by Ned Beauman
‘You mean, would I try it again?’
‘Would you?’
‘If you tried to do what I tried to do, and something happened to you like what happened to me, would you take it as a sign that you ought to dust yourself off and give it another go-around?’
‘No, I certainly wouldn’t.’
‘Well.’
Burlingame put the sponge back in the bucket and left it there. ‘You always seemed like a cheerful sort. But … of course they say, don’t they, that … Um.’
‘I got in a bad fix with Mr Trimble.’
‘Trimble?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t see what sort of fix could possibly be so bad that you’d …’
‘Mr Trimble has a great talent for fixes. He is a top man in the fix business.’ Calix did not detect complete comprehension. ‘You understand, don’t you, Miss Burlingame? You know about Trimble. You must know.’
‘Know what?’
‘Oh, now, come on, Miss Burlingame! Folks might not talk about it much but everybody knows and there’s no use pretending otherwise. Mr Trimble is the master of this plantation. We’re all his slaves. We all belong to him. Up here and down there the same.’
‘You’re being rather hyperbolic.’
‘No, I am not. You can’t really be telling me you don’t know. You’ve seen his newspaper. Mr Trimble’s an evil man and he gets most everything he wants and there’s nothing anybody can do about it any more.’
Burlingame looked at the ground for a while. ‘Perhaps I did know. I have known, dimly. But I’ve been making heroic efforts not to think about it. I suppose I mustn’t be a very good observer, as ethnologists go. But I never thought I was, really.’ She drew in a long breath. ‘And you mean to say that you … tried to do what you tried to do because of Trimble?’
‘I didn’t see any other way out of where he’d put me.’
‘If you had lost your life it would have been because of that man?’
‘I carry my own load.’
‘Just for the sake of his … his bloody …’ Burlingame looked up. She was now meeting Calix’s eye for the first time since the sponge bath began. And Calix was astonished, even alarmed, by the suddenness of the change in Burlingame’s expression. She’d only had her head bowed for a short time, but somehow she already had the flushed and teary face of someone who’d been conducting a screaming argument in a high wind, and there was a rage in her green eyes that Calix could not reconcile with what she knew of this timid Englishwoman.
‘You all right, Miss Burlingame?’
‘I’m going to find Trimble. I’m afraid your bath will have to wait.’
‘Oh, no, Miss Burlingame, you mustn’t!’
‘You needn’t worry. He can’t blackmail me. I’m quite safe. I’ve never done anything interesting in my life, you see.’ And with that she was gone.
*
The clouds were brandishing rain when Burlingame found Trimble further down the steps, chatting with Berg the crane steerer.
‘I really must talk to you, Mr Trimble.’
‘Of course, Miss Burlingame.’ Trimble slapped Berg on the shoulder. ‘See you in church, pal.’
Now they were alone, or at least at a distance from all the usual bustle of an afternoon on the temple. ‘It has come to my attention …’ Burlingame was confused to find herself using vocabulary she associated with school assemblies, but nothing else seemed to be available. ‘It has come to my attention that by your actions, deliberate or otherwise, a young member of the crew has come to great harm.’
Trimble shook his head and gave a little whistle. ‘Honestly, Miss Burlingame, I feel like I just took a medicine ball right in the gut. That’s the last thing a guy wants to hear on a beautiful morning like this. But if you could tell me just what happened and maybe tip me off about how to put things right then you’d be doing me a very signal service.’
‘Miss Calix. The wardrobe girl. As you may already know she is convalescing in bed.’
‘Sure. They say she’s lucky to be alive.’
‘That’s right.’
‘She took a real tumble.’
‘Yes.’
‘But now she’s going to make it through okay,’ said Trimble. ‘Sounds like just the sort of heart-cozy I like to put on the front page of the Enquirer. I’m looking forward to writing it up. Apart from that I don’t see what it’s got to do with me personally.’
‘You will not put it in your newspaper. You will leave Miss Calix alone.’
‘Leave her alone? If it’s okay with you, I’d rather not. She’s a pal of mine.’
‘No. You will stop all this. You will shut up your workshop of calumny.’ Where she might have fished that phrase from she had no idea. She was still quite surprised at herself for using the word ‘bloody’ a few minutes ago.
‘You’ve knocked me for a loop here, Miss Burlingame. I just can’t make out what you’re getting at. Well, you know the old saying – “divided by a common language”!’
‘You put people in fixes. You’re an evil man. Everybody knows.’
Trimble gazed at her. She could see she was close to exhausting his patience. ‘Everybody knows, huh?’
‘Yes.’
‘Everybody knows and everybody feels the same way as you do?’
‘I believe so.’
‘Hey, Ricky-Boy.’ Burlingame looked behind her. Halloran, the first assistant director, was on his way up with a megaphone in one hand and a ball of twine in the other. The Hearts in Darkness crew had lived for so long on this stepwise estate that their gaits had changed. When they went out into the forest they had stair legs instead of sea legs. The topology would be encoded in the film itself, if it was ever finished: all the dolly shots in Whelt’s recent storyboards were lateral, as if the camera was sidestepping along a tread, and all the pans were either horizontal or vertical, to match the rectilinear grid of limestone blocks underfoot. Even after all this time, however, it felt to Burlingame as if interactions in the camp retained a faintly provisional quality, because it was a rule of human life that a meeting on the stairs never signified much. They all longed for esprit de l’escalier, a reward deferred forever because they never truly reached the bottom step.
‘Good timing, Rick,’ said Trimble. ‘Spot me that bullhorn for a minute, will you?’ Halloran hopped up rather slavishly to pass the megaphone to Trimble and Trimble held it out to Burlingame. ‘If everybody feels the same way as you do, you should get them all involved. Start a political party. How about it, Burlingame? Don’t be shy. Tell them about me. Tell them what you say they know. See how far you get.’
‘No!’ Burlingame turned. The cry had come from Calix, who was descending towards them with a plank of pinewood under one armpit instead of a crutch. The rise of each step was so high that she wasn’t so much hobbling as vaulting. She was wearing the clean clothes that Burlingame had brought to the infirmary cabin for her to put on later, although her skirt was backward. ‘Please, Miss Burlingame. Just leave off. Mr Trimble and I can settle it between ourselves.’ Halloran must have made a creditable guess at what was happening, because he gave Burlingame a solemn nod, meaning that she must take Calix’s advice.
Without having decided what she was going to do, Burlingame took the megaphone from Trimble. For all its tinplate heft it did not feel quite real. The truth was that nothing had felt quite real since Calix folded the hem of the bedsheet down to her waist. Burlingame had once read about an Albanian king who’d escaped so many assassination attempts by his own generals that he’d installed a hydraulic mechanism beneath his throne that made steel grills spring up around him on all four sides if he pressed a switch in the armrest. Burlingame felt that was just how she had always reacted to shocks, emotional or otherwise. She would not have survived the emergency of Calix’s bosom if in that instant she had not separated herself from reality inside an impregnable cage, so that she could touch Calix’s nakedness where absolutely necessary but it could not touch her. An
d now, although Calix had put on a blouse, Burlingame’s cage had not withdrawn. There it was still, between her and the weight of the megaphone, between her and the facticity of her actions, between her and the inconceivability of calling a man evil to his face. The trouble was that it hadn’t worked quite as designed. The cage might have protected her from immediate destruction, but not, in the end, from the image of the soapsuds running down the sides of Gracie’s breasts, and not from this fury, this deep rib-cracking fury at the thought of the girl being driven to such despair for another’s silly profit. For a long time she had felt keen to become friends with Calix, but that could not account for what was happening to her. So unprecedented was the intensity of these feelings that Burlingame almost wondered if something from the jungle might have worked its way into her brain. And all the while, everything else felt weightless, fictional, neutralised beyond the cage, just because it wasn’t Gracie’s body or Gracie’s life. Trimble still wore a smirk of absolute assurance that she would not call his bluff when, as if full of helium, the megaphone simply lifted itself to her mouth. ‘Er, good morning, everyone,’ she said. ‘Can I have your attention, please?’
For the first time she realised the practical advantages of possessing the sort of English accent that Americans found impressive. The megaphone had turned a good number of heads. She walked along the step until she was right at the edge of the temple, a pulpit from which the echo of her voice might reach some of the New Yorkers too. ‘Could I please have your attention?’ she called again. ‘Your immediate attention.’
Gracie, who had finally reached her, put a hand on her arm. ‘No, Miss Burlingame! I won’t let you get yourself in this kind of trouble. Not on my account. You don’t know what he’ll do to you.’
‘It’s all right, Gracie.’ The warmth of the hand on her arm only urged her on. Through the megaphone again: ‘Mr Trimble has given me permission to speak to you all about the state of affairs here in both our two camps.’ She glanced over at him. The smirk still on his face seemed to flicker in place like a buzzsaw in motion. ‘I really must have everyone’s attention for what I’m about to say. Gather round, if you please.’ She knew she wasn’t qualified for this. When she tried to think of speeches, all she could remember was school assemblies again, prize-givings, graduations. That, after all, had been her life before the temple. But didn’t that mean she was intelligent, at least? Intelligence wasn’t nothing. She waited until quite a crowd of people had stopped their work or come out of their huts, including at least a dozen down in the other camp.
‘We are all very grateful for Mr Trimble’s hard work over the past few years,’ she began. ‘He has made a diligent chronicle of the goings-on in our little community. After a hard day’s work, who of us has not looked forward to settling down with a copy of the Pozkito Enquirer? Mr Trimble deserves our sincerest thanks.’ She started to clap, which wasn’t easy because she held the megaphone in her left hand so she had to slap the back of her wrist with her right. Here and there, others joined in the applause, but she soon let it finish. ‘However, I’m sure Mr Trimble will not object if I should go so far as to suggest that perhaps the time has come for … Well.’ A raindrop goosed the back of her neck. She faltered. If a real downpour started she would be outvoiced, she would have to stop, she would be allowed to stop and it wouldn’t be her fault. She no longer felt that drunk’s invincibility, and there was a part of her, not such a small part, that would welcome a summary dismissal by the sky.
Trimble took the opportunity to step forward. ‘Thank you so much, Miss Burlingame,’ he said. ‘I’m touched, really I am.’ He reached to pull the megaphone out of her hand.
But Halloran, six-foot-four and sturdy, blocked his way.
Trimble looked at Halloran as if this had to be a joke. And Halloran was squinting and chewing his lips like he had a bee trapped inside his face. But he didn’t budge. As she’d already admitted to Gracie, Burlingame had remained willfully oblivious to Trimble’s program. But one proposition of which she felt almost certain was that in all this time he had never resorted to violence. And so it was strange to see on Halloran’s face – and this was a man who had served in the infantry – the sort of grimace that you might otherwise associate with the animal terror of impending dismemberment. Trimble was feared, she realised, feared like death, this rodential gazetteer who had so little power to do anything that really mattered.
Burlingame looked at Gracie, who had tears in her eyes, and then looked back out across her audience. In the last minute or so it seemed almost to have doubled in size. She tried not to pick out individual faces because she knew that would deter her. Into the megaphone she said, ‘You all know Miss Calix. You all know that Miss Calix nearly lost her life last night. We each carry our own load, of course. But nonetheless I have been led to understand that Mr Trimble, for all his good intentions, must take some share of the blame.’ The right angles of the temple steps meddled with the acoustics so that sometimes her words would come booming grandly back at her but if she let the angle of the megaphone dip a few degrees she felt as if she were talking into a pillow. ‘Miss Calix was in a state of despair. She is a young woman of strong character and gay disposition. Why should she have been in such a state? Why should this have been done to her? What drove her up there last night? What I mean to say is …’ By now Burlingame was having trouble keeping her voice from cracking. ‘Because this young woman, this dear friend of ours, once made an error. Some trivial error, no doubt. And much as he did to Mr Hickock a few years ago, Mr Trimble forced her into a position of …’
‘Miss Burlingame—’ said Gracie.
She felt rain again, and spoke faster. ‘I don’t know what it was she did. I don’t have any right to know. None of us do. But I’m quite sure it was nothing. She didn’t deserve this. What happened to her must never be allowed to happen again.’
‘Miss Burlingame, my niece is confined to a mental asylum because I had sexual relations with her for months and months and then when we were caught I told everyone she forced herself on me,’ Gracie said.
Burlingame stood there open-mouthed for a moment. Thankfully her audience could not have heard what Gracie said. But Halloran had heard, and he was now staring at Gracie as if she’d just licked her lips with an eight-inch forked tongue.
‘Gracie …’
‘I couldn’t have you do this for me not knowing. He’s going to tell everybody anyway.’
‘How do you like that, Miss Burlingame?’ said Trimble. ‘Is this little tramp still your “dear friend”? This cradle-robbing muff-diving falsidical Dixie tramp?’ With a snarl he pushed past Halloran, so that his face was only a few inches from Burlingame’s, and she felt very aware of her position right on the edge of the temple, a hundred feet off the ground. ‘You still want to stand up for her? Knowing what she did? Your “dear friend” tore the frock off her little niece and laid her down and ate her cunt up. A hundred times in a row, probably. I did her a favor. I found that out and I didn’t tell nobody. And if she’d taken a running jump off the top and it was because of me then maybe I would’ve been doing her a favor that way too. You think about that, Miss Burlingame, before you say anything else.’ He smiled. ‘Or maybe that don’t put you off. Maybe that’s part of the appeal. Just speculating.’ He seemed almost to be sniffing for a scent. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I think so. You know, I think that’s it. I should have guessed. When she needed a nursemaid, you weren’t too slow to step up, were you? When her drawers were falling off her and she needed a nice long sponge bath between her legs.’
Without meaning to, Burlingame glanced at Gracie, and then turned away, mortified. She could forgive the girl anything but she could not herself expect to be forgiven. There was no hydraulic cage any more, and no king inside, just a few bent medals glinting from a small pile of ash. Nobody at the temple was immune to a coup d’etat except this warlock who knew your secrets before you knew them yourself. This time, Halloran didn’t stop Trimble from grabbing the megaphone ou
t of her slack hand. He raised it.
‘Sorry for the interruption in the show just now, ladies and gentlemen. We had a little conferrumination to finish in the wings. But that’s over now. What I want to do is give you all an exclusive preview of the front page of tomorrow’s Enquirer. Miss Calix and Miss Burlingame here, they ain’t just fast friends, you know. They ain’t just a couple of gals looking out for each other in hard times.’
But even with the megaphone his voice could hardly be heard, because by now at least a hundred men and women, above and below, Angelenos and New Yorkers, reconstructionists and deconstructionists, were chanting ‘Out! Out! Out!’
*
Pennebaker had been scheduled to leave camp at daybreak. So the previous day he had declared his intention to go to bed early, meaning about eight in the evening, in order to be well-rested for his long journey, and Coehorn had declared his intention to go to bed late, meaning about seven in the morning, in order to be present for the send-off. However, just before Pennebaker retired, Coehorn had asked him to rehearse his opening remarks to the New York press one last time. Pennebaker’s recall was perfect, but hearing him yet again made Coehorn realise there were still one or two mots not quite juste. He told Pennebaker that he wouldn’t dream of keeping him from his bed, but in the time it would take him to brush his teeth and change into his pajamas, they could collaborate on what their rivals might call a last-minute script polish.
Seventeen hours later, there was no longer a script. Not even the barest statements of fact had survived. Coehorn had chewed so much of the sour purple leaf – at first to feel more creative, and later to stay awake – that by now he could not stop grinding his stained teeth. He’d begun to understand that he had no hope of rewriting Pennebaker’s remarks until he’d completed the project of mapping and repairing certain previously unsuspected fissures in the structure of English itself. But he still felt fully confident that they would see Pennebaker off before noon.
When Lon Maisoneuve came into the bungalow to report the hubbub outside, Coehorn instructed everybody to ignore it. This felt too familiar. ‘First there was that circus trick with the Incredible Vanishing Leaper,’ he complained, counting on his fingers. ‘Then the platform being lowered down. And now some other crisis. They’re obviously just craving attention.’