by Guy Burt
To begin with I think it is the arrangement. I try to group them on the walls in ways that will make more sense of them. The linear chronology of the gallery is all wrong: I’m convinced of that now. So I try other ways to hang them. I put them in clusters, clumped together by theme or colour or the predominant tone of the composition. Each time they are as wrong as they were before. There is something about the eyes of the figures, too: the eyes that look back at me from the subjects. It has always been people, for me, never objects or empty scenes: there are always people in the paintings. Studies sketched out in retirement homes and shopping arcades and offices and bus-stops all come together here. It is a sea of faces, and the more I look at them, the more there is something about the way their eyes look back at me that stirs unease – even panic – in me.
I am beginning to feel that I don’t know these paintings – don’t know these people. Wherever I look, I can feel it: these are not my pictures. I don’t understand it. I can remember painting each one, can remember the thought processes and the physical application of media that have gone into their construction, the effort and struggle to get them right, the abandoned attempts that went before, the bundles of working sketches used to rough them out. They can’t belong to anyone else; and yet still I keep feeling that they’re not mine.
I tear them all down and lay them out again, and again. Each time the pattern alters, I think that this time they will reveal themselves to me – that they’ll make sense and, with a deep breath of relief, I’ll see that they are my own work, that I have done these things, that they haven’t – escaped from me, somehow.
Each time, when they’re back on the walls, it’s the same. I can still see that they are the paintings I have made, over the years; but they are alien to me. It’s as if I’ve been blind all along to what I’ve really been doing. Like the way the house is getting fixed around me while I am stumbling in memories, these pictures now look to me as though someone else has made them through me; as if thirty years of work has all been a sham.
In their centre, breaking the sequence, the plaster of the wall is covered with streaks and clots of paint, lines and blocks of dark, night-time colour, defining shapes. A rock. A boy, standing, about to dive.
Max’s words echo faintly in my head. A mid-life crisis – is that all this really is?
I tear them down, put them back. And they’re still not mine.
The signal is there: the quick green blinks of light. I go to the wall switch and click my room light in reply; and then, picking up my shoes and treading slowly and quietly, I make my way to the door and out into the corridor.
This will be my first night with the hermit. As I round the corner of the gate and start up the road towards the farm track, I can feel my stomach turning uneasily. All day, ever since we decided on the rota, I have been wondering if there is any way I can escape being with the hermit in the chapel at night. In the day, I tell myself, it wouldn’t be so bad; but in the awful darkness anything might happen. The chapel alone would be bad enough; but the chapel with the hermit in it is worse.
The empty riverbed at night has a peculiar, alien feel to it. The moonlight and starlight have robbed the land of colour, and the dark green shrubs and pale brown grasses and red dust underfoot are all reduced to different shades of grey. The dust is eerily light, like sand. In one of Jamie’s books on stars there are drawings of the surface of the moon: the flat expanses of dust rising to distant low mountain peaks. The dust could be moon dust; the little spurts and puffs of it that rise from underfoot drift lazily in the still night air, as if in low gravity.
With a start, I remember something: that the great dust-plains on the moon are called seas. The Sea of Tranquillity. The Sea of Serenity, The Seas of Nectar and Showers and Crises and Fertility. Jamie’s charts have them all marked out, the old Latin names first and then the English ones underneath. The Ocean of Storms and the Bay of Rainbows and the great crater, Copernicus. The names are a litany, like a poem. Dry seas; and I am here, walking on a dry river.
It’s weird. I feel myself tugged by the understanding of what it might feel like on the moon, and for one heady second, it is almost as if I might suddenly be tugged all the way there – that I might finally realize Jamie’s ambition of transporting myself to wherever I want, just by thinking it.
Somewhere out in the valley, an owl calls, and the moment vanishes as silently as a bubble. My feet continue to kick up puffs of dust, but now they are just the normal dust of the valley, turned an unfamiliar shade by the faint light of the night sky. My body, which has for an instant felt light as a feather, is its usual weight again.
I walk quickly, but it is still nearly one when I first catch sight of the chapel ahead. The pale walls of the building are just visible between the dark shadows of the trees that cluster round it. I climb the river-bank, feel my way to the railings, and clamber over them. Up above me, I catch a glimpse of a green light flickering on and off; Jamie is making the one o’clock signal to Anna. There are the piles of masonry and wood, and the stone pines, and the end of the building. I round its corner under the ever constant gaze of the blank clockface, and go to the side door.
Inside, a single candle is burning at the back of the building. The hermit is out of sight; we have moved him, after replacing his ruined dressing, to the space under the little organ gantry, where the chapel feels more enclosed and homely. Anna has made him a bed there with the blankets we’ve taken; the jumble of old pews blocks off that corner of the building and makes it more secluded.
Jamie is sitting on the bottom step of the stairs that lead up to the balcony and the belltower. He must just have come down. The candle is on the end of one of the pews near him, and by its steady yellow light I can see he has been reading. He looks up as I approach, startled for a moment, then recognizing me with relief.
‘You were quiet,’ he says.
‘How is he?’
‘He’s sleeping still. That’s all he seems to do, sleep.’
‘Maybe he needs it.’
We make our way out softly into the night. Jamie gives me the torch so I can find my way around the chapel. It is set to white at the moment; when I make my signal, I will need to change it to green with the special ring in the handle. We stand under the wall of the chapel and scrape our feet in the dirt and talk about nothing. We have both been seized with a reluctance to let go. The loneliness and isolation of the chapel at night fill me with uncertainty and foreboding, and these feelings seem to have seeped into Jamie as well, so that he finds it difficult to leave me here alone. We check the torch over again.
‘He just mostly sleeps. Sometimes he makes some noises, but not much.’
‘Yeah.’
I play with the torch. Jamie stares round at the sleeping valley.
‘I s’pose I should go.’
‘Mm.’
‘I’ll watch for your signal,’ he says, a little uncomfortably.
‘Yeah,’ I say. Then, finally finding the courage to give him permission, I add, ‘You’d better go.’ He nods, and smiles quickly. I watch from the doorway as he walks away down the length of the building, the night breezes stirring the bushes nearby.
As he reaches the corner, though, I call softly after him. ‘Jamie!’
He stops and turns. I run to catch him up. ‘What?’ he says.
‘When you’re walking back,’ I say, ‘look at the dust in the river. It looks like moon dust.’
His eyebrows go up, and he smiles, pleased. ‘OK.’
‘I noticed it on the way up.’
‘I will,’ he says.
We hesitate as if caught at the corner of the building, being pulled in different directions. At last I say again, ‘You should go.’
‘Yeah. All right. See you later, then.’
I nod. Jamie walks quickly below the trees to the fence, turns, gives me a wave, and then is over the palings and into the long grass and scrub beyond. I see the bushes waver where he moves through them, and then he is out
of sight down the curve of the river-bank. I wait a while longer, in case he comes back into view, but he doesn’t; and after a minute or two more, I trudge slowly to the chapel door. Now that Jamie is gone I am entirely alone; well, except for the hermit, and that presence is little comfort.
I close the door on the night valley and on Jamie. I am in the chapel now, where the hermit is, and it will be four hours before I can signal to Anna that I am ready to leave. I stay at the altar end of the building, pretending to look at the niches that once held statues and at the boarded-over windows, while back by the steps the candle twinkles away and the hermit, hidden in the shadows, gets on with the business of living or dying.
‘Did you find out about the lecture?’ I say.
Anna nods, spooning up ribollita hungrily. ‘Mm. There’s a whole series of them over the next ten days. I’ll catch the one on Friday, I think.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Just this guy. One of my tutors is really keen on his ideas. He’s controversial, though; far-right stuff tarted up to sound good.’
‘Oh. Not your thing, then?’
She shrugs. ‘Well, you have to listen, don’t you? Freedom of speech and all that.’
‘You don’t have to listen,’ I say. ‘You could not go.’
‘Yeah, well, it could be useful to see what he has to say on some things – eugenics and genetic manipulation, mainly. It’s all relevant.’ She laughs suddenly; she seems excitable, vibrant this morning. ‘Believe me, Alex, after a while everything’s relevant. You can’t see someone pissing in the street without thinking of a footnote.’
I raise my eyebrows. ‘You must have weird footnotes.’
‘I do,’ she grins. ‘Here, try some of this. I love it.’
‘Bread soup?’
‘It’s fantastic. God, I’m hungry.’
‘You sound like you’ve had too much coffee,’ I say.
‘Haven’t touched a drop all morning. Sorry. Am I being hyper?’
‘A little,’ I say. ‘It’s OK, though. I like it.’
She scrapes the bowl empty and pushes it to one side. ‘You said something last night. I asked if you’d had a nightmare, and you said no, it had stopped years ago, something like that.’
‘Oh,’ I say.
‘So? What was it? I didn’t know you used to have nightmares.’
‘Not nightmares,’ I say, vaguely. ‘Not really dreams. Just – a thought, I suppose.’
‘Just one thought?’
‘Well – yes, I suppose so.’
She’s looking at me curiously. ‘Tell me.’
I blink. ‘I don’t have it any more.’
‘I know. You said. Tell me.’
‘Why?’
‘I want to know. Go on.’
I say, ‘Well. It’s difficult to explain, really. I – I used to think sometimes that perhaps everything that was happening to me – my whole life – was just a memory. As if one moment I could be eleven, and playing in the sun, and the next I might – wake up, somehow, and find I was old and – and dying, and that the day when I was eleven was just a bright, clear memory. I used to be afraid it could happen at any moment, that everything could be snatched away.’ I look at her, to see what she’s making of this. She looks horrified.
‘Jesus. That’s grim. Grim and weird. Why would you think that?’
Of course, she can’t understand. I’ve never told her what I told Jamie – about how my mind used to work back then.
Jamie. I say, ‘At his – at the funeral, there was a part of the service. “In the midst of life we are in death.” I remember thinking that it could have been meant for that eleven-year-old me. That was my fear, back then.’
‘You said it stopped?’
‘Yeah. When – when I was twelve. It just – stopped happening.’ In the avalanche; swept away by the same roar of change that blocked up the door in my head. But I can’t explain all that to her now. Maybe one day.
‘Well,’ Anna says, uncertainly. ‘It’s still the scariest thing I’ve heard in a long time.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘That’s how it felt to me, too.’
‘Tell you what,’ she says suddenly.
‘What?’
‘We should go out tonight. Somewhere loud and modern and shiny. Lots of chrome and music and lights. Lots of young people. Get you out of all this moping around in the past.’
‘Um – all right.’
‘Don’t look like that. You’d like it. I saw this little place in the university quarter that looks perfect. You’d like it,’ she says again. ‘Really.’
‘What kind of little place?’
‘It’s a jazz club,’ she says. ‘They do all sorts of stuff. I can’t remember what’s on tonight. What do you say? Do you want to?’
I smile; it’s impossible not to smile when she’s like this. Her eyes are bright and alive and fixed on me, pretending to plead, knowing she’s already got her way. ‘Sure. Why not?’
‘Ottimo. Cool.’ She grins and pours herself more wine from the carafe. A slight chill has come over me, though; the way she’s just spoken has sounded too much like – I can’t be sure. Another time, maybe, or something someone else once said. I shake my head, and the feeling is gone.
‘I hope they hurry up with the veal,’ she is saying. ‘I’m starving.’
‘Have some more bread,’ I say, and watch, amused, as she tears it apart and wolfs it down. I wonder what it is that’s got her so worked up.
The place at the bottom of the stairs where Jamie has sat is comfortable enough, but I can’t read. The hermit, though silent and motionless, fixes me to the spot as rigidly as if he were awake and staring right at me. I sit with the candle by me for what feels like an hour at least, and at the end of the time I casually check my watch to see if I’m right. But only a few minutes have gone by. I stare at the watch face, holding it closer to the flame to see it clearly, and the second-hand is still ticking round regularly; the watch hasn’t stopped. But the minute-hand is hardly moving at all; no matter how closely I peer at it, its gradual, insectile creep doesn’t alter. And it has to go all the way round the numbers before the first hour is up; and that is only the first hour of four. I know, deep in my stomach, that I am not going to be able to do this.
Then the hermit moves. His head turns, though his eyes are still shut, and one of his hands flutters for a moment, weakly, before dropping to the floor. His face, catching the light a little now, is shiny with sweat.
I am frozen to the spot: even my breath has stopped. But nothing more happens. The hermit stays as he is, head over to one side, sleeping again. Slowly, very slowly, I let myself relax.
Time passes.
I am on the road into town and it is noon when I see the snake. It is to one side of the road, not in the middle, and the wheel of a car has gone over it and mashed its body into the asphalt. It looks dead, but even dead snakes can be dangerous, I know.
I get a stick from beside the road and, crouching down, prod cautiously at the snake’s head. The place where it has been flattened and split is further back, and there is a good foot or more where it looks undamaged. It is a big snake, dark in the sun, and it seems to be baked onto the surface of the road.
When my stick touches it, the snake moves. I give a twitch and almost drop the stick, but then I see that the snake can’t harm me. The way it moves isn’t like a snake any more: not oiled and fluid like a snake in the scrub grass, but just a slight contraction and pulling away. Its mouth comes open a small way and I think I see its teeth folding out, but then the mouth falls closed.
With a kind of horrified curiosity, I push the stick close to its head again. The snake’s eyes, dusty with the dust from the road and unblinking – not a lizard’s eyes, and I certainly can’t stare for that long – see the stick and it makes again its spasming, sluggish movement. The mouth comes open and seems to fumble for the end of the stick, but I pull it away out of reach. I don’t want the snake to get hold of my stick and pull it from m
e; and I don’t want it to bite the stick, and for me to pull at it and for the snake to come away with the stick. The place where it has been burst open and welded by the heat of the sun and the asphalt into part of the road looks like it might tear away and leave me with a part of the snake – the living part, even if only sluggishly alive – suddenly free.
Once the stick is away from it, the snake stays still for a while. Then a strange little tremor kicks through the length of its body, once, twice; there is a tiny, flat sound as its head knocks against the road. I wait, my mouth open, for a long time. Then I push the stick in close again, but the snake doesn’t move any more.
I get bolder, and push its head round a small way with the stick’s end, and feel the slow heaviness of the snake’s body transmit itself up the stick to my hand. But the snake doesn’t move at all any more.
After a while, I stand up, looking down at the dead snake. I throw my stick far away into the bushes by the roadside; I don’t know why, but it feels somehow like the stick might now be contaminated in some way, might be able to hurt me or infect me or something. I shiver, even though the sun is very hot, and rub my hands on the sides of my shorts.
I take a step or two back, and cross the road to the other side, and only then – at a good distance – pass by the snake. When I have gone some way, I turn and look back. It is still visible, a dark line on the reddish road, and the heat-haze trembling there makes its body seem to waver and float a little. But I know it is still dead. I hug my arms round my body and walk on into town.
There is the sound of a voice in the darkness, and I strain to catch the words – but they aren’t real—
The hermit is talking. His voice is low and hoarse and the words make no sense to me; just sounds. His voice doesn’t sound like it did when he was talking to us all, when he was properly awake; it sounds different, frightening. Instinctively I try to move away from him, but in getting to the next stair my foot slips and scrapes and makes a noise. The hermit is suddenly quiet, and I look up. The eyes are open in the glistening, flushed face, and staring about, looking for something.