a heavy blanket of snow. But I hear s
omething that could be a paddle dipping into the water.
You there, shouts Joe. Ahoy!
A slight thinning of the mist passes over us and I see the man. Paddling away from us, maybe a quarter of a mile away. Joe shouts again. No reaction. The paddle continues dipping into the water in unhurried rhythm. The canoe rises and falls gently on the swell. He is heading north, along the channel, away from the sea. The mist falls again and he’s gone. Joe squints hard, willing him to reappear. Nothing.
We could go after him in the inflatable, says Joe. Who the hell is he?
We’ll go nowhere in this mist, I say. We’d be lost in minutes. Might never find our way back.
He knows I’m right. Back in the wheelhouse we tell Fabián.
The ghost of a Yagán, he says. Nobody lives down here. Stay in the wheelhouse. Keep your minds in the twentieth century.
Do you believe in ghosts? I ask him. Missus thinks she sees them, sometimes. Round the pub, like. They never help her with the hoovering, mind.
Perhaps, says Fabián, perhaps not. The church teaches us about limbo. The in-between place, not heaven and not hell. A grey place, without shape or substance.
A bit like here, says Dave.
It’s where you end up, says Fabián, if you never had the chance to convert. Say you died before the birth of Christ, or you came from some remote tribe. You get stuck in this misty nothingness for ever. I always wondered whether anyone escaped from limbo.
Decided to go a-journeying, I say.
Exactly, says Fabián.
So ghosts are men who are just too bloody-minded to die, I say. Who find a way to come back without anyone really noticing.
Bollocks, says Joe. You live, and then you die. Meat for worms. They tell us all that shit to make us behave ourselves. Meanwhile they’re busy robbing us blind. There are no ghosts. The man was real.
Some time later the mist lifts as suddenly as it fell, and it’s late afternoon. The sky is muscular, clouds clenching and unclenching. Shafts of pale sunlight stab through from time to time, animating a patch of sea or a distant mountainside. Joe stands in the stern, peering through binoculars.
Got him, he says. Do you want a look?
I take the binoculars and scan the sea. The man is a speck now, almost out of sight. Mountains rise either side of him, dwarfing the tiny boat.
We could get after him, says Joe.
Something glittering in his colourless eyes, something that has been absent.
What are you thinking? I ask him.
He shrugs.
You think it’s Horse Boy, don’t you?
He says nothing. Eventually he shows me a clenched fist, looks at my two extended fingers.
Stone blunts scissors, I say. You win. Let’s go.
That was for real, he says. You didn’t let me win.
For real, I say. Can’t be lucky all the time.
Now the deadening mist has gone, sound in this landscape is somehow purer. Perhaps it’s the absence of background noise. Perhaps the mountains and the channels amplify the slightest whisper like a Roman theatre. The sound of the outboard and the inflatable running through the water like a long, satisfying drink, rattling the throat as it goes down. Joe is in the bow like a Labrador, sniffing the air. I sit at the stern and guide the outboard. We continue along the channel, rocky shores and dense low forests to either side, vertiginous green slopes rearing above. It’s cold on the open water, my face reddening, feeling pinched. We round a headland, a tongue of shiny black rocks and forbidding trees, find a larger expanse of open water before us and the shorelines of the two islands dropping away to left and right. The shore in front of us is high and craggy and drained by distance. It must be several miles away.
We’ve lost him, says Joe.
He lifts the binoculars and scans the black water ahead, towards the far shore. The light is fading and I’m anxious to get back to the others. A mug of tomato soup, the agreeable warm fug of the galley.
Perhaps he was a ghost after all, I say.
We’ll check five or ten minutes along each shore, says Joe. He must have gone one way or the other. He isn’t out in the open water.
Then we’ll go back.
He nods assent. I roll a cigarette between damp and numbed fingers, spark it up with a sear of flame from the lighter. The smoke feels dense and gloomy. The bright coal bobs and nods in the growing dusk.
Fire moving through the darkness, says Joe, grimly, as the inflatable chugs along the blank shore.
We check to the left for ten minutes. Headlands and coves, empty and echoing. Return to the channel and continue in the other direction, the outboard puttering into the loneliness. Ten minutes, and nothing. I touch Joe on the shoulder. The dusk is indigo and dense. We should go back.
One more headland, he says.
We round a low line of rocks bobbing in the surf like a grin. A cove opens up before us and we see a small knot of fire ahead, bubbling in the half light at the head of a pebble beach, between tide line and forest. Someone is standing by the fire, scanning the sea. I kill the engine and we sweep in towards the beach.
You speak very good English Matteo, I say.
He guffaws through the grizzled beard.
You are too kind, he says. It is my Oxford education and my extensive library of classics, of course.
There’s a strong smell gusting from him, of smoke and sweat and the goatish tang of unwashed body. He’s a small man, dainty beside the gangling frame of Joe. He wears the remains of a tattered set of oilskins, weathered almost into oblivion, and his hair is long and black and gathered at the nape of his neck with a knot of elastic. His features are small and delicate, much obscured by the vegetation of beard. A pair of large dark eyes loom above the foliage, intelligent and intensely watchful.
Joe thinks he’s a loony but we squat down by his fire anyway, warming our numbed fingers while the night thickens around us in Tierra del Fuego.
You live down here all year round?
There are camps where I stay, says Matteo with a charming smile. Sometimes all winter, sometimes just two or three sleeps. You see, I’m always on the move. The canoe knows the roads, roads defined by the wind. I eat shellfish and roots and fruits and seabirds from the colonies.
You eat seabirds? says Joe, lugubrious.
Only what I need, says Matteo. I only take what I need. No more.
You didn’t seem surprised to see us, says Joe, matter-of-fact.
Matteo bursts into a peal of delighted laughter.
No. Never surprised at anythings, he says. Because anythings can happen in this world.
Joe seems bemused and Matteo lets the words hang. Besides, he says, I heard and smelled you coming some time ago. The senses are sharp with no TV and no traffics.
Why do you live down here, I ask him, tentatively. Problems with the law? It must be lonely and hard.
He bubbles with laughter.
He-hey, yes my friend. Matteo is dangerous criminal. Worse than paedophile, worse than nincompoop.
Come on then, says Joe. Spill the beans.
I am a back-to-front man. A man who wears his arsehole on his chest and his dick in his backpockets.
Joe looks at me pointedly. I ignore him.
Most people, says Matteo, are happy in the city. It is the parliament of fools, like the penguins in their colonies. They crowd together because it protects them from the predators. It gives each individual citizen penguin a smaller chance of being eaten up. See?
He smiles and laughs, looks to us for affirmation.
Okay, I say.
And, says Matteo, most people would go crazy out here alone. The quietness would turn them into stark raving maniacs.
Aye, fair enough, says Joe.
Well, gentlemen, says Matteo, I am back-to-front because I defy the logics. In the city I am lonely. I have wife and children there, but I am still lonely. Every one of us living in a bubble, all alone. I try to touch other people, even my family, but the bubble is too strong. I
would die alone, inside my bubble, and nobody would see. They would only see the bubble walking and talking and never know that I was dead inside.
He spits succinctly onto the beach, then he gets to his feet and pulls the oilskins around himself. I stay squatting by the fire, warming myself, and the night begins to precipitate around us, a solid wall of blue darkness.
I heard the call, he says. Just very quiet, in my head. Get up and follow me, like our Lord said. So I walked out of the house where my wife and children were asleep, I got on a train and I came to Tierra del Fuego and then I walked into these islands. And I have never been lonely since. This is why I am back-to-front.
When was this?
Since ten years.
How do you square that, in your head? I ask him. Leaving them. Not being there.
Matteo is here, he says. Tussac grass here, and pigvine. Fish also here, and penguin. We are connected. Wife and babies are not here.
You can’t tell me you don’t miss civilization sometimes, growls Joe.
Of course. Matteo laughs crisply, like a handbell. What is it like to have a woman? Or drink espresso or cold beer, take a warm bath? You tell me my friend, because I cannot remember. Most people, they would go mad alone out here.
But not you?
He laughs again, more gently this time, fingering his beard.
You see, he says. Modern man, he thinks he is separate from the out side world. An individual, yeah? Like he has a wrapper round the self. Like a chocolate bar. If he was out here and he tried to keep the wrapper safe, with the sea and the sky and the beasts and the birds all pressing on, tearing at it, then he would go mad.
What about you?
I had a wrapper, once. But now it’s gone. It’s blown away. And when your wrapper goes the chocolate starts to melt. Where does Matteo stop and where does the world begin? I become part of the world and the world becomes a part of me. Water and rocks and animals and vegetations. When I kill a penguin for food I am killing myself but I am also sustaining myself. When I eat shellfish I am eating my own flesh but I am becoming stronger. When I die I will melt into all of this, the tussac grass and forests and the shellfish singing in the sea and the birds crying in the air. This Signor Yan, Signor Joe, this is why Matteo is never lonely.
Hemispheres Page 11