by Nick Laird
“And then when the Japanese invaded, thousands fled from the coast. Most hid in the forest and were hunted down. The rest tried to get inland and cross the island to the southern shoreline.”
“But that’s hundreds of miles.”
“One hundred and twenty. It gets slightly marshy here.”
“How did they survive?”
“They didn’t. There were something like seven who made it. That they know about. And all of them had native—Look!”
Stan stopped in front of her.
“A skink with his dinner,” he whispered.
A dark brown lizard—about six inches in length—sauntered down a broad buttressed root carrying a cricket or a cricketlike insect in its mouth, much like a dog might carry a newspaper. The tiny dinosaur stopped and swiveled its hard triangular skull round to look at them, at their impertinence, then jerked its head down and bashed the insect on the root once, twice.
“He’s softening it, to eat it.”
Liz moved around the side of Stan, to see it better, and slipped her camera out of the side of her rucksack. Then something was in her hair and on her face and she shrieked, brushing frantically at it.
“It’s just a web,” Stan said.
“Is there a spider?”
“I can’t see one. I think this is an orb-weaver’s web, probably a golden—”
“I don’t care! Get it off me.”
She did a little twirl, as if showing him her outfit, and he repeated, “I can’t see one. I think you’re fine. I was just going to say—”
“Liz? You all right?” Margo called from up ahead.
“I’m fine.”
A long strand of spider silk wafted from her hand and she rubbed it against her thigh.
“The webs of these spiders are so strong they can trap a small bird, and you’ll find local people even use them to make bags or fishing nets. It’s absolutely—”
The look Liz gave Stan halted him midsentence. The remnants of the vast web swayed from a branch and the trunk of a palm tree. Two porters in front of Stan had stopped and were staring back with amused curiosity.
After fifteen minutes of trekking in a zigzag through forest that thinned as they ascended, they now emerged in a clearing inhabited only by grass and low, desiccated shrubs and one enormous, roughly cuboid rock, the size of a small car. It stood by the edge of the clearing, where the flatness began to fall away so steeply one could, if one were braver than Liz, reach out and touch the sharp needles of the conifers, whose roots were five storeys below.
All of them stood for a moment in silence. A warm breeze came up from the valley. Landscape unfolded as far as vision allowed. To the north were immense mountains, sheer cliffs, thin chimneys of black rock, plunging slopes, gullies, valleys thickly carpeted in all varieties of green. Three long white ribbons of waterfall fell from a far cliff, cutting through stillness, athletically twisting and twisting but remaining the same. Above it all the blue sky stretched tall, the unchecked sun shone, and a few tufts of cloud drifted.
“This is approaching perfect,” Paolo said, with a certain grudging respect.
Liz looked at his broad back and had a brief desire to touch his shoulder.
“It’s beautiful,” Liz said, which seemed inadequate. She tried again. “Breathtaking.”
“I always think if you get high enough above the cloud forest,” Stan said, “it looks just like a crate of broccoli.”
Paolo filmed Liz pretending to arrive at the rock and take off the rucksack that one of the porters had carried so far. They did the shot three times and already her shoulders felt the impress of the rucksack’s straps. It was obscenely heavy. She could hardly have walked the length of herself had she actually to carry it. She felt a low, familiar pulse of guilt about the falsity of the situation, and asked Margo, in a whisper, “Are we paying these guys properly?”
Margo gave her a patient look and replied, “We’re paying the standard fee.”
“Ours or theirs?”
Margo was short, strikingly dark, heavy thighed, and her lips forever pursed in appraising situations. She hadn’t seen her since they’d made The Use of Myth program, but everything came back. The trick was to keep her on a very casual level of intimacy, at a friendly arm’s length. If you wandered off the main road with her, you faced the real risk of being lost for some time in the outskirts of her complicated backstory. There was Javier, a Cuban ex-husband, and Bella, the teenage anorexic daughter who lived with Margo’s mother and stepfather, because Margo herself was Bella’s “trigger.” There was a litany of professional grudges and gender slights and the humiliating difficulties of middle-aged dating. Liz knew they were coming, these conversations, but they must be held off as long as possible. Conversely, though, you had to keep her sweet. If Margo felt snubbed, the fallout was chilly, immediate, lengthy. You wanted to keep her star within your orbit, but not so close as to get burned up, not so distant as to lose all light and heat.
“Liz, stand here . . . No, forget that. That’s not going to work.”
The rock was black—basalt?—and scraped with white geometric shapes and patterns. On the center of the side facing north, towards Wapini and Ibaki and the coast, a rudimentary tableau had been etched in outline: a huge snake crawling up from the ground in a winding pattern. Its head split open into two fanged jaws and fleeing from it were all manner of creatures: a rat, a fish of some kind, a pig, a spider, a long-legged bird, and several tiny white stick men. The dell was like a giant altar awaiting sacrifice. Liz felt exposed. She looked at the tree line round the ring of the clearing. Were they being watched? Margo paced back and forth with her clipboard, deciding on shots, general views, cutaways. Liz read her Piece To Camera and tried to memorize the first paragraph. Take it slow. Make it natural. Something had bitten her on her neck and it was starting to itch.
Stan appeared behind her.
“That’s new.”
“The carving?”
“The snake. And that’s new too. The little figures fleeing before it.”
“Over here, Liz. When you’re ready.”
—
“This astonishing landscape behind me”—Liz swiveled, made the sweeping gesture—“is the island of New Ulster. For centuries this harsh mountainous terrain, not to mention the legends of the local tribes’ ferocity, kept Europeans away. But over the last fifty years the missionaries have started coming. In that time many of the natives converted to Christianity, turning away from the gods and rituals that had been their way of life for millennia. But here, in a high valley in the very heart of New Ulster, one woman has begun a revolution.”—Dramatic pause—“She’s started a brand new religion, perhaps the newest religion in the world, and I’ve traveled here to meet her.”
Thirteen times. The first time she said “trocal libes” instead of “local tribes.” The second she forgot what came after “Christianity.” The fourth time one of the porters coughed. Halfway through the sixth take a fly landed on her chin. The sweat on her back was making her shirt clammy, and Margo’s encouraging smile had morphed to a grimace. Liz’s mind began to turn on itself; helplessly she started smirking at the absurdity of the situation, the way she was wafting her arms about for accentuation, the enthusiastic manner of her speech, the odd collection of human animals ranged around and watching her. The ninth take was good until the same guy who’d previously coughed gave a sneeze, just as she was finishing. With a wave of her hand Margo exiled him from the clearing. The eleventh try she nailed but her voice dropped off at the end. Finally:
“That was great.”
“I’m so sorry about—”
“It takes as long as it takes.”
Margo gave the same dismissive wave. It was a mistake to apologize.
“Let me watch it back. Paolo, good with you?”
The cameraman raised his head from the lens and p
resented his crooked, reassuring grin, holding Liz’s eye for a moment too long.
“Great with me.”
“Are we almost there?” Margo asked Stan.
“Ten more minutes tops,” he said, though his eyes looked less certain.
They followed the path that led from the glade through the trees. There was an eeriness to this place; the forest seemed alive. The branches stretched out to embrace her. After a while the forest began to thin again and the path opened up and straightened and a small boy stood up ahead of them, staring. Liz was third back—behind Stan and Margo—and one by one they all stopped, with the usual, slightly comic domino effect. The boy was some way off, watching them as a statue might, giving nothing away. There was some kind of whiteness in his hair, white feathers maybe or white blossoms. He wore a tattered pair of red shorts and nothing else and after a few seconds turned and bolted sudden and easy as a hare, as if his body were all lightness.
“Hello there!” Margo called out after him. “Hello!” But he was gone.
A few minutes later they came out of the forest gloom to arrive in a village. Wooden huts dotted either side of a grassy clearing. In the space between, two groups sat in lines facing each other. The men wore faded T-shirts, a few baseball caps, shorts—and some had sticks or clubs across their knees. The women all wore meri skirts, long, patterned dresses. In the firebreak between them a woman in the same kind of patterned dress walked up and down, gesticulating and talking loudly. She also wore, improbably, a white sailor’s cap pushed back on her head. She was shouting, repeating the same phrase enough times for Liz to make a basic phonetic copy in her notebook:
“Em I strongpela sia. Yumi tupelo I ken sindaun long en.”
Some of the listeners were mumbling and whispering, but most sat rapt. Now she turned to their little group—sheepishly they’d filed in and stood along one edge of the clearing—and she seemed to Liz to look directly at her. The woman made a shape in the air with her brawny arms and announced in her low raspy voice, “It is a strong strong chair. You hear? Good news! We can all of us sit on it.”
CHAPTER 17
Some force from the dreamworld pushed sharply and repeatedly on Stephen’s lower back until he rolled across, towards her, and forced his eyes open. They hadn’t lowered the blind properly. A wedge of bright light snuck in from the bottom of the window, picking out the scene. His hangover greeted him first. The tangle of his morning suit, the twist of his white shirt on the chair. Her head was not on its pillow. She was sitting up, her rounded, colorless shoulders facing away. She stared at the screen of her phone. He reached up and over and tucked his index finger under one of the straps of her burgundy silk nightie, tried to slide it down but she pulled away.
“What is it?”
She angled the pixels of the phone at his face.
“What is it?”
“Can you sit up?”
Her voice had a frayed, dangerous edge. He raised himself on one elbow as she pushed the smartphone into his hand.
“It’s from Liz.”
He read, and then flicked through the next few texts, and handed the phone back. One part of him peeled away from another. His heart thumped, full of blood.
“Aw fuck,” he said, and lay back on the bed, breathless. There, it had happened.
“What have we done?” Alison said, still not turning to face him.
“You haven’t done anything. The story in the . . . Did you read it?”
“Not yet.”
He sat up beside her, and swung his legs off the bed, spindly and hirsute beside her plump, pale thighs.
A siren was going off somewhere at the other end of town, and Stephen had the absurd but very real notion that they were coming for him.
“It’s not letting me in.” She looked down at the half obscured Sunday Life Web site. “You need a subscription.”
“You know, we could just put our clothes on and go to the airport and pretend it never happened.”
Even as he spoke he knew how ludicrous this sounded. Alison looked at him, a level unloving gaze.
“And that will stop everyone we know reading all about it, will it?”
Stephen grimaced.
“What do you want to do?”
She felt very cold suddenly and stood up, snatched the hotel dressing gown from the back of the bathroom door and put it on. Once she was wrapped up, defended, she sat back down on the bed and turned to him.
“You have to tell me what you did.” Loosely she was hugging herself, braced for the response, and her round blue eyes brimmed. “You have to tell me everything.”
“You know. Killed people.”
“Yourself?”
“Yes.”
“With a bomb?”
She watched him lower his head to his hands.
“With a gun.”
“How many?”
Now a whisper: “Five.”
“In one go?”
Now only a nod. Alison too buried her face in spread fingers. Stephen put his own hand out towards her—he watched it move across this strange new distance between them. When he touched her shoulder she flinched and he drew back.
“You OK?” he whispered.
After a few seconds she looked up and asked in a dry, compact voice, “Where was it?”
“In Eden, Londonderry.”
“That pub they shot up?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus Christ! I remember it!”
“Yes.”
“Who did you kill?”
“Whoever was there. Four Catholics, a Protestant.”
An early-release prisoner, a beneficiary of the Good Friday Agreement: two years for killing five people. Mostly it lived at the side of his vision, that great darkness he’d brought into so many lives, and into his own. It existed, a vast island, just beyond the horizon, its presence confirmed by the way the light above it deformed and colored. Nine years in Ballyglass. Nine years building it all up brick by brick till the wolf of the past comes along and blows it over, one puff. He had planned this morning: breakfast in bed, lengthy baths. Check in at 10:30 for the 12:55 to Faliraki. They needed to get sun cream in Boots, but they’d have plenty of time. Plenty of time to order a couple of flutes of champagne in the Voyager bar, snapping pics to stick on Facebook. They would be giddy with love.
Now he gripped his knees and wondered if he was going to vomit. It was that huge falling feeling he had when the police came to the house on Erskine Place and banged on the door, shouting, “McLean, McLean, open the fuck up.” Part of the sensation he’d felt was relief. He realized he’d been half waiting for them to turn up. Don’t we want to be known? Don’t we want it all out there?
The blind was hanging down wonkily. At the top its blades were horizontal, evenly spaced, and then as it got lower one of its strings had got caught up and the lower half was lopsided. She looked at the desk, the fire exit notice on the back of the door, the landline phone, her wedding shoes—white slingbacks lying on their side under the chair. Every object was suddenly giving off tiny vibrations. She turned back to Stephen.
“I’ve no idea who you are.”
—
When he’d imagined it—and he had, many times—the moment of admission and unburdening brought such a deluge of relief that he and his dear wife were brought closer; it cemented their love. Not immediately, obviously. He wasn’t a fool, he knew it would be difficult. But she had seemed so accepting of his past, so fine with it. Even—could he say it?—thrilled that he had been involved. Her eyes glittered when she obliquely referred to it. His dark secret. His terrible past. But now in the wake of its explicit revelation his wife sat at the desk and stared at a point about three feet above his head. He tried to meet her gaze, but she refused and stood up and walked to the window. She twisted the blind open without fixing the bottom of it, then twisted i
t shut again.
The door had closed on the old life. The man who cut the church’s lawn and stood for six hours at the door of Tesco’s collecting for Cancer Research. The man who had come through. That man was discarded. He felt himself slipping irrevocably back into the old Stephen in the eyes of others, Mad McLean, despicable son of a bitch. And in his own eyes. Bastard with a semi-automatic and a black heart. Everyone knew what he was. It was not the past to them. It was once again the eternal truth of him.
Alison looked directly at him, a new thought forming.
“What age were those people you killed?”
“I—I don’t know.”
She just kept on staring.
“The youngest was nineteen. The oldest was seventy-something.”
—
Over and over she said, “I can’t believe this is happening” with slightly varying cadence as she pulled her jeans and a hooded gray top on over her nightie. She pulled on her honeymoon sandals and lifted the card-key and went out, pulling the door behind her. Almost ran to the lift, and waiting for it felt the silent tears slide down her face. As soon as the doors closed on her, a raw sob came out of her mouth, shocking in its loudness. She looked at herself in the mirror and wiped her blotchy face with the sleeve of her hoodie. By the time she arrived at the ground floor, she’d tied her hair back and sorted herself out with a few deep breaths. She strode out briskly to face the morning, to cross the road and walk to the Spar on the corner.
Stephen lay in the bed with his head under the pillow, a flock of thoughts continually roosting and alighting inside him. In the interrogations the police kept showing him photos; of the inside of the bar, of the horror, of the autopsies, of the bodies. “How does that make you feel, son? Take a good long look.” There were casualties in war, but wasn’t he also one of them? Wasn’t his whole family? He thought of his mother looking at him through the tempered glass, her features hardening, setting. She died after he’d been inside eighteen months, poor woman. What he had done had solidified her face into a mask of sorrow, of shame. Now he would do the same to his wife. The door opened. She was back, he sat up. She set the paper on the bed, unfolded.