Hemispheres

by Stephen Baker

  He stops talking. The small waves flicker at the edge of the shingle beach and the fire laps at our feet.

  Why did you follow me? asks Matteo.

  I open my mouth to say something but Joe is already talking.

  We lost somebody, down on South Georgia. A friend. More than that. Fuck it, you could say he was like family. A brother.

  He stops, passes a hand over the greasy mane. Blinks a couple of times as a gust of woodsmoke splashes over him.

  When I saw you in the canoe, he carries on. I don’t know, I didn’t think you were him, that’s too simplistic. But I was somehow reminded of him. I smelled him. You know that cheap spray deodorant he used to wear Yan, that fucking stuff that used to make your eyes water like a flamethrower the amount of it he put on? Well, I smelled that, when I saw you. I smell it now.

  You were following the smell of a dead man, says Matteo.

  Yeah, says Joe. Stupid, isn’t it. I realize that now. He’s gone and we have to accept it.

  No, says Matteo. Not stupid. The dead are here, and they outnumber the living. Yagán people, animals and birds, countless generations. Here at the end of the world. I don’t know why. Perhaps the entrance to the underworld is close by.

  But death is final, says Joe. Anything else is delusion.

  Ha ha, says Matteo. Religion is the opiate of the masses, okay. But Matteo sees the dead. They walk and run and fly and swim around him. We have many worlds to pass through and perhaps there is only a heartbeat between one world and the next and perhaps we do not notice when we pass from one place into another. Who knows, you may be dead already. Perhaps we are all dead.

  There is a strong and thick silence. The forest behind us is bubbling with darkness.

  *

  Matteo moves over to his canoe, which is pulled up beyond the tide line alongside our inflatable. He pulls out two bundles, and carries them over to us.

  See, he says. Food for three dangerous nincompoops. I get them from the colony today. Immature adults, not the chicks or the breeding adults. Nice and fat.

  He puts the bundles down on the shingle, and the firelight washes over them. Small black-and-white penguins, trussed motionless with cord. A single eye looks up at me. I watch the eye, and it watches me. It seems quite calm.

  Magellanic penguins, I say. You can tell by the markings.

  Uh-huh, says Matteo. You write the name on the wrapper, Signor Yan. They are ourselves. They are your friend.

  There’s a shallow pit scooped into the shingle, some way beyond the fire, and he carries the bundles there and lies them gently down. He smoothes the feathers of the first penguin and whispers to it so quietly that we cannot hear the words. A knife appears from inside his oilskins and he draws it across the bird’s throat. A small hiss as air escapes from the lungs through the severed windpipe. Thick blood bubbles onto the pebbles, black in the dying light.

  Now the dead will come, says Matteo. They are drawn to the blood. Your friend will come back. Their blood for his life.

  And then the smell of it is in my throat, dark blue, smoky and wistful like semen. The smell of Mount Longdon.

  Matteo dispatches the second penguin the same way, black blood draining into the pebbles.

  They are curious, but shy, he says. They will gather at the edges of the forest, for they do not know what we are. Later when you sleep, you will see them.

  He sets to plucking the birds, throwing clouds of feathers into the air.

  I’m lying on the shingle, close to the embers of the fire. Woodsmoke tickles my nostrils, wood ash tinkling as it gradually subsides. The uncomfortable shape of Joe is humped close against me, Matteo asleep on the other side of the fire. My stomach shifts alarmingly. It’s the penguin meat, greasy and with a pungent aroma of fish. Swallow hard and turn onto my back, trying to get comfortable on the uneven shingle. The sky is largely clear with shreds of cloud ripping across on the wind. And behind them, unmoving and unmoved, are the stars of a strange hemisphere. They don’t offer me the comfort of picking out the familiar patterns I’ve seen on a thousand other nights, when I’ve looked up and been glad to see them like old friends. They remind me that I’m in another place altogether. A windscreen has shattered into a million sherds of glass and they’ve been smeared across the glacial sky. They drip, here and there, from the edges. I am astigmatic. I am old.

  Turn again onto my side, questing for sleep. Movement in the heavy darkness at the edges of the forest. Perhaps the dead are indeed gathered there, scenting the black blood in the pit, bubbling between the stones.

  Perhaps he is there.

  I hover on the edges of sleep. Men and women and children, silent among the trees. Pale faces turn, hands rest on the shoulders of impatient children. Thousands of them, rippling like a wheatfield in the wind. I strain towards them, looking for a boy with a rabbit-fur scalp and a paperback in his hands. But they shift and the faces change, mocking me. Animals and invertebrates crawl beneath their feet and the trees are encrusted with birds like overripe fruit, and the sea is crammed with fish, fat silver bodies seething at the shore.

  I know that I’m dreaming, and in the dream I’m sitting at that kitchen table, rough-hewn and rounded by time and use, and there are cards in my hand. But I get a strange feeling, sitting there. A bubble of darkness, of blind horror, somewhere down deep inside of me. Every so often I feel it start to rise to the surface, draggled with weed.

  I’ve been here before, I think inside the dream. Four jacks in my hand. I look at Dave’s heart flush, already turned up on the table, and feel the glow of triumph.

  I drain my glass of beer. It is astringent, medicine for the heart. Their eyes are on me, shining. The deep mahogany sheen of the tabletop. I begin to lay my cards down, one by one, looking at the pillar of ash teet ering at the tip of Dave’s cigarette, notched into the edge of the ashtray.

  A pair of jacks, Matthew and Mark. And then nothing. Three, seven, ten. No Luke, and no John.

  Softly and soundlessly the pillar of ash drops into the ashtray and the cigarette dies. A moth still presses at the window, patiently and persistently, looking for the moon.

  This is the poker game you’re dreaming about, right? Back on East Falkland?

  Correct.

  But you’re dreaming it the other way – you lost that hand. Like you were saying to Joe, perhaps there’s another world where things turned out different.

  No flies on you Dan.

  It was on your mind, though. It’s natural that you’d dream about it.

  I’ve dreamed this dream almost every night for the last twenty-five years. I’ve come to thinking this is how things were meant to be.

  Meant to be?

  Dave guffaws, wipes sweat from his brow on a grubby shirtsleeve. Begins scooping up the money from the table.

  Now that, he crows, is magic.

  He flashes a little wanker sign at me, grinning from ear to ear.

  Joe is standing behind me and I feel his hand on my shoulder.

  We’ll leave it till first light, he says. Then we’ll head out. A couple of hours to get your head together.

  When I was here before, after I won that hand, I went for a wander around upstairs. Remembering it, the bubble gives a little lurch and my heart jumps. I hear the others talking, but their voices in the dream are thick and impenetrable like moss. I stand up and walk, shine my torch up the wooden tunnel of the stairwell, start to climb. On the stairs the bubble rises and the reflexes of fear work on my body. Heartbeat audible, sweat leaking out, a tightness in the stomach.

  I stop here, in the dream, and remind myself what happens. There’s nothing to worry about. You go upstairs and poke around in those empty rooms. You find that old lighter, lying on the floor among the debris. It’s one of them old-school Heath Robinson things where a little cap on a lever comes down and snuffs the flame. You pick it up and dust it off and decide to clean it up later and make it work again. And then you come back downstairs to the others.

  This
thought steadies my heart and I carry on up to the landing. It’s a long corridor with a single window looking out to the east, glass long gone from the panes and a green wind loping through straight from the South Atlantic, charged with salt and moisture. Strips of wallpaper have slumped from the walls, and the torch beam moves over their tortured bodies on the floor, raddled with damp and mould. I step carefully over them and try a door. The bubble lurches and I feel sick to the stomach. I’m looking at a bathroom, the bath and toilet a grim shade of avocado, offcuts of faded green carpet on the floor. A mirror above the sink. Look at my face for the first time in weeks and I don’t recognize myself. I know it’s me, that the grey eyes, receding hairline, thick stubble and broad nose belong to Yan Thomas. But there’s no sense of recognition. It reminds me of looking at the stars and seeing no constellations, only chaos.

  Later, when you sleep, you will see them, I hear Matteo say, as I stare at my own strange face in the mirror.

  Back on the landing, footfall dampened by the thick pile carpet. Open another door, the bubble still rising, in my chest now like pleurisy. I’m in what used to be a bedroom. I feel relieved. I have been here before. Everything just as I remember it. Collapsed rafters lying across the bed, clothes strewn across the floor, crumbs of ceiling plaster across everything like icing sugar. It’s important now for the dream to follow what I remember. So I sweep the torch beam carefully across the floor, and there it is, glittering with reassurance. I bend and fold it into my hand like a metal egg, let my body heat leach into it, incubate it. The bubble rises and I taste bile. The penguin meat, my dreaming brain says. You’re going to be sick.

  Back on the landing. Now it’s time to go down to the others. But there’s a feeling of incompleteness. I shine my torch down the landing and there’s a door at the far end. Planks and cross-braces, the brass doorknob shimmering, and when I look at it my head swims and my heart hammers. The bubble climbing my throat, hard and pneumatic like a ball of undigested food.

  Go downstairs, I tell myself. That’s what you did. Go downstairs to the others. But my body’s beyond control now, moving towards the door, one step and then another. Go downstairs, my mind screams, but my hand reaches for the doorknob. It turns and I hear the latch click and the bubble has almost reached the surface where it will burst and whisper small words of oblivion wriggling like worms into the emptiness.

  The door swings towards me and I step back and there’s a stairwell, leading upwards, wooden steps painted white. An attic up there under the bones of the roof. A wave of nausea sweeps over me but my feet are on the stairs and the sound of my boots swelling out, filling the world. The bubble of horror at the back of my throat, burning in the nasal cavity and behind the eyes. Stomach acid crawls into my mouth. The lighter still in my hand, warm now. Hot.

  And then I reach the top and see the two dago conscripts crouched there where they’ve been hiding from us all along, and there’s no sound because they’ve already fired their rifles and the last thing I see is the two ragged muzzle flashes like the last pale stars nuzzling at the belly of morning.

  I wake up and the first pale and unhealthy light is creeping into the eastern sky and I’m retching gobbets of half-digested meat into the pebbles of a lonely beach on Tierra del Fuego. The forest is full of ghosts and the sea is full of fish and beside me Matteo and Joe are sleeping the sleep of the dead.

  10. Spotted Redshank

  (Tringa erythropus)

  Thought you were dead this morning, he says.

  I was asleep.

  Bet Kelly gave you a hard time, the old man banging at the front door at five o’clock.

  No, she didn’t.

  The sound of our boots crunching through cinder, each footfall like a dry cough. When I was a kid he woke me with a cup of coffee, bitter and outrageously hot, and it was still night outside when I tumbled out of bed and pulled jeans on over my pyjama bottoms. I remember the handbrake creaking off on the battered Renault Twelve as he willed it out of the yard on those perishing mornings, and the pear drop smell of the upholstery as we headed down the Seaton road to Saltholme and Dormans, the reedbeds by Reclamation, the Long Drag. My feet already pulsing with cold inside the wellingtons and that coffee still burning inside.

  You were up early, I say. You had that dream again? The one where you die.

  Aye, he says. It’s always the same dream.

  We’re tramping down Long Drag towards the Seal Sands hide. It’s a rough cinder track running alongside a low bank which used to be the sea wall, before reclamation. Tidal pools beyond there now, fringed with reeds. They dumped thousands of tons of slag to drive out the sea – the excreta of steel creating the land on which the chemical industry grew, back in the thirties and forties. Like tomato plants springing from undigested seed in the beds of a sewage farm.

  My nan had the same dream every night, he says. When she was dying from stomach cancer. She dreamed of pork pies.

  That’s cruel.

  There’s an early haze over the marshland, the rough grass and thorn scrub. Refineries and distillation columns and gas flares looming with their feet in the mist, the strange fruit of industry sprouting from quiet earth. Pipelines rearing into pipe-bridges and burrowing beneath our feet. Brinefield valves like rusting root crops in flat green fields.

  They use them for storage these days, says Yan. Inert gases and that. Nitrogen.

  Where?

  Under the ground man. That’s what brinefields are. They used high-pressure water to scour out the salt deposits, and left these immense voids underground.

  Right.

  When I wake up, he says, three, four in the morning, I think to meself I should have died back there. If I’d gone up them stairs. See, I cheated it somehow.

  Aye, well. That time in the morning, it’s hard to keep those thoughts away.

  I cheated it then but it’s catching up with me now. I feel smaller Dan. Like I’m shrinking. Do I look smaller?

  No. You’re all right.

  Maybe one day I’ll just disappear, and the next thing you hear will be that they’ve found my bones in the Falklands. In some old tumbledown house. And that I was there all along. And that I never came back at all.

  Is that right?

  Something as small as a hand of cards. Or which way you fall off a roof. Which stone you hit. It can change everything. It can put things on a different track.

  We walk on. The wide silver pools hold the compass of the sky within their placid surface. The low pervasive hum of the refineries like a quiet respiration.

  When you get to the end of the Drag you see the Seal Sands hide stark against the sky and beyond it the tidal flats sweeping out towards the river’s mouth. It’s a new hide – arsonists got the last one back in the late eighties. The creosote catches beautifully and the whole thing goes up like a hayrick.

  We approach it with careful feet and slow breath blooming in clouds, and nobody else is awake and the sky is a deep milky-blue just creeping into life. Mount the steps, shudder the door open and breathe the dry and pent-up air inside, heady with creosote. We wait in the darkness for a few minutes to let things settle, light chinking in shyly through cracks and knot-holes. Wormholes of light tunnelling through wooden planks. Plenty of room for both of us.

  Yan lights a fag and the lighter flame splashes from his face.

  Is that it?

  Yes, he says, handing it to me. Still warm from his hands.

  Funny to think you picked it up on the other side of the world.

  Mmm. Didn’t need much cleaning up, really. Just a new wick and a dab of Brasso.

  I try the mechanism, relishing the warm, oily smell of petrol, the big sprawling dab of flame. And then I lower the little cap to dowse it.

  We could have another shot at IVF, I tell him. But we’d have to fund it ourselves. And there’s still only a one-in-four chance of a viable pregnancy at the end of it. Reading between the lines, they think we’re too old anyway. They keep dropping hints about fostering.


  One in four, that’s not bad, you know, he says, quietly, shifting on the bench. In my poker-playing days I’d have taken them odds. One card to a flush, say. If you gave me those odds of seeing the next couple of years out, I’d bite your fucking hand off.

  Do they give you the numbers? You know. Percentages.

  Sometimes, if you push hard enough.

  He sounds weary, suddenly. Clears his throat.

  They’re pretty confident I’ll get into next year. That’s only a couple of month, mind, so I’d have to go downhill pretty snappish not to make it. Five to ten per cent chance of getting to the end of next year.

  It’s still a chance.

  Aye.

  It’s true, he says, about your horizons shrinking. Used to think, if I was given a death sentence like this, that I’d just make a quick clean end. Under a train, off a block of flats. What’s the point in spinning it out?

  But now?

  Well, the end of next year is an eternity away. If I can get a few more months, a few more weeks. Days even. It would be worth it.

  He pauses to cough. Not a particularly alarming or sinister cough. Just persistent.

  Your life list, I say. How many?

  Britain?

  I nod.

  Three nine eight. I’d like to get four hundred.

  We lapse into silence, absorbing the still darkness of the hide. Neither of us wants to open the shutters, breaking the moment open with light. The rapidfire calls of redshank outside, jabbing urgently into the dawn sky like the bleep of an electronic alarm.

  They’re nervous buggers, says Yan. Keep going off like a dicky trip-switch.

  Aye.

  In the darkness I sense him smiling, and I feel close to him.

  Yan slips the shutters open and secures them and the vast mudflats of Seal Sands are spread before us. There are thousands of waders feeding across the mud, crawling over the glutinous surface, and loose parties of duck further out in open water – wigeon, merganser, shelduck. In winter there are whooper swans on the ice-encrusted flats, visitors from the Arctic. And in the distance you can make out the bulky forms of seals hauled out on the more remote banks.