Hemispheres

by Stephen Baker

  Perhaps some of you may be aware that I spent some time in the paras, he began. You’d be forgiven if you weren’t aware, because I tend not to talk about it. There was an explosion of laughter here. He acknowledged his audience with raised palms and they quietened. But at the risk of boring you still further, I want to tell you what I learned in the army.

  This could go on all night, muttered Paul, next to me. We were right at the back, among the distant relatives and hangers-on, small children bored and running noisily between the tables.

  Because I only learned one thing in the army.

  Hurrah, shouted somebody.

  In fact I only learned one small, simple word.

  Even better, came the shout. There was a gentle frisson of laughter. Fraser paused. He knew how to work a crowd. They were silent, attentive, champagne glasses forgotten on the tables in front of them.

  Respect, he said, quietly. Respect. That’s all. Not much for twenty-five years’ service. But actually, it’s all I’ve ever needed. It’s a code for life. And since I learned that, I have striven every day to show respect to my wife, respect to my beautiful, clever daughter. Ah, sighed the audience. And respect to my friends and comrades.

  Respect my arse, smirked Paul. He was going to chuck us out of here.

  He drained his toast glass without waiting for the speech to finish, and sloped off towards the bar. I was growing sleepy, full of buffet food and without much shut-eye in days. Plus I’d been tucking the booze away since we arrived. I steadied myself on the table with an elbow, and the marquee lurched.

  What do I mean by respect? he continued. Well, I mean accepting another person, entire and whole. Accepting the good points and the bad. I mean generosity, and I mean hospitality. Because we’re all connected, aren’t we? No man is an island, as the poet said. What goes around comes around, eh? – as the lager commercial said.

  A splurge of laughter. I watched Helena’s occluded eyes circle the room, until they came to rest. Not on her respectful husband, but on Paul, leaning against the bar and quaffing a pint of lager. She blinked like a buzzard.

  Bile rose in my throat and I swallowed back hard. I wanted to sleep, to lie down and sleep. I would do it anywhere, with my arms wrapped around a toilet bowl and my cheek resting against the cold tiles, in a shrubbery with a holdall scrunched beneath my head, on another cold station with the moon melting into the world like an aspirin. My chin slipped from my hand and I pitched forward, before shaking myself awake. Fraser was winding up.

  So you see, he said, respect breeds respect. That’s what I learned from my daughter. And from that day onwards I swore that I wouldn’t let any man marry her.

  He stopped, abruptly. There was bemused giggling. Helena lifted a canapé and popped it into her mouth like an owl swallowing a chick.

  Until, he carried on, to cheering. Until she found a man who would show her the same respect that I always have. And in Jonathan –

  He was slowing towards his conclusion now. – in Jonathan, she has found that man, and I wish them the greatest of happiness.

  He raised his glass.

  To Selena and Jonathan, he boomed. Selena and Jonathan, echoed the room.

  The string quartet had been replaced by a four-piece band playing cheesy covers from the sixties and seventies, and many of the guests were dancing as evening fell away into night. I looked at the pint of lager in front of me and couldn’t remember how it got there. Bubbles rising insistently through the yeasty liquid.

  What’s the matter, boomed Paul. Can’t take your drink?

  He raised another pint to his lips and tilted his head back and necked it in seconds. Plonked it down aggressively on the table, where there was already quite a collection of empties.

  I’m fine, I said. Tired.

  The turf floor of the marquee was beginning to look inviting. I could just crawl away under the tables, into a dark corner.

  Have you enjoyed your evening boys? Helena Fraser was sitting at our table.

  Grand, said Paul. Free bar, he added. Grand.

  Then he looked at her.

  How does it feel? he said. Your daughter getting married.

  She laughed.

  She’s not mine. I’m just the trophy wife. Number one had the child-bearing hips.

  I swayed on my seat, trying to bring her into focus. Small, perfect white teeth like beach pebbles, her tongue flicking between them. She looked at me but her body was turned towards Paul.

  Yan, she said. Your dad. He was an unusual specimen. One in a million.

  She looked sidelong at Paul.

  He could charm the knickers off just about anything, from what I remember. She touched my arm with her hand, long turquoise nails immaculately manicured, matching her dress.

  Including me, she said, very quietly.

  Her skin shimmered, the tip of her tongue between her teeth.

  I haven’t shocked you, she said. How old are you Danny?

  Sixteen, I slurred.

  Sixteen, she purred. Sixteen and legal.

  Then she turned to Paul like I didn’t exist. Conversation over.

  You must be older, she said. Do you work out?

  Nah, he said. It’s all natural.

  Me too, she said, tongue between her teeth.

  So if Selena’s not your daughter, he said. I reckon you must be feeling like a bit of a spare part at this bash.

  Perceptive, she said. I don’t like all this upper-class backslapping. I prefer my entertainments to be a little more diverse.

  I was just saying exactly the same thing to Danny.

  She laughed.

  May I have the pleasure of a dance?

  The pleasure, he said, is all mine.

  He stood up, tall and tanned, his eyes flashing, and the two of them disappeared onto the dance floor. Like a stricken Zeppelin my head descended towards the table and burst across my forearms, and I waded in and out of a shallow sleep.

  I thought I saw them dancing together to something slow. Her blonde head was on his shoulder, eyes closed, and coloured lights swept across them like the onrushing sea. They turned and I saw how his hand rested in the deep V-shaped plunge of her dress at the back. It was proprietorial, the way it hung there in the fabric, with every right and intention to move down across those glossy buttocks, but choosing not to, for the moment.

  I slipped back into sleep, down into the depths and then rising slowly again to the surface with bubbles crawling from my mouth. Glanced over and they were gone. My clothes, my boots, were soaked with cold sleep, weighing a ton, pulling me under. I let myself go down, into the depths, felt salty sleep rush into my nostrils and my throat, filling up my stomach to the brim.

  Ow Danny.

  I was being shaken by the shoulders, none too gently. I opened my eyes. The marquee was almost empty, the band beginning to pack up their instruments, sharing a smoke and a few drinks from the bar. Some of the young waiters were still around, collecting up empty glasses and litter, light beginning to grow outside.

  Danny, you awake?

  It was Paul. I looked at him and strained to focus. He sat down opposite, plonking a glass on the table in front of me.

  There you go, he grunted. Sort yourself out.

  I ogled the oily turquoise liquid.

  Looks like toothpaste, I mumbled. I’m not drinking that shit.

  Crème de menthe, he said. Minty taste, kind of fresh. Really sorts your head after too much beer.

  I snatched up the shot glass and drained it. He was right. It was cold and sharp, sending a shiver through me. I felt marginally more awake. I looked at Paul.

  What happened to you?

  He winked.

  Kicked her back doors in, he beamed. Outside in the fucking rhodies.

  I collapsed into gasps of laughter, which I struggled to suppress.

  You Paul, I slurred, you are a fucking Titan mate. You’re something else.

  What’s that? He looked embarrassed.

  A giant of the ancient
world. You’ve got the life force man, you’re a colossus.

  That’s just the booze talking Danny. If it makes you feel better, you’re me best mate an’ all.

  Next morning at the scrapyard we picked our way through fields where the beached hulks of cars were spread out to the horizon. Early-morning sun shimmered across the rows of bonnets and roofs frosted with globes of dew. It was wet underfoot and we splashed through furrows and runnels of mud.

  Never thought I’d be a scrap merchant, mused Fraser. A crisp voice, deep and insistent. It doesn’t exactly run in the family. Winchester School, Sandhurst, a commission. But this place, it’s far more lucrative than you’d ever imagine. The profits from here are putting my youngest through school. Ex paedore aurum, you could say.

  I looked confused.

  Gold from shite, he grinned. Ran a pale hand through the deep red of his hair. I looked at the gold watch glinting at his wrist beneath the waxed jacket and flannel shirt. Paul was loitering at a distance, opening bonnets and rooting about, not wanting to intrude. We continued almost to the edge of the field until we came to the end of the cars, looked out over a wetland bristling with reedmace and stands of dense alder and thorn. A stretch of open water, black and inscrutable, tufts of morning mist caught in the vegetation.

  Beautiful, no? said Fraser. The whole of the Fens was like this, once. One vast wetland running away to the sky, millions of wildfowl rising with the wind thrumming in their feathers. Imagine it.

  Then he slapped the roof of a car.

  Take a seat, he said.

  It was a brown Cortina, lacking tyres and side windows. We could still see the fen through the windscreen, streaks of polarized light smeared across it. A heron stood stock-still at the edge of the reeds, its head cocked. The morning was blue and cold, like the edge of space.

  Fraser slapped the steering wheel, let his hand rest there.

  Of course it’s all been drained. Farmland now, the richest in the world.

  He smiled.

  Shall I tell you a secret Danno?

  I never said anything but he carried on anyway.

  You’d think that landscape is pretty permanent, wouldn’t you? he said. The shape of the land, the contours. We die but the land remains, the hills and the valleys, durable as stone. Well, this land is blowing away. On the wind.

  He paused for effect. I recalled how he’d done this a number of times during his speech last night.

  Peat, you see. The fenlands left behind a peat soil when they were drained. The richest soil. But when peat dries out it crumbles to dust. One breath of wind and it’s gone. There’s been too much drainage. The soil just blows away off the fields. It’s light as a feather.

  He continued looking pensively out of the windscreen, then seemed to gather himself.

  Sorry, he said, you didn’t come here for one of my lectures. Did you hear my speech last night?

  I nodded.

  Respect, he said. It’s like karma. Give and take. You give kindness today and tomorrow you receive it back. Because we’re all connected Daniel. We’re all in the same boat.

  He looked into the distance, tapped the steering wheel with a thumb. I jumped into the silence.

  Do you know what happened at Mount Longdon?

  Fraser was quiet. I fidgeted nervously with the plastic knob of the gear lever between us. Out on the fen the heron waited, stock-still.

  I saw George Barlow, I said. He told me about this kid getting shot through the eye – an Argie, like. And then Yan and his mates just disappeared into thin air. I got the idea there was something he wasn’t telling me, mind –

  Silence, said Fraser, cutting me dead. Silence doesn’t always need filling. You should remember that.

  I waited.

  War is war, he said. People get shot. That doesn’t really interest me.

  He stopped, exhaling pensively.

  What does interest me is people. Human connection. It’s what knits us together into the fabric of a society. It’s what stops us blowing away in the wind, just like fen peat. The army’s like that – like a big family. You’re connected to these people whether you like them or not. You rely on them and they rely on you.

  Fraser didn’t look at me, carried on gazing out of the windscreen at the distant fen. Ghosts of polarized light swam across the toughened glass.

  That’s what your dad didn’t get, he said. In the final analysis, he was just a fucking waster.

  He turned to look at me.

  You look shocked, he said. But you need to know the truth. When you’re a little kid your parents seem as permanent as the landscape. Solid, like hills. But then you’re a man, and you find out that they’re only people. And sometimes you find out that they’re worthless. Those hills are light as a feather. One breath of wind and they’re gone.

  He gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles, smudged with faint freckles.

  Yan always had something faulty inside him, like a broken spring. Don’t get me wrong, he was great company – most people thought he was the life and soul, men and women alike. But I know the type. People got close to him but they didn’t touch him inside, and when he got bored he’d cut them loose and ship out.

  He sniffed, and pinched his nostrils closed.

  The type of man who’d sit at your table and drink your beer and laugh at your jokes, and then help himself to a little of whatever it was he wanted, without a care.

  Your wife, I said. Helena –

  He swivelled quickly and his thumb was pressed against my carotid and his eyes were cold and dark like collapsed stars. I shivered, felt my blood beating against his hand.

  You don’t talk about her, he said. If you talk about her again I’ll cut your fucking throat.

  Okay. I won’t.

  Good lad.

  He relaxed his grip and gazed determinedly out of the windscreen. I looked at the side of his face, framed in delicate sunlight.

  You asked about Longdon, he said. I don’t know any more than Barlow, not for sure. He disappeared, two others with him. Never seen again. But if I had to guess I’d say that he got bored, and he cut the threads, and he pissed off.

  He smiled, ruefully.

  People like Yan, he said. They don’t see it. The ties that bind you to other people, that sometimes feel like shackles and halters and trusses constricting the life out of you. Those ties are also your veins and arteries, your life blood. If you cut them, what are you?

  There was a long silence. I pushed my hands under the backs of my thighs, warming my fingers between car seat and denim. Looked up into the blue of space, felt the planet buck and lurch beneath me like a scarce broken horse plunging wildly through the universe.

  But what happened to them? I said. I still don’t know.

  He turned to me. That rueful smile again, and his watery blue eyes. He rapped his fingertips against the steering wheel.

  Go home Danny, he said. Go home, wherever that is. You seem like a nice enough lad. Too nice to be wasting your energy on Yan Thomas. He’s damaged goods, take it from me. Even if he’s alive, he’s in no hurry to find you, is he? Your position’s simple. Go home and get on with your life. Let him go.

  I looked out of the windscreen across the fen and felt tired and dirty and a long ways from home. Weightless tears rose to the corners of my eyes and I tried to blink them back. I could hear metallic taps and crunches as Paul pottered his way back towards us among the dying cars. And then the heron rose from the fen like a huge soft smut from a fire, great rounded wings billowing up above the reedbeds and into a painless blue sky. And with it a huge weight was lifted from the world. The bird flapped lazily and drifted away on the wind, in search of another island of water among the arable prairies.

  15. Chilean Flamingo

  (Phoenicopterus chilensis)

  Becalmed here with no wind and pitiless sun and the frozen surface of the sea. All the tiny ripples and dreams which are the ocean’s constant conversation with itself – all them little tics and fu
rrows and wrinkles – have solidified and come to a stop like a kettle furring itself dry.

  Islands and mountains float above the horizon in dizzy blueness. Reality and mirage are the same thing. There is South Georgia out to the east with Bird Island at its tip, but when the sun licks the black chain of mountains I remember that South Georgia is a lifetime away. The mountains sizzle and melt into the low blue cones of a drifting volcano.

  Eyes and mouth crusting up with salt, more than a day now since we had fresh water and my tongue a wrinkled lump inside my own head. Lips like blistered wood, eyeballs pickled by the constant flare of light. They wept liquid for days but now they’re dry, as if the outer layers have shed. Keep them downcast beneath the wide-brimmed hat but the glare reflects up and slides a flat-bladed knife inside my skull.

  If I were a sailor I’d whistle for a wind, says Joe Fish. But I’m too dry. Can’t make a sound.

  He blows a few dry notes and grimaces.

  Is that an island on the horizon?

  I squint into the sun and the blade slides further, the tip of it between my frontal lobes. Pull the hat down and cower in its shade. But there is an island, and it’s getting closer as we trudge across the solidified surface of the sea. Why the hell did we need the boat before when we’re making such good headway on foot?

  Fabián, how far is it to La Paz? asks Horse Boy gruffly, with the tone of an impatient child.

  Once we are on the other side of this, says Fabián, it is still some way. But at least there are roads. We can try to find a lift.

  La Paz. Landlocked capital of a landlocked country. I shake my head and remember straight. This is no sea but a vast salt pan. There was a lake here once, but sun and time have congealed the water into a vast flow of sparkling white mineral, shimmering to the horizon where the blue peaks of the Andes hover. Rippling geometric patterns etched into the surface of the salt, running away into painful distance.

  When I look back I can no longer see Barriga’s van. For a long time her carcass was still visible back there where she boiled dry and died, a still black point in waves of salt, the origin of our slow hoofprints. I think about the boneshaking months coming out of Chile and into the south of Bolivia, and I’m almost glad to see the back of her.