“Steady.” He caught and then slowly turned her until they were face to face. “You OK?”
Mary frowned quietly while he brushed the hair from her forehead. “I think so. Good session today.”
“Ah.” He offered her a cautious but entirely unironic smile. “I see. Joe’s finally put the ’fluence on you, has he?”
“Oh, don’t be so cynical. You know you’re really not that way at all.”
It had been a long time since they’d had a proper, amicable bicker between themselves.
“And how would you know the way I am?”
“Because I’ve had to put up with you for God knows how many years.”
He beamed and prodded at her upper arm, “And, of course, it would never have occurred to you that I’ve had to show extraordinary tolerance in all of my dealings with you and your bloody moods and eccentricities. I am the most forbearing and enduring man I know.”
“Don’t get out much, do you?” She prodded him back.
“I continue to be amazed that anyone so revoltingly insolent could have survived for so long in the world without serious injury. And, I might enquire, does the abuse of your elder and better really constitute the best use of your time when you have a leprous novel to cough up?”
“I could say much the same to you.” She was aware that the rest of the Fellowship was hovering, unsure of whether to withdraw discreetly, or to stay and observe the fun. “Don’t you have a novel to write, Mr. Staples?”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Doing what?”
Nathan’s expression blanked and the bounce dropped out of their conversation. “I don’t know.”
She surprised herself by tenderly grabbing his jacket lapels and leaning forward until her forehead rested on his chest. She spoke to the third button on his shirt, “Well, whatever it was, don’t do it again.”
She felt his voice, small in his chest, tense. “I’ll try.”
“I mean it.”
“And so do I.”
Eckless was snow-mad, steam-engining over the whitened grass, bounding as he never had, even when a modestly incautious puppy: crouching and then springing forward to root in the little drifts until his muzzle sported a permanent cocaine spill of astonishment.
He cantered up to Nathan yet again with a volley of smoky barks.
SEE BOSS SEE BOSS SEE BOSS SEE THIS DIFFERENT THIS GOOD DIFFERENT YES
His tail thrashed at Nathan’s calves and then he raced off with a slithering yelp.
Nathan shook his head and kept watching the greenfinch. It was hunched in a birch tree, a bright knot of feathers towards the centre of a branch. Every five or six seconds a thick paring of snow would impact between its shoulders and, each time, it would shrug and shudder off the little weight. Nathan admired its patience. Although he also supposed that it didn’t have much choice.
And how long is a greenfinch’s memory, anyway. Four seconds? Ten? It probably hasn’t the first idea that it’s being stoical.
It’s all a sign of strange times, in any case. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one before on the island, to say nothing of fucking snow. I mean, we’re surrounded by salt water, for fuck’s sake, snow shouldn’t happen here. God knows, we have to put up with everything else—with the possible exception of tornadoes and tsunami—the least we can expect is exemption from blizzards, I’d say.
The finch lobbed itself up into the thick, white air, hung, flurried and then rose to light on another, higher branch. Nathan wished he’d happened to bring some bread.
Not that bread is strictly a suitable food for birds, but I’m buggered if I’m trotting round the landscape with my pockets full of mealworms and seeds . . .
He was trying to take things gently, to creep up on his state of mind with a delicate and wholly unintrusive care, but—even palping only very softly round his ragged, interior self—he couldn’t help but notice that everything there had seemed almost jovial for several days. The first emotion he met on waking was no longer dismay. And he couldn’t deny that, like Eckless, he’d been lifted by the happy accident of snow. Its icicle jab at his lung was invigorating and he’d already spent at least an hour this morning mesmerised by the padded descent of another shower. And as for the smoothing of the island to one big ripple of blameless white—that could only seduce every Calvinist muscle in his soul.
It’s just nice. You can’t help thinking that. It’s just nice.
Eckless pelted back from some private treasury of grit and leaf mould.
Of course. I should have realised. This is the poor bastard’s first snow. And he’s already—what?—about fifty in dog years.
Nathan slowly produced an impressive spout of condensed breath, trying to recall if there’d ever been a time when he’d done that schoolboy thing of lurking outdoors and pretending he was smoking, as soon as the temperature had fallen low enough to make imitation smoke. On reflection, he’d probably always been smoking outdoors and sod the pretence.
And they only ever said it would stunt my growth. Lying bastards. If I’d had a boy child, I’d have told him—lie and blaspheme and drink and wank all you like, but skip the tobacco, or you’ll end up with a hollow chest. Look at me.
But I didn’t have a boy child, I had a girl.
The pleasure of this flexed in the pit of his stomach and softly tousled his brain.
Before Eckless charged again, spinning and baying, and eloquently indicating—only Lassie could have done more—that people he was fond of were coming this way.
“Hello, Nathan.” He leaned round towards the voice and was rewarded with a snowball to the hip. Sophie had halted, perhaps four yards away, and was struggling to catch her breath and laugh. She eyed him once, with a little snap of wariness, and then bent over to giggle more effectively. Now she was older, Nathan noticed, she sometimes faltered this way, had to check that any signs of relaxation, or enjoyment on her part, weren’t leaving her, in some way, exposed.
All part of growing up.
He did his best to beam as if the very thing he’d wanted was one chilled and dampened kidney. “Good shot.”
Christ, go on, just fuck about, for heaven’s sake, be a kid. Just play—no caution required. Take it from me, once you step over that line and get adolescent it’s nothing but ugliness and embarrassment for a decade. For life.
Joe now puffed over the rise, suitably rustic walking stick in hand. “Is she attacking you?”
“Only a little. But I think that one of us should warn her that once I am roused to return her fire, I will take no prisoners.”
This announcement was welcomed with a palm full of slush from Sophie that managed to spatter his shoulder and drop a few clots of ice down the side of his neck.
Joe ambled forward to swoop Sophie up in a hug. “That’s probably enough, though, now. Poor old Nathan’s done you no harm. Go on and have a scramble with Eckless if you like.”
The dog always wanted to be restrained with Sophie. He was already performing a kind of involuntary dressage in his efforts to restrain the urge to romp and leap.
Nathan crouched and scrambled around with his hands in the grass until he could find a piece of stick. He then launched this, with shameful inaccuracy, and suggested, “Fetch.” Eckless thought about this and then consented to trot off. Nathan smiled at Sophie. “Go on if you want. You know how much he loves you.” She looked very slightly discomfited. Eckless’s adoration wasn’t quite the appropriate thing to mention in front of a female person of such undoubted maturity. Nevertheless, Sophie rose above it and even allowed herself a look of satisfaction as she marched off, following her greatest canine admirer.
Then Joe closed on Nathan, halting to land an avuncular palm on his remaining dry shoulder. “How’s life? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“No, I don’t mind.”
“Must be not bad, then.”
“I suppose it must.”
Joe, Nathan noticed, was wearing a Bedouin keffiyeh instead of a scarf—the black
and white check of it was visible under the collar of his coat.
You can take Joe out of the Holy Land, but you can’t take the fucking Holy Land out of Joe. And possibly I’m being picky, but I did think such things were intended to keep off the sun and not the snow.
Joe raised an eyebrow amiably. “You’re glowering at my choice of scarf. But, really, it makes perfect sense. Very cold at night in the desert. If this kept me warm there, it’ll keep me warm here. And it reminds me of the sun.” He slipped his arm through the crook of Nathan’s and tugged him into a slow walk. “It makes me happy. What makes you happy, Nathan?”
“I don’t remember.”
“That’s not true.”
“I don’t want to say, then.” He halted their progress with a jerk. “Look, I’m not uncheerful. I’m adjusting to my situation and everything’s fine. You don’t have to steer me about like a hospital patient. Mary’s doing well, she’s in love and so on and scribbling away. I have no editor, but that’s not so bad, it’s how I started out, after all.” He tried to swallow while his throat suddenly locked with something uncomfortably close to a sob.
Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks, change the subject, you dozy fuck.
He swabbed the snowflakes off his eyebrows. “I was just watching that greenfinch. Funny, it being here.”
“They do sometimes come.” Joe allowed him to slip his arm free, but then took care to meet his eyes. “And you were thinking?”
“Yes.” Nathan surrendered, rather than be wheedled at further. “All right. I was thinking how I did start out. I was remembering that I wrote because it made me happy. Or I wrote because I wrote and it so happened that made me happy. And then I found out I could still write if I was sad. And then I found out that being happy was far less common than being sad and I decided that I would be satisfied with that, because, as long as I still wrote, it meant that even the very worst things in my life could have a purpose. It meant that pain would keep me eloquent. Just nature, isn’t it? Pain is always supposed to make you howl.” He closed his eyes. “But, right now, I hurt too much, Joe—too much to say anything at all. For the first time in my life, I’m nothing but quiet inside.”
“Which could be no bad thing.”
“Bad, or good—it’s here.” The finch bounced up into flight, hovered blurrily and then settled again in a different, slightly more sheltering tree.
Well done, wee man. Good choice.
Nathan avoided saying more, occupying the silence by stamping to ease the growing cold in his feet. Somewhere to the left, Eckless had started to bark.
God, I wish Joe would just go away.
Then again, why not talk? Why not jabber away at him, if the person who used to listen isn’t there. I still have to speak, don’t I? I still have to get my voice out somehow, I still have to hear it. How else will I know I’m still here?
Nathan sniffed, rubbed his face where it was starting to numb in the cold. “It’s odd, though, in all of this silence—perhaps because I have more room for them now—I’ve got whole squads of new memories roaring about. And it’s not as if you wouldn’t think I had enough. But these are weird—details and whole incidents I haven’t come across since I first met them. I even—and this is the finch’s fault—I remembered, just now, that I found a gull once, with a broken leg. It heard me coming and was flagging its wings flat in the mud and limping and trailing all over the place. I was ten or eleven, probably eleven, and terrified of it and fascinated. Anyway, I took off my jacket and threw it over the bird, bundled it up and walked with it home. Its feet were extraordinarily cold, I recall, like dead things, and it tried to peck me once or twice.
“When I got to the house, I took the gull inside and unwrapped it. For a moment it lay on the table and then it slowly tried to move away. The surface made it slip and when its weight dropped on the injured leg, it screamed. Then it looked at me.
“And I knew I had to kill it. The sound it made explained everything. I had to kill it as soon as I could.
“So I ran and grabbed a hand towel from the bathroom and swaddled up the bird again. I carried it outside like that and set it down on one slab of the path. It blinked and clacked its beak before I covered over its head with the towel. I remember that was when the life or the will seemed to leave it and not when I brought my heel down on its head.
“I struck harder than I needed to. I wanted to be sure than one blow was enough.”
Joe nodded, but didn’t attempt a comment of any kind. Eckless kept up his barking—playing hard.
“Of course, a couple of hours later, I caught myself running over the incident and beginning to be excited by the poem it might make. Just the stuff poetry takes to: gull’s heads crumpling like eggs, the soft feel of that. Which was when I found I had to throw up. Not when the bird died, but then.
“And I made sure to never write about it. And I gave up verse. Not to stop myself from being parasitic—from stealing the life out of life—but because something in it drew me to do wrong. I had a ridiculous presentiment that, if I kept on with the poems, they would make me do much worse things to feed the words. They seemed to suggest that kind of appetite.
“Whereas my current medium has always kept me much more virtuous. Or much more contained. All prose has ever brought out in me is self-abuse. It’s been both generous and imaginative with that.” Nathan thought he’d put that rather well and wondered why Joe wasn’t showing the slightest sign of approval.
Probably takes offence at the negativity of my tone. Pompous old tosser. Still, he’s not so bad at . . .
What the fuck is that bloody dog complaining about? Yapping on. I can’t imagine he’s actually caught something—he wouldn’t know what to do with a rabbit if it dropped down dead at his feet.
“Nathan?”
Joe was holding Nathan by both elbows, yanking his attention back into place. “Uh?”
“Nathan, what is the matter with your dog?”
And before they understood they must, they were running, heading for the sound of barking and trying not to think the bad thought, which came anyway, overtook them, solidified as they breasted the slope and saw and saw and saw the black dog leaping and pawing and barking at the air, its breath in sheets, and the broken white of the lochan, a long shard of darkness tongued into it, fragments of ice in the charcoal-coloured water at the broad stub of its base. And the blue of her coat there also, the blue of Sophie’s coat in a soft, small mound, barely clear of the surface and motionless.
And then they were down at the pool’s side in a slip of sick time and Joe said her name, didn’t call it, only spoke it, like a promise or a prayer, as he slewed out over the squealing ice on his feet and then his knees and then on his belly and reaching both arms down into the water as if he might dive in after her, but instead holding and clawing and scrambling the gleam of her up. She was floating with her face down, with her face down, and Nathan was here to help now and the two men hauling and hearing themselves bleating with the effort and the fear they were too preoccupied to feel.
And they had her out now, finally, and all of them lay together for a moment on the dangerous surface and next they were dragging her to the bank, where they looked at her face for the first time and the turning of the day around them stopped.
Her skin was a porcelain, violet white, her lips the colour of new bruises and gently parted to show good teeth. Her hat was gone, was deep and cold somewhere beyond reach, and her hair was a naked, black weight and heavy. Her eyes were closed.
Oh, God. Dear God.
Nathan crouched in the grass, cradling one hand in the other, observing vaguely that he’d lost one of his gloves, and he stared at Joe who, face as still as a sleeper’s, kneeled beside his child’s body and began to perform the correct procedures for feeding breath into empty lungs, for pressing blood through a stalled heart.
“There’s no—” Nathan broke the sentence. Whatever he said, there would be no stopping Joe. He would repeat the kneading at her breastbone,
the methodical kisses at her lips until his hopes were exhausted and he always had been a man with a quite remarkable store of hopes.
Eckless whined quietly, lying by Sophie’s feet.
She was wearing newish trainers, their laces sensibly tied with a double knot.
Five minutes passed and then seven. The snow thinned to a halt and the breeze dropped. It was very much colder now. Nathan’s arms, soaked to the shoulder, seemed to have lost all sensation and still Joe worked and still he watched.
At eleven minutes, “Joe. She’s gone. Please, now. She’s gone.”
Silence arched above the men and Nathan wondered if Joe had even heard him, but, perhaps another minute later, back came the reply, jerking out with the dogged rhythm of the pumping at her chest.
“The cold. The cold will save her. She isn’t dead. Not dead. Speak to her. For me.”
“Speak to her?”
“Yes.”
So, because he did almost believe his friend, because he wanted to believe him, Nathan huddled round to kneel at Sophie’s other side, facing Joe. Then leaned his face so close to hers that he could feel the recoil of his breath when it touched her cheek and he spoke to her. He told her about the supper she’d have waiting, and the island full of people who needed her, he invented information about finches. He described to her the intricate coral beauty of resin casts taken from the airways that filament, miraculous, through lungs. He told her that Ibn Arabi once wrote that all being was one and that Al Kindi once wrote that all intellect was one and that she couldn’t leave them because she was part of them—all one. He began—stumbling at subjects—to explain Syme’s modification of the circular method of amputation. He tried to recite, to remember anything, anything, anything at all, until he was surprised to resurrect, “My father and my mother uttered my name, and they hid it in my body when I was born, so that none of those who would use against me words of power might succeed in making enchantments to have dominion over me,” which was Egyptian, but he couldn’t think what, and
that was when she moved her head and coughed.
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