At first I found it terrifying. I saw how frightened the boys were, big beefy boys who quailed at the sight and sound of hundreds of girls possessed, and I was surprised how frightened I was too. They would pray, to protect themselves from evil. I wouldn’t, although I was unnerved. One day it had started in my own classroom. Asked to do some English lit, I’d gone to the shabby, dilapidated school-library to dig out a story and come out with a collection by Guy de Maupassant. We were ‘doing’ a story: Maupassant, in English lit, in Borneo. It was very hot. A black rain cloud was rolling towards the school, fast and huge as a tidal wave. Just outside my window, a bulldozer was chewing at the trees, revving noisily and belching smoke and breaking them down, one after another, in a rude and ugly assault on the forest. The hysteria started in my lesson. Just as the crash of the rainstorm hit the roof, a sweet little girl called Dayangku Siti Hafizah Qurr’atul binti Hj. Mohammad Alimin fell off her chair and started crying. Despite, or because of, my attempts to comfort her, she got louder and louder. Within moments, nearly every female in the building was wailing.
It didn’t last long. When it was all over, thanks to the over-layering of male voices praying through the loudspeakers, a boy told me that a spirit from the trees collapsed by the bulldozer had come into our lesson and possessed Siti. That evening I had an extra big, extra swirly drink on my balcony, to settle my nerves and keep the spirits of the forest at bay.
Allah akbar. Gordons is great. I heard it from the mosque five times a day and I celebrated it in the evenings. I didn’t know if the gin was keeping me sane or driving me mad. Rehab? After a year or six in Borneo, I wasn’t sure if I was running from something or I was sliding headlong into a trap I’d never escape.
I remember talking to one of my students, a girl called Fatin. We were practising for her oral exam and I was asking the usual questions about her family and friends and hobbies and hopes for the future. She told me her father was the muezzin at the mosque. In my imagination, I pictured the stern, sanctimonious man whose voice woke me and needled me every day, and I looked at her earnest, perfect little face. She had the smoothest brown skin, the most perfect teeth and the biggest brownest eyes a caricaturist could draw... except that she was real, a living human being swaddled in her crisp white tudong. Trying to tie the question into the kind of format she could expect in her forthcoming exam, I asked her what she might want to do in the future. Mischievously I asked her, could a girl ever be the muezzin in the mosque in Marudi?
With the greatest seriousness, she answered, no. If ever a girl or a woman did the call to prayer, the world would end.
The world would end. At least that would be something. It might awaken me. At least for a millisecond, in whatever cacophonous, tumultuous moment the end of the world might occur, I could awaken from my dream of swiftlets and fireflies, from the mumble of meaningless prayers, from the mosque and school and alcohol the same and the same and the same and the fucking same...
AND NOW? AND now, I’d flown seven thousand miles to England. From the sweet, seductive pitcher-plant entrapment of Borneo, to the Lincolnshire wolds.
Same difference. The days and weeks of June and July and August blurred dreamily together. What did we do, the three of us, me and Juliet Lundy and Lawrence Lundy? Was it real, or part of my dream? Were they real, this woman and her boy, or had I conjured them, in my fumey, sweaty sleep?
I tried, one morning, to call my father. I remember trying to re-connect with the reality of my returning to England. While Juliet was changing the bed upstairs and the boy was in his tower, I went into the living-room and plugged the phone into its socket. A cheery nurse picked up, in Grimsby. I could hear a radio playing a pop song in the background, and then, when she turned it off because she couldn’t hear what I was saying, I could hear the seagulls. She said sorry, no, Mr Beal was resting comfortably in his room, but he wouldn’t be able to talk on the phone. He was quite alright, but his speech was... she tried to think of an acceptable euphemism... his speech was compromised. Mr Beal was alright in himself, he was eating and sleeping, he had the television and the daily newspaper, but he couldn’t speak. Come and visit him anytime, she said, he would no doubt be very happy to see me.
I thanked her. I listened to the gulls for another second, long enough for me to imagine my father at the open window of his little room, the salty air and the fustiness of his own smell, before she rang off.
A brief encounter with the outside world. Yes, it was still out there, somewhere, not so far away. But when I pulled the plug of the telephone out of its socket so that Juliet wouldn’t know I’d made a call, the sense of isolation was so intense that I could hear the falling of dust around me and feel the weight of it on my shoulders.
Another day... was it the next day or a week later?
I found myself wandering deep into the woodland and past the hearse and onwards to the end of the drive. I was going, for only the second time since I arrived, to set foot outside the limits of Chalke House. Not sure why, because my ribs were still aching and I had no intention of plodding up the lane and surfacing into the upper world, except maybe to gulp at the air like a drowning man whose clothes were utterly waterlogged... and there was Juliet, with the boy.
He was carrying a big, heavy cardboard box. She was carrying a smaller one. She was radiant, and her voice chimed among the trees as madly as the laughter of the yaffle. ‘Hey, Christopher, where are you heading off to? Up to the village again? No need... we’ve got enough supplies of everything to keep us going for a month, maybe more.’
I turned and trooped back to the house, behind her. She wouldn’t let me take the box. I could hear the clank of bottles, but she insisted she could manage. She’d made a call to the supermarket in Alford, she’d quoted her bank card number and they’d delivered her order to the end of the drive. She was bubbling with the success of such a simple fait accompli. There was a triumphant note in her voice. ‘No need for any of us to go anywhere...’ a bit out of breath as the box bumped against her chest as she walked, ‘I heard you on the phone the other day and I guess your Dad’s ok or else you would’ve said something... and now we’ve got food and drink... we’ve got gin!... So we’re alright and the rest of the world can go hoot as far as I’m concerned... what d’you think?’
It didn’t seem to matter what I thought. It was a rhetorical question.
Meekly, I followed her and the boy through the French windows and into the kitchen, where I was told to sit down and keep out of the way while they unpacked the groceries and re-organised them into different cupboards. They were in cahoots, the woodland elf and her ogre-son. I felt a deliberate sense of exclusion. I was, just then, as superfluous as if I’d never called from Lincoln railway station and never blundered into their life. And the satisfaction with which they stacked the shelves... they were so smug, as if the outside world were smitten by plague and yet they were safe, they would survive, some invisible benefactor had smuggled in the life-saving supplies and they would be alright.
NO NEED TO go anywhere. So what did we do?
I coupled with the woman. I engaged with the boy. But everything we did was tinged with a strange, desultory madness, as though we were simpletons... droll, harmless inmates of an asylum, with tasks assigned to fill our time between eating and drinking and sleeping.
Everything was pleasantly pointless. Even the sex.
Me and Juliet, we did it like children who’d discovered a new game, a game so marvellous that when we got the urge to play, we went at it in a frenzy which blanked out all the other games we’d played before. And then, when the game was over, we lost all interest in it. Like spoilt children, who could have whatever we wanted whenever we wanted it, we pushed the game aside, not bothering about its bits and pieces and who might tidy up afterwards.
In the daytime, we did it in the garden. Juliet on top, always, worried about my ribs, although the bruises had faded from black to purple to a kind of Tuscan ochre... concerned for my ribs, that was the rea
son she put into words. In the hearse, she pressed me down, her body forked on top of me, my father’s blanket coarse beneath my back. Under the Scots pine, she forked me into the sweet dry needles. At night she came to my room. In the moonlight, she was a silvery nymph who’d slipped into the house from the shadows of the woodland and captured me, a trophy she might take back to her faery-world. Or a wild creature. She pinned me down, panting and staring fiercely around her, like a hawk on a feebly-fluttering thrush.
For those brief moments of uncontrollable ecstasy, she didn’t seem to know or care who I was or where I’d come from. It was a kind of madness. In her head, she was making love to a man whose body was decomposing in the North Sea, a corpse, nibbled rotten, but more or less intact because it was encased in a helmet and flying-suit.
Yes, I engaged with Lawrence.
One day, nearly all of a pleasantly pointless summer’s day, we worked on the hearse. I remember suggesting it to him at the breakfast table and he agreed with a shrug. In the morning, when the shade was cool and we could hear the swifts screaming around the remains of the tree-house, we opened the bonnet of the car and cleaned the engine. By no means an expert myself, I expounded the pedigree of the sooty machine – the same XK straight-six which powered the Jaguar saloons and sports-cars and even the legendary D-type which had won the Vingt-Quatre Heures du Mans. We checked the oil, extracting the dip-stick and wiping it clean. We checked the water in the radiator. We tested the tension in the fan-belt as though we knew what we were doing. And then, until Juliet called from the house that it was time for lunch, we salved the smooth surfaces of the engine and the black rubber hoses with oil, every mysterious bit whose name we didn’t know.
It looked great, as though we were entering it for a classic-car competition. But all the time I was thinking, and no doubt the boy was thinking too, that the car wouldn’t go, however great it looked. Quite incongruous beneath the bonnet, there was a flat battery from a modern German car. And the Daimler’s own battery was flat too.
But we didn’t stop. We worked with great seriousness, as reverent as priests with the body of a pharaoh, preparing it for some spurious afterlife. It was dead, the heart of it was dead. But thanks to our earnest ministrations, the corpse was fragrant and clean.
‘How are you boys doing down there?’ Juliet was amused. Also, she was pleased. She presided over the pâté and salad she’d spread out, some of the bounty she’d received from beyond the borders of her domain. She smiled on us, on her boys. She had us where she wanted us, safe and sound and no reason to go elsewhere.
In the afternoon, we opened the car itself and cleaned it out. I sprayed furniture polish on the sunburnt woodwork beneath the windscreen and around the dash. Lawrence buffed as though his life depended on it, and the whorls of walnut re-appeared like magic. I applied unction to the upholstery and Lawrence buffed until the leather was gleaming. We took everything out of the capacious, corpse-carrying compartment in the back, we swept and dusted. We discovered a system of runnels in the floor, and a hole with a plug in it under the driver’s seat; and Lawrence, pretending great wisdom in such arcane matters, declared it was there to drain out blood and other bodily fluids which dripped from the caskets.
I wasn’t so sure. But I didn’t know, so I nodded and agreed with the possibility. And the macabre supposition was part of our business; our painstaking maintenance of a vehicle which didn’t go, and in any case, was already close to its retirement as chicken-shed or tool-cupboard.
We didn’t stop until the evening. For a few moments we’d thought about tackling the rust-pitted chrome of the classic, fluted radiator, and the chrome bumpers and headlamps. But no. We stood back and appraised the hulk looming in the woodland.
Yes, we’d been honouring my father, who was dribbling in an old people’s home in Grimsby. But the futility of what we were doing dawned on me. I remember I blinked and stared at the car. I narrowed my eyes and looked and I saw what it was: a superannuated hearse, subsiding into the long grass on its slowly deflating tyres.
Lawrence and I glanced sideways at one another. No, we weren’t going to polish the chrome. We walked back to the house. I didn’t know what the boy was thinking, but for myself it was a mixture of satisfaction – that I’d engaged busily with him as I’d been hired to do – and dismay, an inescapable sense of the surreal.
STRANGE DAYS. WHAT else did we do? How did the dream-like days of summer unfold?
‘Anyone for tennis?’ The boy came down from his tower with a couple of badminton racquets and a battered shuttlecock.
It was a sweltering, airless afternoon. Me and Juliet and Lawrence, we carried our drinks of lemon barley water outside, to a flatter space of tousled grass beside the pond, and we took turns to swat the shuttlecock backwards and forwards until most of the feathers had been knocked off it. At last, when I’d smashed it far over Lawrence’s head and into the nettles, he’d groped around and suddenly declared, ‘Even better, this’ll do nicely,’ before turning towards me and hitting something high into the air.
Even as it floated down, spinning and twirling in a dazzle of sunlight, I could see it was a bird.
A fledgling blue tit. Dead, of course. Either he’d seen it dead or it had died the moment he’d smacked it with the racquet. In any case, my instinct was to step away and let it land.
But I surprised myself. He shouted, ‘Go on, Chris, hit it!’ And I did.
The woman was laughing. The boy was laughing. I heard myself laughing. And for a horrid, hilarious half-minute we played the best rally of the afternoon, popping the blue tit back and forth a dozen or twenty times.
It got smaller and smaller. At last it disintegrated in a puff of feathers. Still laughing, we collapsed onto the grass and drank our lemon barley water.
SO THE DAYS and the weeks went by. If I’d thought Borneo was a dream from which I would never wake up – where I’d been steam-rollered by the mosque, unmanned by the heat, lulled into niceness by the niceness of my students, slugged into unconsciousness by gin – then the summer at Chalke House was sama sama, as they said in Malay. Same difference. The same contagion of torpor. The dream was intoxicating.
Me and Lawrence, we discovered the garden of Chalke House. I stumbled on a bed of mint, so swallowed by fireweed that it had almost disappeared. Me and Lawrence, we scythed the fireweed and the mint was revealed, its perfume fresh and clean in the smuggy heat of July. It inspired us to look again, into the smothering wilderness, and find what men had planted, what previous owners of the house had done...
We found rosemary, we found lavender. There was a burgeoning stand of rhubarb, so strong that when we’d cut away the suffocating grasses we could hear its muscular, rubbery growth. Mint and rosemary and lavender and rhubarb... and horse radish, a superb and secret root, secreting its heat in a jungle of cow-parsley.
And lupins, a peppery miracle. My favourite from a childhood in my father’s garden. Me and Lawrence, we found lupins, lost in the overgrown woodland of Chalke House.
And what did we do, not knowing or caring what day it was... in June or July or August or whatever?
We cut lupins by the armful and carried them into the house. Juliet put them in vases, in her shabby, seductive living-room. We drank gin. We had rosemary with the lamb they’d delivered from the outside world, we had horse radish with a succulent steak. We had rhubarb with the cream they’d smuggled in. We washed it down with wine from Chile or California.
And at midnight, when Lawrence had gone to bed, she would take me into the woodland, where the wren was ticking and the owl was calling, and roll me into the mint, for a dreamy herbal fucking.
Chapter Twenty
VIRGINIA WOOLF WROTE, in one of her celebrated letters, ‘Life is a dream. ’tis the waking that kills us.’
When does a dream become nightmare? What is the transitional moment, when the pleasant, random ridiculousness of a dream alters and shifts and is tinged with fear?
I could feel it happening at Cha
lke House. The woman – her laughter, which had seemed so blithe and fey, was jarring into the cackle of a woodpecker; her silvery body, which had come to me as a miraculous sprite, was pinning me down. The boy – his teenage gawkiness, as daft and clumsy as my boys in Borneo, was now imbued with a strange, nude, muscular strength.
And their collusion. The two of them. I’d had an inkling when I’d arrived that they were riven somehow, there was a rift I was required to heal. No, not now. No, longer: a month or six weeks or two months later. Whether it was me who’d achieved their reunion or some other energy afoot in the woodland, they were together again, and a force to be reckoned with. What did they want of me? Who did they want me to be? Who did they think I was?
‘POOR BABY... YOU just stay there and stay cool...’
She’d coaxed me, one lunchtime, into a second and then a third glass of wine I hadn’t really wanted. It had been a hot, hot morning, and the three of us had been cutting the grass outside the French windows. Why? Because Lawrence had emerged from his communing with the swifts in the greenhouse with an ancient, rusty scythe he’d discovered, an antique trophy he wanted to try out, and in any case it was that kind of late summer morning when the air was heady with elder and you could hear the gorse-pods popping in the heat. A day to be bucolic. Stripped to the waist, me and the boy, spectated by the woman, we’d wielded the scythe this way and that and managed to flatten a lot of the grass with the blunt blade.
She’d disappeared into the house and made lunch. Dizzy with the sun on my head, aware of the sinewy leanness of the boy’s body as it gleamed with sweat, I’d drooped into the shade of a horse chestnut until she called us indoors.
The Waking That Kills Page 14