by Simon Ings
I took out the keys I had filched from the pocket of his jacket and unlocked the car. The rubber button gave against my thumb. The boot was on a spring, it pulled away from me and swung all the way up before I could catch it. I stared into the boot. There was nothing to see. It was too dark to see anything. Was she even there? Imagine her awake, her head wrapped in that plastic bag. Jesus. I put my hand out, imagining her there, willing on the original, familiar horror of her presence to bat away the terror that she might have climbed undead from here, be standing at my back . . .
The touch of her hand, so dry, so cold, so stiff, was an electric shock, knocking me back and away. I paused, trying to gather my breath again, trying to force it down, trying to cram it into my lungs. My eyes began to accommodate the deeper darkness of the boot. There were cryptic shapes there, hard to separate and decipher.
I had no choice. I had to reach inside. I had to touch her. I leant in and found her arms and got my hands under her armpits. The cold there was a shock. It dizzied me. I pulled at her, shifting her about in the boot. Lifting her into my arms was impossible. Though thin, she was too heavy for me.
Low laughter came from drinkers on the veranda.
I reached for her feet. They felt small and familiar. I gripped them roughly, as you would clasp a nettle. I figured the harder I squeezed, the less I would feel. I had them now in my hands. I pulled.
Her knee joints bent stiffly, smoothly, as though steeped in cold oil. Was this the onset of rigor mortis, or the end of it? I pulled her round so her legs dangled over the lip of the boot. I had to reach in further now to lift her hips up and out. I bent down and wrapped my arms under her legs. My head pulsed as I pulled at her. It was no use. I had somehow to get my weight behind her. I would have to prise her out of the boot. If I climbed in there with her, maybe I could push her out.
I was practically on top of her now, fumbling for the right hold, and suddenly I could not bear it any more. I rolled out of the boot and sat down in the road, clenching my teeth against the sound rising in my throat.
Her feet dangled in front of me.
I had an idea.
I shuffled around and leant my back against the boot, my head between her legs. I clamped her legs to my shoulders and clambered onto my knees. The tarmac bit into my knees as I hefted her up. With the backs of her knees round my shoulders, I tried to stand, slowly, straining. I paused half-way, getting my balance, poised like a weightlifter, one leg locked behind me, the other bent forward. At least this way I was facing away from the boot. I took a deep breath, held it, and stood up straight, trembling against her weight. I tottered forward and she came with me, out of the boot. Fresh from its baking confines, she came out cool, inert as earth. There was a double jolt as first her shoulders and then her head bumped against the sill and slid away. Her weight was too much for me. I dropped her and her head smacked the tarmac.
I staggered forward into the dark and froze, listening. I couldn’t hear a thing. No murmurs, no laughter.
Mum lay sprawled on the tarmac – an indeterminate shape. I could not be sure what I was actually seeing. She lay every which way. She made no sense. I reached for her in the dark. I found her feet again.
But I couldn’t just drag her. Not over the tarmac, Christ. (My knees stung where I had broken the skin trying to lift her from the boot. They were wet, bleeding.)
There was a blanket in the boot, laid there to stop luggage sliding around. I found it bunched up in a corner. I pulled it out and tucked it under her feet. I tried to tie it around her ankles but the blanket was too small, the material too thick. I tucked the corners around each other so the blanket protected her feet as I dragged her down the road.
I reached under her arms and her head flopped against my belly. There was a little starlight now. The plastic bag around her head had stuck against her face. That eye was still open, a black pebble pressed against the plastic.
I started to drag her along the lane and the blanket gave way immediately. I laid her down again, took up the blanket, shook it out and spread it beside her. I rolled her onto it. Sitting down in the road, I took hold of the edges of the blanket and pulled. The weight of her pinned the blanket against the road. It didn’t move.
Now I straddled her and gathered the corners of the blanket together, bunching them in my hands. I tried to lift her. Her arms trailed on the ground. Her head dangled and swung as though her neck was broken. My back sang. I couldn’t possibly manage her weight, lifting her at such an unnatural angle. I couldn’t lift her. I couldn’t drag her. It was impossible. Panic strummed my bladder.
Then it came to me. I sat down in the road and I took off my trainers and slipped them onto her feet. With my shoes protecting her heels, I could safely drag her along the tarmac. The only problem was the amount of noise we would make. I took off my socks. I tugged the socks over my trainers to dampen the sound they’d make against the surface of the lane. I knew what I was doing now. I was no longer afraid. A thumping numbness had overcome me. I reached under her arms and I lifted her against my waist; her head lolled against my stomach. The tarmac felt smooth and cool against my feet as I pulled her further into the dark of the lane. Even with socks over them to dampen the sound, the heels of my trainers rattled and chocked, but at the top of the lane, around the pub, nothing moved: the drinkers on the veranda had all gone inside.
The trees parted above me and the tarmac gave out. The ground was warmer here and gritty, smothered with dirt and twigs. I was nearing the mill-race. The sound of rushing water overlaid every other sound. Where crumbling brick embankments canalised the river, turning it past what was now the front door, a wooden railing guarded the drop. I laid my mother’s body down in the dark and pulled the socks and shoes from her feet. The flagstones were slippery under me as I tugged the body alongside the balustrade, to where water spilt over the weir.
A light beside the porch snapped on. I wheeled round, dazzled, and stared at the glossy black door of the mill house. The lion’s head knocker. The little glass eye of its spy-hole. Had my movements triggered the light – or had someone turned it on from inside the house?
I pulled my mother by the arm. The arm gave slowly, turning and articulating like machinery. I let go and it stayed in the air, pointing back at me at an unnatural angle. I crawled around her and sat down and got my feet against her and pushed her underneath the balustrade. The uprights of the balustrade were close together and she was too tall to simply slip between them. I pressed my foot into her stomach. The air remaining in her lungs escaped and the bag around her head inflated like a balloon. The plastic sticking to her eyeball peeled away. The black pebble disappeared. The bag misted, saving me from the sight of her face as she fell through the balustrade. The rushing waters masked all other sounds. I barely heard her hit the water.
The porch-light went off. After all, it was only a security light. I stood up and the light came on again. I put my shoes and socks back on, gritting my teeth in concentration.
A new plan was forming in my head. Up till now I had only been concerned with getting the body out of the boot. Mum’s eventual discovery was something I had been prepared to leave to chance. Now I realised that this too could be managed. There was a way I could tie everything up tonight, and I would not even have to tell a lie, or not much of a lie. What could be more natural than for me to run back now to the pub, breathless, staring, haunted, close to tears? I would tell my dad I had seen Mum – spotted her on my shortcut home. That Mum was floating in the river. Dad would follow me down the track, over the bridge, along the bank of the river – and there she would be. Together we would find her, and terrible as this would be, it would be better, unimaginably better, than what would have happened if I had not intervened.
I leaned over the parapet. I could just about make her out – a pale shape, rotating slowly in the middle dark.
I’d forgotten to take the plastic bag off her head.
I closed my eyes, trying to work this out. I wanted her
body found, of course. The sooner the better. But with the bag over her head? Who puts a bag over their head before jumping in a river?
I was going to have to find her and take off the bag.
The bridge was fenced off to stop sheep wandering off the common. I was half-way over the stile when I heard:
Click-clack.
I froze.
Click-clack.
I knew this sound.
The porch-light went out. (Click-clack.) I waited, my eyes adjusting little by little to the dark. I heard nothing more beyond the race of the water. I saw nothing at all. Even my mother had disappeared. No white shape blurred the millpond’s soot-black surface. She had been carried downstream.
I climbed off the stile.
Click-clack.
I was being watched.
I waved my arms. I was out of the range of the porch-light, but even in the dark:
Click-clack.
There was a soldier out there, watching me. My movement was enough to trigger his visual vest! I tried to find my voice, but no sound came. I hunted the darkness for a halo of white hair, but all I saw were the ghost limbs of distant trees.
I moved forward.
This time there was nothing. Perhaps it was too dark here for the soldier’s vest to respond to my movements.
I climbed off the footbridge. I strained my ears. If he were moving, then I would surely hear him, vest or no vest. I could see the pattern of bushes and trees now, the river bank, the fence line – enough to know I was alone here. Unless, of course, he was hiding from me.
I clambered along the edge of the race, clinging to the stiff woody stems of the rhododendron bushes, and hurried bent-backed along the river bank, hiding from shadows. Away from the sound of the millrace there was nothing to hear, unless you counted, just at the threshold of hearing, the low arterial thrum of the bypass on the other side of the valley.
I ran along the river bank, all the way to Michel’s circle of fridges. Try as I might, I saw no pale shape – no white-haired soldier; and no pale body either, spinning in the river’s dark. I had in the end to abandon my search for her. All the way home, along the track the soldiers used sometimes, I slouched, defending myself against a blow, an assault, a confrontation. It never came.
I had not imagined the sound. In the end, though, I had to concede that the sound was not proof of anyone’s presence, let alone the presence of a blindsighted soldier. Heard over the sound of the millrace, well, that ‘click-clack’ sound could have been anything. The catch of a gate rattling in the wind.
More strange – though I had no room to deal with it at the time – was the disappearance of Mum’s body.
THE SHAMAN
The opening passages to The Shaman, Michel’s first novel, go something like this.
A subtle current bears Cole inland, over flooded levels, past the comically bloated corpses of drowned cattle. Rushes grow up to tickle the branches of dying trees. The new coastline rises incrementally above this shallow sea: an unreliable medium, a waterland where men and livestock founder and blue lights flicker mysteriously in the hours before morning. Inland, axes ring out as the locals, obeying a long-suppressed folk-memory, chop wood for boats of shallow draught and, salivating, eye the skies for teal, widgeon and wintering geese.
Cole is an old man now, perhaps the oldest in the village, his long life earned through guile and a fertile imagination, but he has grown weary of the land, weary of the tales he tells and all the claims which he exerts there. Discontented, he makes for the open ocean, seeking renewal, perhaps – or extinction. But he is, after all, just a dotty old man, the genius of his own place but a fool beyond it, and the sea wall, long since submerged by the rise of the world’s oceans, presents an absolute barrier to his ambitions. No way can his keel-less and homemade raft negotiate the surf that wall kicks up.
So the urge to flee dies in him, as it has died so many times before, and Cole contents himself with a wet and exhilarating attempt to explore the ruins there. The waves will not allow him to get close, and every so often the foamy break threatens to overturn his craft, but Cole persists (it is his chief quality), filling in with his imagination what will not reveal itself to his eye.
Of the houses that were ranged along the sea wall, only stumps of masonry remain to cut the surface at ebb tide. Under the sea’s merciless action, these stumps are falling away very fast – faster than the seaweed and the limpets can colonise them. There is something proud about their ruin, as though they would sooner be extinguished than be subsumed into an age to which they do not belong.
Time is getting on. Cole steers away from the wall, toward lagoon-smooth inner waters and his first acts of daily ritual. Adaptability is his great strength; his only virtue. The old world dies. The old man lives.
Away from the churn thrown up by the submerged wall, Cole throws out his primitive sea anchor – a wicker dog basket, attached by its handle to a length of plastic clothes line – and waits patiently for the bell to sound. Cole understands, better than most, the flow of waters round these parts, and comes to this spot once, sometimes twice a day to hear the church bell in its squat and flooded tower not far beneath the waves. The changing tide sets it ringing, three times, sometimes four. Once, at full moon he heard it sound a dozen times, and trembled, expecting a marvel. A big wave. A flood. A great bubble of marsh-gas. Nothing very surprising happened. The tide was higher than usual, flooding his nephew’s pig pen. In the next village, a two-headed calf was born. But that’s foreigners for you.
The church beneath his rough-hewn craft stands beside an old canal. The route of the canal is marked by makeshift floats, soda bottles and plastic canteens, treasured, irreplaceable.
And here, as he predicted, come the lobstermen – if you can call them men. No men of Cole’s age round here could do what these boys do. Diving from a coracle into that muddy murk, armed only with a nose plug and a scrap of sack-cloth, is work for strapping youths, whose lungs have not yet succumbed, as their elders’ lungs have succumbed, to the region’s vapours. Here they come, not one of them over fifteen, their heavy shoulders rippling as they ply their ash paddles, naked but for their loincloths, and these they strip away before they dive.
Lobster pots are useless here, where the rotten brickwork of the canal offers the local crustacea unmatched shelter and plentiful grazing. No, they cannot be tempted out – they must be manhandled, dragged from their crevices. The boys, saluting Cole with upraised oars, prepare to dive. Each manoeuvres his unstable reed craft about his float, then stands and strips, squeezes the wooden peg over his nose, and wraps his hand in sacking as a glove, protecting his fingers from his quarry’s pincers and its fierce fight for life.
Cole dresses. He shrugs on his leather coat, winds strings of beads around both wrists, and slips the knuckle-bone necklace around his neck. A folded cloth protects his head from the sharp edge of the broken porpoise skull he now proceeds to tie around his head.
Cole sings.
He sings for the fertility of the canal, to this great, dark, weed-furred slot that brings increase and plenty to the people of his village.
He sings words of comfort to the mother lobsters, heavy with eggs, honouring the sons they’ll lose today. Cooked and eaten, their children will be transmogrified into the sons of the village above the water, and Cole sings of this alchemical pact between sea and land, between heaven and earth.
Much of his song is lost on the boys, who spend a minute, even two minutes at a time deep under the waves, hunting their vicious and spiny catch. This old man’s not some mere entertainer. He’s not singing to them. He’s singing to the lobsters. He’s singing to the spirits of the sea, propitiating them, so that the harvest might go smoothly, and no diver lose a thumb. He’s singing – for – them. When the boys are done they gather round him, pull the biggest and best lobster from their scuttling catch, and two young, smooth-loined boys board his craft. One pins the creature to the boards. Its tentacles quiver, its claws creak ope
n and snap shut convulsively, it legs scrabble like an old man’s fingers upon the deck. The other raises a knife and stabs it expertly, and with a show of great violence, through the caudal nerve at the back of its head.
The shout goes up – ‘Ai-eh!’
Now that supper’s sorted, it is time for Cole to steer for dry land. There is much he must arrange for tonight’s ceremony.
Cole’s hold over the village depends in part upon his independence from it. Shamans do not live among the people. They inhabit and embody the wilderness, weaving nets of meaning that bind the human to the other. They are, at best, half-beast. To keep the villagers balanced on the edge between fear and yearning has been his life’s project, and, to his dismay, this balancing act is only going to get harder as he ages. As a young man, he always fancied himself some hermit of the hills – a man wise in council, modest in his demands, yet living well enough off the gifts of a grateful people.
But hermits die by the dozen round here – men and women who have been too proud or too stupid or too stubborn to learn the skills of a fast-degenerating world. The countryside is amok with toothless old skeletons who, for a crust of bread or a sliver of widgeon, will bore you into the ground with fairytales of the great past: of hollow metal birds that crossed whole oceans, and tablets of great worldly wisdom that you could slip into your pocket, of pills to cure fatigue and blight, and heroic feats of observational comedy, and images of copulation everywhere. But these hasbeens are no advertisement for the lost age. They sleep under the boles of trees, set traps for mice and hedgehogs, shit on footpaths, spread disease. The young go killing them for sport sometimes, hating these revenants, these senile, sniggering idiots who, in their distant youth, enjoyed a world these boys will never know.
Cole punts as far up the river as he can (a little less each year, he acknowledges; this world’s built for the strong, not the ‘spry’) and ties up the raft to the stump of a streetlight. He walks the rest of the way, feeling more than seeing how the road bed curves and bends..