by Guy Burt
It must be a curse of some kind. ‘It’s me,’ I say. ‘Alex. Do you remember?’
The hermit flinches briefly, and then his eyes seem to find me.
‘Árpád?’
It sounds like it might be someone’s name. I say, ‘No – Alex. You remember me. We’re helping you.’ The hermit doesn’t look like he understands, so I add, ‘You hurt your leg.’
There are more meaningless words. I shrug helplessly.
‘I don’t understand,’ I say. ‘You need to talk properly.’
The hermit’s eyes wander away from me and his head drops back; his breath sounds thick and painful in his throat.
‘Vizet.’
I know that one now: water. I hold the bottle for him to drink a second time. When he’s done, I dampen the cloth again and press it to his forehead. His eyes close and his breathing slackens and he is asleep again.
I watch him as he sleeps. Shadows lick around his face as the candle flame stirs, but he seems to be resting more easily. I wonder what has been coming and going in the hermit’s dreams, and what he has seen on the chapel wall.
We wait together for the night to pass.
In the third hour of my shift, the hermit opens his eyes again. He looks around him for a moment, and then he sees me. A faint attempt at a smile touches his mouth. He says, ‘Alex.’
He knows who I am for the first time tonight. I say, quietly, ‘Hello. How are you?’
‘Thirsty,’ he says. He’s shivering slightly, as if he’s cold; but I know from the sweat on his skin and the heat coming off him that he can’t be.
I say, ‘Here,’ and I offer him the bottle. He tries to lift it himself, but I have to help him. He drinks, swallowing rapidly, and almost half what’s left in the bottle disappears down his throat. At last he signals that he’s had enough.
‘That’s good,’ he gasps when I take the bottle away.
‘Are you feeling better?’ I say, cautiously.
‘I don’t know. I’m tired.’ He seems to be thinking for a moment. ‘How long have I been here now?’
‘Three days, I think,’ I say.
‘God.’
‘Maybe you’re getting better now.’
He tries to smile again. ‘Maybe I am.’
I pat the cloth on his head and he closes his eyes. His face looks much calmer than before. I say, ‘You should try to sleep. Anna says sleep’s good for you.’
‘Ah,’ he says, with his eyes closed. ‘Well, if Anna says it, it must be true, no?’
I’m surprised at how well he seems to understand what I’m saying. He hasn’t been like this for a long time. I say, ‘I suppose.’
‘Yes,’ the hermit says, and his voice is quieter, fading. ‘I’ll sleep. I’ll sleep, little Alex.’
A moment later his breathing slows, and his head turns a little to one side, and he is asleep.
I watch him. His eyes aren’t trembling and darting behind the closed lids, as they have been, and the small shivers I’ve seen a moment before seem to have ceased. His breathing is slow, and deep, and regular, in and out, in and out. I keep watching him, and his sleep seems to be sound and undisturbed. The dreams have finished, then.
I leave him to signal on the hour, and when I come down from the belltower he has turned slightly, and brought his hand up against his face, but he is still sleeping as deeply as before. His breathing sounds easy for the first time since I’ve known him: no longer gasping, or shallow, or strangely quick, or strained in his throat. It’s peaceful breathing, like Jamie’s breathing when he has fallen asleep in the shade of the garden after lunch. It doesn’t sound like the hermit’s sick any more.
I wait, and watch, to be certain that nothing bad suddenly happens, and the hour wears round.
Jamie says, ‘You’re right. He’s not as hot, either.’
He takes his hand from the hermit’s forehead and sits back on his haunches. I say, ‘He’s been like that all the last hour. It was really strange. Like one moment he was all strange and talking – weirdly. And then he went quiet for a bit. And then he woke up, and wanted water, and he wasn’t strange any more. And then he went to sleep, really heavily, like he is now.’
‘Maybe he is getting better, then,’ Jamie says.
Early sunlight is filtering through the stained-glass window, and the gloom in the chapel is lifted. We kneel around the hermit in a semicircle, watching him sleep. At last, Anna nods.
‘Yeah. I think you’re right. It’s weird. When I left he was worse than ever, and now – well.’ She rubs one hand over her face and through her hair, which looks tousled, as though she may have dozed off against the chapel wall. Jamie doesn’t look much better. I stifle a yawn, and find myself envying the hermit his deep, unbroken sleep.
We trail outside into the bright air. Jamie sits himself on a big piece of timber, like a railway sleeper, and Anna lies down in the sun beside him, resting her head against the wood by his knee. I walk slowly round them, setting my feet very carefully one in front of the other, as if I’m on a tightrope.
Jamie says, ‘What do we do now?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘If he gets better, I mean. What do we – do with him?’
Anna’s eyes are closed. ‘We’ll see. I don’t know yet. But – something.’
I say, rather dreamily, ‘Perhaps we can take him to the beach. To go swimming.’
Jamie looks at me, and after a second he bursts out laughing. In the dust, I can hear Anna snort loudly and start to laugh as well.
‘What?’ I say. ‘What is it?’
‘I think we should take him home for dinner,’ Jamie says. ‘Proper dinner. To meet – to meet our parents.’ He hiccups and laughs again. ‘Good one, Alex.’
Reluctantly, I grin too. Anna, her eyes still closed, says, ‘Yeah. We can introduce him to all our friends.’
Jamie says, ‘Can you imagine my father? “Pleased to meet you. What do you do, exactly?”’
It’s a good imitation. Anna says, pitching her voice low and gruff like the hermit’s, ‘“I kill people.”’
‘“Oh jolly good,”’ Jamie says. ‘“Have some more – some more wine.”’ He hiccups again, and puts his hand over his mouth, still laughing.
‘Well, I don’t know what else we’re going to do with him,’ I say, a little put out that they find me funny. ‘He can’t stay in the chapel for ever.’
‘Well, we’ll think about that later,’ Anna says.
‘Yeah,’ Jamie agrees. ‘Not now. Don’t make me think now. My head’s all tight, like it’s full up.’
‘I’m so tired,’ Anna murmurs quietly. ‘I just want to curl up and sleep for ever.’
‘I know.’
‘We should check on him,’ she says, muzzily. ‘Every now and again someone go check on him.’
‘How often?’ I say. ‘I can do it. I’ve got a watch.’
I wait for her reply, but it doesn’t come. Jamie and I look down at her. She is fast asleep.
‘She shouldn’t sleep in the sun,’ I say critically. ‘Lena says it’s bad.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. That’s what Lena says.’
‘It’s not so hot,’ Jamie says. ‘Let’s leave her a while. We can wake her up when it gets warmer.’ He stands up, stretching. ‘I know how she feels,’ he says.
‘Yeah. Me too.’
‘You want to go and look for lizards?’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘If we can lie down.’
‘You’re on.’
We wander away from where Anna lies sleeping, wrapped in a haze of soft dust and the shrill background buzz of the cicadas.
When I wake up, the sun is high in the sky. Jamie is nowhere to be seen. Groggily, I get up from where I’ve been lying in the warm dust and rub my eyes before heading over to where Anna’s lying.
As I get close to her, I notice a faint but unfamiliar sound. It takes me only a moment or two to work out what it is. A big grin breaks over my face. Then I hear footsteps,
and Jamie is running towards me from the chapel.
‘Ssh,’ I say. ‘Listen. She’s snoring.’
Jamie stops dead, his face blank; then he hears it too, and grins with me. ‘Yeah,’ he says quietly. We listen to Anna snore for a few more moments, and then Jamie snaps his fingers as if suddenly remembering something. ‘He’s awake,’ he says.
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘We should wake her, then.’
Jamie leans down and touches Anna’s shoulder. When she doesn’t move, he shakes her slightly. She snorts and looks up. ‘What?’
‘He’s awake,’ Jamie says.
She scrambles at once to her feet, shaking her head. ‘How long have I been there?’ she says.
‘A couple of hours,’ Jamie says. ‘Well, more like three, actually. It’s OK. I kept checking on him.’
‘I fell asleep too,’ I confess.
‘Yeah. Alex was face-down in the pine needles ten minutes after we left you,’ Jamie says, grinning.
‘How is he?’ Anna says. I know she means the hermit, not me.
‘Well, he’s – I think he’s better,’ Jamie says. ‘I mean, he still looks ill, but – well, come and see for yourself.’
We hurry into the chapel, blinking away the hazy after-images that linger from the bright daylight outside; once we can see adequately in the half-light, we follow Jamie down the building to where the hermit is lying.
He looks at us all, and his eyes are clear, seeing what is really around him. For a moment, I see him as he is when we first find him; the face shifts and then shifts back again, and I realize that the hermit looks a lot thinner than he did. But at the same time, I can see that Jamie is right: he also looks far better than he did the night before. Anna kneels down by the hermit’s torso and touches the back of her hand to his head, frowning.
‘Well?’ the hermit says. Anna is startled, a little, by the voice, and flinches for a second. Then she puts her hand back again, checking.
‘You’re back to normal,’ she says.
‘Completely?’ Jamie asks.
‘Come here,’ Anna says. Jamie crouches beside her and she takes her hand from the hermit’s head and touches it to Jamie’s. ‘You try,’ she says.
Jamie touches the hermit, and then Anna. He nods. ‘Yeah, I can’t tell the difference.’
‘Can I try?’ I say, not wanting to be left out.
‘OK.’
I come in close and touch first the hermit, then Jamie, then Anna. I frown, as if considering my response carefully, and then nod. ‘Yeah. They’re the same.’
The hermit is looking at us, his expression rather mixed-up and strange. For a moment he looks like he might be trying not to laugh, but since there’s nothing funny to laugh at, I can’t think that this is really the case.
Anna says, ‘How do you feel?’
‘Better,’ the man says. ‘And hungry.’
‘That must be good,’ Anna says, glancing at Jamie and me.
The hermit says, ‘I think it is. The fever’s broken. How long—’
He’s asked this before. ‘Four days, now,’ Anna says.
‘Four days,’ the hermit repeats. He sounds dazed. ‘Four days.’
‘It’s OK,’ Anna says softly. ‘You’re safe here. We haven’t told anyone, and no-one knows.’
‘That’s good,’ the hermit says, after the briefest of pauses.
‘If we got you some food,’ Anna says, ‘do you think you could eat it?’
The hermit nods. ‘Yes. Something simple, like bread. I shall have to be careful for a while.’
‘OK. We can get that now, if you like.’
‘I think – yes. That would be good.’
‘Then we can talk,’ Anna says.
The hermit nods. ‘Very well.’
Anna says, ‘We hid your car.’
The hermit’s brow tightens. ‘How?’
‘With branches,’ I say. ‘So you can’t see it from the road.’
The hermit looks as if he’s trying to puzzle something out. ‘Why did you do that?’ he says at last.
Anna says, ‘In case people came looking. Probably they won’t, but we wanted to be sure.’
The hermit looks at each of us in turn, searching our faces with his eyes. Finally he says, ‘Ah. Well. You’ve – you seem to have thought of everything.’
‘You’re safe here,’ Anna says again. ‘All right. We’ll go and get food and things, and then we’ll change your bandage, OK? And then we’ll talk.’
It’s the second time she’s said it. I see the hermit staring at her, appraisingly; and I realize all at once that he’s probably wondering, as I am, just what it is that Anna wants to talk about so much. But in the end the hermit just nods, and Anna nods back, and then she stands up.
‘We’d better go and get food,’ she says. ‘How much money do we have?’
‘We don’t have any,’ Jamie says. ‘We’ll have to get stuff from the pantry.’
‘It’s OK,’ I add. ‘Lena won’t mind. Well, not if it’s only a little.’
But the hermit has been listening, and now he says, ‘Wait. I have some money, if you need it.’
He reaches inside his jacket and, after a second, fumbles out a wallet. From it he takes a slim bundle of notes. ‘Be careful,’ he says. ‘It would look strange if you showed all this money. Use the small bills only, and keep the rest hidden.’
‘Yes,’ Anna says, grasping immediately what he means. She takes the money and sorts out a couple of the smaller notes from it, then folds the rest and puts it in the back pocket of her jeans. ‘We’ll be back soon,’ she tells the hermit.
‘Yes,’ the hermit says. ‘I know you will.’
There’s something strange in his voice, something which sounds a bit like amusement and perhaps a bit like admiration; but it’s difficult to judge, and besides, Anna is hurrying me out of the chapel now. We close the door on the hermit – who, I remind myself, is better now – and start walking in the hot midday sunshine. And as we walk I find myself wondering vaguely at the way Anna and the hermit look at each other; at the way they seem to be understanding what the other is thinking almost before the words are out. It’s a strange thing; but with Anna, many things are strange things, so perhaps this is nothing new.
Anna’s face goes white when I tell her. ‘Are you sure?’ she says.
‘Yes. Last night, apparently. Right after we were there.’
‘Shit,’ she says. She gets up, paces the room. She looks unsteady, shocked, confused – she looks scared.
I say, ‘Are you OK?’
‘Well – I think probably. But I mean – shit.’ She pauses, runs a hand over her face and into her hair. ‘Was anyone hurt?’
‘Yeah. They were saying eight people died, and lots more were – you know. It was practically a cellar, for God’s sake. And you remember how packed it was.’
‘Eight?’ she says, unbelieving. ‘Christ. That’s – that’s awful.’
‘Yeah.’
She stops walking, just stands there in her too-big T-shirt, staring at the wall. She looks suddenly vulnerable. I get up, go to her, put my arms around her. She clutches onto me, gripping the back of my shirt with her fists. After a moment, I feel her body shudder against me, and I hear her sobbing hard into my shoulder.
It’s shock, I know; but it’s also the way I feel. I could have lost her. Another few minutes – God knows what the real timing of it all was, but it could have been just a few minutes – and she might have been gone for ever. Another drink – another song – anything. With a start, I see that if she hadn’t realized at that moment how she really felt about me – or if she’d hesitated – we wouldn’t have left in time.
But she’s here, and alive. I still have her. I hold on tight, not wanting ever to let go again.
Chapter Sixteen
Somewhere back in London, the gallery doors are open and people are walking in, buying the programmes that Julia Connell has designed, passing through the cool, still air of the rooms and looking at the
paintings arrayed there. I suppose, since Julia never got her interview with the artist and her insights into the themes that run through the paintings, that she will have had to come up with something else to fill the pages. And somewhere there will be Max, furious, disbelieving, not knowing how something like this could have happened. I had thought, before, that I would wonder what they all think of the work; would want to know what passes across the faces of the people as they see each image. But instead I find that I don’t much care. I am staring at the faces in the paintings, and at the scenes, and over and over again, no matter how much I feel I am becoming inured to it, I am hit by what I’ve realized: that these are paintings I did not know I had done.
From the beach, the water reflects the spur of rock from which Jamie and I dive, and all you can see on the surface of the water is the shape and colour of the rock; but when you break the surface, everything changes, and the whole of the seabed is laid out below you in that moment. It’s something Jamie and I take for granted; just something that happens, along with the sudden breathless cool of the water along your body and the dull underwater rumbling of the splash of the dive.
Here, though, seeing through this surface all at once, I can’t bring myself to take it for granted.
I have always had the dream that my whole life may be snatched clean away in one moment, but it has always been a literal vanishing: a waking to realize that things have actually passed. This loss, though, has crept up on me, sneaked past me year by year, my own doing. I haven’t painted these pictures; they have been painted through me. All along I have been fooled.
I have scraped paint onto canvases, working hard, trying to get some measure of my conviction and vision of how the painting should be down there with the pigment, and every time, something else has happened. Every time, the picture has changed, eluded me, and whatever I have been trying to paint has turned inevitably to the same thing. There is not one where it hasn’t happened, somehow, in some way. It’s in the eyes. The faces are all different, but the eyes are always the same.
The boy is at the edge of the rock, and the whole length of the beach is dark.
It takes me a moment to realize why it is that the little rectangles of the photographs are blurring, their edges trembling and swimming as if seen just under the surface of a rock pool; and then I blink, and rub my eyes.