by John Watt
She looks towards the smoking ruins of the plane and shudders. There are tears spilling down her cheeks.
‘Those poor people.’ She sobs, takes a deep breath, and steadies the tremor in her voice with an effort.
‘What a terrible way to die. And us, being here, seeing, hearing everything—but no way to help.’
Thomas turns away from her, silent for a moment. ‘I couldn’t … I can’t …’
He is unable to continue, unwilling to revive and confront in his mind the sights and sounds of horror, so turns his attention instead to the baggage he has retrieved.
The two begin sorting through the contents of the packs. The boots are too big to fit either of them. They pull out socks, men’s underwear, shorts, shirts. Near the bottom of both packs some more basic essentials appear. Standard hiking rations: nuts, dried fruit, biscuits. And water bottles. Half a dozen small bottles in total, but only two of them are filled. He tries to estimate how long that much water will last. It will surely be finished tomorrow.
Thomas clambers back into the tail section of the plane to retrieve his own belongings as well as the young woman’s travel bag. He returns to the log and they sit for a few minutes in silence.
She turns slowly to him, breaking the silence after a few moments of hesitation. Her voice is unsteady, almost inaudible. There is a sharp edge of fear in it.
‘What can we do? Where are we? Do you have any idea? What direction could we go for help?’
Thomas shakes his head, looks around the small clearing where they are sitting. There are colossal trees in all directions; massive trunks in the foreground, and behind and between them more and more, receding into the background until any distant view is completely blocked out. The fear in her voice focuses his attention on their danger. Is it possible that he has survived the crash and the inferno to die slowly of thirst and exposure? The muscles across his shoulders are tense. The hairs on the back of his neck are standing up.
The crash site slopes up on one side towards the top of what must be a small hill. He stands abruptly, speaks abruptly. He’ll walk up to the top of this hill. Possibly he’ll see further afield from there. Maybe there are farms, or a house or at least something to give them an idea of where they are. He’ll only be a few minutes.
He trudges up the slope, picking his way over long-fallen branches and around the buttressed bases of the enormous trees, aware of the awkwardness of his feet in their black, thick-soled shoes over the uneven terrain. However it’s not a long climb, and the view from the top gives him at least a little of what he’s been hoping for. One of the biggest of the trees has fallen, toppling down the other side of the hill, opening up a clear line of sight in that direction. Thomas looks out between the ranks of standing trunks on each side, and sees that the terrain changes suddenly and radically beyond the foot of the slope. The ground is flat, low-lying, covered with scrub rather than tall trees, stretching to a distant line of brilliant white marking the horizon. Coastal dunes. Here and there, where the line of the dunes dips lower, there are slivers of blue. The sea. He stands at the top of the hill scanning the scene fruitlessly for any sign of human presence. To left and right the low scrub is unbroken by cleared land or fences or buildings or roads as far as he can see. Wilderness. He shivers in spite of the warmth of the early summer afternoon.
Thomas picks his way back down the slope to where the young woman is still sitting on the log, rubbing her leg. She looks up at him, asks, with the same tense, sharp edge in her voice, what he found. Could he see any houses?
He shakes his head. No sign of people at all. But he could see through the trees to the sand dunes and the sea. At least they know they’re near the coast.
He picks a slightly more distant place to sit on the log again, and stares for a few minutes into the cloud of smoke still escaping from the fuselage. Finally he turns towards her. Speaks hesitantly. He points out how little water they have. It will last them till, well, the next morning. No longer than midday. And they have to expect a warm day, maybe quite hot. There might be water on the low-lying land on the other side of the hill; there’s certainly none here. If no help comes by the morning they’ll have to move. Walk towards the sea. It’s their best chance of finding more water. And finding other people too, if they follow the coast. At least it will give them a direction and save them from walking around in circles in this forest.
She looks away from him into the trees for a few moments, then turns back to face him. Thomas notices a couple of small wrinkles between her eyebrows. He wonders what they mean. She hesitates before responding. Walk to where? How far would they have to go?
He doesn’t know how far. Has no idea. But they will have to try if help doesn’t arrive soon. Either that or stay here and die of thirst.
She turns away, staring into the dimness between the trees. Speaks after a short silence. ‘I suppose you’re right. There’s really nothing else to do. But I’m not sure how far I’ll be able to walk.’ She touches her leg cautiously, and winces. He glances at her leg and thinks he can see a bruise beginning to form, quickly looking away again, nervous in case she might think he was staring.
*
Thomas is sitting on the same log. The afternoon has dragged on towards evening. The sun, out of sight behind the treetops, must be low in the sky. The indistinct spaces between the trunks are fading gradually towards darkness, but there is still light in the clearing. The young woman is also there. They are both sorting through their belongings, deciding what to shift into the rucksacks. She has pointed out that they should be ready to move off early in the morning, before the heat of the day builds up.
The ground before each of them is strewn with clothing: his spare black trousers, white shirts and underwear, black shoes and socks, her skirts, blouses and dresses in clear, bright colours. He surreptitiously snatches an opportunity to glance across to where she has consolidated her underwear into a small heap, but it is hard to make out the forms of individual items. He looks quickly away as she begins to turn towards him to speak. There is not a great deal of room in her pack; she will have to leave a lot behind. And he will too, she supposes.
Thomas notices her eyes scanning the belongings spread out in front of him, focussing on a couple of spare clerical collars that he has put to one side, then moving up to the collar around his neck.
She pauses for a moment before speaking. ‘I’ve been meaning to say—to ask. You’re a clergyman of some sort.’ Her rising inflection turns the statement into a question, calls for a response of some sort from him.
He stumbles over a reply. It’s difficult to know how to explain. And embarrassing. A priest—a Catholic priest. No, that’s not quite it, he’s going to be ordained soon. He will be a priest in a month or two.
She nods. Yes, she thought something like that.
He looks away, thinking. Apparently she’s a non- Catholic. A Catholic would understand that a Catholic priest could hardly be called a clergyman of some sort. To be a priest is to be unique, set apart.
She pushes the conversation in another direction, but one that prolongs his discomfort.
‘This is silly,’ she says, ‘but we don’t know each other’s names. It looks as if we’re stuck with each other for a while, so perhaps we should introduce ourselves. I’m Jane. Jane Peterson. And I’m a student teacher. I’m heading home to Albany for the Christmas holidays.’ She attempts a shaky smile as she corrects herself. ‘Perhaps I should say I was heading home. Heaven knows where we are heading now.’
He tries to match her half-smile about their predicament, and replies, ‘I’m Thomas Riordan. And my family lives in Albany too. But it’s years since I’ve spent much time there.’
The exchange feels uncomfortable for him. It’s such an obvious and unchallenging thing to talk about, but his own contributions seem stilted, stiff. He can’t remember a time when a young lady has spoken to him so freely and directly. In fact he can scarcely remember any conversation with a young lady at all. Eve
n a trivial exchange like this feels like an excursion into unexplored country.
Thomas looks around the small clearing. The spaces between the enormous trunks, receding back into the depths of this remote forest, are getting darker. The light will be failing soon. They will need to be making whatever preparations they can for the night, and will need to get as much rest as they can. He worries about where the two of them might sleep. If sleep is possible after the horrors of the afternoon. Will she want him to be lying close, to let her feel just a little more secure in the lonely darkness? And if she does want him close, what will he do?
5
A Single Step
Macpherson holds up one hand. ‘That is probably enough for today. We seem to be on the right track; the approach is working well so far. We’ll continue next week with the following day’s reading.’
He leans forward, focusing directly on Thomas’ face.
‘That—the plane crash and what happened to the victims— it must have been an overwhelming experience—a terrible thing for you to witness. To be there, almost in the middle of it all. It’s not surprising that your mind shut the memories away. But now that we’ve managed to revive these sights and sounds they won’t go away again. And there may well be more to come, possibly as confronting as these. You may need to develop ways of managing them so that you don’t drown in them, so to speak. I’d like you to spend a few moments holding these memories in your mind, and then tell me what you are feeling about them.’
Thomas shuts his eyes, letting it all come up again: the half-dismembered bodies, the blood, the terrible, inhuman screams from within the inferno engulfing the fuselage, the inescapable, harsh smell of bodies burned black.
‘It’s all—it’s nothing but horror.’
‘Yes, it’s to be expected that you would feel horrified by seeing and hearing other people suffering dreadful pain. It’s part of what makes us human beings—at least normal, balanced human beings. I’d be rather disturbed if you didn’t feel like this. But it’s important not to be overwhelmed by the feeling.
‘Notice that your whole body has stiffened, tensed, while these images flood in. Your muscles are all taut. Don’t try to dismiss the sights and the sounds. Keep them in your mind, stay with them, but consciously relax all your muscles. Do it systematically, one part of your body at a time.’
Thomas has not noticed the tension building up in his body, or the fact that he has shifted forward to perch rigidly on the edge of his seat. He sinks back into the cavernous chair, closes his eyes, and consciously relaxes legs, arms, shoulders, neck, stomach muscles.
‘That’s fine, Mr Riordan. Now, do you find that makes it at least a little easier to bear confronting the memories?’
Thomas’s reply comes after a pause of a few seconds.
‘Yes. I can still picture the bodies and the flames and the rest. But I seem to be seeing it all from a bit further away, and I have a different feeling, if this makes sense. I’ve lost the feeling that it’s all on the point of engulfing me.’
‘Very good. Now I would suggest attempting a couple of extra strategies to manage the feelings. Try reminding yourself that these images and sounds are memories. You see and hear them as if they are happening now, but they are from the past. Focus on the thought that all that suffering is long over. Those people are beyond pain now. And there’s one other way that’s open to you, I imagine, though perhaps not to everyone. I take it that your religion involves believing in a loving God who is concerned for all his creatures—even a sparrow that falls, according to one text that I recall. Do you think that focusing on this belief might help you to control your response to these memories? It would suggest, I suppose, that whatever suffering people have undergone, God will arrange everything for the best in the end. Wipe all the tears from their eyes, as it’s put somewhere.’
Thomas nods agreement, feeling some surprise to hear a self-confessed unbeliever referring to the scriptures, apparently familiar with them.
‘Now are there any other feelings coming back as you recall that time after the plane crashed?’
The young man traces in memory the sequence of events that followed. ‘Yes, there’s something else. I’m not sure that I should go into it. The thing is it seems so trivial. I mean compared with what we’ve been talking about. It seems hardly worth mentioning.’
‘Please tell me about it anyway.’
‘When I think about being stranded down there, what I’m feeling, what I remember feeling … the memories are coming back to me now. You’d probably expect me to be afraid, not knowing where I was—terrified that I’d never find a way out. Maybe die there. There’s some of that. But beyond that what I remember is the embarrassment, the sensation of awkwardness in my whole body, about the young woman being with me. About not knowing what to do—how to be so close to her.’
The young man looks up and sees a new level of intensity in Macpherson’s attention. ‘That is a very interesting reaction. Not at all trivial, I suspect. Possibly quite important. We will probably come back to that in a later session.’
The older man sits back in his chair, hands behind the back of his head. ‘In the meantime I want to move on to another issue. It might not seem relevant at first, but when I think about it there is a connection with what we’ve been discussing. I have to say that I found the story of Saint Sabas—intriguing. I take it that a saint is someone to be admired, perhaps taken as a model to be imitated.’
Thomas nods, looking away from the older man’s face. Wondering what this is leading to.
‘I didn’t understand the story about the apple. Why would anyone admire him for stepping on the apple rather than eating it? If he’d thought of eating it but kept it for someone who needed it more, I see the point of admiring that. That is generosity, unselfishness. We all admire people like that. But crushing it under his foot, that’s just negative, destructive, isn’t it? He doesn’t get the benefit of eating it, and neither will anyone else. It will be no good to anyone. As I see it, the world was a tiny bit worse off for what he did.’ Macpherson shakes his head, looking puzzled. ‘I’m not entirely sure why I’m talking about this. It’s not really part of my brief, not my business, you might think. And you’d possibly be right. But I think it might turn out in the end to be relevant. Relevant, perhaps, to a rather different problem from the immediate one of your missing memories. But apart from that, this story is alien, I mean unfamiliar territory, to me. I’m intrigued. In a philosophical way, if you like. The thinking behind it puzzles me.
‘And vowing never to eat another apple. Why would anyone admire that? What’s the good of it? Who gets the benefit to set against his loss? If he’d vowed to grow apples to give to people who couldn’t afford to buy them, then I see the point. The virtue, if you want to be formal about it. The goodness. The world would be better off for what he was doing. And all that self-inflicted starvation and thirst. What’s the point there? Who benefits from it? He almost died of thirst. Is that supposed to be a good thing? Who was it good for?’
The doctor sits back in his chair looking up at the ceiling for a few moments. When his gaze swivels down again to Thomas his voice has a more decisive tone.
‘While I’m speaking I’m beginning to get a clearer notion of what it was that disturbed me about your book. The author seemed to write about this man’s suffering with an attitude of … I’m not sure how to describe his attitude. There’s admiration there, certainly, which I don’t understand at all, and something else. He seems to be fascinated by the man’s pain. He celebrates it. There’s none of the sympathetic human reaction that we were talking about earlier.’
He shakes his head again, but his expression and his tone lighten. He smiles his slight, controlled smile. ‘Still, I think I worked out from the dates in the story that your saint lived well into his nineties. So it seems that all that self-inflicted torture didn’t do him too much harm. Physically, at least.’
Thomas, still sitting back in the capacious lea
ther chair, has been feeling the tension gradually building in the muscles of his shoulders and neck. Voices buzz in his head with words and phrases from a hundred sermons and homilies and readings. Self-denial. Mortification of the flesh. I chastise my body and bring it into subjection. He has never heard it questioned that this is saintly behaviour, pleasing to God. This questioning, it’s a voice from another world. There must be answers to all these questions. But among all the voices from his own world he can’t find a response that he feels able to give to this man. He opens his mouth to reply but no words come.
Macpherson resumes, ‘Let’s spend the remaining few minutes trying a different approach. Dreams. I asked you last time to make a note of any dream that was vivid enough to make an impression on you. Have you had one over the week that you can describe to me?’
Thomas relaxes back into his chair a little. He can’t see how this will help in the task of recovering his memories, but it doesn’t seem so challenging.
‘Yes. I had one a few nights ago that I can tell you about. It’s a dream that I remember having before.’
‘Very good. All the better probably, if it’s a recurrent dream.’ Macpherson sits back in his chair. ‘Go ahead. I’m ready to listen.’
‘In my dream I’m swimming. Or floating, really. I’m not actually moving through the water, though. I have the feeling that I’m out near the seminary, the first seminary I mean, when I was fourteen or fifteen. But nothing in my dream looks like the real place.
‘The river is on one side of the seminary property; you may have driven past it. But the water I’m floating in is not like the river. Not at all. It’s a long channel, fairly straight, as far as I can see. And narrow, I suppose only about … maybe twenty or twenty-five yards across. And the sides are nothing like the banks of the river: they’re high and steep. Quite smooth too. As if they’ve been built. They’re not natural.’