by Guy Burt
I’m right about the water: it’s not deceptive or dangerous there. It’s not that, they tell me. He drowns because he hits his head on something – a rock – and it stuns him; he drowns because he’s unconscious. It’s an accident. It could have been caused by an unexpected wave, if he was close in to the cliffs or the spur there; it could have swept him in hard against the stone in a moment, if he hadn’t been watching for it. It could have been anything like that.
I ask if it could have been that he dived, if that could have caused it. They aren’t sure. Maybe, if the water was very shallow, or the place he dived from was very high. Maybe. But probably a wave, when he was close in against the cliff.
I betrayed them both. I never meant to, but I did it all the same.
My eyes are full of the paintings that ring the room. They seem to swell up, now, as if the little uniform squares of the photographs are too small to hold them any more. They swell and grow until they burst out of their squares and are as real and as big as when I first made them. They wheel and tumble round me, shifting to and fro, and the faces in them are blurred and gathered until there are really only two. Two, and sometimes a third, at a distance, watching.
It’s then that I realize what they are, what I’ve done. As they settle back into their neat little frames, I understand at last why I’ve painted these things, and why they can still be mine, even though – in one way – they never have been. And I understand also how they should be hung, how the gallery should be arranged. It’s good. I think to myself how it would be, and feel myself smile.
I’m tired. My head throbs with tiredness and my body is numb with it, but I can’t leave them like this, not now that I know. Now that I understand.
I start to gather the pictures down from the walls for the last time. I can do this now. The house is finished, and everything is back the way it once was, and at last I have understood it all.
Chapter Twenty-five
I think I dream of them. There are faint voices that drift away from me as the night comes to an end, murmuring something soft while I sleep, and then fading.
I wake slowly. There is sunlight, warm across my face, and somewhere close by the sound of a bird singing. When I open my eyes, though, the first thing I see is a dark sky, strewn with silver, the tiny stars glittering high above me. There is a moment, halfway between sleeping and waking, when I’m not even sure how old I am, what time this is; and then it passes. I stretch, and remember, and sit up in the bed that I’ve moved back into this room. The shutters are wide and the room glows with sunshine, and the stars glitter and twinkle. It’s perfect.
I go downstairs. Everything is done, at last. The house is finished; the ceiling is finished; and round the walls of the downstairs rooms are the pictures which finally make sense to me. Everything is done at last.
I go out onto the verandah and stare at the side of the valley, where the grey rocks are warming up. Down at the end of the garden, amid the tangle of plants and bushes, is the tree into which I used to scramble to get over the wall. Back there, I would find lizards, and lose myself for hours in worlds which, in turn, became lost to me – and which have now come back again. The trees of the garden murmur very gently in a slight breeze, and the air is warm and scented with pine and rock and great breaths of lavender and rosemary. I could close my eyes, I know, and be there when my mother first planted it: be there to see it start all over again.
Instead, I go back into the tranquil silence of the house.
I can see now why I felt that these pictures were in some way not mine. The eyes in the faces should have told me. I wander among them, following the new progression I’ve laid out, the sequence which finally makes sense of them. In London, in the gallery, they will be laid out all wrong – laid out according to the chronology of my life, the order in which they were painted, from my earliest work through to my most recent. It’s such an easy mistake to make, to think that the paintings are to do with my life, that that’s their framework. It’s so easy a mistake that I’ve made it myself. As a child, I painted Altesa, and Jamie, and Anna; and as an adult, I told myself that all that was over, finished, hollow. My work swept on to new themes and new ideas, and I never saw what was really happening.
It’s taken thirty years to get under the skin of these paintings – thirty years, and one image that has been a starting point, a beginning, a key.
In the sitting room, half covering the wall opposite the garden, is the image of the boy diving. It is locked down on plaster; it will never make it to the London gallery where now there are people walking through the quiet rooms and halls and studying a collection that makes no sense. I have painted it too late; but at least I have painted it. It has come so late because remembering has been so hard. It would be wrong in London anyway. Its place is here. It’s the beginning of things, after all. It’s the starting point.
It’s the only painting of a child. I’ve never painted children because I’ve never thought I needed to; but it has to start somewhere, and so it starts with the dive. With being balanced on the brink of things; and with breaking from one world into another; with change, and where it leads. This is where it starts.
Then, further around the room, the faces are older, become young men and young women. The studies of people on the edge of adulthood. The woman at prayer in a church, looking up at the figure of Christ. The young man in the city street, looking upwards among the crowds and the night-time traffic, his face caught with the neon lights of the shop signs so that it is red and blue and gold. A couple with their arms around each other in a rainstorm, the rain breaking their outlines into star-like facets. City scenes and street scenes and young people.
Further on, they’re older. A woman writing in a book, her face intent on the words she’s setting down, with a window behind her like an arch through which sunlight comes and falls on the pages. A man working late, and through the glass of his office window the city lights and – above them – the stars. A woman with a child in her arms, reading him stories. The faces change, ageing, altering, but the eyes are the same eyes in each.
Three friends at a table in some dark place, their faces animated with laughter and conversation and memory, of things shared and remembered. A man in a boat on a lake, touching the water with one hand. Older now: a woman, with her hair tied back from her face, making a mark with charcoal on the mottled plaster of a wall. A man crouched down low, among earth and plants, with a stone held in his hands and a look of wonder in his face as he turns it this way and that. And older still: a white-haired woman bathing, the water running down the tired creases of her body, but her eyes as bright and alive as the sunlight that comes streaming into the bathroom through the open window. A building, low and shabby and comfortable – a homestead – and lemon trees around, with a verandah out at the front and three old people in the shade there watching the fields and hills while two children play in the dust.
It’s the best I can do for them. It’s taken thirty years, and all that time I’ve thought that it was my own life I was leading. But it’s done now, and now that I can see it, I don’t begrudge any of it. I don’t regret it. Something was owed, and I’ve done the best I can.
The house is finished. The painting is finished. As I walk through the empty rooms, they’re filled with light and colour. The walls are bright and freshly painted, and the morning sun comes in through the windows and makes big rectangles of warmth on the floors. Lena’s kitchen is white and scrubbed and clean, and the verandah glows in the sun with white, and the ceiling of stars is back the way it should be, and all around the walls are these images, these faces: Jamie and Anna.
I look around at what I’ve done, and everything is as it was when I was a child. I’ve taken my hands and I’ve remade the past, and while I’ve done so, the past has somehow caught me up as well: flooded into me and through me, until at last I have been able to see it clearly. Now it is over. Thirty years are gone, and I understand.
There will be buses in the to
wn, if I go and wait in the square; but I won’t do that. I’ll walk. There is a little village inland where I can catch a lift, and besides, there is one last thing to be done.
I leave my bag. I’ve worn out the few changes of clothes I brought; there’s nothing worth packing. I get dressed in the most presentable shirt and trousers I can manage, and stuff wallet and passport into a pocket. I leave the images ranged around the walls where they are; they belong here, after all. They won’t last for ever, none of it will. The house will sell and what I have made here will be painted over; or it will fade with mould and damp and lose itself that way. Time will rub it out somehow. It doesn’t matter: I don’t need it any more. I leave it all, and close the door, stepping out into the clean bright sunshine.
Along the old farming tracks, lizards skitter away among the dry scrub of the verges, and blink at me with jewel-like eyes from the dry stones of the little walls. Along the bed of the empty river, red dust kicks up in little puffs as I walk. The sky is very blue, cupped in the twin arms of the hills.
The day’s heat fades out under the stone pines. It’s always cooler here. I stand on the springy cushion of fallen needles and stare at the chapel.
Things have changed since I was last here. The bushes and weeds have grown over far more of the churchyard, and one side of the building is green and tangled with creeper. Tiles have come loose from the roof and are broken on the ground all about, and a sapling is growing strongly in the shadow of the building, just by the corner, its trunk as thick as my wrist. The great double-doors at the near end are the same, but the side door has been patched across with a heavy piece of sheet steel, and twin zinc-plated padlocks hold a thick steel bar in place across it. There’s no way into the chapel any more.
I clap my hands, and the noise is like a gunshot: there’s a flutter, and pigeons whirl away out of the belltower. I smile to myself: so that, at least, hasn’t changed.
I have to struggle to fight my way through the bushes that have come up at the side of the chapel, but at last I can crouch down and feel with my hand in the matted grass for the little grating that I know is there. I find it, and tug it loose; it comes away reluctantly.
The three rifle shells are dark, corroded with age and damp. Even the shiny, pointed bullets that cap them have dulled. Three rounds in the magazine, three spare in the case. If you can’t do the job with three shots – with one – it’s already too late. I hold them in my hand, and their weight is strange there, and cold.
It wouldn’t have mattered, if she’d told me. It wouldn’t have changed anything.
It’s only a little way to the rusty iron fence. I grip the shells and close my eyes briefly. They’re all that’s left, now, of the oath we made never to tell. Then I throw them far out, over the grey-green bushes and swaying weeds of the bank, into the dry dust of the empty river. I stare after them for a while, and then turn back to the chapel. There’s no way in any more, but I still have to see.
On one knee I get down and put my face in close against the wood of the big doors, finding the cracks I looked through last when I was eight.
The interior of the chapel is murky, as it always was; but there are bright shafts of light coming through the gloom, from the places where the tiles have come off, and there is the glow of the stained-glass window at the far end. Enough to see the dusty floor, and the old jumble of pews. Somewhere in the shadows, I suppose, the plaster Christ must still be lying, one hand outstretched towards the ceiling.
From somewhere in the half-light comes the sound of a girl’s voice singing softly; the words both familiar and unfamiliar.
Aludj baba, aludjál;
Feljöt má a csillag.
I know them now. Sleep, baby, sleep; the stars have risen in the sky. A lullabye.
I stand up, and draw away from the building a little. The nearness of that voice has taken me by surprise, but I find there’s no pain any more.
What do you call a clock without hands?
I don’t know.
I look up. There, high above me, is the dandelion clock, watching me as always with its implacable blank gaze. I look at it straight, returning its stare unwavering, remembering how I thought once I might be able to force it into blinking first. I stare at it, and the clock stares back. As the minutes pass, my eyes start to water with the glare from the whiteness of the wall, but I don’t look away. I don’t blink. I stare and stare as if, this time, I might be able to make it happen. I stare and I don’t look away.
The face of the clock is not a face any longer. Its smooth surface is a vast plain, impossibly huge, stretching out to the horizon in all directions. It is bigger than the chapel, bigger than the valley; it is all that there is. I am stranded at its centre, while over me the sky is black and sharply glittering. In the distance, almost too far away to see, there are the ghostly shapes of the numerals of the hours, like low mountains on the horizon. I turn, staring about me, and I can see them all – the whole sequence, from midday to midnight.
There are no hands here to guide the time, to drag it relentlessly from one moment to the next, past and present and future. There is no single line: only surface. I can choose any direction, walk from one hour to another, and the order can be anything I choose. All the points on the plain are the same, all as easy to explore as each other, all within my reach. I look about me in wonder, and as my gaze sweeps across the expanse that is the clock-plain, faint scraps of image and recollection seem to jump to life wherever I look.
I’m Jamie. Pleased to meet you.
There was a hermit, you see, who lived there.
Here. This is the Silver Surfer. You’ll like him. And here’s Spiderman. You know him, of course.
They break through the surface of the pitted bronze, which is the colour of dark leather, almost black under the dark sky.
I think we could get up there. Wouldn’t it be great to dive from?
Wait. He doesn’t want us to go.
Look at the dust in the river. It looks like moon dust.
Everywhere I turn there are fragments of time, caught in the surface and held there, as if in amber. I can tell that all I have to do is walk among them, let them wash up over me. I haven’t been able to do this for nearly forty years, but it has come back to me, and I know I can now.
I think he shot someone.
I’m going to be eleven tomorrow.
I think I love you.
And there is a kitten playing in dry grass; and over there, three children huddled around a fire in a deserted chapel; and there, a boy with a telescope; and a red light from the head of a dark valley. I can go anywhere.
There is a rustle like turning pages; and I see the words clear on paper, sheet after sheet of them, packed in tightly, and I know that I could read them now. On the first page, alone in the blank whiteness of the paper, is one phrase standing alone. In csak fegyver vagyok.
I am only the gun.
And I remember the hermit’s voice in the darkness: words I don’t understand as I hear them, which I have to wait forty years to hear clearly and truly in my head. I’m only the method; I don’t make the choices. I am the gun and someone else pulls the trigger.
I blink. I can’t help it.
Then the huge expanse of the plain is gone, and I’m back under the stone pines. The clock is back in its belltower. The valley is back all around me, hot with the smell of resin and shrill with cicadas. I wonder how long it has been.
There’s a sound from the bushes away to one side of the churchyard: a cracking of twigs and swish of leaves. A second later, I can hear a voice: a child.
‘And then they locked it up, and no-one’s ever been inside again, ever.’
Another voice. ‘What was he like, then?’
‘Oh, you know how hermits are. With a beard, and teeth all like this.’
‘Why’d he go away?’
‘I don’t know. He just walked away into the hills.’
‘Maybe he’ll come back.’
‘Well, he
might, but I think—’
The voice stops dead. I can see them, now: two small girls, maybe eight years old, their bright T-shirts standing out sharply among the dusty greenery. I see their faces freeze – the one who’s been talking still has her mouth open – and their eyes go wide. They’ve seen me, I realize.
I say, ‘Don’t worry. I’m not the hermit.’
‘It’s the hermit!’ the second girl squeals, and with that they’re off, crashing away through the bushes. I hear two more piercing squeals, and then a torrent of giggles, before they’re out of earshot; and I find myself smiling to myself. I wonder who they’ll think I really am, once they’ve calmed down. With imagination, I suppose I could become a new hermit for them. I shake my head, still grinning, as I wander among the piles of masonry and timber that are grown through with generations of weeds.
There is a past, and I can go there if I want. I know that now. Whatever shifted in the avalanche, and closed off the way, has shifted again in these past few weeks: from that first scent of rosemary in my mother’s garden. If I want, I can fall away into the past the way I did as a child. The message from the great bronze plain is very clear. I can stay here, surround myself with it, sleep under a ceiling of stars and fill the empty house with the people I’ve loved: with their laughter, and sadness, and friendship, and trust. I can be here for ever. Every moment can be a new moment: a first look; a first word; a first kiss. I have been given all these things back, and I can have them over and over again, for all time. I can immerse myself completely in them. Jamie and Anna and Alex, always and always, and always in the times when there was no blame or betrayal or pain or change, when nobody died and nobody was hurt. Just the times when it was all right and good.
There is more. I’ve glimpsed the pages of the manuscript that Anna had with her in Florence. Then, the words were meaningless to me; but now, I could go back with the knowledge gained in the years since. I could read them now. I am only the gun. I could break into this empty chapel, and sit in the belltower, and read her words, and maybe understand her – actually understand her, the way I never did.