by Guy Burt
I suddenly regret having waited so long. Perhaps, if I’d said something before—
But at least everything’s all right now.
I round the corner into the street where the club is, and I’m looking towards where the news kiosk is, so it takes me a moment to realize that something is going on. There is a fluttering line of tape across the road, green and white, further down beyond the kiosk; and some police cars lined up against the kerb. A handful of people are standing about, watching something. Curious, I quicken my pace, and the tune I’ve been whistling slips my mind.
At the kiosk I hand over money for the paper and nod down the street.
‘What’s going on down there?’
‘Bomb,’ the man says. ‘They’re still clearing up. No-one’s allowed past the lines until they know what happened.’
‘A bomb?’ I say. ‘Where?’
‘A club,’ the man says. ‘In the basement there, so there’s not a lot to see in the street.’
‘The jazz bar?’ I say, feeling suddenly hollow.
‘Yes. You know it? Blew the whole place apart. Everywhere’s crawling with police.’ He shakes his head, warming to the story. ‘It happened last night. Everyone in the street heard it, they were all out here. There was a fire, too.’
I can see a blackened smudge of soot across the buildings further down the street. I say, ‘Were – was anyone hurt?’
He nods. ‘Eight people killed, and a lot more injured.’
‘Christ,’ I say.
‘You all right?’ the man says; then, ‘Hey. You don’t look well. What is it?’
‘I was there last night,’ I say, the words sounding as if they’re coming from a long way away. ‘I mean – I was in there. I went there.’
‘Hey, calm down,’ the man says. ‘You look sick. At least you weren’t there when it happened.’ A shadow of worry crosses his face. ‘You had friends in there? You should talk to the police, they know the names, I think. Is that it? You had friends in there?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s OK. It’s nothing.’
‘Well, you still look sick.’
‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘I’m fine.’
‘If you were there last night, that was a close escape,’ the man says. ‘I think I’d look sick too.’
‘Yeah,’ I say, not really hearing. I grip the newspaper in fingers that feel numb, and start down the street towards the police cars and the tapes.
The steps leading down to the bar are black with smoke and slick with water. Standing by the tapes I can see across the cordoned-off area to a fire truck on the other side. There are policemen and firemen standing about in huddles. In the street, apart from the water from the hoses, there is little to see. There are some glittering fragments of glass, but nothing else. There are no ambulances, and I realize that they must have been and gone long before I arrived.
‘Hey,’ I call to one of the cops. He turns and sees me, but goes back to talking to his companion. ‘Hey,’ I call again. ‘What happened?’
He finishes talking, and comes over. ‘Explosion,’ he says.
‘The man back there said it was a bomb.’
‘It might have been gas,’ he says. ‘We’ll know more later. You should move on now.’
‘Was anyone hurt?’
‘Yes,’ he says shortly. ‘Eight people killed. Maybe more by now. Some of the ones they took off to hospital looked pretty bad.’
‘Why?’ I say. I don’t mean to say it; it’s almost as if I’m thinking aloud.
‘You think the people who do this kind of thing need reasons?’ he says. Then he hesitates, as if hearing how the words have sounded. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘It could have been gas. You should move on now.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, of course.’
My feet carry me slowly back down the street, but the rhythm of my footsteps seems sprained, disjointed, as if some mechanism has broken. I am still holding the newspaper. I thinks, Thank God. Thank God it didn’t all – end there.
Into my head from nowhere comes a dark night, rain hammering down, and her hand slipping out of mine – Anna falling backwards away from me, swept suddenly into darkness. I can’t let it happen again.
Suddenly I am desperate to get back to her, to make sure she’s really safe, to hold her, to hear her voice. Everything seems fragile, as if it could crack. I need to touch her, to make sure she’s still there.
The disturbed nights are starting to tell on us all. Jamie has dark patches under his eyes and I find it more and more difficult to get up for breakfast. But we have to get up, so as not to look suspicious; and we have to keep waking up on the hour, every hour, because none of us wants to be the one alone in the chapel, with no reassurance that friends are thinking of them at the other end of the valley. Still, when the alarm clock goes to start me on my shift, it is achingly hard to drag my legs out of the cosy comfort of my bed, and pull on my clothes over my pyjamas. I have stopped bothering about getting properly dressed; it’s easier this way to get back into bed once it’s over for the night.
It is Anna’s shift at the moment. I trudge up the valley, my feet walking in a mass of footprints left over the many days we’ve all made this journey now. The dry dust of the riverbed is still smooth and unbroken in some places, towards the edge; but we’ve kicked and scuffed and trodden in it all down the middle, wearing a band of darker, less crystalline colour through the soft red. In the starlight, of course, it’s just another shade of silver-grey. Jamie reads that the colours don’t go at night; it’s just that our eyes can’t see them any more. He tells me about it one afternoon when we are in his bedroom and Anna is keeping watch in the chapel; one of the few moments of normality we manage to snatch in the middle of all the pretending and planning and running and keeping watch that have to be juggled for the hermit’s safety. Normally I am fascinated by anything Jamie tells me, but this time, I am just too tired. My concentration wanders and my mind drifts away from Jamie’s voice and before I know it I am asleep. Jamie has to wake me up. He looks almost guilty about doing it, as though he knows how I feel and would perhaps secretly like to join me; but we’ve promised Anna that we’ll go back and join her by the end of the afternoon. I realize with astonishment that I have slept two hours away.
It has got so that I know the route of the journey perfectly in my head. I recognize particular bushes, particular shapes in the dusty sand, particular trees against the silhouettes of the hills. I can keep a good track of where I am, how much further there is to go. I play little games in my head: when I reach the tree that looks like an old man, I am halfway there. Then it’s half the remaining distance to the flat stone low in under the bank. Then it’s about half what’s left to the bush which has night flowers that smell dully sweet in the late evenings. Half again to a little scatter of bones, some animal killed by a fox, or perhaps drowned when there really was a river here. Then halfway again …
I reach the chapel. We have worn a little way through the weeds up to the fence. In all the time we have been coming to the chapel, I have never seen anyone else near it, so the fact that we’re leaving signs of our coming and going doesn’t really worry me. The air cools and smells a little bit tangy as I pass under the stone pines; and then, at the end of the chapel, right under the dandelion clock, I stop, because I can hear something strange.
Very faintly, there is the sound of singing: a clear, high voice weaving through a strange, rather mournful tune. It’s so quiet that I shake my head to see if I’m imagining it; but it’s still there a moment later. Very slowly, I walk forward, to see if I can hear better. By the big double-doors of the chapel I stop again, and turn my head this way and that to catch the sound. I stare around the empty churchyard for the owner of the voice, but the place is deserted.
Then it comes to me that the singing is coming from inside the chapel. I step in nearer the door, and sure enough, the faint sound becomes fractionally clearer. I frown as I realize that it must be Anna singing. I’ve never heard her sing b
efore. Her voice is sure, and in the still night air it sounds haunting and beautiful. But what makes me frown is that, though I can hear her properly now, I can’t understand what she’s saying. The words of the song make no sense.
I’ve heard something like this before.
Slowly, like the way sunlight fades out of a room when a cloud goes over the sky, a kind of coldness comes over me. I have the sense that I am on the edge of something I don’t properly understand, that there is something here I must remember but mustn’t mention. It isn’t frightening; it is just – something.
The voice moves through the music, up and down through the phrases, but the words – the words are like the sound of water through gravel. Anna’s voice changes with them, and it is unfamiliar, Anna’s voice but also not Anna’s voice.
Something clicks together in my head, a connection: this is like the moment when I see her poised on the lip of rock high up in the shadow of the cliff. They’re the same thing. I shouldn’t have seen that, and I shouldn’t have heard this. They aren’t supposed to be for me.
I’m not sure what to do, so I wait by the doors. It hasn’t occurred to me before that, when one is outside the chapel and down at this end, the hermit’s bed is of course only a couple of yards away through the arch here. Because the doors won’t open, and we always go to the far end of the chapel, we have almost forgotten how the inside corresponds to the outside.
I wonder suddenly if I can see inside.
People are supposed to look through keyholes, but most of the keyholes I have ever tried to look through have been blocked up with stuff, and no use at all. I kneel down, making sure to let my knees down gently into the pine needles, and lean forward. I don’t touch the doors. In the wind, they move and creak a bit, and they would do that if I touched them, I’m sure.
Anna’s voice comes cleanly through the keyhole, but I can’t see anything much. There is a dim, uncertain glow, but the angle or something is wrong for me to see the hermit.
There are cracks in the door, though. I try them one at a time, putting my eye up close to each one. And I find one that works.
There is a candle burning. We are all being careful to obey Jamie’s injunction about wasting candles, and we only ever have one alight at a time. Sometimes they blow out, if there is a sudden gust of wind under the door, but that doesn’t happen very often and the torch is always nearby. Even so, it can be a breathless few seconds before the torch is on and you can see again.
The hermit looks as if he’s asleep. Anna is sitting by his head, holding him. She has a torn piece of sheet dampened with water, and she’s holding it to the hermit’s forehead. Although the candlelight is flickery and I can’t see the hermit all that well, his face looks beaded with sweat. Anna’s head is bent down, looking at him, and again I think of the pietà, the body brought down and cradled in the woman’s arms. And all the while, Anna’s voice lifts very softly in music I don’t know and words I can’t understand.
She’s singing so quietly that it is only because I have passed so close to the doors here that I have heard. I wonder to myself if I would ever have known, if I had been a few yards further away from the building; if I had gone down to the far door and opened it. The door there makes noise coming open; she would have heard me, and I am sure she would have stopped. So I would never have known – just as if I had gone on into town that afternoon without making the connection about Anna’s watch, I should never have known about her dive from the cliff.
I suddenly wonder how many other things there are about Anna that I don’t know because I haven’t happened to be in the right place, unnoticed.
I swallow, and then get up from my crouch. I walk briskly round the end of the chapel and down the side, kicking my heels through the grit to make sound. When I reach the door, I fumble the catch, rattle it a little as I pull it open. The sound clatters and echoes in the air of the chapel. When I step inside, the only sound is the last fading hiss of echoes from my own entrance. There is nothing of any voice, or any music. As I walk down the length of the building, Anna stands up from where she’s been sitting, and comes to meet me.
A kind of deep, incipient tiredness has taken the edge of excitement from these night-time meetings, and Anna and I spend little time in conversation before she leaves. Looking after the hermit is becoming a routine: a routine that leaves us only half awake for most of the day. Anna looks eager to get back to her bed.
Once I’ve seen her safely round the end of the chapel, I go past the hermit, whose face twitches slightly in his sleep, and up the little twisting staircase and along the organ balcony and up the wooden ladder to the bell platform, and watch Anna out of sight through one of the windows there. I can make out her small shape mainly by its pale shirt; her jeans are too dark to show up well against the weeds and bushes. She scrambles through the undergrowth down to the river-bed, and is gone.
I stand in the belltower and look out at the night for a long time, caught by the silence. The night seems to have wrapped itself around the tower, and everything is very still and very calm. The sea, far away down the valley, is dark, and I can’t see the horizon.
I shake myself, and bend to the gun case. I fiddle the clasps open and lift the lid carefully on the smooth, organic shapes of the rifle. The six little sockets are there, three empty, three filled. With my fingertip I pry each of the remaining bullets free of its resting place, putting them with exaggerated caution to one side. I have no idea how easy it might be to set a bullet off; if maybe dropping them or jogging them harshly or even letting them clink against one another might be enough. But I have to do this.
When they’re all out, I close up the gun case again and put it against the wall. The bullets I wrap up in my hanky and slip slowly and steadily into my trouser pocket. Then I take the torch, and make my way back down from the belltower, and into the chapel – where the hermit is asleep, but still moving occasionally in his sleep – and out into the night.
The night-time air is faintly redolent of the scent of the pines. I have a place in mind which I have found during the day, soon after deciding to do this. It is on the side of the chapel which we approach from the river, but where there is no door. Towards the altar end of the building, the bushes start up more and more thickly, and it is difficult to get round under the great boarded-up stained-glass window for all the thorns and foliage. In the thick of this tangle of undergrowth I have found a hiding place for the hermit’s bullets: low down in the wall of the chapel is an iron grating which has come loose, and there is a space behind it. I have worked out that it must be to let air into the chapel somehow. Whatever its purpose, it is a good place, and after I’ve put the grating back in place and scuffed some dirt and pine needles up around it, you would never notice it. Certainly you would never guess there were three rifle bullets nestling together just behind it.
At last I feel satisfied, as if I can relax. Now no-one can put the gun together, and no-one can get shot.
I have to look after the hermit now. I get up, and look around me at the night-time valley, and think of the hermit’s face twisting in the dancing candlelight, and wish I didn’t have to go back in. But it’s what has to be done.
The hermit is dreaming. His eyelids tremble and his head sometimes jerks, as if he’s suddenly heard a sharp noise in the silence of the chapel. Once or twice, his right hand, which is lying out from his side on the boards of the chapel floor, clenches and drags a little against the wood.
I sit watching. I have the cloth in my hand, the torn piece of sheet which we keep cold with water and use to mop the hermit’s face and neck. The little pocket of air here at the back of the chapel is, I believe, warmed by the hermit’s fever, so that the occasional draughts which come in under the double-doors feel cold on my skin.
The hermit’s eyes flicker open for a moment, and he looks around himself, uncomprehending. Then they fall closed, and he returns to his twitching, febrile sleep.
I pat the folded cloth gently across his fac
e and neck, as Anna has shown me. I know from when we have changed the dressing that the hermit’s leg is no longer bleeding, but if anything it looks worse than when it was; the holes are puckered up, but the skin around them is mottled and taut with swelling, and the bandages which we remove and bury under rocks by the river-bank are stained with discharge.
The hermit’s eyes open again, but they are rolled up towards the chapel roof and he doesn’t see me. His mouth opens and I strain to catch the words.
‘Vizet.’
It is the fever; I can’t understand him. But then his eyes dart towards the bottle by my side, and I understand. I lift it carefully to his mouth and he drinks until the water spills down his chin and onto his shirt front. I lift the bottle away. After a moment, the hermit says something else; but again, it makes no sense.
I shake my head to show him that I don’t understand, but he hardly seems to see me. His eyes move uncertainly around the chapel and then fix on something, and widen. Instinctively I look as well, to see what the hermit has seen; but there is nothing there except the bare wall. Whatever the hermit is seeing, it is in his head.
He’s speaking again.
I shiver slightly. The sound of the meaningless words rings through the chapel, and the echoes seem to filter through to the hermit, because his voice stops, and a look of fear crosses his face. He glances this way and that, as if afraid that someone or something will creep up on him if he doesn’t keep alert.
‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘You’re safe. You’re in the chapel. Remember?’
Slowly, very slowly, as if fighting against some invisible weight, the hermit turns his eyes towards me. His mouth opens and closes twice, but no sound comes out. Then he seems to see me, because he tries to lean forward; but he can’t. He falls back against the pillow and gasps.
‘Istenem!’