Black Chalk

by Albert Alla

  I didn’t reply, but I started to question what I was doing. I was certain that I’d done the right thing in leaving England, but I also had the feeling that my travels couldn’t last forever and that spending them aboard Hunter wasn’t as exciting as I’d first made it out to be. I started voicing my doubts to OJ, a man with a forward jaw, a full beard, and a rising count of tattoos, who came from one of the Home Counties. Ever since I’d come on board, he’d taken me under his wing in a rough fatherly way, alternating between stern instructions and hefty pats on the back. One drunken Canadian night, as he fed me cheap blended whisky, I started telling him about home. He stroked his beard and told me of his village green, of his father the butcher. I spoke of our cricket square, of the view from Stone Hill. And as he poured me another glass, as he told me about his mother’s blackberry pudding, something in me moved. I caught the tears before they’d gone too far, and downed my glass, stinging myself back into shape.

  ‘What’s wrong, my boy?’ he asked me, putting his hand on my shoulder.

  And I didn’t know. I had trouble speaking, but the only feeling I understood was a sense of wasted opportunity. So, without realising that he’d started his career doing what I was deriding, I told him that cleaning toilets and dishes didn’t satisfy me. He was a good man, for he bent his head and listened, refilling my glass when it went empty. When my babble turned back into man’s talk, he put a hand on my wrist, commanding my silence, and with a knowing look, told me what I needed:

  ‘A pair of legs and a pretty cunt, that’s what you need, my boy.’

  He spoke to the captain, and arranged to have me transferred to a cruise ship. It happened in Brisbane. I was given a white uniform with sparse epaulettes, and I was ushered into a cabin with bunk beds. In my new job, I carried drinks, cleared plates, coached racket sports, smiling to all the old ladies I passed, strutting past rich men’s daughters. Despite my rather dashing uniform (I must say), it was difficult to follow OJ’s instructions and socialise with our guests. For one thing, there weren’t many young people on board, and for another, they tended to band together and giggle in their closed groups. But the crew was a different prospect – more than half were young and looking for adventure. We partied hard, and soon I was in a stormy relationship with Sally, an Australian girl with hair more pink than red, who appeared shy only around people she didn’t know. A few drinks in her, and she’d suddenly grab a chair, thrust it in the middle of a group, and sit on it as on a throne. It was the same thing when she took her clothes off. She once tied me to the railing of my bed while I was sleeping, and left me there until my roommate walked in and undid me. Word spread, but nothing came back my way that justified my own mortification.

  Sally kept my mind off my mother’s irregular emails.

  Your father is working harder than ever. And your brother is turning into a full-blown teenager. He leaves the house for the whole day and he doesn’t tell me where he’s gone. You were never like this. I’m going to have to get him a mobile phone.

  Beth had encouraged her and, despite my silence, she’d kept at it. On birthdays, around bank holidays, she’d send me short vignettes. Always truthful, always brushed clean of conflict, she needed me to think of them, to long for home. Her first few emails repulsed me. There was one I left unopened for three weeks so strong was the feeling. It stood bold like a great pulsating barrier, representing all I needed to flee. To live, I needed to be a thousand miles from their great hunt.

  But as with all things, I grew used to her intrusions, pebbles aimed at a still pond.

  ***

  Sally and I stayed together for over a year, somehow managing to work the same routes, and OJ was right, her legs engrossed me for that whole period. It all changed when we were shifted to the Mediterranean, and I met George. George was a twenty-something intellectual, the sort who knew his own genius and expected the world’s universities to recognise it as soon as he’d decide to grace them with his presence. His bedside reading started with Freud and moved on to such exciting titles as Core Reading in Psychiatry, an Annotated Guide to the Literature. George’s chief danger lay with his ability to hide his ideological fervour behind a normal, almost jovial appearance. When he was one among many, he could laugh just as hard as the rest of us, but taken alone, he would suddenly grow very serious, identify a barrier, and try to break past it.

  ‘Nate,’ he told me once at the end of a drunken romp in Crete, waving at the group that had walked ahead of us, ‘look at them. Take Jung and Winnicott together, and you have it…’ He marked a pause. ‘The personas we adopt are walls to our true selves. They might be a social necessity, but don’t you think we should go past them?’

  He spoke as if he had no doubt that I would agree. Agreeing seemed easier, so I did, but if anything it proved to be a greater mistake. George was English, and on hearing my name had immediately worked out who I was. He’d kept silent about his knowledge, hoping to do a good deed quietly, as all good men should. He’d tried to speak to me alone many times, drawing me out into philosophical discussions, only to interrupt halfway through my answer and ask me about home. ‘But take your dog, for example. What does thinking of your dog make you feel?’ Unaware, I played along until I saw something better, perhaps Sally’s outstretched hand, or a free bottle of booze, and I left him frowning thoughtfully, his lips delicately pursed.

  It all came out one evening three weeks into his assault on my psyche.

  ‘Nate,’ he said while I watched Sally speak to a new guy, ‘I have to confess something.’

  And he confessed that I ought to confess. And with his words, my bubble seemed to collapse – the purity of drunkenness, the appeal of ever-changing shores, the joy of Sally’s mouth over my cock. It was a simple world, built on a thirst for endorphins and new experiences. With his roundabout revelations, I harked back to Andrew Hill’s thick glasses, to my hospital bed, and I heard screams and smelled smoke, and my mother was by my side and yet further than she’d ever been. It was as if I hadn’t and couldn’t ever run far enough.

  ‘I have to be frank with you,’ George said. ‘Keeping this quiet is not healthy.’

  I guess, Yeah, That’s interesting, Each to his own – I said them all, but he drove on, his questions more direct – Have you spoken to anyone about it? To Sally, at least? – and I shrugged, but he wasn’t going to let me go. As if I’d just heard Sally call me, as if that call were interrupting the best of conversation, I made an apologetic face, asked him to hold his thought for a second, and retreated towards the others. I spent the evening avoiding him, holding on to Sally as I’d never done before, shoving the new guy out of the way, fondling her in public one instant, downing half a beer the next. But even my beer tasted warm and leaden. The streets of Cairo, which a few minutes before had felt full of well-meaning strangers, suddenly seemed overflowing with clingy touts. I woke up the next morning with dried vomit stuck to my hair and the sticky blueness of one dirty memory. That memory rushed back, all at once, when I was convoked to my boss’s office: slurred insults, wide bloodshot eyes, an aggressive lean, I could recall doing all that and more. Her formal manner, the careful words she chose, instantly sharpened my mind.

  ‘I’m afraid that sorry isn’t good enough,’ she answered, in the same dry, rehearsed tones she’d used since the start of our interview.

  ‘Well, it was more than that,’ I started, and her expression changed as she listened to me, until she looked as if it was her who could never be sorry enough.

  I left her office with my job safe and my honour sullied. For two days, I walked around feeling like nothing could wash away the layers of dirt I’d encrusted in the skin of my palms. Two nights after my antics, her roommate gone for a strategic walk, Sally called me to her room and faced me with tears in her eyes.

  ‘After all we’ve done together,’ she said, her voice breaking with every sob, ‘sixteen months with me… and you never told me a thing… How could you do that to me?’

  Two weeks
later, I disembarked in Nice and holed up in a dirty hostel near the airport until I saw the cruise ship leave. It was the end of my sea career.

  ***

  George wrote to my mother and my mother wrote to me. The nerve of the man, the sheer confidence – he hadn’t spent a full twenty hours with me that he already knew how best to cure me.

  Nate, darling, your father informs me that emails should be short. Not like the long letters your father and I used to send each other when I was teaching in Newcastle. So let me get to it: I’m afraid I have bad news. We went to see the vet about Sloppy yesterday, and the prognostic is what you would expect for a sixteen-year-old dog. The vet recommended putting him to sleep now. The three of us talked about it, and James felt very strongly that Sloppy is your dog, and that you should be the one choosing. Do you think that perhaps you could let us know your wishes?

  On another note, your friend George emailed me on Tuesday. I was glad to receive first-hand news about you.

  She signed: Your mum and your dad who love you very much.

  ***

  It was the start of years drifting between the Mediterranean and the Alps, drifting with the seasons. I spent my first summer raking sand, my first winter shovelling snow. And there were friends, enemies, bosses, colleagues, jealousy and lovers, the sea and the slopes – but none of it ever reached deep, for I was always one season away from another move. In Antibes, I worked at the Galapagos, a beach bar on a narrow strip of sand, where pink skin reddened during the day, and where, in the evenings, it came back, clothed in white, adorned with gold, to sip mojitos and watch black Ferraris roll past. In Chamonix, I started on the mountain, and when the constant glare, wind, and sun got the better of me, I switched to working in shops. Of all the places I lived in, Chamonix was the one I returned to the most – for its slopes, yes, but also because the valley soothed me. Weeks into my first season there, I’d learned to ignore the glitzy shops selling branded bags/jewellery/clothes, the mountains rising above the valley, where every day someone else seemed to die, until I had the town down to its essentials: three bars (one Scottish, one Irish, and one strange mixture: between its polar bears and fake stalactites, it was a haven for all things kitsch, but there was something there that had me coming back), two cafés (to read, to meet pretty tourists), Guilia’s restaurant (with her homemade pasta and her fresh pesto), and one supermarket (grey but functional).

  Still, if I thought I’d avoid people like George by leaving the cruise ship, I quickly found out how wrong I was. The crew had been full of ignorant Antipodeans, while south-east France was a haven for British accents. For people who’d been transfixed to their screens, to their newspapers, as Hornsbury drew the nation’s news outlets. Whereas I’d gone for almost two years unrecognised, I now couldn’t spend a week without seeing someone’s eyes widen, and a month without someone asking me outright about it. That was when I started calling myself Nathan, instead of Nate, and although it worked to some extent, I also found that it wasn’t the recognition itself that bothered me, but rather, it was the idea that I owed people my story. Not everyone behaved that way. In the way they turned words, in the way they squeezed my shoulder, I learned to identify the undesirables. They were the ones who pitted everything on my answers, as if I held the key to a puzzle that had become theirs.

  ‘But why’ – they’d start, and then they would ask me about Eric, about his parents, about the wrongs of our community, the certain evils it must have hidden, sexual, moral, or otherwise. At first, I looked at these people with refreshed horror. But soon I was as impervious to them as I was to an evening’s first four pints, and I swatted them away with my sharpest contempt. When that didn’t work, I feigned pain, letting my eyes go blurry and my mouth drop ajar.

  Most of the people who remembered the shooting, and who linked my name to it, were kind enough not to care about what I had to say. A minute after they asked me what it’d been like to be there, after I answered with distant bravado (‘Oh, you know, you just accept it, right?’), they harked back to our previous conversation, and five minutes later, we were drinking, dancing, and laughing as hard as before. The matter was handled so casually that soon they were pointing to me, and telling their friends that I was the man who’d survived, and the friends felt satisfied enough that they didn’t come to ask me anymore.

  Some people, and George was one of them, think that I handled things wrongly. Victims of PTSD needed to be followed. Followed and then cajoled, medicated, drugged, treated, even confined if their situation demanded it. Perhaps because it doesn’t involve practitioners, no one speaks of the benefits of distance – and yet for me, it was the best of cures. In hospital, three specialists of the mind had lectured me on how I would feel, how I should think – and with them, my memories were only ever a stab away from breaking my calm. On the road, they were as distant as home.

  Had I stayed, my life would have revolved around the one incident. I could have explained all of my weaknesses on one morning of my life. The love I couldn’t give, the hate I couldn’t source, the dullness I couldn’t outflank. But away from those who knew me, banishing the past to a foreign land, avoiding those who wanted to talk, I soon learned to spend a day without thinking of it, and a day became a week. And I loved without looking over my shoulder, and I hated just as hard. And there were weeks spent fixing skis, and weeks spent serving martinis. And slow days behind a glass counter, and manic days on my feet, rushing up and down three flights of stairs, a phone on my ear. Now, as I face the greatest of calms, I realise that for close to six years, jobs, faces, flats all blended into a trail of warm-tinted pastels. I was drifting so fast that everything was possible, so fast that happiness was rushing past.

  My mother’s infrequent emails tried to ground me to my past, but I brushed most of her words away. Thinking of home no longer had blood pumping unease into my limbs. It was only in what she hid that I felt discomfort. ‘Hornsbury’s changed so much that we’re thinking of moving.’ ‘Your father and I went on a holiday to Greece last year. It was the first time we’d taken a holiday together for three and a half years.’ Or: ‘I’m going on sabbatical for your brother’s A-levels.’

  Sometimes, the incident felt distant enough that such offhanded remarks made me doubt my reasons for leaving.

  ***

  I enjoyed the transient nature of seasonal jobs. Love was free, and drugs weren’t much more expensive. There was Naomi, with her generous breasts and loving thighs, Jennifer, with her eager mouth and droopy eyes, Maura, with her unshaved armpits and marijuana plants. There was also coke, speed, ecstasy, pills and powders, but while I was happy to dabble, I was too careful to plunge into their world.

  As the weeks passed, as the seasons ticked over, I drifted towards a French crowd, drawn in by their authenticity and Marie’s freckled nose. Marie was French as I’d expected the French: small, dark-haired, with a fiery brow, and a hatred of everything English.

  ‘Pour toi, je fais une exception, mais seulement parce que je te trouve mignon.’

  I was the exception which confirmed the rule – we never spoke English, since we were in France, and French was a superior language: clearer in its diction, prettier to the ear, free of the sort of shifty vowels she hated in English. As our relationship grew, I moved away from the expat community and into hers, a loose group of true Français. The men had goatees, the women smoked like Audrey Hepburn. The conversation often turned to the hordes of tourists who descended on our fief when the sun shone hard, when the snow piled high. It was easy enough to make fun of the Germans, since they were, after all, Germans. The English were another favourite target:

  ‘There was an English stag party at my bar,’ Marie would say, ‘and they drank and they drank—’ but instead of the usual reverence an Englishman would have in his voice while relating a big night out, disdain would drip from her every word, as if I’d never had to carry her drunk and stoned back to our place.

  Early on in our relationship, I’d wanted to tell
her that I loved her, but feeling she would laugh at me, I’d kept quiet. Even though I was still learning their boundaries, I already knew that French words were not made to express love. And if what I was feeling was not love, then it was something strong, and the key to understanding it was in the language. In the evenings, lying next to Marie, as smoke mingled with the smell of sex, I would repeat a sentence until it sounded French.

  ‘You sound Belgian,’ she said to me once. Holding my breath, I asked her whether I sounded Walloon or Flemish. ‘Faut pas exagérer,’ she said, ‘you sound Walloon, but like a dairy farmer.’ I felt proud for days afterwards.

  Marie was beautiful, Marie was good in bed, Marie worked the seasons with me. I liked holding her tight against my chest, I liked the words she whispered in my ear, I liked bunching her blue miniskirt over her hips and taking her from behind. Our desires were simple enough that we kept on coming back to each other for two and a half years.

  ***

  Denret was the one who brought me to a halt. Whenever he came into our group, he became its very centre. A reputed mountain climber, a daring windsurfer, he was a giver, whether it be of the story that everyone would be repeating the next day, or of the few spare pills he always found in the pocket of his sports jacket. He had a way of standing, lightly perched on the one straight leg, his hips cocked and his head titled to one side, which seemed to suggest ease and indifference. To Marie, he was aristocratic. But his parents were honest and loving accountants, and his demeanour went beyond affectation. I came to understand it as I spent more time with him: emotions ruled him. An image, a memory, an injustice, and we’d all fade from his sight, and he’d be wagging an imaginary finger at a long-dead general, and he’d remember his first love’s scent, her promises of an unbreakable bond. My French was poor enough that I stayed quiet when a memory took hold, and he stood silent in that deceptively warm and off-handed way of his, a stance he’d developed to mask his emotions. It was perhaps for my reserve that Denret sought me out.