Beacons

by Gregory Norminton

  When he has gone there is nothing left.

  It takes her two days to reach it. One long journey by the only train that now travels that far north, and then a shorter one to reach the outskirts of the city. From there she has to walk. It has been a dry summer here, too. The uplands are covered by yellow grass, wiry thorns, and heather that crackles underfoot. The solitary sound. Only when she reaches a valley and a stream are there trees, but even these look parched, as if they are already dead.

  MacPherson Health Spa used to be the seat of the Earl of Throckmorton. Now it is converted into apartments, and the surrounding deer park turned over to vegetables and a newly planted wood. Hoops of bamboo, covered in polythene, are arranged untidily alongside trees.

  An avenue of sparsely-leaved poplars leads from the road to a large wooden front door. A handle brings a small hammer in contact with a large bell. The man who comes to open this door is just as she imagined he would be: a reddish-white beard and a large, upright frame. The top of his nose is etched with tiny red veins along its entire length, and his eyes are set so deeply she cannot see their colour. They peer at her as though she is standing against the sun.

  ‘Paul Smithson?’ She asks, and holds out her hand when he nods. ‘Sophie Galsworth,’ she says. ‘You sent me your manuscript.’

  The top of the ring finger of his left hand is missing down past the second knuckle. The end of it is white and smooth, almost like bone. ‘An accident,’ he says, when he sees her looking at it. ‘Means I can’t get married,’ he says.

  Sophie laughs, uncertain if this is a joke.

  With a sweep of his arm he shows her into a brightly painted kitchen with a couple of large stoves and two long kitchen tables. Saucepans are hooked on the wall, and above them various ladles, spoons, and knives. Some of them are new and polished, while some are chipped, with broken handles. All of them look clean. A couple of young men in mud-spattered overalls are talking when she comes in. When they hear Paul’s voice they stop and acknowledge him with a nod.

  ‘Toby and Tom,’ he says.

  ‘Sophie,’ she replies.

  There is no further introduction. Paul gestures for her to sit at the table, and Toby or Tom serves them with two lop-sided mugs full of milky tea.

  Paul is reluctant for her to stay. ‘But what can you do besides correct manuscripts?’ he asks.

  ‘Nothing.’ She says. ‘It’s either this or …’ She indicates her bag at her feet. ‘This is all I have now.’

  He looks at her where she sits at the table. ‘But you’re not …’ He pauses.

  ‘Young? Fit? No – thanks for pointing that out.’ She sighs, and with the thumb of her right hand, smoothes the edge of each of the nails of her left, one by one.

  ‘Well …’ he says, shifting, as though he is about to rise to his feet.

  She interrupts him. ‘But it’s not too late, you know!’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not looking to increase numbers just at the moment.’

  ‘I can learn!’ Gripping the edge of the table she looks at him. ‘I know I can!’

  ‘Everyone has to earn their place here.’

  ‘I know.’ Still gripping the table she leans towards him, her eyes intent on his. ‘Why don’t you just give me a chance, and see?’

  ■

  She begins the day by looking at the sky. Its blue is intense, its clarity dizzying. She remembers contrails: the line of white ink becoming blurred on the wet paper. Now only the rich dream of launching themselves skywards. At the end of the garden there is a small shed with a wooden seat. As her tea brews she lowers herself onto it and pees onto the straw below. In a couple of weeks she will fork it onto the compost heap in the farthest corner; a rich, warm kingdom of worms, woodlice, and slugs.

  She pauses outside the back door. The chickens have gone inside their coop to roost. So quiet. Always so quiet. Once she heard a seagull in the distance but when she rushed out to see it there was nothing but that intensely blue sky. She opens the door of their roost and smiles as they cluck their disapproval. Reaching under their warm softness she finds seven eggs. The four larger ones she will take to the woman in the village whose hens have stopped laying. ‘They need to watch their step,’ the woman had told Sophie with a fierce smile. ‘Any more of this and we’ll be having a good roast dinner every Sunday.’

  It is mid-afternoon before she finishes planting out the potato chittings. She straightens slowly, vertebra by vertebra, her hands stroking out aches. Everything costs so much effort. Both knees ache. Her arms are mottled with nettle rash and her right index finger has an angry-looking, pus-filled wound where a thorn went in. Yesterday morning she spent an hour tying back beans, only for them to loosen again in the night, and last week she dug up a promising row of parsnip plants only to find the roots were the size of a baby’s finger. Swallowing down disappointment, she’d boiled them, but they were too bitter to eat. She looks around at the wilting vegetation. Everything seems constantly thirsty, and she worries about the stream at the bottom of the valley which seems to be shallower each time she sees it.

  ‘It’ll rain soon,’ Paul had said last night with a puzzling certainty. He visits her most nights with food he has spare.

  ‘But aren’t you worried it might not?’ she’d asked.

  ‘Worrying won’t help,’ he’d said, then on his way out, added, ‘Your hair looks good that way. You should keep it like that.’

  She touches her hair now. Behind the vegetable beds are sweet chestnuts and apple trees; neither has fruited since she’s been here, but they keep off the worst of the sun. Their branches creak in the heat. A large white butterfly flutters daintily between her cabbages, laying an orange egg on each one, and Sophie follows her, scraping it away, and removing the tiny caterpillars that have already hatched. She digs between the carrots.

  Her neighbour Brian passes on a bicycle. He waves at her and stops to tell her about the rain. He’s been in the hills to the west to catch rabbits, and although the trip yielded just a couple of young bucks, he’s seen a storm approaching. The clouds are large and grey: a classic anvil. It’s going to be a big one. Everyone is waiting.

  He gives her a few blackberries he’s found growing on a verge, and she gives him one of the eggs for his teenage daughter. He stows it carefully in a box with the rest of his berries. ‘Our Gaia says she’s something for you,’ he says. ‘Don’t get too excited, it’s just a story. But she’s been on about showing it to you for days. Just say no, if you’d rather not. Apparently her mother and I don’t understand her.’

  Sophie flushes. ‘She can come over any time she wants.’

  ‘I expect her mother will want you to sample some of her new jam, too,’ he says over his shoulder as he pedals off. ‘It’s gooseberry. New season.’

  She returns to her weeding, pleased at the prospect of company. By the time the sun has set her right hip is aching as well as her knees. When she steps over the threshold to her cottage her leg gives way, and she finds herself clinging to the doorframe for a few seconds until the strength returns.

  Paul finds her peeling the potato he gave her. ‘Jake Lamington says he’ll do us fifty copies!’ Paul is still determined to publish his manuscript. ‘Good news, eh? He says he’s traded a few books for some paper. Enough to do the lot.’

  She nods but doesn’t look up.

  ‘And Thomas Finley wants to speak to you about his little project. He wants to use the bikes in the gym for something useful, and thinks he can work out a way of making them charge up a battery. If he does that, do you think you could write the manual?’

  She nods again.

  ‘Anything wrong?’ he asks.

  She straightens her knee. ‘Tired.’ She says. ‘I’m too old for this.’

  He opens his mouth to reply, but then the windows rattle as something hits them. He runs to the door and throws it open and whoops. Rain. At last! Lots of it, all at once, driven by the wind into sheets.

  ‘Look!’ he says, smiling. ‘S
omething for your cabbages!’

  She shrugs. She thinks about the caterpillars that are probably hiding in the stalks. When the rain stops they’ll be feasting again.

  He swoops forward again and pulls her upright by her arms.

  ‘There’s something I wanted to show you,’ he says, ‘I was going to wait, but …’

  He pulls her out of the door to where there are overhanging branches. She can’t remember when it last rained like this. She’d forgotten how quickly it soaks through clothes, and how it makes the earth smell of mould.

  ‘Here,’ he says, pulling her forward. There are so many trees and high bushes it is possible to traverse the whole length of the garden without breaking cover.

  ‘We have to be quiet now,’ he says, abruptly holding her still in his arms, ‘Keep looking at that nest of twigs on the ground.’

  For a few minutes nothing happens. She can feel rather than hear the thud of his heart through her chest. She sniffs quietly, then holds her breath. Maybe she too smells just as strongly of stale sweat. It’s been weeks since either of them washed. She swallows down a little stomach acid.

  ‘Look, did you see it?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Go a little closer.’

  There’s something moving: a tiny furry-looking head and then a dull-brown thorax and abdomen. It gives a barely audible buzz.

  ‘That’s it!’ she says, ‘that’s what’s been missing.’

  He claps her face between his two enormous hands and kisses it. ‘Yes!’ he says, squeezing tighter. ‘Now we can expect apples in a year or two, maybe even the chestnuts. Who’d have thought the bees would go for your messy woodpile?’

  The sky is clearing. Behind his head the grey is giving way to duck-egg blue. Always there, she thinks. Even when everything else is gone: there’ll always be that blue, the colour of a warm, unruffled sea.

  ‌We’re All Gonna Have the Blues

  ‌Rodge Glass

  I reckon it’ll be late autumn, heading into winter. That time of year when Europe goes black long before the end of the working day and people walk home by lamplight, eyes on their shoes, umbrellas held out like shields against the wind. In the November cold even life’s winners grip the rail on the underground or the tram, coats damp, wondering what they might have done with their best years. Jaro says it’s all about temperature drop. About smells too. The physical is everything, he says in that low growl of his, as if what he’s saying couldn’t possibly be disputed. Jaro tells me that even if people don’t know they know it, most folks can sense darkness coming. Their bodies can. Their brains. And this is when he sees it happening, at the back end of one of our bleakest days, the water steadily rising, creeping up on us like old age. No big flash of light. No earth-shattering crash or bone-shaking split. He says it’ll probably all start all quiet, while we’re both here, far from home, amongst the doubters of Eastern Europe.

  Where I sit right now, at a low table in the Jazzrock Blues Bar in Krakow, underneath the low brick arch, I’m waiting for Jaro to show. I usually hold off on my first grown-up drink till he appears, but this day has felt like a week and the fat old bastard was supposed to be here half an hour ago, so fuck it, I’m getting started. I order a beer, pay and sit back down at the moment the Magda Octavia Quartet float on stage to the pitter-patter of warm applause; as they pick up their instruments I count six of them. This seems an important detail. Right now, all details seem important. Perhaps because I did eighteen hours yesterday, and I was up five hours before polls even opened today, the night is climbing all over me and my mind’s beginning to run. Jaro says that’s OK – he says that wherever I am, it’s the running mind that’s got me here – but these days I mostly dream of just lying still. I sit at my table and sip, and swallow, and as the music starts I wonder why there are six people in this jazz quartet, and wonder where the fuck Jaro is, and then I become convinced that this is how it’s going to be: it’ll begin in a place like this, on a night like this, the floodwaters lapping at the door, then suddenly breaking through. Beata, our Glorious Leader, wrote in this week’s email to all staff that together, we can hold back even the strongest tides, but then she’s bound to say that – it’s her job to ignore reality. She was born for this game of ours because she:

  doesn’t change her mind about anything

  doesn’t like explaining her decisions, and

  is senior enough not to have to.

  But instead of dictating a letter, sending an email or, God forbid, picking up a telephone to get things done, she ruffles my curls, promises me treats for good behaviour and sends me bounding across the Channel, into the corridors of not-much-power, tail wagging and tongue hanging out, messages tied to my collar. My task? To sniff the arses of those at my level, then persuade them to go home and bark at their masters that no matter which party wins the election, it’s really about time they opened their hearts to the movement. Most of us younger generation know appeasement will fail. Right now we’re busy appeasing all over Europe, in Germany, France, in Switzerland – in jobs where all sensible tactics will have no impact until it’s nearly too late. Jaro understands this. Say what you like about him, but the man has a good nose for the brown stuff. First you need to eliminate poverty, he told me last year, on my twenty-first birthday. Then crime. Then cellulite. Then maybe we’ll get people’s attention. But in the meantime, we’re fucked. He forked a meatball and swallowed it in one go. Still, at least we can die knowing we were the kind of losers who never gave in to the Dark Side. There’s another reason Beata keeps me on permanent duty in Krakow – to babysit a man twice my age who talks like the Star Wars trilogy is a series of historical events. In recent months, that man has decided he wants to move to Poland for good, to live in the land of my people. (His ancestors are mostly Lithuanian.) In recent weeks, he’s talked about giving it all up. He’s asked me what I think it might be like to die in a flood. You know – what the sensation of choking on water would actually feel like. If you’d guessed my role here already, please accept my congratulations, but this isn’t the school tombola. There are no prizes to be given out. I’m sorry, but we’re all going home empty-handed tonight.

  There are about fifty seats here in the Jazzrock, and they’re nearly all taken. At the front are the local regulars, each sitting cross-legged and nodding solemnly like they’re receiving some news they’ve been waiting for their whole lives. In the middle rows there are several lone men. Some middle-aged tourists. Elsewhere, a few groups of friends in their thirties and a younger couple who might be on a first date. I’m at the back, where two wasted teenagers are dancing as if they’re living on another planet which is doing just fine, thankyouverymuch. The first number goes round a few times, Magda’s saxophone is carrying the melody, then she calls out, off-mic, ‘Helga Emmanuelle, everybody!’ and the torture begins. Helga the piano player is first to get a solo. The drummer is second. The percussionist is third, battering the bongos like he’s going to break right through their skins. He gets everyone clapping along – there are even a few whoops. I get up and go to the toilet, pissing at the urinal with one hand on my hip, one thumb and forefinger pressed hard on my nose, trying to remember how I got here. I think about where Jaro might be. I rub my eyes hard, check my phone and remember there’s no reception down here. Then I wash my face with cold water and return. The bongos are still centre stage.

  I speak to Beata every day. While she’s busy in Brussels, a place where decisions are usually postponed but occasionally actually made, she tells me she needs someone she can depend on to look after our special boy, the big thirsty kid who’s somehow keeping us all afloat almost entirely through force of charisma. (That and rich rock star friends who empty their pockets whenever His Majesty does his little donation dance.) I know I shouldn’t bite. I know I should play nice. It’s just that I don’t believe in guardian angels, I’ve been sleepwalking for weeks, I can’t remember a time before Jaro, and even drunk I can’t imagine life after him any mo
re. Jaro lives behind my eyelids. He’s under my fingernails. I wake up at night thinking he’s sleeping in the road outside the hotel, about to get hit by a car. In this job, you get used to thinking about the worst-case scenario, so perhaps all this thinking makes sense. But still, it’s emptying me out, there isn’t much of me left, and every night I waste hours thinking about what I’d say to Beata if he jumped naked from the Debnicki Bridge into the Wisla River on my watch. He was a great man, but as frail as the rest of the human race. Or maybe, People loved him because he was both the best and the worst of us. Or some other shiny lie. Excuse my tone. It’s just that these days I seem to spend half my life sitting in bars with no reception, listening to eight-minute percussion experiments and waiting for my boss to show. I’m sure he’s dead, and that soon we all will be. Sometimes, when I try to picture the big day coming, this big water day he’s always talking about, this is how I see it.

  It’ll be a bit like now, after a big day on the job, but with Jaro actually here. We’ll be at this table, deep in the future, my head fit-to-burst with the sound of his never-ending force in one ear and the screech of yet another fucking saxophone solo in the other. After the band finish, Jaro will try to persuade me to stay later, his hands picking away at the candle wax dripping from the bottle in front of us, his eyes tiny red dots in the near darkness as he tells me about this new barmaid who works the all-night shift that he says has eyes like lollipops. I’ll remind him he falls in love with Jazzrock barmaids about three times a week. The way I imagine it, he’ll answer, Look, Zyg, I like happy endings as much as you do, but these fuckers, these elect-a-holics we have to deal with every day, are afraid of their own voters. He’ll say, And unless they start listening to us soon … Then he’ll draw his finger across his throat. So let me have my lollipops, OK? Then the water will burst through the door, rising fast up the walls, turning the Jazzrock into a swimming pool, then a fish tank, then a prison. Jaro and me and the girl with the lollipop eyes will know what it feels like to choke on water. I look around: there are no windows in these underground clubs, and we’re here three or four times a week – so the chances are, this is where we’ll be when it happens. Jaro says jazz helps him think clearly.