‘I’m still drunk. That’s my only excuse.’
‘So am I. Usually about this time I feel like death, but thanks to you I am so happy I feel like I am flying. Let’s not go to sleep.’
She melds her naked body with his. The dull, sick feeling that has inhabited her since Josh pretended to kill himself – before that even – is already seeping away. Although it is at times hard to believe it, the recuperative powers of the body and the mind are strong, as everybody says.
When they arrived at the club, somewhere in Shoreditch, wrapped in a happy corporate spirit, Rosie said she hadn’t been to a club for a year or more, and for a moment Lucy thought she saw desolation on her brother’s face, as if he recognised the future, stuck at home in the twilight zone of marriage and babies. Who knows, this baby may be the precursor to a whole corps de ballet. Ed seemed to have a suspiciously wide knowledge of cocktails, but maybe that’s what lawyers en fête do – drink cocktails with silly names to take their mind off the tedium of pushing paper. Rosalie swayed, like deep tethered seaweed, and drank mineral water. Lucy and Nick danced and kissed. Ed and Rosalie came by; dancing is a strange thing. Ed always gives the impression that it is somehow a little amusing: he smiles madly when he’s at it, as if he’s demonstrating that he is still in touch with the ordinary people. The trouble is, to be any good, you have to take it seriously. Rosalie was floating and Ed, sure enough, was grinning, as if to say, Look, I’m getting down with my homies. And Lucy wondered, not for the first time, if he was a lawyer at heart. Nick danced neatly and naturally, nothing fancy, but pretty rhythmical. Like me, she thinks. Like me.
Much later, outside the club, the rain was coming down hard; a meteorological change had taken place while they were drinking lurid cocktails underground, oblivious. It was disconcerting, like waking in the night unsure of where you are. The music was incredibly loud, and now, back in Nick’s flat, she can still hear its susurration and its beat, going on minutely inside her head.
They talk. They’ve reached that point where they want to talk about their families and their deepest wishes, although a certain editorial control is still required because the magic of the first few days must be preserved. Too much frankness could still destroy it. Nick tells her that his mother and father are divorced, which happened when he was fifteen, a bad time, and his younger brother, Simmy – Simon – suffered even more than he did. Simmy took to drugs briefly, but is now a budding academic. Their mother has married again, but his father’s affair lasted only two years after the separation, and he now lives in France.
‘And your famous father? How has he taken your mother’s death?’ Nick asks.
‘That’s difficult. Ed and I have discussed it. At first he was very calm, almost serene. But I don’t think you ever know what goes on between your parents. He was always off somewhere, and she kind of took over at home. I think she resented him a little when he came back from Washington or somewhere, having interviewed the President or smuggled himself into Afghanistan. And I think he felt that she was a little too much the hausfrau. Now I think he’s beginning to see just how wonderful she was. In less obvious ways, of course. I think he’s got a woman, too, some whacko with a dog. But anyway, he’s gone to the Kalahari with his brother who is dying. Uncle Guy. He lives out there.’
‘Do you miss your mother?’
‘I am always wanting to talk to her. Yuh, I know this sounds banal, by the way, before you think I’m one of those bitches from hell who launch into like self-obsessed psycho-babble without warning, but there are moments in every day when I want to speak to her and it takes me a second or two to remember.’
She worries a little in case there isn’t just a touch of the self-serving in these questions of families and loss and inchoate childhood anxieties. No one can say, Shut the fuck up when you are talking about your childhood and your parents, as much as they may want to.
‘When my parents separated,’ Nick says, ‘we were sent to boarding school and I would wake up each morning thinking I was at home in my own bed and then be absolutely shattered to discover I was in a dormitory with fifteen others, all farting away. But I got to like it after a while.’
‘The farts?’
‘No, obviously not the farts. What I loved was the sodomy and being flicked with wet towels.’
They hold on to each other, their lives bundled together now. She strokes his chest.
‘You don’t have much hair on your body.’
‘Oh God, I hoped you wouldn’t notice. Do you mind?’
‘Mind? No, no, sorry. I love it. It was a compliment.’
Josh, locked up, drugged, closely monitored, is a hairy person. He is furry, and that hirsuteness she thinks now is linked to his psychotic behaviour. She wonders exactly what Josh was intending by putting a gun in his mouth. She can’t describe to Nick the abyss that Josh opened in front of her and she can’t understand how it came to this. She wonders if there isn’t something about her that attracts disorder.
19
His brother says that the elephants pass by here often at this time of year. Elephants always pass: they are restless spirits, apparently never one hundred per cent content with their surroundings.
They make camp on a ridge overlooking the dried riverbed. Although it contains no water, the Huab has many recognisable attributes of a river: a line of trees follows its course in the red desert, boulders are strewn about, hurled there by forgotten floods, and the banks are sharply cut in places where the phantom river turned a corner. His brother is big on phantom rivers, which David thinks is a lovely phrase. Also, there are bright blue and carmine birds nesting in holes in the walls of the river, and there are nests of weaver birds hanging down from the trees. The weaver birds have masks of black over their eyes, like robbers in cartoons. Deep sand, beach sand, covers parts of the riverbed, rolled and sieved – presumably – by storm water. The elephants browse the trees, Acacia erioloba, commonly called the camel thorn, and they dig for water in places known to them. So says brother Guy.
Two nights before, they camped on a vast, barren salt flat. There was no sound and no life at all, not even insects could exist on the salt. Guy said the salt flats covered an area larger than Wales. It’s curious how very large areas of the wilderness are routinely described as being bigger than Wales; Wales has become a handy yardstick. In his career David found that countries were often described as the breadbasket of Africa if they could grow anything at all, or the Switzerland of Africa if they had a functioning currency.
Guy has a mission to impress on his brother the spiritually expansive possibilities of open spaces and the limitations of life in a small wet country; he has in mind England.
‘Don’t you sometimes feel cramped?’
‘Not especially.’
‘Yah, but look at this.’
‘What, this nothingness?’
‘Yes. Do you know what “hermit” means?’
‘Means? What do you mean, “means”?’
‘The word “hermit” comes from the Greek for “desert”, eremos. People who lived in a desert, like St Alexander of Cairo. The eremitic life came before the monastery. The point was that hermits didn’t want anything or anyone coming between them and their God. Like Hopkins.’
‘Particularly not women. Hopkins was gay.’
‘What, a pansy?’
‘Well, yes. He was gay. In a Victorian way. The Roman Catholic Church was the best place to be at that time before it was acceptable to come out. It provided a sort of deliberate separation. Like a hermitage.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course. Does it matter?’
‘No. I suppose not.’
He was uncharacteristically silent for a while.
Later he asked David to stand up.
‘Now, shut your eyes. Walk for ten minutes in any direction, but keep your eyes shut.’
The night before they had heard lions, roaring with a hoarse, rumbling intensity.
‘What about lion
s?’
‘There are no lions within fifty miles, in fact. There’s nothing here. No insects, no plants. Absolutely bugger all. If you shut your eyes you will experience total sense-deprivation.’
‘Do I want that?’
‘It opens the mind.’
‘OK, I’ll give it a whirl.’
He stood up. He walked for ten or maybe more minutes, meeting no resistance in this stark, magnificently dead landscape. If his brother was suggesting that deserts are places where you could shed distractions and come closer to your God, he was probably right. If you had a God.
As he walked he tried to empty his mind to create a productive space into which some important understanding might creep. It was a hopeless task: his mind became chaotically active and was flooded with memories; it was treading water, with a hint of panic. He thought of Jenni’s drowning reproach and felt again violent shame so that his face heated from within as he wandered in the nothingness. He thought of Rosalie, her hair falling on his face. But he couldn’t pin his thoughts down or turn them in a contemplative, self-improving direction. His brother’s mistake, he thought, has been to look for meaning out here, when in fact all around them is an unmistakable demonstration of meaninglessness and nullity.
When he finally opened his eyes he could see the campfire and the silhouette of the Toyota about half a mile away in the steel blue and ox blood dusk. He walked back and perversely the emptiness of the vista calmed his mind.
‘How was that? Mind-blowing, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t think I did it right.’
He suddenly felt irritated by his bother’s assumption of spiritual authority; easily assumed but difficult to substantiate.
They had bought a stunted, fatalistic sheep at a tiny settlement a few hundred kilometres away, which was promptly and inexpertly butchered; the dismembered body parts – they returned the head to the grateful vendor – are in the electric cool box, which is powered by the vehicle’s battery. Guy has decreed that it is a useful aid; in fact if his own car hadn’t been occupied by poultry he would probably get one himself, he said. When David arrived back from his blind walk, Guy had a scrawny leg of this sheep on a spit over the fire. He believes that anything can be cooked on an open fire, flavoured by beer, and while this is happening you should smoke a joint. As they inhaled, David, nursing his peevishness, looked at his brother, deliberately turned away towards the more congenial mysteries beyond. His motile face suggested that he was perhaps coming to terms with the idea that Hopkins might have been gay. It was making small involuntary movements, somewhere been speech and chewing: O my chevalier!
David wondered what Guy had been doing all these years, in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment at the expense of his family, or families. And his health. He seems to have no concept of healthy living; for instance, on a whim he will eat a half-kilo tin of tiny wiener sausages in brine, slathered in ketchup. The day before he ate a packet of Romany Creams for breakfast. During the journey the Romany Creams had collapsed in the heat and had congealed overnight to become a sort of trifle, on to which he poured condensed milk before setting to.
When David, watching this, asked him about his health, he said, ‘I’ve had my time. So have you. What does it matter if we go tomorrow or in five years? This is delicious, by the way; you should try some.’
Technically speaking, this must have been a general recommendation for the recipe rather than an invitation to partake, because he had eaten the lot. His face had a high colour and a softness, like a fruit that was on the turn, and David was concerned.
Later in the day, when they arrived at the great salt flats – ‘This is just the very edge, they go on for hundreds of miles’ – he looked better, less palpable, as he became excited by the prospect of endless space. His enthusiasm hasn’t diminished once during the weeks they have traversed this space.
‘I think this is what Merleau-Ponty meant when he spoke about le regard pré-humain. This is how the world looked in prehistory.’
His accent was shocking. David was tempted to tell him, as brothers are inclined to do, that he hadn’t actually done French. Languages were David’s forte.
Guy turned towards him.
‘The human creature. Oh shit, ow, that hurts,’ he said, sucking his fingertips, scorched as he prodded the lamb, ‘the human creature is an abnormal creature forcibly removed from all connection with nature. What Hopkins saw was that sacraments don’t just belong in church. We can enter a personal sacrament. This is the REAL PRESENCE, in nature. It’s there. It’s always there.’
‘And the snake you decapitated the other day?’
‘I don’t think you understand what I’m saying.’
‘I do. You killed a snake. You forcibly removed it from all connection with nature, and life, too.’
‘I had forgotten what a competitive little monkey you are. It’s all coming back.’
He shook his head sadly at the recollection of his limitless forbearance. Now they were both turned towards the immeasurable emptiness. For a while David considered taking the hire car he had paid for and leaving his brother out here to reconnect with nature in his own time. He looked at Guy: they shared the same implausibly thick hair, but little else. His brother’s hair lent him a misleadingly sage look, especially now, as it was covering his ears and creeping down his collar. The family’s monumental look – which has skipped Ed – had undoubtedly helped him in his television career. Guy looked at David’s teeth one day soon after they set out and said, ‘You know, your teeth are about as natural as a tuxedo on a baboon.’ Global had paid a fortune for these teeth – six veneers and two implants – in one of their frequent rebranding exercises. Guy’s teeth – there aren’t that many – are crooked and grey, tending to brown. But David didn’t try to explain the demands of television. He was wrong to imagine that his brother would be impressed by his celebrity. Out here it meant nothing anyway: in truth his glittering teeth were confirmation of everything his brother believed about the delusions of Europe and North America. It depends on where you are standing, of course: there on that desolate salt pan, his brother was at the centre of the universe.
And who am I to deny him?
‘Do you know what moves me most about the Bushmen?’ Guy asked, still in brooding profile.
‘No, but I have a feeling you are going to tell me.’
If he detected the irony, Guy was above it.
‘It cracks me up that they valued their own simple lives above anything. They just wanted to carry on as they had done for fifteen thousand years. They just wanted to get in touch with their god. One day I will take you to a rock painting that shows a white man firing on Bushmen. One lies dead, the others are running for their lives. It’s the saddest thing I have ever seen. I’ve written a paper on it.’
David saw by the light that Guy was racked by the memory. Guy poked the meat again, this time with a penknife. He hacked at it, cutting off a large piece, and chewed on it; juices – surprisingly plentiful from such a skinny animal – ran down his pupate mouth.
‘Perfect. Let’s graze.’
David wakes very early. Because elephants are unpredictable, Guy decreed that they should sleep in the back of the Toyota. They started the night bedded down in the back on foam rubber, but Guy soon rolled over almost on top of him, and farted constantly (perhaps it was the wiener and Romany Cream diet), and then his remaining teeth began to grind alarmingly. After an hour David moved to the front passenger seat and covered himself with his grey blanket. He was very comfortable, although the dental grinding still reached him, albeit at diminished volume.
Now he hears a ripping sound. Soon afterwards an elephant appears in the riverbed below them, carrying a slender branch of acacia in its trunk. The elephant has a hide something like the colour of dark paprika, something like the colour of Rosalie’s hair. It stops for a moment in the delicate business of stripping off the leaves and transferring them to its mouth and turns towards the Toyota. It shakes its head – its ear
s are immense – and then from deep inside it comes a rumble, a sound like the approach of a train on the Northern Line, before it walks on. Eleven more elephants, all coated with red dust, follow. Two of them are calves, perfect elephants in miniature; they are quickly screened from the Toyota by two adults, which turn towards the vehicle and raise their trunks anxiously to test the wind. David tries to wake his brother by banging on the partition. While obviously inaudible to his brother, it arouses the elephants’ interest. One advances up the ridge towards the Toyota, huge, red and terrifying. It has only one, broken, tusk. In its agitated state, its legs are strangely loose as though it is doing a comedy shuffle. David sits very still, trying to be calm, although his heart begins to pound. He thinks it may be audible to elephants with their famously sensitive hearing. It is like some independently terrified animal trapped in his ribcage with no way out; it clearly knows instinctively what he knows intellectually, but this is no time for an exploration of dualism. A few feet from the Toyota, the elephant looms like a medium-sized building; it fills his vision as it shakes its head once or twice, advising him to retreat. He can’t; he’s trapped in the passenger seat without the keys. The elephant now advances, lowers its head and pushes the vehicle backwards. The locked tyres slide over the stony ground.
From the back of the Toyota, he hears Guy shouting.
‘What are you doing? What’s going on?’
‘Elephant. A fucking elephant is pushing us.’
David hears the back door of the Toyota open and, to his horror, his brother appears outside the vehicle beside him. He is naked. He raises his arms in the manner of a charismatic, outstretched in forgiveness, as if to invite the elephant to reconsider its sins, and it does, retreating reluctantly in the face of this old naked fellow with the yellowed buttocks and greyish penis. It turns and follows after its fellows at a slow trot. Some way down the riverbed the other elephants emerge again, rambling along their pathways, casually harvesting the trees as they go, before disappearing suddenly between some cliffs of red stippled rock.
To Heaven by Water Page 24