“This is it, eh? Some wind! But could do with a bit of extra help here . . .” He grappled with a stretch of canvas. “Keep a hold of this for us, our Terry.”
I did as he said, even though the whole nightmare force of the storm seemed to buck against me. Mum and Helen crawled out from their corners of the tent just as the frame started twisting. Lightning flickered. They looked like muddy zombies. I suppose I did as well.
“Ah! There you are! See that guyrope, Helen? Try to keep a hold and stop it from lifting— And you, darling . . .”
But it was too late. With a splintering screech, the frame broke, tearing as it did so a widening rent in the canvas. There was an odd glimpse of the fragile indoor normality of our camping life: the towels and the tins and the games and the cooking things and all the flip flops and the Wellingtons and the hanging stuff we’d vainly hoped would dry, and then the night ripped through it, pulling everything apart. Pack of playing cards and Scrabble letters spewed. An empty water bottle took flight. Someone’s lilo slalomed downhill. There was a wild anger about this storm, a sheer physical presence which, as the edge of the tent which I’d been struggling to keep hold of ripped finally itself from my fingers and slapped viciously against my face, I knew it was impossible to fight.
Dad, though, was having none of it. He was still laughing and barking out orders. For him, no matter how bad things got, this was just another story he could tell the neighbours and the kids at his school and those unwary strangers he stopped at the roadside, another camping adventure, a fresh wave of destruction which he’d brought to our lives and would grinningly inspect and discuss with us across the kitchen table through all the endless evenings afterwards. I realized, even as my feet buckled and I slipped back into the mud, there would be other nights, other tents, other holidays – that the lives of us camping Wainwrights would continue to go stupidly and unbelievably wrong.
Lightning flashed as I scrambled back to my feet, and I saw that Mum was gripping the famous blue gas canister, about which there had been such dispute this holiday, in her hands. The thing was heavy now that Dad had had it refilled, but she held it as if weighed nothing. Dad, who was crouching as he attempted to stop the tent frame’s last straight leg from twisting, looked up as she stood over him. The rain had washed Mum’s nightdress pale. Her hair streamed black around her white face. Lightning flared again, and Dad’s grin broadened. Even though Mum looked strange and eerie and angry, he probably imagined she was going to use the canister to weigh down our rapidly collapsing tent.
“That’s great, darling, if you could—”
With a strength I didn’t imagine she possessed, Mum swung the canister down and around. Dad looked surprised when, with a wet, splitting sound, it struck the side of his head. “. . . careful . . . could really have hurt—” His grin loosened as Mum swung and struck him again. The side of his skull had become oddly shaped, and his voice was slurred. “Could still do with a bit of help here . . .” His mouth began to bubble with dark fluid. “If you could just—” The gas canister flashed for a third time, and all expression dropped from Dad’s face. He wavered for a moment, then toppled forward, landing in a splash of limbs amid what was left of our tent. Mum just stood watching, the dripping canister still in her hands, as his body gave a series of spasming jerks. So did Helen. Dad had dropped his torch as he fell. I stooped to pick it up from where it had slid across the mud.
“Turn it off!” Mum shouted.
The torch was darkly slippery. Its beam seem to brighten and fan out as my fingers struggled with the switch, lancing across the field.
“Here – give it . . .” Helen, nearly falling across Dad and the mess of the tent, wrenched it from me. But still the light wouldn’t go out. Mum joined in, and our struggles with that stupid and unobeying object filled our attention for what could have been seconds, minutes. Then the wind gave a surging moan, a wall of wet darkness slammed into us, and we realized as the torch finally blinked out that something strange was happening to Dad and the tent. It was mainly a sound at first, a huge ripping and tearing. Then, as the clouds flared again, we saw that the whole thing was rearing itself up in the wind. Dad had become part of it. We saw the flail of his limbs tangled in ropes and canvas as poles twisted and parted, then the bony white mask of his face. He even seemed to be struggling grinningly against the stripes of rope and bloody canvas that had wrapped themselves around his body, although more likely it was merely the storm which was animating him. The tent streamed up and out. Then, as some last restraint gave in a groaning tear, it took off and began a tumbling movement down across the campsite, lit by the lightning’s stuttering flares, and bearing Dad with it. It was one of those things that you see and yet don’t see; that your mind struggles to grasp even as you witness it. Amazed, we followed. The storm tore with wild hands, straining to lift us as well as we stumbled across the sodden field and the thing danced ahead like some weird black jellyfish. Shedding aluminium pans, wire hangers and plastic plates – the whole detritus of our lives as camping Wainwrights – in its wake, it finally snagged against the fence which separated the land from the sea. There was a loud bang as one of the posts snapped. Then another was ripped from the earth and barbed wire unravelled in a series of bright screams until the whole edge of the land gave way and Dad and our tent tumbled off into the night.
The rescue services were incredibly busy that night, but there was still a rigorous search. As Mum, Helen and I sat huddled in blankets and waiting for news in the bland florescent glow of the campsite owner’s kitchen, I still half-imagined that Dad would be found alive. After all, it was just like one of this stories, the whole way he explained the world. Well, the tent caught certainly me up, hut it acted as a sort of parachute, and then it floated . . . Sounds strange, near-impossible, I know . . .
CAMPING MIRACLE – MAN BORNE ALOFT IN GALE SAVED BY TENT
I could see the headlines, and the twin red spots on his cheeks above his smile. But Dad was dead. They found his body not long after dawn at the far edge of the same beach on which Mum and Helen had sunbathed, and I’d paddled. He’d died, we were told, from the injuries sustained from his fall off the cliff. Most probably, we were reassured by several doctors and policewomen, he hadn’t suffered.
We returned home to find the house wrapped in its usual holiday post-drowse, and a note on the doormat from the local camping shop apologising for having accidentally given Mum an empty gas canister the week before. The place seemed quiet, empty, ridiculously dry and clean and spacious, but then, at the end of holidays, it always did. There was a spate of the things which happen after someone dies – visits from relatives, an inquest, many forms to fill in, more relatives, solicitors, a funeral – and then life returned to what us three remaining Wainwrights would eventually come to think of as normality, even if the evenings did seem longer and quieter as autumn set in. The pension and insurance policies which Dad had paid for through his school and his teaching union were quick to pay up, and Mum soon bought a new car – a much smaller, sportier, redder, prettier thing than Dad’s old Volvo. It took the three of us out on expensive meals quite different to those you eat in the family rooms of pubs, or to the cinema to see the kind of stupidly comedic films of which we knew Dad would never have approved. We sat there in the dark gazing up at the screen, listening to the sound of other people laughing. And then we went home again.
Christmas, as anyone will tell you who’s lost someone, is a hard season. The idea of going up into our loft and rummaging around for the lights and the tinsel close to the space where all our camping stuff had laid – have you sorted out those new bulbs like I asked you to, our Terry. Pity about what happened to that plaster Santa Claus – was never something about which any of us felt happy. Instead, Mum came home one evening with bright handfuls of brochures for holidays in parts of the world which are still warm at that time of year, and it was almost like the old times as we spread them out over the kitchen table and looked at the vistas of palm trees
and swimming pools, and talked of times and dates and facilities. The odd thing was how often things continued to go wrong for us. The downstairs sink cracked, my schoolbooks got unstapled and Helen’s favourite perfume evaporated – all seemingly spontaneously. The only thing that was missing was Dad’s humming, those bright spots on his cheeks, his occasional cheery shouts, and his bizarrely pointless explanations as he stroked the ruined objects with his fingers.
Then school term ended, and Christmas came, and all three of us were kept quietly busy wondering what to bring with us to this strange, hot land where people swam and sunbathed and ate fresh salads in December. The pots, the pans, the folding chairs, the games of cards and Travel Scrabble, were all gone anyway, although it was odd to be getting ready to go somewhere without them, and without the pervasive smell of our lost tent. But the flight itself was early in the morning, and the business of going to bed early knowing you wouldn’t sleep was familiar. But I slept anyway, and dreamed that Dad was crouching in front of me in his canvas holiday shorts, and that he was turning over and over in his long fingers something which looked like his own ruined head. You really imagine I do all those things, our Terry? he was asking with a strange, sad and wounded look on his face. Then the alarm went off, and I dragged myself up from darkness to get dressed.
I paused outside my sister Helen’s door as I hauled my suitcase towards the stairs. We didn’t normally enter each other’s rooms, but something about the way she was standing by her windowledge made me go in. She had one of her favourite new multi-coloured biros in her hand, and it was covered with streaks of blue and black and red.
“I left it last night on the radiator,” she explained. “And see what’s happened – it’s leaked. Just from the heat. It was probably the same with those ones I had in my bag last summer. I mean, you remember how hot it got inside our tent.”
I looked down at her hands, which were stained and twisting. “I suppose some things do just happen by pure accident,” I acknowledged. “But not all of them. I mean, my cassettes—”
Helen barked a laugh. “Those ridiculous tinny recordings you make! Your taste is even worse than Dad’s – you really thought any of us could bear listening to those terrible, stupid songs of yours all the time cooped up in our tent?” Taking her ruined biro more firmly in her right hand, she mimed holding something with her left, and then stabbing it, twisting it through the heart and turning and turning with the biro’s tip. I realized that she was miming unravelling one of my cassettes.
“You never said.”
She shrugged, and was about to say more when her expression changed as she glanced behind me. I turned, and saw that Mum was standing in the doorway. For all that she had her hair done more prettily now, the look in the dark of her eyes was impenetrable and her face was pale. “Better get your stuff downstairs,” she muttered, and we three remaining Wainwrights carried our bags down to the car and headed off on our first non-camping holiday through a world made strange by dawn mists, buzzing milk floats and the absent sounds of Mantovani, Syd Lawrence and Perry Como.
REGGIE OLIVER
* * *
A Donkey at the Mysteries
REGGIE OLIVER HAS BEEN a professional playwright, actor, and theatre director since 1975. Besides being a writer of original plays, he has translated the dramatic works of Feydeau, Hennequin, Maupassant and others. Out of the Woodshed, his biography of the author of Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons, was published by Bloomsbury in 1998.
Besides plays, his publications include four volumes of supernatural horror stories: The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini (Haunted River, 2003), The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (Haunted River, 2005), Masques of Satan (Ash Tree Press, 2007) and Madder Mysteries (Ex Occidente Press, 2009), which includes “A Donkey at the Mysteries”.
“In 1971, before going up to Oxford, I travelled around Greece for several months by myself,” Oliver reveals, “and this story is based on those experiences.
“In my wanderings I came to an island on which was the site of an ancient mystery cult. Next to the ruins there was a hotel whose only guests, beside myself, were an archaeological draughtsman and the widow of the man who had excavated the site.
“The Ancient Greeks have a reputation for reason and ideal beauty, but they, like all of us, had a dark irrational side which was all the darker for the contrast with their better-known aspects. This darker side is to be found in their so-called ‘mystery’ religions.”
DOLPHINS HAD FOLLOWED the little ferry boat that afternoon all the way from Alexandroupolis to Thrakonisos, their polished pewter backs arcing in and out of the sapphire and diamond waves. They seemed to me like an escort, a guard of honour, seeing me safe to the little island, celebrating my voyage. I was eighteen at the time, an age when, if you are reasonably lucky, the whole world can seem to be in your favour.
At first Thrakonisos was no more than an indigo smudge on a stretch of brighter blue. Then the golden rocks that crowned its heights, intersected by deep green gorges, began to define themselves; and finally the white lines of houses that composed the island’s principal town and harbour of Chora, glittering in the unclouded sunlight. I knew little about the island except that there were some archaeological remains there connected with an ancient mystery cult. This was the reason for my visit.
As I stepped off the ferry onto the jetty at Chora I was surrounded by schoolchildren who had come with me from the mainland in their bright sky-blue uniforms. The teacher in charge was talking to the captain of the boat, and the children, taking advantage of their release from control, surrounded me, chattering and asking me questions.
My Greek was only sufficient to understand simple, slow interrogations and to give equivalent replies, so I smiled and waded through them towards an inviting looking bar on the sea front. One of the children pointed to the paperback I was carrying and which I had occasionally tried to read on the choppy voyage out to the island. He was indicating the strangely distorted human figures outlined in turquoise green on its cover, and seemed to be asking me what the book was. It would have been impossible for me to explain that it was a copy of E. R. Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational, a book my future tutor in Greek Literature had recommended I read before coming up to Oxford. Up till now the book had interested without engrossing me.
I sat down at one of the tables on the pavement outside the bar and ordered a beer. In those days I travelled hopefully. I knew I wanted to visit the site of the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, and that near it was a Xenia Guest House, but I had no idea how to reach it or whether there would be accommodation for me.
When the barman came out with an icy, perspiring bottle of FIX beer I asked if there was a bus going to the Sanctuary. He shook his head several times. What about a taxi? He looked doubtful and gave an ambiguous reply. He suggested I do the six kilometres to the Xenia guest house meta podia, on foot. It was a razor-bright, cloudless Greek afternoon, and the prospect of doing six kilometres with a heavy rucksack was not inviting. I would decide what to do when I had finished my drink.
The local habitués of the bar sat inside playing draughts or clacking their worry beads. The tables on the pavement were occupied only by myself and a man and a woman drinking ouzo.
They seemed an odd couple. The man, balding, fifty-ish, sandy-haired, wore a shapeless linen jacket and baggy trousers. He looked like an English schoolmaster on holiday. The woman, slender and in her thirties, wore an immaculate black trouser suit which could have come straight from a Paris couturier. A little diamond brooch glittered on her lapel. Her hair was covered in a vivid scarlet and black silk headscarf and she wore dark glasses. From what little I could see of her face she must have been something of a beauty with high cheekbones and a perfectly formed mouth. Her skin was a smooth creamy white. She might have been taken for a film star trying to travel incognito.
I thought of approaching them, but in those days I was very shy. It was one of the reasons I had decided to spend some of the eight months
or so between school and Oxford travelling around Greece and Italy on my own. Though I missed the pleasure of companionship, I was entirely free. I could stay or go where I liked. If I missed a bus, or failed to book ahead and had to sleep on a beach, I needn’t feel guilty about having inconvenienced anyone but myself. I took a sip of beer and read from Chapter Five of the book I had been carrying:
There is no domain where clear thinking encounters stronger unconscious resistance than when we try to think about death . . .
A shadow fell across my page. It was the barman and beside him was a nut brown, wizened man with teeth the colour of his amber worry beads. The barman explained that this was Stavros who would drive me the six kilometres to the Xenia Guest House. He named a price that was high even by London cab standards. I wondered if I was meant to haggle but I was too tired and full of beer to bother. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the sandy-haired man rise, as if he were about to come over to me; but the lady gripped his arm and he subsided into his seat. I noticed her fingernails for the first time: painted scarlet and honed to a point, like little bloodstained arrowheads.
The road out to the Xenia ran along the coast. It was little better than a dirt track and Stavros drove fast. Whenever we bumped particularly violently over a stone or into a pothole he would turn to me and grin. It was not reassuring: I would rather he had kept his eyes on the road, especially as his breath smelled strongly of garlic. Several times he asked me questions which I could not hear above the racket of the car, so I simply nodded and smiled.
We roared up the drive of a long low modern building, which was the Xenia Hotel. I paid Stavros the sum we had agreed upon, at which he seemed slightly embarrassed. He asked me a question which this time I understood. Was I here to see “ta archeea”, the ancient things? I nodded and said I was. Stavros took something out of his pocket and pressed it into my hands. It was a small set of yellow plastic worry beads with a little metal cross attached to them by a chain. I protested only slightly as I could see he would be offended if I refused the gift.
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