by David Mathew
Peter had been absent again less than two minutes when the mauve People Carrier crunched off the road and on to the gravel driveway.
Jess’s body tensed. Had they found her missing so soon? Had they come to fetch her back to the prison house?
No. Or apparently not, anyway. Curling out of the front seat was a woman in her mid-forties, her long greying hair pulled back into a ponytail.
‘You found him?’ the woman said. ‘Thank you so much.’
Even as she delivered her gratitude, however, her face displayed an unmistakeable sign of confusion – made worse when Jess replied, ‘He found me.’
‘Beg pardon?’ The woman approached the stone bench, the stone cross – approached Jess. She wore muddy Wellington boots and second-hand jodhpurs.
‘He found me. He’s calling the police for me,’ Jess said, her voice croaking.
‘What’s going on here?’
The question set Jess’s tears in motion once more, and the new arrival was temporarily lost for words.
‘Dad?’ she then called into the house.
Peter appeared at the door. ‘Hello, Sandra,’ he said.
‘Were you lost again, Dad?’
‘No Oi weren’t! Oi were alpen this young’un. She were eld carptive agin her will!’
‘Oh Dad…’
‘He’s telling the truth,’ Jess interrupted. ‘He got us back here safe and sound – or his dog did, maybe.’
Sandra frowned in the porch light. ‘What does he mean you were held captive?’ she asked, enunciating each word with care.
And Jess started to cry afresh.
Descent
1.
It took them three days to descend the mountain. Although the journey was far from straightforward, the optimistic air that Atchoo created as they trudged – the songs he sang, the conversations he conducted with himself as he led the expedition – was often sufficient to convince the others that they were making good time and reasonable progress. No one questioned his navigation; whether his skill for orienteering was the result of blind luck, or a lifelong exposure to the stories told in the village, or perhaps even something more spiritual or instinctive, he preceded them down slopes that were blessed with neither paths nor landmarks, chanting and laughing, and only raising his voice from time to time when he noticed someone behind him not sticking to the strict single file on which he had insisted at the outset. When a wind dislodged an acre of snow up into the chilled air, Atchoo paid it very little mind; a homing strategy pushed him onwards… even if it happened to be home that he was leaving behind.
The expedition was seven travellers strong. Atchoo had assumed a senior role in the proceedings before they’d left the village that had served as a base camp, single-handedly rounding up three men who spoke little but who seemed willing enough to top and tail the march and shoulder bags of supplies. Each of these men carried a rifle. And as the journey took them down the side of the mountain – a descent on occasion so looped and slalomed that it was hard to imagine much change in elevation had been made in the previous hour, the only sign that progress had been made, in fact, being a half-degree rise in the temperature, and an improvement in the ease of respiration that could not have been faked by even the most resilient sense of self-delusion – the seven pilgrims plodded on through the waves of snow, silently praying for a plateau that might indicate the beginning of foothills.
For long stretches of the march, Massimo and Bernadette kept close together. They talked. The scooped up snow with mittened hands, and drank it at approximately the same time. (A nurse should know when the body needed water, Massimo figured.) When it was time to fill their bellies, the guides from the village boiled water from snow, using a tiny gas stove and a large copper kettle that one of them kept in the bag on his back. They added fistfuls of desiccated ingredients and made a lumpy, sweet porridge that lacked in rich flavour what it gave out in energy. The mealtimes were solemn affairs, and not even Massimo and Bernadette said much to each other after the second of these, concentrating instead on banishing their hunger pangs and wondering why Connors insisted on walking so close behind Atchoo.
2.
At the close of the first day, although light remained in a curiously bronze sky, the guides assembled the tents in which they would spend the night. As ever, they worked to the accompaniment of very little conversation; for the first time in a while, Massimo blessed this silence and sat down on a rug with his legs out.
Bernadette approached and asked, ‘Room for a little one?’
‘Sure.’ Massimo shuffled over a little to allow her some space.
‘Not too far. Share warmth,’ Bernadette explained, sitting down with a pained sigh.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Well, I know I’ve done some exercise, I’ll tell you that much,’ she answered. ‘Christ. Had no idea I was so unfit. We’re gonna ache like hell tomorrow.’
Massimo nodded. ‘And then we do it all again… Bliss,’ he added, his voice wet with a new coat of irony.
‘I almost did the London Marathon once, a couple of years ago. Four years? I had it all set up. I was gonna do it for breast cancer research. I thought I’d make a few hundred quid if my colleagues sponsored me. Do you what happened?’
‘You didn’t do it.’
‘I didn’t do it. I couldn’t do it – I couldn’t even face the bloody tracksuit! Which I’d bought already, and some new trainers. Couldn’t so much as think about it.’ She paused; she laughed. ‘Ended up feeling so guilty I got a loan from the bank and gave it to the cancer charity anyway. Cost me five hundred quid, that particular example of cowardice. Six if you count the clothes and the power-shakes.’ She laughed again.
‘Well you’re making up for it now,’ Massimo told her. ‘There’s nothing cowardly about this feat of madness.’
‘No… but there’s nothing especially dangerous about it either,’ said Bernadette.
‘Not yet. But they’ve got a gun apiece; that’s gotta suggest something.’
‘True. But why do we need three of them?’ Bernadette continued. ‘Atchoo says nothing much lives up here. There’s no vegetation.’
‘Nothing much is not the same as nothing at all. I was there, remember? He said snow leopards, birds…’
‘And how many of these predators have you seen?’
‘…None. Your point being?’
Massimo had spread his rug some distance – close to ten metres – away from where the guides were erecting the tents and Atchoo was constructing the framework for the forthcoming fire. Connors had taken himself off in another direction, again to a distance of approximately ten metres. He had not spread a rug of his own. He lay on a snow bank, staring up at the ship of bronze sky and its cargo of rum barrel clouds.
Bernadette disregarded Massimo’s question. Nodding in Connors’s general direction, she asked, ‘Do you feel you know him well?’
‘Connors? Less and less.’ Massimo admitted that the change in the man – from the cocksure resident of this new dimension, his feet firmly under the celestial table, to the grumbling, moody prick into which he’d changed since the meeting with Atchoo – had left the atmosphere unsettled. ‘And all because of a boy!’
‘A boy he thinks he met,’ said Bernadette. ‘A boy he thinks he saw killed, let’s not forget.’
Massimo turned. ‘What are you saying? He imagined the other boy?’
‘It’s possible, isn’t it?’
‘It’s possible… but what about your dog?’
‘What about her?’
Remembering to choose a feminine pronoun out of respect for the dead animal, Massimo answered, ‘She was with him.’
Bernadette shrugged. ‘So he says. How do we know?’
Massimo waited. For an instant he did not know why he felt such an urge to defend Connors; then he remembered why. It was
because he’d employed Connors in the first place that they were all here on this fucking Alp. ‘He seemed strong.’
‘Exactly. Now he doesn’t know how to chew his own food… I exaggerate. But you see what I mean.’
‘I’m not sure I do.’
Bernadette leaned over and grabbed a fistful of snow; she stuffed it into her face and mouth with all of the precision that her mittens allowed. ‘Hark at me telling people how to eat,’ she remarked, tittering. ‘But who would’ve thought snow would be yummy?’
Massimo watched the guides for a few seconds. They had finished pounding the frames into the snowy ground; now there were unravelling the skins and hides that would act as carapaces. ‘That’s two things you’ve broken off telling me,’ he said.
‘True. The second one first, then. Bereavement. Believe me… I’ve seen it do peculiar things to an otherwise rational mind. When my Aunt Imelda lost her husband – my Uncle Piers – she slept with his trilby on the other pillow for over five years. She said it made him visit her in her dreams, like he was right beside her. And she wasn’t kidding either; she meant it point blank. Imelda believed in an afterlife, and a place where the two existences could overlap – like mixing paints, she would say. And let’s not forget, Connors saw Dorman get his head chopped off by flying glass. You’d expect him to be seeing a bereavement counsellor for two sessions a week for three years. Instead he gets lumbered with this.’
Bernadette indicated their surroundings with the sweep of her right hand.
‘Maybe he’s grieving for Dorman, or for someone else who died on the other side. Who knows? I mean… does he have parents, a partner…?’
Massimo shrugged. ‘I couldn’t tell you,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t know anything about the private lives of those I employ. I never ask. It’s none of my business. And I appreciate it if they never ask me either.’
Bernadette smiled. ‘That sounded forceful.’
‘I’m feeling forceful. Maybe I need some more mush in me belly.’
‘I’m hungry too…’ Bernadette paused. ‘Would you say that our current situation represents a reason to relax the rules a bit?’
‘The rules about what?’
‘About colleagues asking you personal questions,’ said Bernadette.
‘Yeah. Yeah I would say this qualifies.’ Massimo looked at her. ‘What’s on your mind?’
Bernadette waited a few seconds before replying. Then she said, ‘Do you feel lonely?’
Exhaling loudly, Massimo answered her as simply and honestly as he could.
‘I have never, in all my life, felt lonelier,’ he said.
‘Me too. Are hugs allowed?’
‘Hugs are allowed.’
And awkwardly at first they embraced.
3.
Despite what Bernadette had not-quite-promised, she made no mention of the second matter that she had stopped short of discussing with Massimo, not until the third day of their trek, when they’d descended to the mountain’s foothills, their leg muscles tight and strong, their stomachs clenched.
They had just spent one hell of a night together; all of them had shared and suffered a strenuous strain of the collywobbles that had affected each person with a different severity, but which had meant that no one slept well. Out of nowhere – almost as if it had laboured for its own life on a breeze – a germ had found its way into the system (probably via a meal) and the upshot was a series of panicky sprints away from the party, to where one could expel one’s poisons either through the mouth or the anus - the bug proved to be quite unfussy on the manner of egress.
Ill it was, then – ill and weak and suffering a crapulent hangover that had nothing to do with alcohol – that the party faced its third day of the descent. It went unsaid that everyone looked like death warmed up. Atchoo had gone so far as to cease singing the gee-up ditties that had once seemed fun but which had grown repetitive and dull. The comparative silence was a godsend to all.
The altitude being lower, breathing conditions had altered for the better; a temperature rise of a few degrees meant that the snow appeared threadbare in places, and the sweat on their brows did not chill so quickly… And yet. And yet, despite these improvements, Bernadette was more anxious than ever. Having got used to her new existence on the mountainside, she feared what she did not know – what she could not guess – about what lay ahead.
Was now the right time to confess her worries to Massimo? she wondered. Since the embrace they had shared, was it Bernadette’s imagination or had the man changed a tad? Become ever so slightly more stubborn, more difficult? Shied away from her, perhaps… just a little? No?
He might be embarrassed. Clinging together as they had, only partly for warmth, his erection against her thigh had been unmistakeable; perhaps he regretted his own body’s indiscretion; perhaps it concerned him, the belief that Bernadette would have found the experience offensive – or even uncomfortable. But Bernadette felt none of these things. True enough, just for a second there, she had experienced an embarrassment of her own, stoked by the anxiety that Massimo had misinterpreted her request for a cuddle. (Had he though? Was Bernadette being truthful to herself about her own motives?) However, it had only been a passage of seconds before she had silently thanked Massimo’s honesty. If he wanted her in a way that he had yet to voice, it was surely preferable a state of affairs than his not wanting her. After all, she was as far from home as he was… and nurses got lonely as well.
None of this, however, meant that Bernadette was ready to confess her fears. By no means was she certain that she could have found the right words anyway: it sounded absurd. The notion that the guides expected attack up ahead – or worse, that they intended to use the visitors as bait to bag a larger wild beast (a vast lizard, perhaps) was demonstrably preposterous…
Wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it, Bernie?
No. No it wasn’t a dumb fear at all; not in the slightest. The guides carried rifles for a reason, and no wildlife had been spotted on their way down the mountain, not even a falcon, a deer or a wolf. Nothing. It was only now, as they trudged through aromatic orange heather (it smelt of fudge) and red gorse, that they were able to spot trios or quartets of bats circling, their appearance made all the more wonderful by the brightness of the morning.
‘How are you feeling?’ Massimo called, five or sex metres to Bernadette’s left.
‘Warmer,’ she answered.
‘That’s good.’
‘And like I’ve eaten four plates of mutton phal.’
Massimo chuckled. ‘That’s not so good.’
‘No.’
‘Sphincter that glows in the dark.’
‘Something like that.’
‘Red raw, I am.’
‘Yeah all right, Mass, I don’t need the details.’
‘You’re a nurse!’
4.
Midway through the fifth day away from the village, the expedition became aware of the sound of voices, up ahead.
‘Signs of life!’ Connors announced – the first utterance he’d made in twenty-four hours.
The voices were shouts, guttural and low-pitched; it sounded like cheering. A game of sports? An execution?
The guides spoke among themselves as the party trudged on through patches of snow on the hardpacked pink-and-saffron earth. They passed buildings shaped like domes, made of the same earth, which were thought to be homes; and as the voices grew louder, the trekkers’ mood lifted.
A crowd had gathered around a rectilinear piece of land about twenty metres by ten. At either end of this pitch stood a basketball stanchion; and two teams of seven players apiece were engaged in what looked like a game of netball. One team was playing naked; the players were covered in fur from head to foot, and alternated between running on two feet and scampering on all fours. Their chests were protuberant but muscular; no penises were in
sight, so the team was possibly female. The other team was dressed in saris made of mirrors; their gender was impossible to determine – they wore mirrors on their faces and heads so that only the three eyes in their foreheads could be seen.
It was not a netball that passed from hand to hand, however.
It was a human head.
An Absence of Light
1.
Eastlight woke up in a state of high agitation. He did not know where he was; all he was aware of was pain in both his legs, the sense of a retreating hangover… and the dark physical confines of where he’d been placed. When he tried to stretch out his arms, he understood that there was no space for them to stretch to. Instead, his fingers touched the walls of his upright coffin – walls cold and damp – and he remembered the attack that Don Bridges had served him, comprehending in an instant that Don must have shoved him into the hole in the kitchen floor. His heart fluttered. He wiped sweat from his unseeing eyes and tried to dry his hand on a trouser leg.
There were no trousers. Don must have stripped him. There were no boxers either; as Eastlight conducted a touch-search of his own body, he concluded a mental tally. He was not wearing socks; he wore nothing on his upper body. Nothing at all.
He’d been left in a hole completely naked. He’d freeze!
Jesus Christ.
His mind mouthed the words slowly, as if to someone who spoke a different language.
I’ll starve to death. He’s trying to kill me…
With this realisation planted, Eastlight reached up with both arms and pushed at the underside of the trapdoor. The wood was chilly and dry; it was strong. The trapdoor did not move (had Don placed something heavy on top of it?) and only when his chest muscles burned did Eastlight give up, exhausted and panicky, the pains in his legs excited by the exertion.
But I’m standing, he thought. I’m not crippled… He didn’t finish my legs.