by Nick Jackson
He couldn’t take his gaze off it. The eyeless head nodded at him. Something had begun to scrape away at the creature’s flanks—opening a ragged wound.
The air hummed with flies and seaweed popped on a rock. The pristine gulls wheeled above, buffeted by the thermals. They swooped down above Duncan’s head and soared again, fixing him with the beads of their eyes. If it had been him opened to the sky, his entrails exposed; they would have shown no mercy. The birds settled, squabbling over some plump gelatinous morsel, oblivious to Duncan’s presence. “Hey!” he shouted, and waved his arms. The birds flapped up resentfully but edged back after a few moments. Duncan felt stupid, shouting at the wildlife, so he left them to their meal and began the long return journey.
*
Judith touched the boy’s shoulders, the scapular, the folds of his ears, and felt a hot flush rising from her feet, travelling up her body. She ran a finger down his cheek. He said nothing but looked mournful. Then they knelt awkwardly on the stones. The grey nodules pressed themselves into Judith’s thighs and buttocks as he crouched over her, fumbling with the zip of his shorts. She repeated to herself that this was what she’d wanted, to have this boy.
At first he’d kept his eyes closed. But she was determined to claw her way into the thick-skinned boy, to make some lasting mark. When she dug the points of her nails into his back, his gaze sharpened to a resentful fury that she found herself grateful for.
The boy entered her with a hurried clumsiness. Judith arched her pelvis in an attempt to connect with him and to force him to slow his thrusts. She was enjoying the weight of his body pressing down on her and the sight of his face framed by the curling mass of his hair that seemed to flare with the light behind it. She felt alive; he was demanding something of her that she was able to give and she felt a fierce joy.
Then came the hot swollen gush of him between her thighs and she gasped with the intensity of her pleasure, a pleasure which caused her whole body to tremble. She became vividly aware of the glittering sea and the sky; it was as if she’d been released into a fresh world which shivered with colour and light. Even the pebbles seemed smoother and her flesh experienced the pressure of each probing nodule with a new acceptance.
*
The slime of seaweed slipped underfoot as Duncan came in sight of the bay and Judith—a distant pale blur. He was anticipating the coconut smell of Judith’s sun-screen, her voice raised an octave: “Where on earth have you been?”
But Judith merely lifted her head from her novel and smiled. He couldn’t see beyond the green lenses of her sunglasses.
“You’re back.” When she pushed up the sunglasses he could see that her eyes had shrivelled to wizened raisins. Something was wrong, but Duncan could never quite fathom his wife’s moods. She might just be angry that he’d been gone for such a long time.
“Did you have a sleep?” asked Duncan.
“I tried. I dozed for a little. Did you see anything on your walk?”
“Oh, nothing much.” Duncan licked a drop of sweat from his upper lip. “There’s nothing much to see.”
“You must have gone right round into the other cove.”
“Yes.” He paused, panting in the dry air. “But it’s all the same, just sand and … and rocks. No sign of that boy then?”
“Not a thing. I should think he’s waiting in the other bay where he brought us in. I’ll just put my things together, shall I? And then we can go back.”
Duncan followed the gently sloping beach down to the water. There in the wet sand he saw the marks of a boat’s keel where it had been hauled out, the freshly impressed pattern of a rope and footsteps where someone had trodden.
“Are you ready, dear?” called Judith.
“Of course.” Duncan turned to his wife and smiled. “Lead on,” he said.
Spadework
I’m in the middle of digging a hole for a gatepost; down and dirty with a trowel and with damp patches at my knees, delving into the Norfolk clay, hacking away with a cold chisel and a hammer borrowed from my father. The old gate-post had rotted away and could be pulled out, it seemed, like a bad tooth from its socket but the part below ground didn’t rot, it has remained intact, squeezed tight into the hole dug for it. The underground part of the post doesn’t rot, my gardener neighbour explained, because there’s no air: it’s the mixture of air and water that helps the process of decay. He understands the science of it; to me it’s just an awkward stump.
At the age of seven or eight I became stuck in a hole—a telegraph post hole, or a drainage hole, we never knew which—in the middle of a ploughed field. My brother was furious with me for sitting in the hole with my knees up against my chest. He told me to stop messing about and get a move on, or he’d leave and go home without me.
I was tempted to tell him to get lost, just to see what he’d do. Then I discovered I was wedged tight in the hole, unable to move, even if I’d wanted to—in the middle of a ploughed field in Norfolk with nothing to look at except the horizon and the flat, bare sky.
Last year I went to the doctor with a small lump on my lower eyelid. The doctor referred me to a consultant at the hospital, who prodded it and examined it. They sliced it off and carried out a biopsy and announced that it was a small tumour and that they would have to do more work, more gouging. It was the kind of tumour, they said, that was like a rogue ulcer that would, if unchecked, begin to burrow in.
In the newspaper, coincidentally, I’d recently read an article about a woman who’d had a tumour removed from her cheek. They’d had to remove more than they’d thought. In the end they’d had to cut away most of the right side of her face: the right eye and most of the upper jaw, leaving her with a gaping hole (there was a photograph). The left eye, clear and rather beautiful, peered out of the untouched half of her face, a pleasantly confident face.
You could only marvel at how someone could continue to exist like that with half of her face missing, leaving a black hole with cleanly healed edges. Couldn’t they have done something with plastic surgery, I wondered, to cover it up? There was a complicated patch that she sometimes wore to disguise the absence but she’d taken to going out without it, the latticework of her cheek bones exposed. She’d recovered after a long period of depression and now she plays in an orchestra.
In the event, the hospital decided not to operate further on my tumour. The consultant said that the biopsy had probably removed all of the cancer cells.
But it gave me a small scare, the thought of the gouging I’d escaped, which got me to thinking that, if my brother hadn’t called the fire engine out to rescue me from the hole in the ploughed field, I’d never have made it this far; I’d have sunk down into the hole, unable to move my legs or arms. The hole, which was about five feet deep, was hundreds of yards from the nearest road, a tiny country lane, out of sight in a dip of land. I’d have sunk deep, covered in layers of silt; maybe I’d have been preserved like one of those prehistoric bog-people with leathery skin and tattered scraps of cloth or perhaps I’d have been transformed into a tightly folded skeleton, to be discovered years hence and mistaken for a ritual burial, evidence of a dark cult that buried its victims alive.
So, back to the hole I’m digging, scraping away with a trowel—I’m reminded that the man who sank the original gatepost was a Norfolk bricklayer who committed suicide not long afterwards. This might have been his last job—ramming my gatepost home. There was something earthy about him, like honest clay. His hands were large and the fingers were blunt, good for moulding mortar and plaster. He’d been a good builder in his younger days but had fallen on hard times and was reduced to picking up odd jobs. He was quietly spoken and had one of those pleasantly nondescript faces, unremarkable except for the eyes. He had greeny brown eyes but he wasn’t good at making eye contact, except for the last time we’d met, passing each other on Dove Street, when he’d held my gaze, turning his head to stare after me as he disappeared.
In the bottom of the hole that I’ve dug I can see
the orange wood, like the tuberous root of a carrot. I feel slightly despairing. It’s going to be a tough job to extract the remains of the post, splintered as it is by my efforts. The remains could go down another eighteen inches compressed by concrete, the concrete that my builder chap mixed up and pressed into place, smoothing it out with a trowel or with his own fingers.
I lie on the ground to try and get my cold chisel against the edges of the hole, trying to hack away a bit more of the concrete but the chisel just judders and slides down the edge of the concrete. I try breaking up the post by hammering the chisel into the wood and levering but all that happens is that the chisel gets jammed in the wood and I have to lever it free with a screwdriver.
The woman with a hole in her face said that she lay for days in a darkened room, that she stopped washing or taking care of her appearance. Then one day she realised that no one would come to rescue her from this hole and that unless she went out and faced the world she might as well give up the ghost. Having made up her mind about her future, she went out and bought some new clothes and joined an orchestra and never looked back.
My builder was unable to climb out of his depression. The voices, he said, came from inside his television. He threw a brick at it and smashed the screen. I imagined him sitting among the shards of glass looking at the empty box. He felt better, he told me, for smashing the television.
My hole hasn’t got any deeper—I’ve reached an impasse. I’ve considered getting a pair of heavy duty pliers or a barbed harpoon-type contraption to yank out the remaining wood but I’ve got a feeling that what I really need is a much bigger hole. I’ve thought of hiring a Polish labourer: one of the young blond men with their clear skin and blue eyes and their expressions of incongruously cloddish resignation. There are practically no Norfolk labourers anymore. The clever young men are going into IT or the financial sector; the less clever (or perhaps the cleverest of all) are content to claim their dole cheques and sit watching the vast skies revolving over the fields of ploughed stubble. They’ve no intention of cleaning potatoes or bagging up Brussels sprouts, much less digging holes for a living.
Having done more extracting with a trowel, I stare down into the hole I’ve made and measure the depth for the umpteenth time: ten inches. The cold chisel is now useless as I can no longer get the hammer down to bash it. It’s taken me two hours to dig a ten-inch hole. I’m sweating like a pig and the clouds are gathering, plum-coloured, and pregnant with rain. I’m going to give up in a minute. The shards of wood look more and more like the root of something.
Norfolk hedgerows, the majority of them, were dug up in the fifties or sixties, rooted out for intensive cultivation so that the combine-harvesters had room for manoeuvre. The little fields were transformed into endless expanses of clay. You could lose yourself in the middle of those fields. You could scream and shout and there’d be no one to hear you for miles.
It was very quiet in the middle of that field where I was stuck waiting for my brother to bring help; silent apart from the sound of my own shouting and wailing.
And then there was a moment, once I’d cried and shouted myself hoarse, when I found myself listening to the wind soughing across a field of ploughed stubble. That was all except for a distant crow hopping across the furrows. It seemed pointless to cry when there was no one to hear me. In that moment I felt as much a part of the field as if I’d been a nodule of flint. The clay surrounded me, unsentimental and unyielding. I was there for good and all it seemed for those few minutes. And since I was powerless I subsided into a kind of dreadful peace. Then with something of a jolt I slid down another inch or so. The clean rim of the horizon disappeared and I tasted grit and was reminded of the possibility of being lost, buried in a field, where no one would find me alive or even, perhaps, dead. The thought stirred me to another bout of panic under the bone-white sky.
They came at last, men with spades, to dig me out. There was even eventually a fire engine, redundant, but impressive. It took the men some time to decide how to extract me from the hole. I remember the wait and then the way the clay suddenly gave up its grip and I broke loose.
You’d think it would have given me nightmares being stuck like that. Strangely, I don’t remember any. It’s only later in life that bad dreams have begun to trouble me: dreams plagued by carrots—ugly chunks of carrot like the roots or stumps of gateposts; blunt fingers stained by nicotine; a green-eyed man passing me in the street and turning to have a final look; a look I’ve never forgotten. His hole, the one he’d perhaps been sliding into all his life, is clear to me now. He couldn’t go out and buy some new clothes and join an orchestra, his hole was too deep and confining.
Finally my neighbour comes to my rescue with a massive iron pole that turns out to be perfectly designed for extracting gateposts. I’m dreading the other gatepost, for of course there are two, one on either side. After the struggle with the first one I’m expecting a tough day’s work. But, after breaking through a plug of concrete at the surface, I find that the post is set in sand. That builder must have been in a hurry to get the job finished.
The clay of Norfolk sticks. You’ve only got to walk across a ploughed field to know that it has a glutinous clinging quality that makes it difficult to shake off. And they say that people who make their homes here find it hard to leave.
The Norfolk builder who sank my gatepost succeeded in escaping from his earthly element, his suicide was a feat of aerial grace. He hurled himself from the top of a tall building and thereby escaped briefly, elegantly, from the earth, but it was the paving stones that killed him, flying to meet him.
The Rope
The summit of a low hill was the highest point from which to look out over the forest. As she turned, Fortunata’s gaze did not fix on any particular detail in the wilderness; rather she absorbed the impression of unbroken green. Not so many years before, she might have walked for days under the tree canopy and never have come to a barrier greater than a smooth brown river, sliding under the cohune palms. The loudest sound that the girl could hear was the throbbing warble of the oropendola bird: glug glug glugglug glug loog loog loog, like water draining from a bottle, and the zither-like rustle of its wings as it hung upside down, suspended from a branch and cocked its head quizzically. Her mind revolved in the space inside her skull, curling like a small animal, soft in its silence. She turned away from the view finally and made her way back to a small hut in a clearing in the trees.
“Fortunata,” said Mamita when she came home, “go to Barbosa’s store on the highway and sell the plantains and pineapples that grandma has been growing in her garden and bring back a rope. It’s something we’ll need for our journey.” Mamita had been away for a week working to earn the precious disks that buy the corn; she looked tired and her face was as empty as a freshly-scraped cooking pot.
“If you see the men, stand still. Don’t move, don’t look. Whatever you do, don’t look in their eyes and if they speak to you, pretend that you didn’t hear, that you’re as deaf as a snake.”
“Where are you off to—can I come?” her brother Francisco asked from his seat in the shade.
“Barbosa’s store: I’m going to sell the plantains. You’ll never make it that far. How can you?” Fortunata slung the plantains into a sack.
Francisco massaged his useless leg which was twisted out of shape and pulled a face. Then, he went back to his game of squashing the ants that were climbing up the legs of his chair.
Fortunata set off with the sack of plantains and two pineapples. And the oropendola bird fanned its tail in the sunlight and watched her go.
Mamita worked in the mining village. She poured wine for the men who went down into the ground. They went down the wooden shafts, so far down that their faces of burnished copper were invisible, unless someone lit a cigarette.
The mines went deep. When it rained, the gushing waters opened up the shafts and tore open the earth creating a pit of mud. Already there was a canyon, so wide you couldn’t see the ot
her side when you stood on its rim. Sometimes the miners came back from their labours with hard lumps of the yellow stuff. They smiled then, and drank and laughed until they choked with tears and wanted jiggy-jiggy and Mamita sat on their bellies and played with them. Mamita smiled her empty smile and thought of the luxuries she’d be able to buy with all the disks she earned. But sometimes, especially when it rained, they came back with faces like thunder clouds and they beat Mamita. Sometimes they stroked her; sometimes they slapped. Usually it was all the same to Mamita, but lately the miners had been losing a lot of over-time and they had to take it out on someone.
Sao Tomas, the nearest town, used to be a quiet place at night: it was always the same—what was there to be excited about? When they brought electricity to the town, everyone knew that things would change forever. The blue flame jumped out of the wires and lit up the streets with coloured lights in the trees and people came from far and wide to sing and dance the latest tunes. That was the great thing about electricity, it turned the greys and browns and the endless stodgy green of the forest into an explosion of colours.
They put up tall poles and strung out the black wires like vines and the blue flame came along the wires, flickering its blue tongue like lightning. Soon the store had a freezer and a TV set. Papita sat in the bar and found it was good to drink cold beer and watch slim girls with no hips at all, sitting on couches and talking in a funny foreign lingo. As he watched the ladies he wondered what kind of a life it was where you sat by a blue pool all day and did nothing except sip something from a tall glass. He forgot about his cocoa pods and they fell and rotted in the orchard.
Now that there was the blue flame in the wires and cold beer, you could sit in the bar all day clinking ice and falling off the bar stools. There was a tiredness in Papita’s limbs. It was hard to get to the orchard and, anyway, the cocoa pods sold cheap these days.