Clutching for anything positive he could mention, Nathan suggested, “Mary likes you.”
“And I like her back. And if you’re going to say that she’d want me to be careful, I can tell you that I am. And I can also tell you that you certainly shouldn’t worry her with this. And I can also tell you that there are two things I’d like to see by the end of the year: your first draft and her with an identified father. Think I’ll be in luck?”
“I don’t know, Jack. I really don’t know.”
They hung up with the usual courtesies, a little more gently delivered, more consciously meant. Nathan set his phone down and lay back in the sand. A gull turned in front of the sun, its shadow disappearing into the brightness faultlessly.
That evening was a slow, broad falling of fire. Dusty heat rose, lazy, from the ground while the burning of the sea and sky commenced with peach and egg yellow and ended with sparking iron, bright mercury and blood that cooled to a thickening, ashy dusk.
Under all this, Foal Island kept its peace.
Ruth and Lynda still talked amiably together, slicing fresh bread to have with their soup for supper while Richard made his slow way to be with them, considering—in spasms—the reprieve of the life that he’d thought he had lost and the new, taut happiness in Lynda. He watched his shadow reel away beside him, a steady accompaniment, never stumbling or showing a sign of each vision that clipped him open, daubed him with the feel of his wife, spread and then fitted hungrily to so many other men. Rhythmically, he cleared his mind, kept walking.
Louis was reading from one of his favourites—The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius—and eating a single chocolate truffle, one nibble at a time, as an aid to concentration and because it was fun. He whispered to the honey-coloured dust, caught and drifting in the block of light from his window, “He who has seen present things has seen all, both everything which has taken place from all eternity and everything which will be for time without end; for all things are of one kin and of one form.”
Joe was sitting in the Meeting Room, letting his mind loose in dunes of light. Had his thoughts been running in the shape of words, he would have concurred with Aurelius.
Mary slept, the sand cave shifting to absolute dark around her as the day closed down. Sleeping, she stood at the foot of broad, red stone stairs, staring up at Jonno. He poured milk out from a basin, laughed, and then looked down at her. There was a heat about him that she would taste and need when she awoke.
Nathan sat at his desk with his dog slumped, warm and snoring, across his feet. Having tried—and failed—to doze for a while himself, having tried to concentrate, to be clear in his mind, to be contented, he’d given up and settled for watching the sky. For the eighth time this evening his phone rang, but he didn’t answer it—the heat was affecting the signals again, twisting and evaporating calls. Phantoms were talking to phantoms, bristling Eckless’s fur.
Ancw, across the water, was all decked out to celebrate the anniversary of a thoroughly popular war. The three pubs were garlanded with sandbags, windows crossed with blast-resisting tape and their foulest beers were offered at a roaring forties’ price. The Church of Wales had red, white and blue bunting on its porch, the Methodist and Baptist chapels—not being established—did not.
Nathan supposed the retrospective enjoyment of so much distant death helped to paper over the stain of the Price boy’s individual, more recent, extinction. It was said the killer’s total of children might now be as high as twelve, no one could be quite sure. But it was not improbable that, for years, he or she had been working through Britain, making a personal celebration of lives ended arbitrarily. But there were, it seemed, no governmental plans to make this smaller war a cause for widespread delight, or the sentimental/political distortion of those values assumed to have once made Britain Great.
Bugger it, there’s nothing I can think of tonight that isn’t going to make me sick. My own fault—I shouldn’t have parboiled my head on the beach all day—I can feel my brain adhering to the inside of my skull like a burnt poached egg.
He knew it would ease the pressure if he wrote, but as soon as he started he would hear Jack’s voice, seeping in, describing actions he had no wish to imagine now. Or ever.
Bloody man.
Poor, bloody man.
A man who wants a novel from me, but I can’t give him that.
Nathan picked up his pen, leant his free hand to his forehead, tried to look like a writer preparing to write.
But I’m not writing for fucking Jack. Not this time.
This is for Mary.
Although there’s hardly any point—I’ll never show it to her, she’ll never know.
Ssssh. When I’m ready, I’ll hand it all over, every word. I will.
And this time . . . this time I want to show her something happy, somewhere good.
He reeled himself back to the point where he first began thinking for two. As soon as he’d known she was on the way, his Mary, he’d started saving things for her—for when she was ready, when she was older, and then, later, for the time when he prayed he might meet her again.
And now she was here, she was with him, and he still had notebooks full of the places he’d described for her, the photographs he’d taken, the postcards he hadn’t sent.
But there had always been a choice of what would make the best offering: which part of Milan?—the Inquisition Torture Museum or La Scala, risotto Milanese? The Holocaust mass grave in Budapest or the soft oases of sunlight between trees, the secretive, green courtyards in the Jewish Quarter? The beauties of the European railways or the slipping along complicit tracks that once led to body pits, to the European types of war? The first sight of day through the windows of the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, or the spot in Orléans where Dr. Beaurieux held up a freshly guillotined head, called it by name and saw it look at him? Should he show her the way to the Grail, or the holy bloodshed, the dead or the living word—he’d never been sure of which map would serve her best.
In the end, his decision was easier than he’d thought—he simply picked the only place that he could bear considering.
Hyperborea
I can see the sun. Low, at the far, pink edge of an April sky, it is twirling as suns never really should in nature, but, currently, I do not mind. I am inhaling the live and vegetable damp of opened countryside and also listening to my radio, to the cheerfully Gothic porno funeral music of—if I’m not mistaken—the Doors. And I have all the time I need to think that I very much like the Doors.
The road is delirious with light, casting up great, aching slaps of reflection that make me blink, while my arms are content to marionette away from me, to flap and judder in time with my feet, in time with the road, in time with the sun, in time with my car as it rolls impossibly slowly through thick-as-liquid air, in a clamour of metal and frightened engine, to my right and to my right and to my right and then on down a small embankment, where it tips to slither sideways, wheels quite pointless, creaking with unaccustomed momentums, and finally rocking soft and neat to a mildly angled stop, righted, still.
And this is delight. Entirely and unmistakably, this is delight. I was always sure I’d know it, when it came.
I turn off the final mumble of engine, blurrily amazed that any gesture of mine has even the slightest effect. Somewhere behind me something tiny and metal snaps. Otherwise, there is no sound. And almost no sensation beyond the baying of joy round my skull, the lick of irresponsibility inside my veins and the touch of my wife’s fingers between my fingers, our warp and our weft. Under my skin, or her skin—our whole, proper skin—there skips the minute and continuing pounce of life.We smile at each other and at ourselves, stone drunk with survival.
“Jesus Christ. Sorry, love.” I squeeze at her hand until I can feel the pleasant bite of pressure in my finger bones.“I don’t know what ...” As far as I can tell, I have no other pains.“I really don’t ...know what to apologise for.” I snigger for no good reason beyond the amusement suddenly,
plainly inherent in existence.
Maura shakes her head, equally unscathed and close to laughing.“I know.” Beached at the edge of what we think is a potato field, we try to patch together the train of our unlikely events. A number of minutes ago we were driving at moderate speed on a perfectly clear and even, rural, Scottish road. A rather smaller number of minutes ago a slapstick burst of nothing we can understand flipped the car into a birl of helpless motion, somewhere in the midst of which I thought it more useful to hold Maura’s hand than to clutch at my redundant steering wheel. She thought this much more useful, too.
We unfasten our seat belts—our wonderful, tried and not-found-wanting seat belts—and we hug, we kiss. We agree that our mouths make sense, although nothing else does.Then Maura feels, and I could swear that I feel also, the deep, weird dunt of our almost child against her body wall: our nearly infant, elbowing in.
“Oh.” My wife says this, always, as if our baby had precociously tapped out a private and slightly surprising piece of entirely coherent news. “Oh, my God.” Maura draws back from my arms.
“What? What?” The day starts to crumple round me, while I search Maura’s face, try to translate her expression, and glide one hand—tenderly, witlessly—over the taut, new shape of her stomach.“What?” Her body is different again from last week, altered from the week before.
“I think,” she folds her own palms over mine, “I think he liked it. Our little sideways trip.”
“He’s all right?”
“Oh, yes.”
“You’re sure?” Relief already levering my joints, cooling a flush of sweat I hadn’t noticed rising.
“Oh, yes. ”
“And he’s a he?”
“Or a she.”
“Which do you think?”
“Which would you like?”
“I think I’d like one or the other.”
“Liar. You want a girl, don’t you? I know you.”
And I realise that she’s right, that I do want a girl, a daughter. Before I can stop it, a raw drag of need plunges in me at the thought of being only months away, only inches away, from having a daughter.
I hold Maura as gently as I can, wincing against the onset of tearfulness and trying to appreciate how dreadful things will be if all my preferences are really this decided, but I end up with a son. Of course, I will try to love him, encourage him, tell him the things that only a man can say to another, smaller, man, but I want a daughter.
I do my best to be concerned by this possible ghost across my future, but I fail. Because I know, re-embracing my wife, I fully understand from each part of the shining, soft/hard, unnerving body she is building for herself, that she is going to have a daughter. In there, inside Maura, more inside than I’ll ever be, is a girl. Enjoying today with us, flexing, waiting, is our daughter, I am sure.
“Nathan?”
“Hm?”
“Am I right? You’d prefer...?”
“Uhm. Well, could be ... a girl. What do you want?”
“I shouldn’t say. But probably the same.”
“It’s listening, though.Tell it we love it, in any case—whatever.”
“Oh, it knows that. It’s clever, already. Extremely talented.”
“Ah, I see.” This sounds wholly reasonable: in fact, to be expected. My daughter, the bright girl.
“And it’s noticed two men are coming to rescue us—look, from behind the bank. Do we want to be rescued?”
“I suppose we might as well.”
I turn and watch our pair of saviours, who are, indeed, high-stepping towards the car, over the earthed-up potato rows and plants.They are wearing muddied boots and overalls, clay-coloured caps and padded jackets and—as they close on us—seem increasingly aged and stooped.
Unsure of accident victim etiquette, we do nothing but sit still and watch until the first man halts at my door, leans into an even lower bend and taps my window. I wind down the glass, absurdly close to simply asking directions for somewhere and then winding shut again.
But he pre-empts me. “Are you hur t, ken?” His words are unfocused and have an almost singing quality. I realise that he is deaf. He stares into the car, bluntly inquisitive. “Are you?” I shake my head. At this, he summons his companion—an even older man, who looks to be his brother—and they exchange a flurry of hands and noddings. Then he dips his head to face me again. “Come away out then, eh?”
We do as we’re commanded, finding ourselves quite able to move and walk as usual, but with limbs a touch lighter, more sensitive than before. I feel we may float off soon and leave our escorts trudging ahead of us, unaware.
The brothers—they must be brothers and are both, apparently, quite deaf—take us into their farmhouse and feed us the slightly leathery, sliced white bread I had forgotten it was still quite possible to buy in Scotland.This is accompanied by margarine and an unidentifiable variety of oily broth. We are then given one slab each of whisky-damp fruit cake, which we eat in silence, as we have done everything in silence since we came indoors.There is no radio. There is no television. There is no telephone. There is no question, as the last of the light leaves the evening, that we will do anything other than stay here tonight.
I look across at Maura and cannot help but see that she is one breath away from giggling like a maniac, unstoppably. I am, myself, in exactly the same condition. The younger brother solemnly doles out tea the colour of molasses and I whimper with wicked, ungrateful hysteria. Maura sighs unsteadily and I cover my face with both hands, hiccuping towards a state beyond any assistance.
We are saved when the younger brother lifts away our emptied cups and carefully pronounces, “Good night.” His senior then pats me on both shoulders and indicates that Maura and I should follow him now up the lean stairs.
Having climbed, we are left in a yellowing but not unpleasant room, dominated by a high, dark double bed.
Maura manages, in a breathy squeal, “Oh, Christ—it’s their parents’, isn’t it?”
“As long as they’re not still in there.”
“Fuck, Nathan. I mean ...”
We stumble together and then giggle against each other for a time.
“We’ll drive up to Scotland, he says. I’ll show you where I come from—it’ll be great.” She squeezes me sharply, once.“Nathan, I will never, ever take another holiday with you.”
“This isn’t where I come from—the food’s too good.” I mouth her neck for a moment, thinking. “And we’ll sort this all out tomorrow. It’ll be fine. I promise.”
“It’s fine already. Bloody peculiar, but fine.”
“And our offspring?”
“Is enjoying it too. I can tell. Now, what’s that place ... ?” She kisses me on my left eye and my right—something which always removes any trace of my independent will. “What’s the name of that place in the north where everyone’s happy?”
“Easy. Scotland.”
“No. Really—the classical place, the Greeks had a name for it . . .”
“Ah, right—the place where everybody’s happy without penalties and guilt ... that’s um ...”
“Hyperborea.That’s it—land of happy people in the north. Here we are.”
“Yes.” I am astounded by my certainty. “Yes. that’s right. Here we are.”
We undress as if we are, somehow, surprised by the fastenings of our clothes and then mountaineer bravely up into the monster bed, where we lie, pressed beneath the clammy weight of fuck knows how many blankets, all topped off with a frayed mauve satin quilt. We wait, anticipating our next moves.
“Nathan?”
She knows I’d like to. I nearly always do.
“Maura?”
And now I know she’d like to, although this is becoming unusual in these expectant times.
And if she’d like to and I’d like to, then we ought to. So we do.
In the soundless dark, we position stealthily: Maura crouching on elbows and knees, because, for pregnant ladies, this is the sensible way t
o be, and not at all because it slackens my jaw to even think of her, curved here against me, my thighs beginning to press at the slightly cool and upturned flesh of her arse and having its brain-glazing smoothness press me back. I hunker up tight behind her, reach round and play, find her heat and kiss her spine: the lovely bone that guards all her motion, her every nerve. And, of course, finally, finally I am sinking, driving, praying in—being held and muscled in, deeper than want.
Maura is the first to speak. She whispers, mutters, then almost chants a wonderful succession of appalling obscenities. I am puzzled for a throbbing moment and then realise, join her, gamely narrating my way in and out of her cunt while she growls from the back of her throat and I hold her hips and we work up into a fast, wet smack of fucking, the sound and feel and scent of which sets me jabbering every carnal thought I’ve known, a red pressure closing both my eyes and Maura even—in a way that makes me come— actually, fully screaming at each jerk of me.
We cool, heaped softly together, in the deafened house.
“Fuck, Nathan.”
“I think we just did.” I begin to cover us, settle us in. “You are a shameless woman.”
“No, I’m not—I’m your wife.”
This information rings through me, makes me kiss the damp beat of her throat. “That’s right.”
“Mm hm. But I’ve got to pee. I’ll be back soon.”
“You be careful out there.”
“I will.”
I listen to her fumbling into—very probably—my shirt, covering it in the process—I hope—with the smell of her, wet and traced with me. Something lovely to get up for in the morning.
My thinking mists and snatches as I wait for her to be back here again, beside me. I think I recognise the first dip of her weight on to the mattress, returning, but already I’m losing hold of the night, its sense quietly folding away.
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