“Oh, Mary.”
That surprised them both—he hadn’t meant to say it out loud. And now matters might have a tendency to get upended, to go astray. If he didn’t take care, his intentions could work quite seriously adrift. So he should really start getting on with what had to be done.
Fuck, she was amazing, though. Amazing and right here.
“Yes?”
For an instant, he couldn’t think what she was asking him. “Ahm, yes, I . . .”
That buggering sleepiness of love bit doesn’t last, though, does it? Doesn’t come with a guarantee. One minute you’re dozy, the next you’re all poker-worked in to the bone with fucking confusions and fright.
He cleared his throat and grappled with his composure, hoping that it might consent to be composed. “Ah, yes, indeed, I thought we might talk through the bits and pieces you gave me and then we could climb up and look round off the top. You should see the top. You’ve never been up there?”
“The beach is as far as I’ve got.”
He wondered if she was enjoying herself. It was, maybe, a little chilly for this kind of jaunt, but she did look as if she was happy enough. In fact, she appeared—he swallowed hard but the thought still remained—she appeared more than averagely pleased to be with him.
“Nathan?”
“Hm? Oh. Right. Well . . .” Nathan pulled out the fold of papers, checking his hands for signs of nervousness, but—no—he felt safe to proceed without any tremors or reservations. “Bit of a mixed bag, aren’t they? I mean this one—” he waved a portion of the sheaf, felt a nudge of sea air inspect it cursorily, “is perfectly acceptable, really fine.”
“I know.” She frowned, uncomfortable with having been so definitive. “I mean, it got published. It must be OK.”
Mary gave him a watchful look. Its acceptance and publication had, of course, happened while they weren’t speaking. But he could say, “I know,” which would, he hoped, translate as I did still take an interest, I kept an eye on you. She nodded with a tight, good, little smile.
“And then you go and give me this,” he waggled another, less happy sheaf, “and Jesus—it’s God-awful. I’d never have thought you could be so bad.” The thing about doing this kind of talk, he hoped, was to drive on in, make it sharp, but with any luck amusing and useful and nothing personal. “And that thing about the woman and her pets. Fuck.” He was taking the right line, here. Apparently. She was still sort of smiling, agreeing with her eyes—he thought, agreeing—so no need to worry at all. “I picked it up and read it and it was like . . . like having maggots fall out when you tap a biscuit. Not a proper handful in any way.”
“I’d have thought that was what you wanted.” She wasn’t going to take this completely lying down, which was all right, too. Very healthy. “The kind of stuff you write, I would have thought a fistful of maggots was right up your street.” The light of a grin just flitted behind her eyes.
“Mm hm, A Fistful of Maggots Is Right Up My Street will be the title of my autobiography.”
“If it is, I’ll demand a percentage.”
“There’s no copyright on titles. Not a chance.” Teasing. Such a good thing to do. Bit of banter to sharpen the brain. “And what were you thinking of with . . . hang on . . .” He shuffled the pages until he found what he was looking for. “Here we go—‘the sun, like God’s bleeding arsehole’— God’s bleeding arsehole? Do tell me what possible kind of excuse you could ever come up with for that. Concussion? Pre-senile dementia? Ergot poisoning from one of Ruth’s dodgier loaves?”
She giggled and frowned simultaneously. “I said I knew that some of it was crap. All I needed was for you to agree and then I was going to go back and work on it again. Or burn it—obviously.”
“I know.” He nodded his most understanding nod— this is just the game we’re playing, this is just a bout of sparring, a proof we are safe with each other, even when we come to blows. “I remember what you told me when you handed it all in. No pre-senile dementia here.” He tapped at his skull, finding it shockingly easy to endorse his own thought process.
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Meanwhile I’m still waiting for you to justify your hideous sunset.”
“Oh, good grief, fine.” She stood up, shaking her head with—he knew—mock impatience. “I was trying to reflect the protagonist’s state of mind in my description of his surroundings.”
“Ah, I see—so he’s a verbally challenged lunatic deprived of his medication. All is clear. Or else he’s bow-legged with monstrously gory piles that go unmentioned in the rest of your narrative.”
Mary pursed her lips, solemn, and bent to pick up a largish, flattish stone. Almost at once she began to swing her arm back, still holding its burden, in a movement that suggested, for one astonished breath, that she might be about to brain him, there and then. He let out a whinny of alarm as she flung the rock wide of him to land flatly in the sea with a cracking slap. This sent up a hard, broad tangent of water that thoroughly drenched his leg. As she had, no doubt, assumed it would.
“Ach. You fucker.” Nathan danced vainly across the gravel as if he could retrospectively avoid the impact. His shin was chilling already. “That was completely unnecessary.” He enjoyed how plaintive he was sounding. And how attractively triumphant she looked.
“It shut you up, though, didn’t it?”
“I was actually on the brink of dealing very admiringly with some of the excellent sections in the good stuff. I was going to lavish you with unreserved praise. Before you made your characteristically highbrow contribution to the debate.”
“It wasn’t a debate, it was a mugging.” And then, as a milder afterthought: “Are you very wet?”
“Not really.”
“Damn, I’ll have to do it again.”
She began casting about her for another stone while, intoxicated with the whole proceedings, he dodged and slithered like a fool and made small bleats of protestation.
Perhaps I am a masochist.
No. Not possible. If I were basically masochistic then most of my life would have been just nothing but concentrated fun. Every time I woke up, bleeding from my heart and soul, I’d find myself barely able to hide my joy.
I’d be adoring every moment. Like I am now.
They reached a giggly truce and decided to abandon this stage of the proceedings. Nathan led her to the point where the gravel narrowed and then disappeared, crushed between the water and the cliff face. Here, just before they ran out of ground, was the start of an uneven staircase, cut into the rock, its steps hollowed and pitched with long usage.
He let her go ahead, hoping this would give her the comforting sense that, should she slip back, he would catch her.
Not that we wouldn’t just both break our necks, to be frank, but it’s the thought that counts. And nothing unpleasant will happen today. It can’t.
He bawled forward to her, trying to be a good guide, “The Head is one huge cylinder of basalt—a volcanic core.”
“I’d noticed that it was a cylinder, thank you. And that it’s got bloody steep sides.”
“Shut up and fucking listen, I’m being educational.”
“Well, that doesn’t happen often.”
“Ungrateful cow. Shush. The steps you’re climbing are extremely ancient. Probably pre-Christian. The only reason they aren’t worn completely away seems to be that people didn’t come here very much.”
“I can’t think why.”
“Or that, once they had come, they stayed.”
Then the climb took over and they panted their way to the sudden clarity of the summit, a slightly rounded oval, hunched under the moving air, risen out of the sea’s horizontal imagination. Mary wanted to sit for a while in the wiry grass, but Nathan shooed her on. “You can rest in a minute, it’s just a little bit further—go on.” He loved this part: the gentle ascent across the softly domed surface here always made him think of walking over a tiny planet, his own space. “Now. There. What do you
think of that?”
Just where the apex of the rock should be, there was instead a steep-sided hollow perhaps twenty yards across and flat at its base. And lifting in the turf of the base like pumped veins were ridges—beautifully defined— marking a path that whorled in and in concentrically to the island’s heart. Mary stood at the lip, silent, looking from Nathan to the pattern and back again. When she spoke, she whispered—people often did once they got up here, “God, it’s lovely. What is it?”
“Oh, a variety of things. If you’re Christian, you step into the spiral there, where the opening lets you in, and you walk until you get to the centre and then back, perhaps in your bare feet, perhaps fifty times, perhaps a hundred—some number of times, anyway—and that would be the equivalent of going to Jerusalem—no need to head off and stab any Saracens. Or, indeed, risk being stabbed.”
“I’ll bear it in mind.”
“Or maybe it’s only a model of the alchemical pathway to material transformation. Or maybe it’s Celtic and the path leads to the sun, to life, or through life.”
“They used to put mazes on tombstones to keep in the dead.”
He resisted the temptation to say well done, but was—nevertheless— impressed. “That’s right.” Pointing her way to the start of the path, “And here the dead are our speciality,” following her, wanting to go in and round the track with her, to be there with her, “On you go,” right at the final curl of it, inside with her.
They slithered down the bank and started the walk, single file—all the marked channel would allow. The grass was short, mossy and oddly giving, it took the sound from their feet. The breeze faded, the sea below them was struck dumb and their progress continued, noiseless. Above them, the air thickened and smoothed, almost gave the impression of sinuous walls, grown up about them to keep their course safe and unvarying.
Nathan touched his hand quickly to Mary’s shoulder and murmured, as if they were in a hospital, or a church—some place demanding his respect, “You know that, at one time, the sailors in Brittany paid no taxes to the king because of their unusual duties. At night the new dead would come to them and would ask to be borne out of life, would wait to be taken to sea and so, after sunset, the fishermen would sail them northwards to the Island of the Dead.”
“North? That would take them to Britain.”
“Yes, they were heading here, for Britain. And people have occasionally said that their proper destination was precisely this point in Britain. Because Ancw is pretty much a Welsh way of spelling the Breton name for the dead. What’s the matter?” Mary had halted in front of him. “Hm? What’s wrong?” He stroked her back and she shivered her shoulders in response.
“Wrong? Don’t know . . . Walking on the gate of the Underworld . . .”
“It only is if we say it is.”
“Makes you feel like you’re being watched.” She shook herself again. “Uff. Like an invisible camera crew, or something, an intrusion.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to . . . It’s just a story, after all.” Their words, he noticed, emerged compacted, vaguely watchful, slipping between them as if they were bolting for cover. “Do you want to go back?”
“Oh, no. Not at all.” She didn’t turn to him, only started on again. “This is all part of the package, isn’t it? The experience.”
“What experience?”
“The one you’ve planned to give me. Oh.” And now she did turn, having reached the centre of the maze and caught sight of what he’d known she would.
“I haven’t planned anything,” he feigned ignorance, in a way that let her see he wasn’t ignorant at all. “Not really. This is just something I thought that you might like to know about.”
They smiled slowly, met each other’s eyes, almost bashful, then found the fit of the look and held it, calm, while high silence raged on every side.
Then Nathan blinked. “You said Oh. You saw the carving, then.”
“Mm? Oh, yes. It’s wonderful. I think that’s the right word. A bit mad, but wonderful.”
“Now and then people have said the same of me.” It felt right to tell her that, it wasn’t boasting, or stupid, it was OK.
Mary smiled again and knelt to look at the midpoint of the maze, the little stone-sided box sunk into it, the basalt sculpture set there, staring up at them. It was a man’s head, darkly sleek, streamlined to an almond shape, a little as if it were some stranded seafaring creature, and not a head at all. Its eyes were wide, the pupils deeply pierced, and its mouth full open, brimming with gathered rain. Other details might well have been worn away, but it looked exactly right as it was, as if this was the way it intended to be.
Nathan crouched beside her. “Every time I see him, he makes my own head smooth. I mean, he’s soothing. And the opened mouth, for singing, speaking—that’s a sign of life.”
“Or death. The dead can’t close their mouths.”
He could hear it, she was hurt. Nathan felt the sourness of that close on his mind before he even understood her words. When she hurt, he had to make it stop. When she hurt, he hurt also.
He began to straighten, edging his palms under her elbows, finding she gripped his arms in return and used him to help her stand. From there it was easy to hug and think of nothing for a while, to be smoothed.
Go on, go on, go on. Follow through for once in your life.
God, she’s a good wee woman, deserves better relatives than me.
Go on.
“Mary. Another story you don’t know . . .” Love broke, folded in his chest—it was the same each time: a clean sheet taken, stretched and snapped and pressed into layers of heaviness, into a pack of frightening, complicated weight. It shortened his breath.
He made his decision—backed away from the one big story, set another that was merely important in its place. “There’s supposed be a library here, buried, cut in the rock: books from Alexandria, from Mistra and Bessarion, the Pythagorean Brotherhood, the Gnostics and the Alchemists; unknown Vedas, Mayan Codices, a new Homer, a more dangerous Bible; things that even Crowley wouldn’t read. And the antidote for gunpowder; the constitution of a perfect state—anything you’d like, kept here alive.” She was still in his arms, listening, light against him. “I have my personal wish list. I like to think of it, sneaked away under our feet. And I’m never going to try and find out if there’s anything really here. Not that it would matter, anyway.”
“Mm?” She frowned up at him, her chin resting sharply on his chest with a nice little pain.
“No, really, it wouldn’t matter. We could make them all again, if we had to. What matters about them is still here, in us, we just have to notice. I mean . . . I mean.” He kissed her forehead, neither intending nor expecting to have done so, and then stepped a half pace backwards, but reached in to hold both her hands, continue the touch. “I mean . . .”
Shit, I’m losing it.
Mary squeezed at the roots of his thumbs. “You mean that . . .” She grinned, “Let me think if I can think what Nathan Staples would mean. That . . .” and let herself be, tenderly, quite serious, “well, I’ve always thought we were like the Masai. You know? Maybe you wouldn’t say this, but I would. The way that the Masai see it—all of the cows in the world belong to them, cows are their thing. All of the cattle, all over the world, are theirs by right. And all of the words in the world belong to us.”
“Oh, no.”
Shit.
He hadn’t intended to be so loud with that. She flinched, withdrew from the comfortable look she’d had and dropped his hands.
He went on in any case, whatever damage he’d caused already done, “No, that’s the point, that really is the whole, important point. They don’t belong to us.” He dodged forward slightly and held her shoulder, loving, just loving, just loving, that they could talk about this, be together in this— his work, their work, the work that they’d both do now. “That’s, that’s . . . the words, you see—you can’t wish them here when they’re not, you can’t stop them when the
y are: they’ll fill your life, make your life, eat your fucking life. They can’t belong to anyone. They’re like land—it’s not in their nature to be owned by anyone and if you try it, they’ll choke you—in the end they will choke and skin and bury you. A writer sells what a writer owns—the skill and the effort and the time—not the words. You don’t own words. Things will all go so wrong if you even start to try.”
“Is that a Rule?”
He tried to tell if she was cross with him, or not.
“Um . . . ach, all right, then. Yes. Yes, if you want, that’s Rule Four. You do not own your words.”
“If you say so. OK.” She folded her arms.
“Really?”
Fuck, that was easy.
“Yes, really.”
“Because otherwise, for one thing, when people like your stuff you think they like you and when they hate it, you think they hate you, and then there’s that arrogant thing people get when they assume that the whole thing’s their right and a sign of their being a fucking genius and—”
“It’s OK. I’m agreeing.” She grinned, shaking her head at him in a good, in a positive way.
He grinned, too. “And I hope you notice that when I tell you your description of the sunset is immensely repellent shit . . .” he waited while she rolled her eyes, “I say that because I care about the words and I want them to be their best—I’m not getting at you—I want to find the words the shape they need to say what’s closest to their intention, and to leave the right spaces around them, because God’s bleeding—”
“Enough. You know how I get violent.”
“I’m only trying to explain—”
“Really, Mr. Staples. Enough.” She was enjoying being stern with him, darting close to kiss his forehead and slingshot his whole future through him, clean up from his heels, extremely bright.
Oh, Mary.
That sleepiness was seeping in again. He closed his eyes, swallowed. “Let’s walk out of this thing and get home. Go on, get a move on. I don’t know . . . bloody writers . . .”
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