Hemispheres

by Stephen Baker

  You tell each other stories, about quenched thirst, about swimming in highland rivers. There’s me and Kate in York on a chilly spring morning, walking on the old city wall behind the Minster and stopping every few paces to tongue each other silly. And there’s this garden down below, running from the back of an elegant Georgian house. A grace and favour pad for some cathedral bigwig, I’d hazard a guess. An expanse of clipped lawn, turquoise like a submerged forest of seaweed, the surfaces shimmering with dew, with a billion tiny globes of moisture. You could dive into that lawn and submerge beneath the wet grass. You could drink those lucid worlds of dew.

  Now I can’t forgive myself. I saw the jewelled lawn but I didn’t dive in. We continue plodding towards the cone of the island.

  Okay, says Horse Boy. When I was seventeen or eighteen.

  His Wiltshire burr is growing stronger. He pauses to gather enough moisture in his mouth.

  We drove up to the Ridgeway. One of them late summer evenings when you think it’s never going to get dark. A harvest moon, massive and orange and hanging like a pregnant belly and the sky blue like smoke. You could see the White Horse on Uffington Hill. Looks like its leaping, that horse, from one hill to the next. Made out of chalk, dry as a bone and thousands of years old.

  He licks his lips and the sun bludgeons us about heads and shoulders. I look at Dave, huge patches of sweat burgeoning on his back and under his arms, dried to a white crust around the edges. Dry as a bone.

  We went down to Wayland’s Smithy. It’s a prehistoric tomb, right, just off the path in a grove of trees. This long low mound of grass and at one end there’s a facade of big flat standing stones like a row of teeth. We looked out across the fields, acres of wheat moving in the wind. And I thought, this is how it’s been, for five thousand years. The quiet tomb and the trees whispering and the wheatfield stirring. And then I thought, maybe five thousand years ent really that long at all. Just the blink of an eye.

  We march on across the salt pan, the dead sound of our feet mopped up by the soft mineral. Tramp tramp. Horse Boy looks like he’s lost the plot. Tilts his head from side to side, as if considering.

  We got off our tits down there, brew and cans and blow. Me and Emma ended up doing it. I’d been wanting to for so long that it was over in a few minutes.

  Shot his bolt, roars Joe. You should wait for the starting pistol son. Next time you give her my number.

  Horse Boy winces, but continues.

  And then we passed out too. I woke up in the middle of the night and I’ve never been so thirsty. That’s what made me think of it just now.

  Tramp tramp tramp. I stumble and almost drop but Joe grabs me under the armpits and sets me upright. The island isn’t far now, shimmering in unbearable light.

  In the end I got to sleep again, says Horse Boy. And I heard this drumming sound. Like the hardest rain bouncing from the pavements. Apples, hard and bitter, raining from the trees and buffeting the ground. Hooves, coming across the downland. The white horse, careering across the sky, just cresting the hills. I could see froth brimming up out of its mouth, and running down its neck and sides. The front hooves were over me like crescent moons and the spit was dripping from them, down into my mouth while I was asleep. It was like opium, like sherbet. White and sweet and bitter and tender. And I weren’t thirsty any more. He was in the field with me and I was standing up, holding out my hand. He nuzzled it and it became a green apple, huge, like a cooking apple. I held it out and he bit into it with these clean white teeth.

  You forgot to tell us about the magic mushrooms, Joe guffaws. Or was it an acid trip son? Can you conjure up a white horse out here?

  I don’t think so, says Horse Boy.

  We reach the island and the day’s long-drawn-out scream of heat is dwindling into a cold Altiplano night. It’s a shallow conical hill of rock, rising only a few metres above the salt pan and studded with bulbous cacti clinging to crevices in the rock. Fabián takes out a machete and butchers one and a milky fluid begins to drip out.

  It’ll be salty, says Horse Boy, don’t get excited. Can’t be no fresh water round here.

  Perhaps the cacti drink rainwater, says Fabián. There’s only one way to find out.

  He raises a slice of cactus flesh and squeezes it so that the milk dribbles into his open mouth. Stands like this for some time before closing his mouth and gasping.

  It may not have dripped from the hooves of a white horse, he says, but it is fresh.

  So we take turns to guzzle milk from the cactus flesh, ignoring the spines which puncture our skin. It’s bitter but refreshing, like a thin coconut milk. And when we’re sated we sit, shivering as the temperature plunges. There’s a thin crust of salt across our skins, stinging the sore corners of mouths and eyes, and our boots and trousers are white. The stars come out like clumsy fists and beneath them the salt pans glitter.

  Joe wets his lips and whistles a few bars and I lift my voice and join in with the words. We’re a bunch of fucking animals, we’re the airborne infantry.

  When I dropped off that roof, says Horse Boy. If I’d fallen a few inches to one side, I’d have caved my skull in. I’d never have come back.

  Bollocks, says Joe. And I’ll tell you for why.

  Go on then.

  Because it’s all predetermined boy. From the day the universe set rolling. There is no such thing as what if. You were always going to come back.

  I reckon, I say. There’s a parallel universe where Joe is a right looker and he has the gift of the blarney and has the ladies eating out of his pants.

  Horse Boy laughs. Now you’re stretching credibility Yan.

  When I started walking, that day at Mount Longdon, I say, I thought I’d walk down the hill, into the belly of the ocean. Look where I’ve ended up.

  So why did you start? says Horse Boy.

  Dunno. Why did you come after me?

  Dunno.

  Horse Boy laughs and shakes his head, hunkers back down on his rock. Night thickens.

  Tongues of rock begin to appear among the salt flats, and we realize we’re nearing the far side. The sun swamps the entire sky in flood-waters of sulphurous heat, and dark bare hills begin to loom. We scramble up and over a low ridge encrusted with garish minerals, and look down on a lake of blood, many miles across and encircled by pure snow. Bare rounded hills float behind it, hazy in the heat. We scramble down closer to the shoreline and find, not virgin snow, but a white crystalline precipitate. Fabián crumbles some of the mineral and dabs it with his tongue.

  Borax, he says. And the lake is blooming not with blood but with red algae. This is Lago Colorado.

  There are thousands of flamingos feeding across the lake. Chilean flamingos, a vivid salmon pink, legs crooked at improbable angles as they wade, their dark bills inverted, sweeping through the water to strain out algae.

  The algae give them the colour, says Fabián. Otherwise they turn white.

  More birds stream in from the sky, legs trailing, and the blood-red lake is alive with movement and chatter. We watch the garish pink birds skimming the algae out of the water, squabbling and flirting, sleeping with one foot tucked up and bill smuggled among the back feathers. They are at home here, on a lake of rusty blood, lying in a bed of congealed minerals and salts, high above sea level in the Altiplano of Bolivia.

  I sit down on a rock, shade my eyes. As Fabián passes in front of me his skull blots out the disk of the sun, like the knurled fist of the moon making an eclipse. The sun’s corona spills out around him, straggling in his long hair, making an improbable halo.

  And seven days later in La Paz, the man sitting opposite me also has a halo. Sunlight pours from the thin blue sky and streams, ghostly, from behind his crisp black shape. The air is attenuated, low in oxygen. Even sitting motionless I can feel my lungs working, wringing the meagre gas from each breath. Across the table his face remains in shadow, thrown into eclipse, but there are flames around it where shafts of light ignite his wispy golden hair and solar flar
es leap out into space, cold and giddy. He sips at a short dark coffee and one sleeve of his black suit rides up to show a shirt cuff so sharp and white it’s almost blue.

  So, he says, you have decided.

  I’m not sure if this is statement or question. His voice is flat, but resonates with the heat of coffee and tobacco. I swallow a mouthful of coffee and it drips from my vocal cords like golden lava. I look away, beyond the billowing corona of gold, beyond the pavement café in Plaza San Francisco and up towards the Altiplano and the bleached horizon, the three peaks of Illimani floating in the sky like jagged sherds of moon, cupping La Paz like a day-old chick nestling in the hand. Small houses jostle down the steep sides of the canyon, and below them the encircled city thrusts up buildings of concrete and glass into the emptiness like jewelled stems of summer grass.

  The man with the halo is waiting for an answer, his manicured fingertips drumming against the white porcelain of his coffee cup.

  I’ll do it, said Dave, earlier in the hotel room. Don Hernán is my contact after all.

  Don Hernán is my contact after all, scoffed Joe Fish unkindly. Listen to you. You think you’re a big-shot drugs baron. You smuggled a bit of snout, end of story. He lolled back in the armchair.

  I’m in, said Horse Boy, pacing across the room. I’m sick of this, since the money ran out. He ent offering us much, but at least we can get back to Europe. I’m ready to go home lads.

  I looked around the little hotel room, the metal shutters still closed, pinpricks of light clattering around the room like small change. Delved into my tobacco pouch and found it almost empty. Just enough bumfluff in the bottom to fashion a loose cigarette. I lit it and it burned quickly and the smoke was harsh and sallow.

  I’m against this, said Fabián, sitting on the bed and running a hand over his straggling hair. There’s too much risk. I’d rather be penniless in La Paz than in jail. Drug mules can get twenty years.

  He paused and exhaled.

  I’m against it, he said again. But you’ve drowned me in the Southern Ocean and burned me in that hotel room in Chile and if you are all for it then I will go.

  I have to say it’s tempting, said Joe, gruffly. Passports, good forgeries. Tickets to Europe. And money. Just to take one suitcase each, and hand it over to somebody at the other end.

  I was lying on the bed, hands behind my head. There was a ceiling fan above me which didn’t work. Flies were buzzing round it, alighting on the blades.

  But your man has seen us coming Dave, said Joe. He knows we’re desperate and that’s why the wedge is shite.

  The sun was pawing at the shutters, desperate to come in. I couldn’t work out why we were sitting in the dark.

  It’s up to me and you, then, Joe, I said. If we’re in, we can tell the man yes. If we’re out, then it’s no deal.

  He cleared his throat and tugged at a pendulous earlobe. Raised one eyebrow, and slapped a closed fist on the arm of his chair. He looked at my hand, flat as a pancake, and rolled his eyes.

  Paper wraps stone, I said. We’ll tell him yes.

  I walked over to the shutters and lifted the metal bar. Then I threw them back and the sunlight roared across the room like a breaker, motes of dust and cigarette smoke sparkling and twirling.

  Solar flares continue to erupt from the golden mane of Don Hernán. He has finished his coffee now and the bustle of the market moves around us in Plaza San Francisco, but we sit still like chess players, like boulders in an upland stream. I drain my coffee and his corona shimmers.

  The answer is yes, I say, putting my coffee cup carefully down in its saucer.

  I’d normally smoke a cig here but I’m out of tobacco and the money’s finished. I feel restless, rub a finger against my thumbnail, tracing the same pattern over and over again.

  Good, he says.

  He picks up his briefcase and gets to his feet. A respectable businessman.

  Go back to your hotel, he says. My associates will be in touch about your travel arrangements.

  He moves away through the market, starkly black and white among the colourful Indian shawls, his golden head burning like a field of summer wheat.

  *

  So we wait for two days and then Dave is handed a brown envelope in a pavement café. Back at the hotel we rip it open and empty the contents onto the bed. Five passports and five tickets. Somebody will meet us at the airport with our luggage. We examine the tickets. All flying into Köln–Bonn, but on different days and by different routes. I look at my passport and see that they’ve done a sound job – a British passport in the name of Michael Cornelius, place of birth Wakefield. How do these people know about Wakefield?

  In with the tickets there’s a small advance of cash, just to tide us over. We walk out of the hotel feeling buoyant, looking for a bar and some smokes. We look at women on the street and Horse Boy barks like a dog and draws some bemused smiles. The sun is warm on our faces.

  Late at night, in the hotel room, Fabián shells a photograph out of his wallet.

  Your kids?

  Yes.

  He lays the photo down on the table. A boy and a girl.

  He has your eyes, I say.

  Carlos. He will be twelve this year. Wants to be a footballer. Amazes me, sometimes, what he can do with the ball. You have a boy also Yan.

  Danny. Aye, he’d be older now. Fourteen, fifteen.

  Bet he’s a card sharp, like the old man.

  You bet. All the fancy shuffles. Bluffs like an old-timer. Thirteen years old he was breaking hearts.

  I grin.

  Nice kids Fabián, I say. So why don’t you go home?

  He tosses his head like a spooked horse.

  Why don’t you?

  I shrug.

  I’m light as a feather, I say. Life is light as a feather.

  *

  All the fancy shuffles. Bluffs like an old-timer. Why did you tell him that?

  I don’t know why I told him that Dan.

  Maybes you were ashamed of the real me. The lad who was all thumbs at cards and turned puce whenever a lass spoke to him.

  I wasn’t ashamed. It was just – I wanted to make this image for Fabián. To make it a good story, that was all. Maybe I just wanted to impress him.

  That’s pretty sad Yan.

  Aye. I suppose it was.

  You couldn’t even remember how old I was.

  And we play cards for small change, the few pesos and bolivianos we still have rattling around in our pockets. Fabián opts out, falls asleep on the bed, hands tucked behind his head. Light splashes across the mahogany sheen of the table.

  I’m out, says Horse Boy, grey circles around his tired eyes. He lays his hand face down on the table and the light flutters over a series of faint notches in the edge of one of the cards.

  I’ll see you Dave, I say, clattering a handful of pesos onto the table. I run my fingers down the edges of the cards in my hand. This one has a little notch in, just below the corner. And this one. Both of them are kings.

  Thou shalt have a fishy, on a little dishy, sings Joe, thick smoke guttering from his filterless cigarette. I smell you Dave.

  He lets a handful of little coins fall onto the table, shimmering like a waterfall in sunlight.

  Okay, says Dave, taking a sip of whisky from his glass. Now for the draw. How many Yan?

  Three.

  Thou shalt have a fishy, when the boat comes in.

  He slides them across the table to me, and I notice for the first time how he runs a finger down the edge of each card as it comes. How he does the same thing when dealing out two cards to Joe, one card to himself. I take a suck of beer, cold and clear and constant. Keep watching Dave’s hands, not his face.

  I’ll stand pat, I say.

  Raise you ten, says Joe.

  Another shower of clattering coins.

  Ten, and raise you twenty, chirps Dave, shovelling more in.

  Dance for tha’ daddy, sing for tha’ mammy.

  And then I see him do it.
Flips a thumbnail across the corner of a card, making a little notch.

  I’m out. Slap my cards down, sick to the stomach.

  Aye, says Joe, with a wink. Too rich for me, as well.

  Come on, crows Dave, reaching out both his arms to sweep up the drift of coins from the centre of the table.

  I grab one of his forearms hard, and twist. Suddenly Joe and Horse Boy are deadly serious, looking at me. Dave wriggles like a fish on the hook.

  Marking the fucking cards Dave, I say. I’ve just seen you. What is it, a notch on the court cards? One for a king, two for an ace?

  He twists free, puts both his hands flat on the table. A sheen of sweat across his face.

  It’s not on, he blurts. You’re questioning my integrity. What –

  And his voice rises to a squeal as I go for his throat and the table goes over, little pesos and bolivianos exploding everywhere, glinting like fish scales. Glasses smash, whisky slicks the floor. Dave backs against the wall, knocking down a flimsy shelf as he does so, chipboard splintering and rawlplugs ripping out. I press him against the plaster with my forearm at his throat.

  Fucking your mates up the arse for loose change, I say. What kind of a cunt are you?

  He backs along the wall. Joe and Horse Boy are on the floor, patiently picking up the spilled money, and Fabián is reclining on one elbow, watching.

  Come on, Dave stammers. Don’t have to ruin our friendship over it.

  I pick up the Walther and smash the butt into one side of his head and he squeals again and goes down on all fours. Then I grab him by the hair and hoist him back up.

  Get out, I say.

  He hovers, incredulous. I watch a gob of dark blood come adrift from his hairline and sway down the side of his face, making a neat detour round the eye socket and the corner of the mouth, disappearing below the neckline of his shirt.

  But we’ve got a deal with Don Hernán, he stammers, face a ghostly white.

  We’ve got a deal. But you just counted yourself out.