by Guy Burt
‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Who’re you?’
A quick flood of warmth comes with the words: he speaks like Lena – Italian. ‘I’m Alex,’ I say. ‘Hello.’
‘I’m Jamie. Pleased to meet you,’ he adds, formally. Then he says, ‘How did you get up there?’
‘It’s not as high this side.’
‘What’s back there?’
‘Rocks,’ I say. ‘And lizards.’
‘Really?’ I can see him looking at the wall, which must be almost hidden from him by bushes and flowers, looking for a way up.
‘My garden has a tree,’ I explain. ‘You climb that, then you climb the wall.’
‘There’s nothing here,’ he says, sounding frustrated. Then, ‘Wait – I know.’ He looks up at me again. ‘You’ll stay there?’
‘OK.’
‘Won’t be long.’ He turns and runs away across the lawn to the side of the house, and disappears from sight there.
I cling on where I am, wondering what he is going to do. It is like a puzzle, like one of the ones my father gives me to stimulate my mind.
‘Imagine, Alex,’ he says, ‘that you have three pieces of string.’
I try my best, and nod.
‘The first one is as long as two fingers. The second is as long as three fingers, and the third is as long as six fingers. Do you think if you put the first and second end-to-end, they’d be as long as the third?’
I stare at the table, but the words muddle me. String and fingers dance in my head: Lena shows me how to make a cat’s-cradle and pass it from person to person; I stretch string tight and twang it, feeling the quick-dying vibrations in my hands; I coil string tightly around my thumb and leave a red spiral mark when I take it off, neat grooves running all the way up.
This problem is easier, though. The boy – Jamie – Pleased to meet you – wants to get over the wall, but there’s no tree like the one I have. I think it through, and am pleased to realize he has gone to get a ladder, when there is a scuffling sound off to my left, on my side of the wall. I look round, and to my surprise see Jamie coming round the end of the wall. I drop down from where I’m hanging and go to meet him.
‘How’d you do that?’ I ask, impressed.
‘I went round,’ he says. ‘I ran. It is higher back here, ‘isn’t it?’
After a second or two, I start to see what he means. If you go out of the front gate of his house, and followed the wall to your left, and went through the fence that runs beside the road, and kept following the wall round the next corner – you would be here, at the back. The idea is amazing. In another couple of seconds, I see that I can do the same from my front gate, turning right instead of left. It has never occurred to me before that this might be possible. You get to the rocks and the lizards by going up the tree and over, that is how it has always worked. I have never imagined—
‘What is it?’ he says.
‘Nothing.’
‘You looked weird.’
‘I was just thinking,’ I say.
‘Oh.’ He is quiet for a moment. ‘How old are you?’
‘Six.’
‘I’m seven,’ he says. ‘So. Where are these lizards?’
I look around me. ‘They’re not here any more,’ I say. ‘They go away when it’s evening.’
‘Oh,’ he says, sounding disappointed. ‘But you said they were here.’
They’ll be here tomorrow,’ I say. ‘If you could come tomorrow, I could show you some.’
‘Yeah? OK.’
At that, we both hear a woman’s voice calling, ‘Jamie!’
‘That’s my mum,’ he says. ‘I’ve got to go. I’ll see you tomorrow. Bye, Alex.’
‘Bye,’ I call after him, as he runs off around the end of the wall. He runs quickly and easily, his feet sure on the uneven ground, almost as if he is floating. I trudge back to my end of the wall, but rather than climb over, I go around the end, and find to my astonishment that what I have worked out is right: after getting through the fence, I am outside my own front gate. The discovery makes me smile as I go inside, and the smile is made wider by the thought that tomorrow, Jamie and I are going to look for lizards together.
I am staring at the window, still. The more I look at it, the more I can’t bear it being broken. It’s as if some important part of the house’s warmth and security is gone. It speaks of neglect, too, and there’s something peculiarly upsetting about that. I shall have to—
I stop myself abruptly. I am supposed to be concentrating on the paintings, not on fixing window panes. They’re still in the suitcase; I haven’t even got them out yet. I have spent a whole evening and most of this morning doing – what?
Doing something I haven’t been able to do since I was twelve.
I want to shake my head, clear it of these distractions so I can focus on the things that are supposed to be important. But it’s more difficult than I have thought. How can I concentrate on the pictures when, all around me, small signs of change and neglect are needling in at me, whispering their presence? It will be impossible.
Perhaps I could mend some things, fix some things; get the house a little way back to how it should be. It wouldn’t take too much effort. Just some very basic repairs would perhaps be enough to give me the peace of mind to concentrate properly.
I can make a start with the window. I have to start somewhere, after all. I tell myself that I will think about the exhibition, and the paintings, while I work; and this sounds so convincing to me that I almost start to believe it.
Chapter Three
I do get to the paintings eventually. In the afternoon, I buy what I need to mend the broken pane, and more besides; heavy bags of tools and materials for which I am bound to find a hundred uses. I buy house paint, too: emulsion for the walls, to get them back the way they were – the way they should be. I set out all I have bought on the sitting-room floor, and go to work to fix the window. All through the afternoon, in the easy rhythm of working with my hands, the past comes, floating up around me and threatening to engulf me; and I fight it back, trying to stay in the here and now, trying to gain control. Sometimes – most of the time – I manage it.
I can’t understand why this is happening to me now; and why so strongly, so – insistently.
Jamie and Anna. I tell myself that it must be inevitable that being back here again would stir up memories of them. It’s natural; this was their place, of course, as well as mine. It’s no surprise that they’re here in my thoughts so much.
But it has been so long since I’ve thought of them, and these aren’t just memories – these are fragments of reality, snatched from the past and creeping up around me in the present. It’s something I’ve learnt to live without all my adult life, and now it’s here, it’s back, and I can’t even control it. I might have expected to think of Jamie and Anna once or twice while I was here – but not this, not this.
In the evening, I try to lose myself in the pictures. I open the case and spread them out on the floor of the sitting room, covering the boards with rectangles of colour. From them, faces look out at me, their features fractured and then regathered, as if seen through a thousand cracked lenses at once. I remember how the critics first called this style of mine a bastardization of cubism; and how later they found in it a fusion of styles that they were pleased to decide broke down the barriers between formal movements in painting; and how finally it became so accepted that now there are younger artists who make their own fusions from it, and find in it new barriers to be broken down. Sometimes it makes me laugh, and sometimes it makes me angry. Right now, I find I hardly care: they all seem so very far away.
I try to arrange them vaguely as they will be in the gallery. It’s to be a chronology, from my earliest work through to the present day. A retrospective. I deal out the photographs like a fortune-teller arranging the cards, spreading them out on the boards, first to last in a wide arc. Gradually the sense of them starts to become apparent: the shifts of style and focus that have happened ov
er the years. I sit in their centre, staring, puzzling, trying to see what it is that feels so wrong – so incomplete – about them. There must be something. It’s strong enough to have made it impossible for me to stay any longer in London; and yet at the same time it’s so slight that I can’t get hold of it, can’t lay my hand on it. All I know for sure is that something is missing. Even that shred of understanding is new to me, has come only with this business of the exhibition, and the gathering together of the pictures that it’s involved. Individually, the paintings are whole. Seen together, they are—
I can’t understand.
I stare at them, frowning, and the colours shift under the intensity of my gaze: change for a moment and are darker, as if a cloud has come over the sky and cut out all the light of the sun—
* * *
Darkness but the light of stars—
It’s dark; the shadows of the rocks and cliffs are very deep. It is night-time, and the cliffs and the vegetation that straggles along their top are leached of colour. Somewhere close by is the sea: the sound of it, slowly rhythmic; the interlocking patterns of the waves discernible by moonlight, some blue-black here beween the pearlescent ribbons of light that blur across the low crests. Off to one side are three rocks breaking out of the water, and to the other is a little promontory of land that curves out into the water, defining a naturally calm place sheltered from the greater expanse of the sea beyond. The shadow of the rock where it hits the water kills the moonlight, and makes a dark, impenetrable hollow by the curving underside of the promontory.
Standing on the curve of land—
With a quick gasp and shudder the pictures are around me again. I stare at them blankly for one long, uncertain moment when the floor feels not quite solid and I am not sure whether I can keep my grip here or not. Then everything is hard and real again. With clumsy hands I sweep the photographs together into a pile, fumbling them together, pushing them away from me.
What was that? Where did that come from?
I look around the room and everything is how it was.
I need to do something. I need simple work that will – steady me. Hold me together.
By the wall are tins of paint. I remember: the room is the wrong colour. All the rooms are wrong. I have to change them back. Moving quickly – eagerly – I leave the paintings in the middle of the room and turn my back to them, getting brushes, a screwdriver, levering the lids from the cans of emulsion. I look at the empty expanse of the wall, ready for new paint, and take a deep breath.
* * *
The Art rooms smell of turpentine and oils – chalk, charcoal – white spirit—
The picture I have made is the still life we are supposed to draw, but there is something else – a face breaking through the surface of the picture, half submerged there – his face – Jamie’s face—
As soon as I can, I scramble over the wall to wait for Jamie. I have endured the morning’s story with my father and am free now until lunch. It is hot back here already; the sun rises at the head of the valley and sets down over the water, and though this side catches it a little more fully, the whole of Altesa is bathed in light from mid-morning through to sunset. The stones of the waste ground here soak up the heat and hold it, and even after dusk will be warm to the touch, as though alive. Jamie is nowhere to be seen. After a few minutes of walking back and forth, I settle down to wait, finding a comfortable place to sit and raking together a pile of pebbles to throw at the larger rocks.
It is warm and I feel lazy and happy.
Lena and I go for a walk up the valley. Sometimes we do this, though not often; more usually our walks take us down, to the shops and the central square and the piglets and the drinking-fountain. I like the drinking-fountain a lot. The bronze lion’s head, with its snarlingly open mouth and constant stream of bright water, entrances me. Even when we are sitting at Toni’s waiting for ice-creams and Cokes, I keep my eye on it.
This afternoon, though, we go further along the road, and then, once we are quite far from the town, down a side-track that Lena says once led to one of the outlying farms. Lena is telling me stories, too – some of which I’ve heard before and know almost by heart – and keeping her eyes open for wild herbs growing by the track: sage, sorrel and thyme, to pick and use in the kitchen. A bunch of wild myrtle hung at the window will keep the flies away. I go happily along with her, sometimes running ahead and waiting for her to catch me up, sometimes carrying her basket for her.
We walk for a long time, further than I have ever been before; I can’t see our house any longer, and the countryside around us is full of the sounds of crickets and the quieter, daytime cicadas. We pass a few derelict buildings, and two which clearly still have people living in them: in the fenced-in yard of one, a big brown dog raises his head gently from where he is lying in the shade, but doesn’t seem able to work up the enthusiasm to bark at us. At last, just as Lena is saying that maybe we should be heading back, I see a bridge ahead of us in the dirt road.
‘Lena – a bridge!’
She smiles. ‘Go on, then.’
I dash on to reach it. The sides of the bridge are higher than they have looked, and as I wait for Lena I haul myself up to lean over the edge. Below me, though, there isn’t a river, as I’d hoped; the ground is dry, sandy, though there are what look like waves and ripples in the sand. The sand – or dust; some of it looked more that way – is reddish, like all the earth around Altesa, but much finer, and smooth. Where rocks stand up in its surface, the sand seems to have flowed round them, making strange, fluid shapes. In several places there are matted thatches of dead sticks and twigs and rubbish and leaves, turned brown and dry by the sun.
Lena stands beside me and looks over also.
‘There’s no water,’ I say.
‘No,’ she agrees.
‘But it looks like a river. And there’s a bridge.’
‘Sometimes there’s water in it,’ she says. ‘When the storms come. But most of the time it’s dry. It’s not really a river, you see, it’s just a place where the water runs when it rains in the hills.’
‘Oh,’ I say. I am slightly disappointed that there’s no water, but the not-a-river is peculiar and a little magical. I let my gaze travel up along its length, tracing the course back up through the valley. It twists and meanders from side to side a bit, but I can make out its paler route among the dark earth and grey-green grasses and scrub right up towards the foothills of the valley’s end. Just at the point where it fades from sight, I can see a little building: white walls and rust-coloured roof, standing alone in the middle of nowhere.
‘What’s that?’
‘Where?’ she asks. I point, and she bends her head down to follow the line of my arm.
‘That. The little house.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘That’s not a house. That’s a church.’ She pauses for a moment. ‘Well, rightly it’s more like a chapel. That’s a small church. It’s not used now. You know the church in the town?’
‘Yes.’
‘People go there. The chapel – well, it’s a ruin now. Not many people live up that end of the valley any more.’
‘Mm,’ I say.
‘There’s a story about that place,’ she says after a second.
‘Tell me!’ Lena’s stories are always good. It’s Lena who tells me about the people in the town, and the things that happened when she was young; and about the strange white house high up on the far side of the valley, where Signor Ferucci lives, and hardly ever comes out.
‘Well – maybe on the way back home. Now have a good look, and fix it in your mind so you can picture it when I tell you.’
I do so, staring at the distant building, frowning with concentration. Lena smiles.
‘Right, that’s enough. Let’s go.’
I jump down from the bridge and trot along beside her. ‘What’s the story?’ I say.
She clears her throat the way she does when she’s going to tell me something. ‘Well now. Like I told you, the
chapel there isn’t used any more. I don’t know when they built it – maybe hundreds of years ago, for all I know – but now it’s a ruin. And it was a ruin thirty years ago, when I was a girl.’ We walk on in silence for a few yards, while she orders her thoughts.
‘But for a long time, back then, it wasn’t quite deserted. There was a hermit, you see, who lived there.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A hermit?’
‘Mm.’
‘He’s a man who lives all alone. They’re supposed to be monks, though I don’t know if this one was. Maybe he was just a tramp, or a gypsy; but because he lived in the chapel people began to think of him as if he was a holy man. He lived there for – oh, many years.’
‘What was he like?’
‘I don’t know. I never saw him. My parents used to tell us to keep out of his way.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘One day he packed up his things – he could carry everything he owned on his back – and he went off into the hills over there.’ She points. ‘And he was never seen again.’
‘Where did he go?’ I ask, impressed.
‘Nobody knows.’
‘Maybe he went off to find a different chapel,’ I say.
‘Maybe. Or a cave. Hermits are supposed to live in caves, too.’
‘In caves?’
‘That’s right.’
‘That would be fun,’ I say.
‘You know, I used to think the same thing when I was little. But now I’m not so sure. It might be a bit cold, don’t you think? And damp.’
‘And smelly.’
‘Probably.’
‘Lena?’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you think Signor Ferucci’s a hermit?’
Lena shakes her head. ‘No. Just someone who keeps themself to themself.’
‘Oh. All right.’
We walk on in companionable silence and, in my head, impressions of the hermit whirl, becoming confused with details Lena has mentioned until the church in which the man crouches has an interior like a cave, with rock walls and stalactites and bones, while at the entrance blazes a bonfire, sending up a column of smoke that alarms the distant townsfolk.