Grazing The Long Acre

by Gwyneth Jones

  “Pay for your fare!” repeated the soldier, thrusting me further up the gangway. “First class aircon!”

  The Minister for Culture didn’t speak to the arbitrarily chosen few. Presumably the gesture alone satisfied, proving that his government had done its best and the debacle was our fault. Dazed with gratitude, I turned to see who had shared my luck. First come, first served: Johnny was through, and Brae. So was Major Derek Whynton.

  On the fabled state cruiser there would have been a satellite dish and a powerful radio link. On the riverboat there was a primitive radio room, available only for emergencies. We were lost in space. But we were still in the game.

  At sunset the four of us stood in a line at the first class rail. A vast swath of brown water had opened between us and the shore. The red ball of the sun was sliding down behind a row of smokestacks on the bare horizon.

  “We call this the post-holocaust,” said Brae, “not because of something that won’t happen: it might still, just a different ideology’s finger on the button. But because of what’s happened already. That famous clichéd scenario is all here. The poisoned land, mutated weather systems, birth defects and famines. The cities weirdly transformed into festering sores. Global nuclear conflict, it’s obvious now, was a schizophrenic’s coded warning of the disaster we were in the process of inflicting on ourselves.”

  Johnny gave her a long look, which said he understood that this small-talk was customised for his benefit. Silence lengthened, the chant of insects receding as we entered deep water.

  “These Thirdworlders are all crazy,” said Johnny after a while, perhaps by way of apology for his stunt at the pier. “Their minds are fixed on prestige and not being seen to fuck up. Sometimes you have to cut through it.”

  “I expect the others are pods by now,” sighed Brae. “Poor things. I wonder will any of us survive to the end.”

  Major Derek was gazing ashore with a soldier-like air designed to convey that he was thinking about something very important. I almost sympathised: I felt a little de trop myself.

  On Braemar’s bare forearm, which rested on the rail, I noticed what appeared to be a tattoo, though that seemed unlikely. It was new to me, whatever it was. It said CAVEAT EMPTOR.

  Johnny looked down, and grinned.

  “Braemar, is that a real tattoo? Or did you just write that there with blue ballpoint in the toilet at L’Iceberg?”

  She looked up at him—she’s not a particularly small woman, but Braemar always manages to look up.

  “Well, Johnny. You know what they say…”

  Johnny leaned down and thoughtfully applied the test to Braemar’s tanned and downy flesh. Suck it and see…

  In her cabin, Braemar stowed away certain supplies with finicky care, and disposed a few items on display. Expensive and immoral Swiss cosmetics; a handful of delicate underwear tossed over a box of compact books by her bunk. “All that can be said, can be said clearly,” she murmured, studying the effect. “What cannot be said must be passed over in silence.”

  She started to eat fried plantain from a newspaper package: removing the square of banana leaf in the bottom she read a report of demonstrations in Washington, D.C. The police are joining the blacks in protest against corruption and…

  “How touching…”

  Her fingertips gently brushed the blurred faces.

  She licked her fingers and stripped off her shirt and shorts. If you look down with your back straight and you can’t see your navel, you are in bikini trim. Braemar put her heels together and looked down. Fine. But the mirror, lit by a brutal fluorescent tube, pulled out her bones and gave her the face of a famine victim, a toothless, flat-dugged grandmother in a ragged sari. She gazed at the naked death’s head for a sad moment—everything vanishes. She made corrections.

  Braemar had to have a victim. I suppose she’d have made Derek over into a pacifist for the duration, if he’d been the one. Maybe she’d have prefered the clean cut soldier, but he was impervious. Bit of an old boiler, one saw him thinking. And been around…You couldn’t distract Major Derek from the main point by any intellectual fancywork. So Johnny learned to laugh at her dirty jokes, and appreciate her olde-worlde coquetries; while the poor gazed at us across pipe-clayed hawsers, and the river oozed by. After a day or two she shucked off the tomboy and took to tiny plastique sunsuits that made her look like Doris Day on Mars. I thought that was a big mistake, but Brae knew better. She had Johnny jumping. Once he caught her in low company, tête-à-tête with an African down by the lifeboats. The black man fled. I heard racist assumption, and that awful note of ownership in my poor friend’s voice.

  “Hey! How come you suddenly speak their lingo?”

  Brae gave me one of her swift and deadly glances: and swooped like a mother hen on the loose cuff of his shirt.

  “Is that a fashion point, Johnny? You might catch that on something and hurt yourself.”

  He melted like ice cream.

  “Aaah, sorry mama.”

  “Well, well. Leave it around somewhere in the saloon, and we’ll see what the button fairy can do.”

  The button fairy! Oh, Johnny.

  He cornered me on the twilit deck after dinner, demanding information. I told him nothing, of course. He was very suspicious. He hated her makeup. What was the point in painting herself like that, here in the middle of nowhere?

  I was in no mood for his intimate confessions.

  “Johnny,” I said. “You know exactly what the point is.”

  He grinned, he blushed. He’d never had anyone daub herself in the blood of tortured animals for his sake before.

  He loved it.

  There were no longer tin-roofed markets at the piers, or smokestacks along the horizon. Tall trees began to emerge, back where the swamp became solid ground. The mosquitoes, not much of a threat while the river was wide, became as horrible as the stagnant heat.

  At every halt Johnny and I would disembark, I to record my forward echoes and Johnny to smell the air. What did you see in the sky that night? What have you heard? It felt like the progress of the Magi. My French barely penetrated the local patois: maybe that was why we never got anything but blank stares. We returned with parcels of fruit and strange sticky food, sheepish under the cat calls of the boat’s whores, who leaned out from the second class saloon and shouted for us to film them and make them famous.

  Braemar didn’t interfere with these trips. But by staying on board, taking no pictures, doing no work of her own, she managed to devalue them.

  I wasn’t feeling well. The boat food was horrible. Travel and stress had messed up my menstrual cycle, leaving me with a heaviness that lay on my mind like unfocused guilt or grief. Johnny and Braemar baited Major Derek and played their ‘death of science fiction’ game. Telepathy quizzes, impenetrable allusions. How would we four survive under the tentacled master-race? Derek they had down as a collaborator, I was to join the resistance…I just became more depressed. She couldn’t even leave our fantasy quest alone. Any wild-eyed hope of friendly aliens seemed ludicrous, in competition with the brutal realism of what she was doing to Johnny.

  Our cabin showers had ceased to function. I was queuing at the only working ladies’ washroom, down in the teeming hold. The women were friendly enough, but as I reached the door a crewman appeared and grabbed me.

  “Madame, douche, douche privée: le cap’tan wants…”

  The cabin was tiny, and hot as an oven. A huge woman sat in the curtained bunk, robed in green and indigo, with an intricate indigo head cloth. Her full lips looked not painted but naturally, deeply red. She gestured towards the shower. The bunk curtains twitched: did she have someone hidden there? I stepped into the stall, dropped my sarong and began to wash, the relief of cool water on my skin so intense I didn’t care who was watching. When the water stopped, somebody pulled open the door.

  “Haoi, Haoi!” shouted the little man, as I grabbed my wrap.

  He wore an immaculate white shirt and trousers, his plum-dark f
ace was bloomed and fissured with age. The woman held something bright that moved: a toy of some kind. The captain was brandishing a bag of shrimp crackers.

  Oh, Hanoi…

  “You were in Vietnam?”

  “Oue, Oue. Hanoi. Saigon. Long time ago.”

  I wanted to rush away and get my gear. A retired foreign legionnaire: this was wonderful—

  The captain beamed, satisfied that he had established credentials. “English—moi, non.” He gesticulated further. I gathered that the woman was his interpreter. I was about to launch into French, but she spoke first.

  “You must not ask,” said the indigo woman sleepily. “All this asking questions, that makes problems.”

  She lifted the thing in her hands. As the captain pushed me out of the door, soaking wet with an armful of wet belongings, I glimpsed again the fluid, metallic movement.

  I reached my cabin just in time to throw up. It crossed my mind that David’s vasectomy had failed and I was pregnant. It must be a boy this time, the little alien inside fighting with my inimical chemistry.

  The boat anchored at dawn out in mid-channel, just below a muddy confluence. The halt was for our benefit: it was time for us to leave the great river. Several hours later a small boat came chugging out of the emptiness. Johnny and Brae were in the saloon, studying the garbled ‘Briefing’ we’d all been handed back at the capital. I was on deck with the major.

  Derek jumped up and was at the rail as a vision of military splendour arose: polished cap brim well down over the eyes.

  “Good morning, my name is Simon Krua. I’m looking for the International Expedition to Lake Gerard?”

  My heart sank. The major grew visibly larger as he stuck out his hand.

  “Derek Whynton, Lieutenant Krua. Major, actually. Well, you’ve found us. Let me introduce—ah- Mrs Anna Jones: a British lady journalist.” The major gave his barking laugh. “There are two of them, I’m afraid. Two ladies, and a young American chap. The media, you know. Don’t worry, I’ll keep them out of your hair.”

  The river boat was silent as we left it. Not a single whore stuck her head out to scream goodbye. We crossed a borderline trimmed with sticks and small branches, from gruel-colour to muddy umber, and swept around into the narrower stream. A tiny, ancient steamer was waiting for us, a kind of coelacanth of the swamps. I don’t know what would have happened if the whole party had got this far. It was hard to see how even we four were going to be stowed.

  Johnny cackled. “I think I’m on the wrong trip. Did I book for the dinosaur hunt? I didn’t mean to do that. No wait, is this the fabled Hollywood retro-world? Don’t tell me. Bogart and Hepburn androids are about to come swanning out of the mangroves.”

  Nobody laughed, particularly not Simon Krua.

  The Major had a lot of heavy black boxes. While they were being stowed by Krua’s soldiers, he turned on us—in the cramped and cluttered after deck that was to be our territory. His blue eyes gleamed in triumph.

  “Now listen.”

  We had no choice, there was nowhere to go.

  “There has been a serious infringement of the London Peace Accord, and I surely don’t need to tell you what that means. I’m sorry, but whatever wild ideas you may have had that’s the whole story. My mission is to investigate, and to keep my findings quiet pending a full international inquiry. You’ve been allowed to come along so far because circumstances dictated it: but I’m going to have to confiscate all recordings, and take charge of your equipment.”

  There was a deafening silence.

  “From now on, the ladies will not go on shore at all. This is dangerous country, guerrilla forces are active. Johnny, may I ask you to use some commonsense? Please pack up and itemise your professional effects. Receipts will be issued, naturally.”

  He disappeared into the deckhouse, shutting the door.

  Johnny whistled, on a slow note of sour amazement. “The Empire Strikes Back. Now we’ll be sorry for the way we teased the miserable jerk.”

  Braemar stared bleakly at a pile of divers’ airbottles, stacked in the stern—for once completely silenced.

  I was shaking with rage. I found a roll of tape and began to seal my forward echoes. There is never any way out when you run up against the bastard military. They have no respect. What seems to us utterly inviolable, like consecrated communion bread in old Christendom, they’ll take and swing and smash its brains out against a wall…

  It must have been Major Whynton who told the captain of the river boat to give me that warning. Maybe it the powers behind him who had cancelled the cruiser. I would have shared these thoughts with Johnny and Brae, but it would only have made Johnny quite unmanageably provocative. And I still meant to be there, at the end of this trail.

  “What’s your real name, Brae?”

  “Alice in Wonderland. Kali. Jael. James Bond, 007, licensed to kill. I’m in deep cover.”

  “You won’t tell me, will you. It’s childish.”

  “I haven’t a real name, Johnny. I’ve never been identified.”

  The moon had risen, the night was immaculately black and white. The African Queen (the boat didn’t seem to have any other name) was tied up so close to the bank that they’d been able to clamber into the mud-stalking branches and sneak on shore. A tree had fallen: they were sitting on its trunk above the water. They passed a joint of the grass that Braemar had bought on the big boat. When it was done Brae took out her cigarettes and lit one.

  Johnny removed it from her fingers and snuffed it out. “Destroy yourself on your own time. I don’t want to catch your cancer.”

  Braemar laughed. She loved to be bullied.

  In her cabin on the boat he had moved a small heap of underwear to find out what books she was reading. Like bruised leaves the scraps of silk released a tender perfume: vanilla and roses, the scent of her flesh. He was assaulted by a mad impulse to steal something, to wear it. Something strange was happening to his libido, to be traced no doubt to the combination of poor nourishment, little sleep and excellent East African blow. He was in a state of quiet sexual frenzy: thoughts of fucking Brae with Anna and the whole first class looking on, of all three of them setting on Major Derek and forcing gross pleasures on him.

  But to be doing it with this corrupt middle-aged woman was a perverse orgy in itself. Who was the real Braemar? How did one get to meet her? That was a canard. The invocation, by means of all the masks, of an essential mystery forever out of reach, was only another routine in the ancient cabaret.

  Which he at once loved and hated: a sickeningly pleasant combination. Is this normality? he wondered. My God, is this how it feels to be a regular guy?

  “Actually, I couldn’t care less. You’re Brae to me, and no other label would get me closer to the inside of that box that doesn’t occupy any normal space. All I want is somewhere where I can fuck you without being at the same time ravaged by foot-long poisonous centipedes, or overheard by Major Derek.”

  “We could try the dinghy.”

  “The guy who drove us over from the big boat sleeps in there. And the cookboy sleeps in the rowing boat.”

  Irritably, Johnny threw the snuffed cigarette into the water.

  “Shit—”

  He scrambled out to retrieve it.

  “Johnny, you’re crazy. What are you? A New Age Hasidim ? Don’t you know it is impossible for anyone to keep the whole of the law?”

  He shoved the wet cigarette into his shirt pocket. She was right, the new Torah was as ridiculous as any other set of rules. As if one less cigarette end in the wilderness would save a poisoned planet.

  “Do you feel weird, Brae? Do you have a strange feeling like a kind of psychic travel sickness: brainstem nausea, and it is getting stronger by the day?”

  “I don’t feel anything that isn’t perfectly normal.”

  “I just wondered.”

  “Johnny.”

  She took his hand, still cool and wet from the river, and laid it along her groin.

  “Th
at’s otherness. That’s where you meet the alien. If you could always have a breast to suck and an accommodating cunt to hold you, you’d never miss the rest of the world, with or without flying saucers. You are everything that matters Johnny. And I’m the place where you belong.”

  He looked at her, the cool moonlight mysteriously altering his young face, cutting time’s shadows in its rounded outline: and withdrew his hand.

  “Talking dirty again,” he said. “I think I’ll throw you in the river.”

  “You really want them, don’t you.”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “I’m curious. There are UFOs every day. There’s never before been an official snark-hunt like this one. I just want to know-.”

  Countless insects chanted. Something much larger suddenly howled out a long dying fall of sound. Johnny was instantly distracted.

  “Hey! a wild animal! I didn’t know there were any of those left.”

  He dropped to the path and hurried along it, heedless of centipedes. Brae followed, until he suddenly stopped dead. There were points of gold in the blackness ahead: a cloud of sentient fireflies, the outline of a mind.

  “What is that? ” he breathed, awed.

  “It’s a village, Johnny.”

  “Huh.” He scowled, annoyed at himself. “Those pods are fucking sneaky. It’s probably only pretending to be a village.”

  But the lights in the darkness held him. “When you see that,” he murmured. “Raw, as the cave-people saw it—you know why the stars in the sky had to be people, why stories were made up about them. What else could those steady little fires in the night possibly mean?”

  Braemar touched his arm, turned him to face her.

  “Johnny, supposing I told you the truth? Supposing I told you: I’m a member of a secret international organisation, on a vital undercover mission. And I need your help.”

  “My God,” said Johnny, at last. “You’re not joking, are you.”

  She shook her head.

  He felt a new rush of gloriously mingled lust and disorientation. It was another game, more fun. It might even be the truth: why not. Braemar could be anyone.