‘Your shoes,’ she said. ‘They were the only things you were wearing that survived. I’d have chucked them out too, but we can’t do that with patients’ things, not unless they’re completely ruined.’
‘My shoes?’ I said. I was about to protest, to say that some mistake had been made, but I held my tongue. I asked her to hand them to me. They were still a little damp. And as I held them, sitting there on the edge of the hospital bed, a door unlocked and the missing days came rushing through to me. For the shoes the nurse gave me were not my old walking-boots, the ones I’d had on when I fell into the Black Jaws, but a mangy, battered, cracked and laceless pair of old trainers. They were not mine, but I recognised them. I knew whose they were, and I knew where I had last seen them.
XXXV
I lay awake all that night, reliving in my head what had happened. In the morning I was stiff and sore, but this, I felt, was more from lying so long in bed than from any injury I had acquired. I got myself up and went to wash my face. The lump on my head was a little tender. Sitting on the toilet, I examined the plum-coloured bruises on my right leg. Although it didn’t give me much pain the leg felt distinctly odd. When I walked back to my bed I realised that I was pitching like a boat in a rough swell. I could not help it: I was walking with a pronounced limp. Another half-memory came to me, and I felt uneasy in my heart.
Later in the morning the consultant came on his rounds and spoke to me from a great height. I was extremely fortunate to be alive, he said. If I really had spent three days and nights trapped in the Keldo Water he was at a loss to explain how I had survived. Hypothermia, heart failure, drowning, multiple lacerations and blows to the head and chest – any one of these ought to have finished me off. Yet apart from some cuts and bruises, and the fact that I had been unconscious for thirty-six hours, and probably a good deal longer, I seemed unharmed. Did I not have any memory of what had happened after my fall? No, I lied, I did not. Perhaps it would come back to me later. Yes, he said, sounding doubtful, perhaps it would.
‘When can I go home?’ I asked.
‘Well, Mr Mack,’ he said, ‘given what you have apparently undergone, I wouldn’t have anticipated your leaving us for quite some time. But the restorative powers of sleep appear to have worked wonders with you. You’re going to have a few aches and pains for a while, and I certainly wouldn’t advise going back to work for a couple of weeks – but, frankly, there’s no reason I can see why you can’t go today. We will of course be in touch with your GP, who’ll be your first point of liaison once you’re home, but you appear to have a very robust constitution. Home is probably the best place for you – so long as you don’t work. Rest, Mr Mack, plenty of rest. Rest is what has pulled you through so far.’
His tone suggested that I was little more than an idle layabout. I said I would take his advice and do nothing for at least a fortnight.
‘There is one thing I wanted to ask,’ he said. ‘Your right leg, as you’ll no doubt be aware, has some very severe contusions. It looks pretty dreadful but there’s nothing to worry about – that will all heal with time. But we did wonder, have you ever broken that leg?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘never.’
‘Didn’t break it as a child, no accident you can remember?’
I shook my head. ‘No. Why?’
‘It looks as if there’s been some kind of fusion in the femur. As if the bone has contracted. Your right leg is a good inch shorter than your left. We x-rayed it but there’s no obvious explanation. Perhaps you can offer one.’
‘It’s been a bit dodgy these last few years,’ I said. ‘Too much long-distance running. I must have cracked it against something in the river.’
‘But you didn’t break it. The image the x-ray gives us is more like the sort of thing one might find in human remains after a very intense fire – an air crash, perhaps, or an explosion. The bone appears to have been subjected to extreme heat. It’s very unusual.’
‘Maybe it’ll sort itself out as the bruising goes down,’ I said.
‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think so. We might get you back for a further examination, once you’ve recovered a bit. Did you walk with a limp before this accident?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Well, you’ve got one now. I can’t explain it. You’re a bit of a mystery all in all, Mr Mack.’
He was obviously irked by the problem and seemed on the verge of accusing me of being some kind of charlatan, not a real patient at all.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘if a limp is all I’m walking away with, I’m happy. I should be dead, so people keep telling me.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I agree with them, you should be. Which is why a period of convalescence is essential.’
There was a public phone down the corridor from the ward. I used a couple of the coins from my locker and managed to get Elsie in. She was surprised when I said I was coming home. I said I would have discharged myself if they’d tried to stop me. I felt fine, I said. A little tired, but basically fine. I wanted to get back to Monimaskit. Could she or John go to the manse and bring me some clothes? She said she’d come down for me in the afternoon, once John got home from school. She offered, somewhat reluctantly, for me to go and stay with them. I insisted on going back to the manse. If she could buy me some milk and bread I would be perfectly all right there. It would, I added, be easier for all of us.
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you want.’ She sounded relieved.
‘Elsie,’ I said, ‘see if you can get hold of Bill Winnyford. Ask him if he’d mind dropping in to see me. Tonight if possible. Ask him to bring his tape-recorder.’
‘Tonight?’ she said. ‘Hold on a minute.’ I could hear one of the girls shouting in the background, Elsie quietening her. She came back on. ‘You want him to come round tonight?’
‘It’s very important. If not tonight, tomorrow. Something amazing has happened and I need to record it while it’s clear in my head.’
‘Gideon, you need to rest.’
‘And I will,’ I said. ‘But I won’t be able to until I’ve got this off my chest.’
‘Got what off your chest?’ she said.
‘I’ve remembered where I was these days that I was missing,’ I said. ‘I’ve remembered what happened.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘You were in the river.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But not all the time. I’ll explain later when you fetch me.’
Perhaps there was something too much like a threat in those last words. Perhaps she was still frightened. At any rate, it was not Elsie but John who came for me at five o’clock that afternoon. He brought me clothes that Elsie had collected earlier. She had also, he told me as I got dressed, stocked up my fridge with basics and a few oven-ready meals to keep me going. I’d be able to shut myself away from the world, if that was what I wanted.
‘Although the world won’t be too happy if you do,’ he said. ‘I think a few newspapers are hoping for your story.’
‘They’ll have to wait,’ I said. ‘They can have my story when it’s ready.’
‘What is your story?’
‘It’s complicated. You’ll have to wait too.’
We walked through the hospital concourse together, and I thought, as no doubt he did, of the last time we had done that. But we said nothing, and no distraught lorry-driver accosted me with his need to be absolved of blame. We reached the car without incident.
I was glad, really, that John had come and not Elsie: it made things easier. We didn’t speak much on the journey. I was tired, and closed my eyes. John was also withdrawn. I didn’t know what Elsie might have told him and I didn’t try to find out. My mind was too full of other things to deal with that.
At one point the twists and turns of the road woke me. John glanced at me as he negotiated the corners. We were in the Glack, and again I thought of that previous time, and again we said nothing. But as we emerged from that snakelike stretch, John said, ‘Are you all right, Gideo
n?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said.
‘You fell, didn’t you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You fell in the Black Jaws, didn’t you? You didn’t jump?’
‘What are you suggesting?’
‘I haven’t seen you for a while,’ he said, ‘but Elsie was saying – she said on Saturday in fact, after she’d seen you at the museum – that you were acting strangely. She thought you were ill, stressed.’
‘What else did she say?’
‘She was upset. She said she’d never seen you like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know, Gideon, I wasn’t there. A bit mad, was what she said if you must know. And the next thing we hear you’ve gone up to the Black Jaws and fallen in.’
‘And you think I jumped?’
‘No, I don’t. But it did occur to us, both of us, that if you weren’t well, you might, you know, not be thinking straight.’
‘And I might subconsciously try to kill myself,’ I said. ‘Accidentally on purpose.’
‘We’re concerned, that’s all.’
‘I’m not suicidal, John,’ I said. ‘I’m not even depressed. Believe me.’
‘Fine,’ he said. He sounded annoyed, as if I’d proved him wrong, made him look stupid.
I might have got angry too, but I was thinking of what had really happened to me. It made any misunderstanding with John utterly insignificant.
XXXVI
John delivered me to the manse and left with an assurance from me that I would contact them if I needed anything. We both knew I wouldn’t be doing so, and that was fine by both of us. I locked the door and turned out the lights at the front of the house. I wanted no callers, or rather I wanted only one.
There were thirty-seven messages stacked up on my answer-machine, some no doubt of hope, some of joy, some of relief, perhaps some of curiosity and some of demand. The tape, in fact, was full, and the machine had stopped recording calls. It didn’t matter. I had no interest in them and deleted them all without listening to them. Then I phoned Bill Winnyford. He picked up the receiver almost at once.
‘Bill,’ I said. ‘It’s Gideon. Did Elsie Moffat contact you?’
‘Gideon! Yes she did. Gideon! Astonishing news dramatic in fact I mean…’
I cut him off in mid-flow. ‘Can you come round with your tape-recorder? Now?’
‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘Elsie said you were most insistent. Was about to call you myself. Wouldn’t miss this for anything. God knows what you want to tell me. Is it what you’d call an exclusive?’
‘Yes, it is,’ I said. ‘But you have to promise me something.’
‘What’s that?’
‘That you shut up while I’m speaking, otherwise I’ll lose the thread. You can drink as much of my whisky as you please, but you must let me talk. And afterwards, you must give me the tape.’
‘That’s not much of an exclusive,’ he said.
‘Bill,’ I said, ‘you’re going to be the first person to hear what happened to me. What really happened to me. Believe me, it’s an exclusive.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll be on my best behaviour.’ But after he arrived, and once we had settled ourselves in the study, got the fire going and set up the drams and his equipment, and as I began to speak of the things that were surging through my brain, it proved impossible for Bill to remain silent. I told him about my fall and my journey through the tunnel, and he couldn’t stop himself from offering suggestions and explanations at every turn. I asked him to pause the recording.
‘We need to lay down some ground rules,’ I said. ‘I’ve asked you here because I want to speak about things before I forget them, and because I can’t write or type fast enough to keep up with everything that’s buzzing around in my head. That’s why I’ve asked you to record me. I’ve got an old cassette-player and I daresay I could find a microphone for it somewhere, but that’s not the point, there’s another reason why I want you here. I want you as a witness. If anyone should ask you in the future, whether it’s in two weeks or twenty years, I want you to be able to testify that what you heard tonight came from the mouth of a sane human being, not some gibbering lunatic. Do I strike you as being a sane human being?’
‘You always have done.’
‘Now, though? At this moment?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. So now what I need you to do is just listen. Don’t interrupt me to insinuate your own views. Don’t say anything unless something I say needs clarification. Just listen. Can you do that?’
He nodded. It was hard for him, but after a while he settled down. At the end of the evening, he left me the cassette, and over several succeeding nights I typed out the transcript, stopping and starting and replaying the cassette so often on my own tape-player that I thought one or the other would break. And so what follows is a true and faithful account, as related by me to Bill Winnyford, of the time I spent in the netherworld, deep below the Black Jaws, in the company of one who until then I had presumed to be a figment of the human imagination.
GM: Until yesterday, I had no recollection of the three days during which I was missing, presumed dead. I remembered falling into the Black Jaws, and I’ve already described to you, Bill, the way in which the water carried me, the light that I saw, the sense that I was floating above as well as in my own body.
WW: Everything you’ve said is absolutely characteristic of an NDE. Sorry, a near-death experience.
GM: You think that’s what was happening? That I nearly died, and then I came back?
WW: You want me to answer that? I thought… Okay, yes, I do. There are hundreds, probably thousands of documented examples of this sort of thing. The bright light, the out-of-body sensation, the dreamlike quality of what you were undergoing…
GM: But the point is, it wasn’t a dream. And then there was this gap in my memory. Until yesterday everything was a blank prior to being hauled out of the water by Chae Middleton. I remembered Chae pulling me out, or at least that’s what I thought I remembered. But there was something before that. Seeing the shoes in the hospital brought it all back to me.
WW: What shoes?
GM: These. This ratty old pair of trainers. The nurse said I was wearing them when I was brought in. Well, it seems I must have been, but they’re not mine. I was wearing boots when I fell in the river. My own boots. At some point, somebody swapped my boots for these.
WW: Chae Middleton?
GM: No, somebody else. Look, let me take it from the moment I came out of that near-death experience, if that’s what it was. Let me tell it to you exactly as I remember it.
WW: Go ahead.
GM: I was back in my body, in the water. I didn’t want to die. There was too much I had left to do. I’m back in my body. I’m trying to grab something, to stop myself drowning, but there’s nothing to grab. And then suddenly I’m in a different part of the river. It’s calmer, the water isn’t as violent as it was. I try to swim, but I’m not strong enough. And then, just as I’m going under again, my head bumps against something. Something hard and yet soft at the same time.
The white light’s gone and instead there’s this reddish-orange glow. I stretch up my right hand to this light, and to whatever it is I’ve hit, and a hand reaches down to me, a man’s hand. Somebody is leaning over me. Strong fingers close around my wrist and pull. I hear a voice – ‘All right, I’ve got you, you’re all right now’, something like that – and then a splashing, creaking noise. My head hits the soft-hard object again. Now I’m being towed behind a boat of some kind. There’s a scraping sound – the boat has grounded. I’ve grounded – there’s something beneath me other than water. Then I’m being pulled from the water. I’m lying on my front on a tiny beach. Silvery gravel that sparkles in the orange light.
I don’t know how long I lay there. It might have been minutes, it could have been hours. I drifted in and out of consciousness. I was vaguely aware of a person near me, and this was a great comf
ort. I assumed it was a man – I remembered the maleness of the hand. He seemed to be busying himself around my body and his boat. Also, he was going back and forth to another spot a little distance away. These sounds were immensely soothing. It was like listening to a nurse from your sick-bed. I could have stayed lying there for ever, even though it was cold and wet. I felt safe. Well, I was. I had been saved.
At some point I opened my eyes and was able to keep them open. Beside me on the shingly beach was a sticky, translucent mess of vomit, which must have come from me. I heard a scooping sound and some gravel landed on top of it. This happened a few more times until the vomit was all covered up. I managed to sit up. The man who had helped me from the water was crouched beside me. He looked at me without smiling, without frowning, without any trace of emotion on his face.
He said – I can hear his exact words, it’s uncanny how precisely I remember what he said – ‘You’ve had quite an ordeal. I thought it best to leave you where you were, since you were no longer in danger of drowning.’ Then he bent down and got me on my feet and helped me away from the beach.
WW: What did he look like?
GM: Well, not what you might expect in a place like that – not some bearded, ragged wild man. For a start he was absurdly well dressed for his surroundings. He had on sharply creased black trousers and a black polo-shirt buttoned up to the throat, and a black jacket that looked like it was almost new. The only thing about him that wasn’t immaculate was his footwear – a pair of tattered trainers, all bulging and broken and so filthy you couldn’t even make out what brand they were.
WW: This pair of trainers?
GM: The very ones. I never set eyes on them before I saw them on his feet, and that’s the truth. I remember watching them as he held me up and we started walking. And then I looked up. We were in this huge cavern with a ceiling stretching way beyond the penetration of the light. The pool he had taken me from was long and looked very deep. At the far end I could see the white torrent which I’d been thrown down, but it was about seventy or eighty yards away, and the noise was dulled by the distance and the sheer size of the cave.
The Testament of Gideon Mack Page 30