1990 - Brazzaville Beach

by William Boyd; Prefers to remain anonymous

  I walked from food source to food source, following Joao’s directions, but with no luck. After an hour and a half of wandering some of my sentimental confidence began to evaporate and I began to rebuke myself for hatching such a preposterous plan. What was I hoping to achieve exactly? What was the purpose of this nostalgic revisiting of the southern area? And if I found Conrad, what then?

  Just after noon I stopped walking and sat under a tree to eat the fishpaste sandwiches that the canteen had prepared for me. I debated whether to carry on for another hour or so, or simply make my way back to the Land Rover. This was futile and silly, I thought, this sentimental farewell, this Last Glimpse…

  I was about twenty minutes from the village when I heard the furious screaming of some colobus monkeys not far away. I ran along the path until I saw them, flinging themselves with reckless ease through the branches above and ahead of me. There were a dozen or more chasing a clumsily brachiating chimpanzee, which was hooting and yelping in fear and panic.

  Conrad thumped heavily to the ground in a flurry of torn leaves, and bounded off through the undergrowth. The monkeys gave up their pursuit and returned to whatever fruit tree they had been feeding in. I followed Conrad as best I could.

  I found him minutes later sitting in the lower branches of a tree scanning a small valley that lay below. He was thin and wasted-looking, and he had a red, glistening sore on one thigh, like a shiny tin badge. He looked round nervously as I approached, and I at once sank to my haunches and pretended to scrabble for seeds in the dust and dead leaves around me. I looked up fleetingly from time to time to meet Conrad’s fixed and disconcerting human gaze. His brown eyes never wavered from me. I saw also that he had two scabbed-over cuts on his forehead and muzzle.

  Finally he ceased to be alarmed by my presence and resumed his scrutiny of the valley.

  The valley was small, cut by a stream which trickled sluggishly through livid green grass on the valley floor. At one stage the stream ran over a sharp, grey, inclined wedge of rock and fell a few feet into a shallow, pebbly pool with a noisy patter that I could hear even from my position high on the valley side.

  I saw that Conrad was gazing at a clump of mes-quinho bushes that grew around the pool. The mes-quinho was a tall, dense bush with small, sharp leaves with a silvery underside like an olive tree. Their fruit was out, loose bunches of button-sized, black seeds which, when cracked, yielded a fuzzy salty-sweet kernel. I had eaten mesquinho fruits before. They split neatly when squeezed between thumb and forefinger. You sucked the paste off the kernel to reveal a shiny brown pip. They were good to eat when you were thirsty, some chemical in them stimulated your saliva glands.

  Hungry Conrad stared at the black bunches and wondered if it was safe to go down. He watched on for half an hour before he decided to do so, picking his way cautiously, and in some discomfort, down the valley side and wading across the stream to the bushes. I watched him for a while as he ate rapidly and intently, cramming bunches of the black seeds into his mouth and chewing them up, husk and all.

  I never heard anything, and neither did he, because of the patter of water flowing off the wedge-shaped rock. By the time he looked up—prompted by other noises intruding into the slap and plash of the waterfall—the other chimps were all around him.

  FINESSE

  John Clearwater told me that in the seventeenth century, when the calculus was first being developed, there was a protracted debate over the rigour of some of the proofs. There were gaps, the stricter mathematicians said, sums didn‘t quite add up, there were little inconsistencies in the definitions of certain terms. There was no refuting their arguments but, whatever their validity, there was also no denying that the calculus, all the same, was working. The results it provided were accurate and useful.

  Blaise Pascal (1623-62) defended these minor inaccuracies, these nuances and ambiguities in the calculus. The formal demands of logic, he said, cannot always have the last word. If the calculus worked, but failed to measure up to the most rigorous definitions of proof, then in the end that didn’t matter. The basic idea was sound. It seemed right, even if it could not be fully or pedantically justified.

  On this sort of occasion, Pascal said, your intuition rates higher than rigorous proof. Rely on your heart to tell you if this is the right mathematical step to take. In cases like these the correct mental attitude to apply to the task in hand was one of ‘finesse’ rather than ‘logic’, finesse being employed here in its original sense, meaning ‘delicacy of discrimination’.

  I go about my business. I live in my little house on the beach. I think about what has happened to me and what I have done and wonder if I have reacted and behaved correctly. I don’t know. Yet. Perhaps this is an area where I should employ Blaise Pascal’s ‘finesse’. I like the idea of finessing my way to a correct answer, rather than relying on the power of logical argument. Perhaps I shall finesse my way through the rest of my life?

  Hope left early the next morning, once again without waking John. She went directly to Bowling Green Wood and measured coppice stools all forenoon. She considered going home at lunchtime, but decided against it. There should be a decent interval of a few hours, she felt, before they saw each other again.

  They had talked until late, sensibly, with no rancour or upset on either side. John had seemed calm and resigned, not depressed and lost as she had feared. They had made all the usual promises about future friendship and contact, and had reluctantly conceded that there was nothing either of them could reasonably do that would rescue their marriage. Neither of them, they averred, had a moment’s regret about the time they had spent together. And they both recognized, sadly, that to try and patch it up, to limp along in a mutually hurtful and unsatisfactory way, would be wrong, a grave error.

  As she worked, Hope thought about their discussion. In herself, she felt an enormous relief, coupled with a vague dissatisfaction. It was odd, was it not, she thought, how sometimes rational and tolerant attitudes left you curiously bereft? Reasonable behaviour was the last thing you wanted. You felt as if the resolution of human problems demanded passion and brute unreason, some spitting and shouting. This absence of recrimination, of accusation and counter-accusation, the lack of long-term unspoken resentments and grudges suddenly unearthed and exposed in the heat of argument, disturbed her. Neither she nor John was that type of person so why were they being so serene and worldly-wise…? Because of John and his illness, she supposed. But what about him? Didn’t he want to shout filthy names at her? Demean and debase her for the sake of his own wounded self-esteem? That would have been more natural, she thought, than all this low-voiced, sad sagacity.

  There had been only one occasion when she had been angered. Out of the blue, he had asked her if she were having an affair. “Is there someone else? There is, I know. Who is he? You can tell me, don’t worry, I’ll understand.” She stopped him from talking on in this vein by the uncompromising vehemence of her denial. She was thinking, all the time: you’re a fine one to talk. And he seemed to accept her word, as suddenly as he had brought the matter up he let it drop. But perhaps she should invent a lover, she wondered? Just to make it messier, more real… Perhaps she should say she was having an affair with Graham Munro, literally for the sake of argument (the notion was otherwise unimaginable, not to say hilarious, as far as she was concerned) but at least it might provoke a fur-flying spat: they could spill some bile and purge themselves of their adult rationality.

  She thought on through the afternoon as she searched the underwood for flowers and grass species, taking samples here and there for confirmation and checking later. At least it wasn’t raining, she thought, as she stood bareheaded in the pewtery afternoon light, beneath the stripped trees, scraping the dirt from under her fingernails with the point of her penknife.

  She felt unduly tired, she realized. John’s simple presence these last two days had made her ill at ease and tense. For a moment she wondered if she had the temperament for living with another man—an
y man, she added cynically—if she was in fact ‘the marrying kind’…But then she remembered that indeed she was: that for a while her life with John Clearwater had been as perfect as she could ever have wished. It made her feel sad, then, and she felt a curious respect for John’s restraint and tormented dignity. He had his own problems, John, that she could not share, and that she did not really understand. She resolved, as she walked home, that her mood that evening would be a fond one and charitable.

  The cottage was empty when she returned, although lights and heaters throughout it were on. Her fondness and charity shrivelled and died. There was a note on the table. “Gone for a stroll. Back for tea. J.” She changed out of her clothes, tidied up the sitting-room and kitchen, and put the kettle on the Raeburn to boil. She sat down to wait for his return.

  She had no idea why the question should have arisen in her mind, but it did so with a force and conviction that were irresistible. She went outside, through the back door and down the tussocky strip of grass and beds of wind-lashed roses that was the cottage garden. There was a small green wooden shed at its foot containing a cobwebbed lawnmower and a pile of split logs. A few gardening implements hung from big rusty nails. She opened the door. The spade had gone from its place on the wall.

  She stood and swore for a minute, rigid with disappointed anger. Stupid fucking idiot. Stupid mad fucking crazy nutter bastard. And so on. No, she couldn’t be bothered with this all over again. No, she couldn’t tolerate this any more. The sooner he was gone the better.

  She knew where to find him.

  Still trembling, positively vibrating with her anger at him, she collected her torch from the cottage and drove down to the lake by the ruins of the old manor house. She parked at the end of the ride and walked quickly through the beech wood to the yew trees. It was almost dark and growing colder by the minute. She rounded the opaque mass of the yews to find the lake stretching ahead of her like dirty chrome. The setting of the sun was marked by a mean stripe of sulphurous yellow-grey on the horizon. The colours of the trees and bushes had virtually gone and the grassy meadows sloping down to the water were full of shadows.

  She could not see him. She listened. Nothing. The wind. A wood pigeon. The filthy call of some rooks. She shouted his name several times. No reply. She played the torch-beam aimlessly about looking for any signs of his digging, but saw nothing. She shouldn’t have driven down here, she now realized; he would have walked home through Blacknoll Farm and, in any case, the darkness would have brought him home soon enough. She turned and headed back towards her car.

  About fifty yards beyond the yew trees, on the verge of the ride, her foot kicked the abandoned spade. Her torch-beam illuminated a few square feet of turf that had been removed, and the small hole that had been dug.

  She stood, breathless, and looked around her. Her ears were filled with the noise of the ornamental falls of the stream that fed the lake, and the rush of water through the green frondy pools, flowing around the carefully positioned rocks of the overgrown grottoes and bowers.

  Hope walked through the beech trees towards the stream. Pathways and steps ran beside it, mossy and worn away. This had been designed as a complementary walk to the ride, another more intimate scenic descent to the lake. At the larger pools with the more picturesque falls, carved stone benches had been placed for those who wished to pause awhile to indulge in some tailored reverie. On one of these stone benches Hope found John’s wallet and a small notebook.

  “John!” she shouted, vainly. “Johnny…Johnny it’s me!”

  There was no answer.

  She made herself shine her torch into the pool beneath her. It was a shallow saucer, lined with stone and about twenty feet across. The waterfall that fed it was twelve feet high, but so bearded with moss and weed that the water oozed and dripped rather than fell. Black alder and willow overhung the hollow in which the pool was set, overgrown and unmanaged, a dense arbour run wild, screening the sky and cutting out whatever ambient light there was. It was dark and still, and there was a curious moist fungoid smell in the air, like a damp cellar.

  The light from her torch bounced off the water surface, making it opaque and shiny. She stepped carefully down some stone treads to the pool’s edge and shone the beam obliquely.

  John was lying, face down, in about three or four feet of water, fully clothed, in the attitude of a shallow dive, his heels floating higher than his head. His hands appeared to be folded across his chest. The posture was stiff and unnatural: he looked like a public statue that had been toppled forward off its plinth.

  Setting her torch down so that its beam shone across the pool, Hope waded in, barely registering the cold as the water flowed over the tops of her rubber boots. By the time she reached John, she was thigh-deep. She took hold of an ankle with both hands and tugged. She realized, with a small sob of grief, that his face was dragging along the pool bottom. He felt unnaturally heavy.

  She reached below the surface and with enormous difficulty turned him over. He had none of that near-weightlessness, that easy, oiled manoeuvrability, that bodies supported in water normally possess. She saw why. The blunt snout of a thick fragment of paving stone—a stair tread, part of a bench?—stuck out between his tweed lapels. His jacket was buttoned tightly—three buttons—across it, and both his hands were thrust inside, double Napoleon, hugging the heavy rectangle of rock to his chest and belly.

  With thick icy fingers she freed his hands and managed to unbutton the jacket. The stone rolled slowly off him, and John’s wide-eyed, bloodless, utterly calm face, buoyant now, rose easily through the three feet of green water, his stiff frizzy hair—for once in his life—swaying free and fluid, until his features broke the surface and bobbed and settled there, deaf and indifferent to the shrill, ragged misery of her scream.

  THE LANGUID FIRE

  Every day we inhale and exhale four thousand gallons of air. How many inhalations did it take for John to fill his lungs with icy water? Two? Three?

  Four thousand gallons of air a day. How we need that gas! To feed our blood, to help us burn, fuel for the languid fire that warms us inside…It is the coldness of the dead that is so unnerving. And that perfect stillness, too. The actor feigning death on the stage cannot fully disguise the minute rise and fall of his chest and stomach, cannot wholly control every minuscule twitch and shudder of his hundreds of muscles. He is not still. The systems inside him pump and sift, decompose and consume. But the absolute stillness of the dead is manifestly non-human. The inert, inanimate body is a thing—all that motion has stopped for ever. The human being has become a roll of carpet, a sack of potatoes, a log of wood.

  I started yelling and shouting crazily as I slithered down the valley side towards them, but the chimpanzees appeared not to hear me, or pay any attention. In any event, the noise they were making themselves was enormous, and Conrad was screaming viciously in pain and terror. I could see Darius beating his head remorselessly with both fists, as Sebastian and Pulul held him down.

  I ran across the valley floor towards the mesquinho bushes, shouting constantly, one hand searching in my shoulder bag for Usman’s gun.

  There were eight adult males attacking Conrad, each one many times stronger than a strong man. As I waded through the livid green grass at the stream’s edge the thought of what might happen if they turned on me made me stop with a lurch of horrible fear. For a second I didn’t move. Then I heard Conrad’s screams reach a new intensity, before suddenly cutting off.

  They were all on the other side of the stream from me, thrashing around the mesquinho bushes, leaping on Conrad’s body in their mad excitement. I fired the gun in the air and they whirled round, chattering and screeching. Darius ripped a branch off a mesquinho bush and beat the ground with it. Americo and Pulul dashed across the stream towards me, displaying, howling, their yellow teeth bared. Darius reared back on his legs, fur bristling, arms held wide. The noise was grotesque, like a metallic tearing sound, reverberating everywhere, raw and coarse.<
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  “GO AWAY!” I screamed at them, levelling the gun. “RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!” But what was a gun to them, Homo troglodytes! And what was I? Just another strange, bipedal ape, displaying, noisy, threatening.

  Two others crossed the stream. Pulul rushed a few paces at me, stopped and retreated. Darius screamed, frenziedly tearing branches of the mesquinho bushes. I saw Americo lift a stone from the stream bed and lob it clumsily in my direction. Pulul was leaping up and down, thumping the ground with his hands about twelve feet to my left. Caspar was inching forward on my right. My eyes flicked to the mesquinho bushes, wondering if there was any sign of Conrad.

  Then Pulul charged me.

  My first shot caught him in the chest, high on one side, and knocked him spinning off his feet. Then Darius leapt across the stream and galloped towards me. I shot him full in the face when he was about six feet away. I saw shards of his disintegrating skull fly up into the air like spun coins. I turned and fired at Sebastian and Caspar as they fled, but I missed. Then they were all gone, bounding away out of the valley, screaming in panic.

  Then it was silent again. There were no bird calls, just the sound of water pattering off the rock.

  Pulul was still alive. I walked carefully over to him, watching a leg twitch and move irregularly. He was turned away from me and I could see that the exit wound had left a hole in his back the size of my fist. I fired into his head from a range of two feet.

  Darius lay on his back, his arms spread like a sun-bather. The top of his head, from his eye sockets upward, had either disappeared or had been reduced to a long clotted fringe of expressed flesh and bone.