Closer to Stone

by Cleary, Simon

  And then, once broken, having felt it give way, I wanted to shape it. Playfully. Furtively. Uncertainly. Purposefully. There are a thousand ways to be with a piece of stone you’re about to sculpt. But it did, at some point, begin to trouble me: who was I to change it? Was I seeking to make more beautiful that which was already a thing of beauty? Who was I to think such things? To presume. Given all that men did to each other that was so ugly.

  *

  It was not the Controller who re-entered the interrogation room two hours later, but Grose alone. He smiled as he opened the door, a smile unhitched from time and circumstance. Nothing about him was reliable. He was a naked smiling head atop a vast body of strength and knowing.

  ‘The authorities seem to think you are a spy.’

  ‘I tried to explain.’

  ‘They’ve asked me to vouch for you.’

  ‘I explained why I’m here. To find Jack.’

  ‘So you have come to spy?’

  His glinting eyes. His smile.

  ‘No.’

  He sighed.

  ‘What will it take, Sebastian?’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘What would satisfy you, Sebastian?’

  ‘Satisfy me of what?’

  ‘How many times do you have to be asked, Sebastian?’

  ‘What I’d do to get out of here? Is that what you’re asking?’

  He looked at me as if discovering an order of ignorance inconceivable to him.

  ‘To find him,’ he concluded at last. And sighed again. He seemed almost sad.

  ‘You know where he is?’

  He laughed, God alone his laughing-mate.

  ‘What do you think, Sebastian? Do you think I’m hiding him from you?’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘What, Sebastian, would you give to find your brother?’

  ‘You do know where he is?’

  Again he laughed. I hated him in that moment.

  ‘A hypothetical question, Sebastian, that’s all it is. A man who fears a hypothetical question fears himself.’

  I remained silent, wanting to strike him, my blood rising.

  ‘I repeat: what would you do to find your brother?’

  ‘Anything,’ I choked.

  How many traps had I stepped into already? But what else could I say? Any other answer would have been too small.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘He’s my brother.’

  Grose nodded.

  ‘Get your bag then.’

  At the foot of the stairs I hesitated. Grose took the lead and ascended. I followed. It was so quiet I wondered if night had fallen and the building emptied. But they were all there, the same clustered gendarmes and clerks still at their desks, all of them watching, their eyes trained not on me but on Grose. Those faces I’d seen hours ago – but now one among them stood out. Against a far wall one glanced at me then turned away. This man I’d seen before, sat beside, shared my story with. Who’d called others greedy but had sold what he knew about me for who knows how many dirham or what promise of work. As greedy as the soldiers who’d stopped our bus, Lhoussine had betrayed me.

  TWELVE

  The sun was very high, very bright. I had to blink, but it was a relief to be outside in the open, away from the police and their interrogation chambers and their informants. The air was hot and dry, but still I breathed deep, taking it in through my nostrils as though reacquainting myself with it. Not that I felt free – I was still caught in Grose’s mighty wake, and didn’t yet know what debt I owed. He strode towards the UN Landcruiser I could see through the compound fence, past the sentry box, and the guards with their steady eyes and the barely perceptible movements of their heads as we passed through the gate. Logan stepped from the driver’s seat as we neared, and seeing him was another relief. Yet he greeted me without warmth, no smile, no dry joke. If he wanted to speak, he did not. He merely opened the rear of the vehicle for me to throw my bag in. Grose got into the front passenger’s seat, and I slid into the back, where another soldier was already sitting. Logan started the engine and pulled onto the street.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘I promised them you’d leave immediately.’

  ‘That was not your promise to make,’ I said, emboldened by the sun and Logan’s presence.

  But Grose just yawned.

  ‘It was the only way you were going to leave that building,’ he said, looking out the window at children playing soccer with a plastic container, barefoot in the sand. Logan had said he knew what he was doing.

  With a shift of gears, the vehicle picked up speed. The crude dwellings at the edge of the city dropped away entirely, and we slipped beneath the arch at the city’s outskirts. A young goatherd moving his animals from one side of the highway to the other paused at the side of the road, holding the ear of one of them until we’d passed.

  ‘So, where are we going?’ I asked again.

  Grose was looking straight ahead.

  ‘You’ve done well, Sebastian. You’ve reached Layounne. You’ve read our report. You know what we think. There’s nothing we know that you don’t. There’s nothing more we can tell you. You can take the report home. You can be satisfied, Sebastian. And I can put you on a plane back to Casablanca this afternoon. Or . . .’

  At some sign from Grose, Logan slowed and pulled over to the side of the road. The landscape spread empty and wide beyond the windows: tufts of grass, low rocks, and a few black desert tents in the distance.

  ‘Or I can put you on one to Tifariti.’

  ‘What? Now?’

  ‘Logan’s going down today. He could take you. An indulgence, Sebastian.’

  Grose got out and stretched his arms to the sky. Logan kept the engine running. Grose tapped my window. I wound it down and he leant in, his hands resting on the roof of the vehicle, his glistening head and his shoulders filling the frame.

  ‘Tell me what you’ve decided when I get back.’

  Grose stepped away from the vehicle and into the desert. I watched him, his broad pitching shoulders, his still head. Logan kept his eyes on the road. A truck appeared over a ridge ahead of us. It slowed as it approached, and I could see the faces of two Arabs in the cab, their scarves flapping in the wind. They too looked at Grose picking his path between the desert grasses. As the truck roared past, the landcruiser shook violently, and Grose moved further and further away. Finally he stopped before the only shrub in sight, set himself, lifted his head to the sun, and began to piss.

  ‘So,’ Logan said, turning around to look at me at last, ‘what are you going to do?’

  *

  Jack had asked me the same question once, years before.

  There was a waterhole at the outer limits of our territory, a vast amphitheatre of steep cliffs curving two-hundred and seventy degrees, with a towering waterfall at the centre of the grand arc.

  We were summer’s leaping boys, climbing the cliff-face and launching ourselves into the air. The excited blood, the fear overcome, the submission, the air against your body as you fall. Then the dark disc of water is pierced and you are immersed, dropping towards the depths, kicking your legs to stop, reversing – and then striking upwards till your head bursts out into the air again and you are finally breathing.

  I was still treading water when I heard Jack call down to us. He was on the highest ledge of the highest cliff, supremely confident, utterly capable. All heads turned to him, sleek and glorious, arrow-like as he launched himself and flew, a perfect dive.

  ‘Come on,’ he sang out, emerging from the water beside me.

  The route up was via a vertical fissure in the rock, wide enough to lodge your foot in, then later your knee. As it widened, you wedged your whole body inside, shimmying higher and higher.

 
‘Don’t look back,’ Jack said.

  Growing from the ledge was a tree, some stunted eucalypt gripping precariously to a shallow bank of soil. I grasped it, the thought occurring: What if it gives way?

  That grain of anxiety rose with me as I pulled myself up, scrabbling knees and toes gripping the rock face, and swung my right leg over and onto the ledge. I felt Jack’s hand on the back of my thigh, felt him pull me up the very last part of the journey, a touch that should have been reassuring, but wasn’t: Wouldn’t I have made it without Jack’s help?

  Something cold shot through my body as I stood up and looked down at the water. The chill seemed to emanate from the rock beneath my feet, the stone my toes were curling into.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’

  I heard Jack through a fog. I’d fallen out of time, and he was speaking to another person, in some other place. Then I sensed him inspecting me, close, intense.

  ‘Oh shit.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I mumbled.

  ‘You’ve got to.’

  ‘I can’t, Jack.’

  He tried to coax me off. There were so many good reasons: there was nothing to fear, people jumped from here all the time, it wasn’t that far, it was only water.

  ‘I’m going back.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  He was calm.

  ‘It’s more difficult going down than climbing up. Trying to climb down. That’s dangerous, Bas. It’s easier to jump, much easier.’

  The clarity of that logic.

  ‘So, what are you going to do?’

  But there was another option. I could just stay there.

  I didn’t say this to Jack. I kept it close as he talked me through the jump, as he said again what it would be like, believing perhaps he’d already convinced me to leap, and that the only thing left was the practicality of doing it.

  ‘Just step forward . . . don’t look down . . . there’s no need to look down . . . keep your eyes on the ledge and step forward till both your feet . . . I’ll hold you . . . then you count . . . and on the count of three you go . . . like this . . . just a practice . . . one, two, three.’

  But I was deaf to him, and didn’t budge.

  So he tried something different.

  ‘Everyone’s watching, Bas,’ he said.

  I become aware of the faces turned up towards us. A summer day’s rock pool full of faces, all looking up. And the voices, clear and crisp: hurry up, or don’t take all day, or we’re waiting.

  After a time, the exclamations began to overlap, competing with each other, growing louder. Then they merged completely. At first it was like some acoustic trick, some shape the sound took as it funnelled upwards in the chamber of stone and water. But soon the merged sound sharpened, and it was singing I could make out. A chant, and clapping in time. They were taunting me.

  In my own way I responded heroically. I endured. I remained resolute in my petrification, and eventually the mocking lost its intensity and the beat grew ragged, before finally disintegrating. In the calm after that, the silence, I forgot I was afraid.

  It was almost tranquil up there on the ledge.

  Then Jack pushed me.

  The water was like concrete. My shoulder made contact first. Then my whole right side banged against the surface, shuddering, collapsing as the air burst out of my lungs. My body began sinking downwards, heavy and resigned. But I hadn’t fallen far when I began to pull myself back, clawing my way through the water to the air. I needed air, was desperate for it. I began sucking it back in even before my mouth was free, even as my scalp and forehead and nose burst from the black.

  Jack was treading water quietly, waiting, observing me begin to breathe, and see again. I’d left him on the cliff’s ledge, but there he was with me in the water as I gulped for air. For a moment it was a miracle him being there. I felt as safe and secure in that moment as I had ever felt.

  But then it all came back, the shameful memory of it, and I fought Jack’s hand. I pushed him away and swam – a broken sidestroke – towards the rocks. I felt Jack shadowing me. I was fleeing him as much as seeking the safety of the bank. I crawled from the water, stumbling in the shallows, ribs aching, my head bowed to avoid the eyes of all the inflated boys, the preening girls. I reached the rock and my pile of clothes and covered my head with the towel.

  *

  Grose returned, the sun itself somehow muted by his dark, exultant shape. The silence inside the vehicle was broken by the click of the door handle, and Grose settled back into his seat like it was a throne. He didn’t turn. He looked ahead, surveying the sky and the sand through the windscreen, the road that split the desert in two. There was a hypnotic quality about his breathing. Logan waited in the driver’s seat. Breathing. Waiting.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Tifariti,’ I answered.

  *

  The airstrip was surrounded by a high fence with a security post at the gate. We hardly paused as we passed through, some imperceptible acknowledgement occurring between Logan and the guard. Beside the runway a collection of buildings squatted. Logan pulled the landcruiser in behind the largest hangar and got out. The soldier who’d been sitting beside me took Logan’s place behind the wheel. Grose stood as I lifted my bag out of the back and Logan set off towards the runway. Before following, I turned to Grose.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  Grose looked at me.

  ‘You will not find him,’ he said. ‘You don’t have it in you. You don’t have what it takes.’

  Then he leant forward, his giant head and shoulders looming, the breath from his nostrils on my face.

  ‘You are not your brother,’ he whispered.

  I pulled away and he laughed. ‘Good luck anyway, Sebastian Adams. Logan will look after you.’

  I hurried across the shimmering tarmac to where Logan was lowering his head and climbing into the gleaming white Porter Pilatus. The pilot loaded my bag, and closed the doors. The engine started, its sound a guillotine brought down on Grose. Through a small side window I watched the plane’s single propeller battle with inertia, its reluctant movement, the first jagged turns, the quickening rotations before it disappeared finally in a blur.

  We taxied to the end of the runway. The pilot turned, lifted his dark sunglasses and grinned, letting out the throttle, gathering speed. When there was no tarmac left he pulled back on the joystick and the plane lifted into the air, rising in slow increments until we were banking. It was only then – the vibrations of the engine gentle, and the sky beginning to surround us and me glad to be leaving and not caring yet where I went – that Logan pulled at my wrist. He motioned me to look down. I saw Grose’s landcruiser parked at the end of the airfield, dead-centre and on the verge of sand, its nose facing down the runway. Grose was leaning against it, leaning back with his hands folded behind his gleaming head, looking up at the underbelly of our plane as its shadow swept over him.

  THIRTEEN

  A line of crescent-shaped dunes appeared from out of the rocky flatness below – sand collected from the gibber plains by the wind and blown into perfect arcs.

  ‘Barchan dunes,’ Logan yelled into my ear, above the engine of the plane. ‘They creep, those dunes. They’re always moving.’

  I stared down at the delicacy of that migration.

  ‘The Islamic crescent,’ Logan continued, ‘always on the march.’

  No, I thought, ignoring him, it’s like the moon has bent the winds and the sands to her shape. We droned on through the sky. One day, I thought, I’ll sculpt crescents.

  Later Logan pointed out four parallel lines etched onto the land, each stretching endlessly east and west towards the horizons. Like a cat’s claws had swiped the planet.

  ‘The berm,’ he yelled.

  ‘The what?’ I yelled back.

  ‘
The Moroccans built it to keep the Saharawi fighters – Polisario – out. It’s their Great Wall.’

  I thought of the rabbit-proof fence.

  ‘It’s not just one wall,’ he said, so close I could feel the warmth of his breath on my cheek. ‘Some places it’s four, sometimes five, or six, one wall after another. There are trenches as well . . . to stop the tanks. And there’s a wall of rocks, a metre and a half wide, one to two high.’

  Once we’d passed over, Logan leaned close again.

  ‘We are now flying through Saharawi airspace.’

  An airstrip appeared on the earth below, a discoloured ribbon of desert cleared of rocks and lighter than the stone-strewn plains. Laid out on a ridge nearby was a word in large, whitewashed stones: LIBERTAD. A message which greeted all arrivals and farewelled them as they left, as if it was the name of the settlement itself. LIBERTAD. Whether you cared or not, so you knew.

  Beside the airfield was a small mudbrick village, and white and alien next to it was the UN compound, scraps of foreign matter staked to the ground. As the plane descended, half-cylinders formed, white plastic curves one beside the other in a protective arc. Wagons in circles, I thought. This was Tifariti, the last place Jack had been seen.

  Logan leaned towards the cockpit and pressed a hand on the shoulder of the pilot, who turned and smiled, seemed to wink.

  The plane swung around in a broad sweep, and lined up the airstrip, descending, the strip in front of us, the white buildings to the right. We were so close the ground seemed to be roaring, and for long moments we remained at the same altitude, the rushing, howling earth no closer. Then, suddenly, the plane veered towards the UN compound, the white buildings themselves at the plane’s nose. I could make out antennae rising from roofs, could see the windows, saw figures emerging from doorways. We were increasing speed and the plane’s engine began to screech, and the UN compound was closing – our plane somehow heading straight for it.