by Robert Edric
‘For what he tells me. I don’t work too hard to separate the “news” from the rumours and sundry tale-telling. It helps me to stand a little more steadily at the calm centre of things and imagine I still have some control over what’s happening.’
‘He’s selling it in both directions,’ I said.
‘I know. I think you underestimate our Sergeant, James.’
‘Oh?’
‘Truly. I envy him the simple, straightforward way he has of looking at things.’ He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together.
‘He considers himself first and foremost, and anyone else hardly ever,’ I said.
‘Precisely. You and I, James, we step back to take in the whole canvas; Bone, however, goes directly to the small, poorly painted figure in the bottom corner, sees himself, and disregards everything else.’
‘I don’t see how that could be thought of as enviable.’
He walked ahead of me. We resumed unheard at the centre of the space. The voices of Bone and his men came to us distorted through the heat.
‘You know, of course, that Nash has been to see me and started his work.’
‘We all—’
‘And that it is his policy to start from a distance and circle me in ever-decreasing circles, that he resists all my attempts to draw him into me more quickly.’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘Not necessarily. I merely object to having to comply to his own timetable, to make everything fit so neatly into his own plan of events.’ He smiled. ‘Almost as though his report were already written and I were merely adding my initials to each printed page.’
‘So you still see that broader picture, then?’
‘I saw it the instant I came round and saw Hammad’s men staring down at me and felt my hands and feet tied.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Did Bone tell you about Nash closing the quarry?’
‘I imagine Abbot will soon find some new purpose in life.’
I told him about the understanding which now seemed to exist between the two men.
Afterwards, when he had made his own assessment of what was happening at the quarry, he said, ‘Nash has a great deal more to do here than prepare me for dispatch to the coast.’
A month ago, a week even, I might have felt an impulse to deny what he said, but standing with him there, I said nothing, and this appeared to relax him, knowing that I had begun to accept the unacceptable.
‘Did Bone tell you about his man who was attacked?’ I said.
‘No. Attacked how?’
I told him what Bone had told me the previous day. He was concerned by the news, treating it as though it were not an isolated incident of revenge, but rather something he had been anticipating. He asked me if there had been any reports of other attacks. I said I hadn’t heard of any, and he told me to ask the traders and boatmen if they had encountered anything similar. I promised him I would.
I had with me several nine-month-old newspapers I had acquired from an indigo trader earlier that morning, and I gave them to him. Like the rest of us, he had long since learned to live out of step with the world, but he thanked me for them as though they contained that morning’s news and it was all good.
It had not been my purpose for visiting him, but I had a sudden desire to ask him if he wanted me to let Caroline know what was happening to him. I would not relate the matter in all its speculative detail, of course, but I might at least suggest something of his situation to her. My last letter to her, written ten days after his disappearance, would still be a month away from her, and I gained some reassurance from seeing how this dislocation worked in reverse. He would be hanged and buried and his grave overgrown and she might still be writing to me to ask me about our specimen-collecting adventures together. I felt a sudden chill at the awful task which lay ahead of me.
I was diverted from all this by Frere remarking aloud on something he read. I half-listened to him and half-answered his questions as he went on talking to me. After several minutes of this, he stopped, folded the papers and pushed them under his arm. I walked with him further from the watching men.
‘In three days’ time, Nash intends to quiz me on my disappearance – my desertion and dereliction of duty – and my crime.’ He raised his hand to prevent me from speaking. ‘Until then I must live in this limbo. I am prepared to accommodate him and adhere to his plan. It is how he works. I understand that. And in understanding that, I consider myself to have some small advantage over him. It is not what another man might consider to be an advantage – I am still condemned – and it may be a very short-lived advantage – he will learn all he needs to know in a single hour of quizzing me – but, nevertheless, it is how I choose to see it: an advantage. Put crudely, I know something he does not; I know something it is his duty to learn, and that one question and its answer define his whole being. I know he has interests elsewhere, and that he involves himself in those wherever possible, now here and soon elsewhere, but at the very centre of him lies what I must tell him and what he must learn. Do you understand what I’m telling you, James?’
I nodded.
‘And you do not need to tell me how fragile and possibly worthless that power is, how illusory and deceptive it may yet prove to be. It will not save me; it will not redeem me; it will not remove me from Nash’s blessed plan. But while I possess it, it is all I possess. Do you understand that, too?’
I told him I did.
He had raised his voice to tell me all this, and a fleck of blood had appeared at the side of his mouth. He touched this gently with his fingertip, studied it briefly and then wiped his lips with his palm. Whatever illness afflicted his gums and tongue, remained. I remarked on it, but he said he was still treating it, though with little effect.
He had told me what he wanted to tell me and I felt a great relief at having heard him after so long being refused and denied by him. After all that time, I felt as I had felt being in his company during our first months together.
Then, as though he had earlier read my dark thoughts, he said, ‘Do you hear from Caroline at all?’
‘Nothing. Nothing since all this…’
‘I suppose that is to be expected.’
‘Nor have I written anything concerning any of this to her,’ I said, knowing that this was his true question.
‘I’m grateful,’ he said. ‘I spend most of my time when Nash is absent composing long letters of my own. I hoped you might take charge of them and ensure—’
‘Of course,’ I said.
Then he took a deep breath and said, ‘I think of her often.’ But no more, as though those five words were to convey to me a whole day’s conversation filled with remembering and longing – a thousand words, a hundred thousand, where the same few, simple things were to be said over and over again in their variant forms, just as they were said over and over again in all good conversations made endless by excitement and savoured by each participant.
‘I know you do,’ I told him, and I too could say no more.
We remained silent after that, walking absently towards the garrison wall. It was as we reached this that we heard shouting behind us and saw Bone gesticulating in our direction from the shade of the buildings.
‘I’ve strayed too far,’ Frere said. He embraced me and thanked me again for the newspapers. ‘Please, let me return alone. Tell Cornelius to avail himself of anything of mine that Nash has not already taken as evidence.’
It was beyond me to tell him that Cornelius would have cared little for the offer, that for most of the time he now kept himself apart from us as the nightfall of his own future descended around him.
‘He sends his best wishes,’ I said.
‘Tell him his medicines are working.’
I saw how each of these small gestures and remarks was a gesture or remark of detachment. More blood had appeared at the corner of his mouth, but this time he made no attempt to remove it.
I left him by the gate in the garrison wall and he returned t
o the gaol. I watched to see if Bone might once again approach him, but Frere entered the building alone and was lost to me the instant he stepped from the light into its impenetrable shade.
22
The following day I was distracted from my work by the sound of gunfire coming from upriver, and I went outside to investigate. Fletcher and Cornelius had heard it too and had left their own work. The shooting continued. Cornelius suggested that the commotion was coming from the quarry, and Fletcher ran to fetch a rifle. He returned with two, and offered the second to me. But I refused it, and the weapon was taken by Cornelius. Fletcher told me that if I insisted on being unarmed, then there was no point in me accompanying them. He ran ahead of us out of the compound. It was beyond Cornelius to run any distance, and so he and I followed at a slower pace.
There was a break in the shooting as we went, but it resumed as we left the river and passed into the trees beyond. There was by then little doubt that the noise was coming from the quarry.
It was three days since Nash had ordered the digging to cease. I did not know for certain what had happened since then, but I assumed Abbot would have dispersed the diggers and concentrated on completing his accounts of the place and preparing a Statement of Closure for the Company.
Cornelius was quickly out of breath and we frequently stopped for him to rest. There were now longer periods when the shooting fell intermittently silent. There was no real pattern to the noise, but amid it we could now hear an occasional human yell or scream.
We emerged from the forest onto the broad track which led from the workings to the river. Ahead of us, Fletcher crouched behind a mound of the salvaged pipes. He motioned for us to join him, looking hard at Cornelius, who gasped for air, and whose face was red and slick with sweat. Fletcher took the rifle from him and gave it back to me. More for Cornelius’s sake than his, I took it without argument.
I asked him if he had identified the source of the shooting, and as though in answer to this, a fusillade rang out ahead of us.
‘Whatever it is, they’re our rifles,’ he said. He searched over the top of our cover and then slowly rose. Emboldened by the weapon I held, I rose beside him.
Ahead of us lay the rim of the quarry. A group of men stood there and these were the shooters. A short distance away stood the overseer’s hut and another man stood beside this. I recognized Abbot. I started to raise my hand to him, but Fletcher grabbed my arm and forced it down.
‘They’re Bone’s men,’ he said. He, too, looked to where Abbot stood apart from the riflemen. ‘The bloody idiot,’ he said.
‘What?’
Cornelius rose beside me and stood looking at the quarry. He wiped his face, but this had little effect on the wetness that constantly formed there. Fletcher told him to stay where he was and to keep anyone else who arrived with him. He was still holding my arm, and he pulled me alongside him as we approached the riflemen.
Mid-way between our cover and the men, he called out to them. I pulled myself free of him. At first no-one heard him, but then a single man turned and pointed.
‘Hold up your rifle,’ Fletcher told me.
I copied him.
He called out again, identifying himself.
I did the same.
Several others turned in our direction. Some pointed their weapons at us, but then saw who we were and lowered them. Others among them continued to aim and fire away from us, but as we approached closer to them I saw that they were not shooting at specific targets, merely firing out over the void of the quarry. Some of them held their rifles in the air and fired.
I looked for Bone among them, but he was not present.
As we approached the quarry rim, Abbot left the shelter of the hut and came towards us. He was holding a pistol, but I saw by the way his hand shook that he was unlikely to have fired it. It was the first time I had ever seen him with a weapon. I imagine he looked at me in much the same way.
Fletcher called for the shooters to stop. There was a strong smell of powder and the sooty haze of shooting all around us.
‘They went crazy, went wild,’ Abbot said. ‘No reason, no reason at all. They would have attacked us. I had to do something, they went wild, no reason at all.’
One of the men continued firing into the quarry until Fletcher stopped him by knocking the rifle from his hands. The man resented this and made his feelings clear to us.
‘Who went wild?’ Fletcher said.
‘Them, they did, the workers.’ Abbot gestured with his pistol towards the quarry rim.
Fletcher went closer to it and looked down into the workings below. He indicated for me to join him.
Beneath us, in a group on the quarry floor, pressed to the sheer face above which we stood, were several hundred of the workers, barely distinguishable from the mounds of rock and rubble amid which they tried to hide and shield themselves.
Abbot came to us, but was careful to remain further back from the edge.
‘Who sent for the garrison?’ Fletcher asked him.
‘I brought them with me in case of just such an eventuality.’
‘What eventuality?’
‘When I told them that work here was being stopped. It was as though they didn’t believe me. They started to complain that it was all they had, that their crops had failed, that they needed the quarry money. I told them it had nothing to do with me, but they wouldn’t listen to reason. They were going to smash everything up, I know they were. They wanted blood, they would have killed me.’
‘And let me guess,’ Fletcher said. ‘You waited until they were all down there before making your announcement from somewhere you considered yourself safe.’
‘I considered it prudent to keep myself at some distance from them, yes. Look at them, you can see what they’re like, you know what they are.’
I looked back down at the terrified men, the bravest of whom were then emerging from the quarry wall to stand further out now that the shooting had stopped. I looked elsewhere in the workings to see if there were any more. Individual figures emerged and congregated together. I saw where one man, possibly wounded, was helped to his feet by several others.
Fletcher told the riflemen to move back from the edge. He told Abbot to return to the hut and to retrieve whatever he needed to take back with him to the Station. Abbot told several of the riflemen to help him, and they went reluctantly.
‘Why no Bone?’ I said to Fletcher.
‘I imagine Bone has enough dirt on his Company-owned hands without getting involved in any of this.’
We stood for several minutes longer looking down at the men below us. If the man I had watched being helped had been wounded, then it did not prevent him from walking. Fletcher called down to them to ask if anyone was hurt, and a chorus of complaints rose up to us.
Abbot returned with the men carrying his packages. Fletcher told them all to go back through the trees. He told Cornelius to accompany them, and then he and I waited at the rim as we were left alone.
The men beneath us had fallen largely silent. They had formed into groups, and most were now sitting. A solitary man called up to us, indicating the steep path which led up the quarry face. Fletcher motioned for him to come up.
‘I know him,’ he told me, as the man finally climbed to the rim and approached us.
He spoke to us in broken English, complaining that Abbot had allowed them all to complete four hours’ work before announcing that the quarry was to close, flanked by the riflemen as he did so. They had started shooting at the first murmur of complaint from the workers. Many of them had not been paid for their past month’s work and Abbot had also announced that there was now little chance of this happening.
‘He means no chance whatsoever,’ Fletcher told him.
The man knew this. He left us and made his way back down to his silent companions below.
‘Abbot,’ Fletcher said, and shook his head.
The men below rose and gathered slowly around the solitary emissary, like filings shaping the
mselves to an irresistible magnet.
I watched them closely, expecting some new uproar at what they were being told. But there was nothing, and when the man had finished speaking, those surrounding him withdrew and scattered. Their anger, it seemed, had turned to resignation in an instant.
Fletcher left the rim and I followed him back to the Station.
At the edge of the trees he turned and looked back at the quarry. The first of the workers had already climbed the walls and had gathered there, more shapes than men, and they all watched us go. Others struggled up through the mud to join them. Some pointed at us; others wandered aimlessly amid the abandoned machinery; and a group of them went to the empty shed and beat upon its tin door until it buckled and fell open.
I asked Fletcher if he thought they might follow us, but he simply shrugged. I walked close beside him until we re-entered the trees. Once inside them, he occasionally paused, raised a finger to his lips and turned slowly to search in a full, close circle around us, and though I did not say it, I sensed that we were observed – if not by the quarry men, then by some silent, watching others – along the whole of our route.
* * *
Two days later, I was interrupted by a single perfunctory rap on my door, followed immediately by Amon coming into the room.
‘Please, come in,’ I said.
He looked at me, barely able to contain whatever it was he had come to tell me. There was never anything unprepared, unrehearsed about a visit by Amon.
‘I interrupt you,’ he said.
‘Of course you do.’ In truth, I had been doing little other than embellishing my finished charts, more often than not filling them far beyond their requirements. For all the good I did, I might just as well have been Ptolemy drawing his spouting whales on interminable, unfathomable oceans, or drawing his never-seen elephants according to the descriptions of others on his thousand-square-mile blanks of jungle or desert or plain.
Amon came to the desk and looked over my shoulder, turning his head from side to side to better understand what he saw.