A Walking Guide

by Alan S. Cowell

  “I felt bad, Jeremy.” He thought: not as bad as I did, but kept his silence. “I treated you terribly. I deserved what I got.”

  “No. That’s not true. No one deserved that TV fiasco. And don’t think I haven’t realized that I got my comeuppance too.” But she did not want his confession: she knew most of it, anyhow—for all its vast reaches, Africa was a village, where his transgressions were tallied in a currency devalued by an oversupply of misdeeds among the settlers and expatriates. She wanted just to talk to someone who knew her, a familiar shoulder. She had gone over her lines many times in the quiet evenings of Joe Shelby’s absences and decline, but, until now, there had been no stage, no audience.

  “Would it be offensive to you if I told you? I mean. I don’t want to open closed chapters for you. Really I don’t. We can talk about lots of other things.” She almost added: before you leave. But did not.

  “As far as I’m concerned, the plot’s still unfolding. Your story. Tell me your story. Mine you know. And what about his story?”

  “That’s the hard part. I shouldn’t be talking like this. But it’s so difficult. I mean it’s one thing to try and work out your things with a healthy person. That’s bad enough.”

  “But there shouldn’t be guilt. You didn’t bring on this illness.”

  “I know, but if it weren’t for his illness, we wouldn’t be sitting here.”

  “The question is, as far as I can see, Evie, is whether, if it weren’t for his illness, you’d have put up with all this for so long,” he said.

  “Forget the illness, Evie. Just for a moment. Put it to one side. Say: this is something I am not responsible for. Just ask yourself: is this what I signed up for? Is this what was promised? And the answer has to be: no. Every relationship has some kind of contract to it, whether it’s spoken out loud or not. And if the contract is breached, then the other party isn’t bound to it. God. I sound like a lawyer. Hiding behind words. But you know what I’m trying to say. Whatever happened has happened. Finished. Period. Draw a line in the sand. Whatever. But on the other side of that line, you don’t have to go on suffering. You don’t have to live with broken promises. You have a life of your own. You have a right to be happy.”

  “We shouldn’t be talking like this, Jeremy. Least of all when he’s up that stupid, bloody mountain in this stupid bloody weather. You heard what the mountain rescue people said. And the others in here. It’s craziness. And probably least of all should I be talking to you.”

  “No. Most of all to me.”

  His hand had taken hers across the table. Most of the other diners had finished their meals and repaired to one of the warm, firelit lounges for coffee. The few who lingered, and the waitress, watched them furtively, drawn as if the two of them were bathed in a spotlight, immune to their audience, bound together through their fingertips in a closed world.

  “I know it’s not what I signed up for. I know I’m not Florence Nightingale. I know I can manage my AIDS orphans like a nice liberal white woman in Africa is supposed to do. I can manage the TB and the malaria and the sleeping sickness. I can handle all the poverty and sickness and everything else. But I can’t manage it in my own home. My own bed.”

  The words were coming fast, unleashed from the rehearsals where she had tried to cast herself in a more noble light. The waitress thought there’d be tears before bedtime, and she thought she could guess which bed that might be in.

  “I know I shouldn’t have done it. It was wrong to you. It was probably wrong for me. But I made my choice. Maybe I was confused. Certainly I’m confused now. I ran off with someone who offered me a different world. I wasn’t satisfied with all the wonderful things I had. I couldn’t see that love isn’t always about champagne and roses and what did he call it—nights of magic.” The wine bottle was empty. But Eva Kimberly did not seem inebriated. Her words were clear and forceful. Her eyes glistened. He was not sure whether she was looking at him when she spoke, or beyond him, at some point where the jigsaw finally fell into place.

  “And, by God, it turned out a lot more different than I expected. I thought I wanted his mad adventures, and look where that got me. I thought I’d enjoy the life in the fast lane and now he’s looking death in the face in a very slow lane indeed and I don’t know where to look at all. He said he loved me. He still says he loves me. But what he really loves is an image, a mirage, an antidote to the Frenchwoman. He takes in the way I speak, the way I look, the way I have a home and roots. He sees me all neat and logical and presentable. But he’s seeing something he wants to create for himself. He sees something that you would aspire to if you hadn’t had it—a person who knows where they come from while he’s completely confused about whether he’s a cripple or a hero. He doesn’t know, deep down, if he belongs here or nowhere. He wants me to be his anchor and he thinks that because I know where I come from, he can cling to that. He’s like someone who’s cast off so often they don’t have a home port anymore. Sometimes I think I was tricked, then I think I fooled myself into thinking he was what he seemed to be. I was in love. Am. Don’t look away, Jeremy. You wanted to hear it all and I’m telling you. It’s not nice, is it? It’s not the old Eva, always knowing the right thing to do at the right time, how to arrange Pop’s Naivasha parties and how to run Home Farm and how to manage the clinics in the Rift Valley. Everything the memsahib is supposed to do. And now I’m all adrift. Like him. He’s got us both confused. I don’t know what to do. I’m in a situation I can’t control. No one showed me the script. I don’t know my lines. Look at me, Jeremy. Look at the bags under my eyes. Look at the wine bottle and ask who drank it. I’m not your old Eva. Old faithful. I made a choice and it went wrong and I have to stick with it now because he needs me. Forget the crazy Frenchwoman. He’s doing this ridiculous expedition to prove something to himself and to me. Not to her. Whatever there was with her was in Israel. This is England. His home base, if there is such a thing. His damp, cold, icy roots. Before he left he was very sweet. He wasn’t the person you saw at Naivasha, all blood and guts and Captain Wilderness. He was a frightened and quite brave man doing something scary that was like his farewell. Like shaking off an old skin. An old life. When I met him he always knew exactly what he wanted to do and he had this total lack of self-doubt about getting there. When he set off on this expedition, he didn’t know whether he’d make it past the first farmhouse. He didn’t know if he’d get down. I don’t even know where he is. But I do know he needs me to be there for him for that, no matter what happened in Israel. We don’t know what happened there, anyhow. We don’t know if they got together again in the way you think. Oh, I know you think I’m naïve. You think: of course they had a screw or a bonk or a rumpy-pumpy or whatever you want to call it—don’t smirk like that or I’ll use another word very loudly, like fuck or shag. OK? You think they did because you would have done. Right, Jeremy? Isn’t that what you always did on your safaris? If it moves, screw it. Shag it. Fuck it. Client’s wives. Friend’s lovers. Did you think I didn’t know? Of course I knew. Didn’t you think you made it easy for me to try someone else? Especially after your photo-safari stunt with the Frenchwoman. Funny, really, that she’s messed around with all of us and here we are wondering just what he did with her. Hilarious. But it’s not so funny now, is it? Sorry. Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. But it’s true all the same. When you went off into the bush with her, you left me alone and you just took it for granted that I’d be waiting when you’d had your fun. How long did you think I could take that before I started thinking that sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander. Except that I couldn’t just do the one-night-stand thing, like you always did. No. I was a one-guy-gal. I had to go the whole hog and it all went wrong. Or right. But at least I could hide my conscience. I could say to myself: well, Jeremy won’t mind because he’s always got his clients or whatever he calls them. He did it first. And even as Joe was coming knocking on my door, you were off with his floozy in the bush. You’re thinking I’ve turned into a shrew
, a lush, aren’t you? You’re thinking: where did this tirade come from, aren’t you?”

  The restaurant had emptied and the kitchen staff had adopted that look of impatience that is designed to hurry the stragglers away. They had begun setting tables for the morning’s breakfast. There were yawns and furtive glances at wristwatches. But she was not finished.

  “And then there they are on TV, the same woman for both of you. One size fits all. Is that it? And, no, I don’t know what they did after their prime time heroics, and perhaps it doesn’t matter because the worst betrayal isn’t the bedtime kind, it’s the feeling that you aren’t needed anymore, that you’re inadequate. It’s the if onlys. If only I’d done X then there wouldn’t have been a Y and then there wouldn’t be a Z, a betrayal. But one day, maybe soon for all I know, I’ll find out and there won’t be so many ifs: if he survives, if he tells me, if it’s true. If they did screw or shag or fuck or whatever, if it turns out that way, well, that’s a new script and I’ll know my lines. And I’ll walk away. Probably alone. But, until then, he needs me to be there when he comes back down that hill to tell me he did something good. He’ll probably, if he survives at all, tell me he doesn’t want to drag me down with him. But until he makes that choice, I have no choice either.”

  “You do, Eva. You do have a choice. You’ve opened up, cleared the air. You’ve said all you need to say. You’re right about me in the past. But that’s past. I’m different. I’m all yours if you want me. You have a choice right now. Tonight. You can choose me—no commitments, if you like, no promises. You can choose me and tell the mountain rescue to go find him and they will. You will have acquitted yourself. And it is not you who has a debt. It’s him. He owes you and you can call that debt by coming with me. Not for revenge but to come back to where you belong, where you’re happy, where your work is, your family, your friends. People like you and me, we just don’t transplant. We look across the ocean and see the world and it looks exciting, but when we get there, all we do is hanker for Africa. We want to go home. Look, his doctor says he’s not as sick as he thinks. Hold the Mayo, or whatever. He has a life. He has the crazy Frenchwoman. You don’t have to be alone. You don’t have to be messed about like this. You can choose.”

  A particularly ferocious gust of wind rattled at the dining room windows behind heavy, velvet drapes, wrenching them open and blowing the curtains apart with a blast of cold and snow that came straight from the heights beyond.

  GREAT GABLE

  from Lingmell

  Chapter Seventeen

  TAPE THREE, SEGMENT TWO

  SEPTEMBER 15, 2000

  MONITORED SEPTEMBER 17

  No GPS to tell me where I am or how far I went. No watch either because I was using the one in the GPS. And no mobile. Ground control to Major Tom. Floating off, outside the gravitational pull. Beyond hope of return or rescue. Camp Two blues. The summit is everything. Everything that has been building up, every small step accumulating. Left, right. Stumble, slip. But progress. Without the summit, everything that went before has no logic.

  You can’t control the way people perceive you. You can’t control the surreptitious glance to see if your foot’s been caught in a mangle. You can’t run, flex muscle, swim, kick sand and do all those other things that mark out your territory. You can’t say: don’t mess with me because it’s pretty obvious that people can mess with you with impunity and you have no reprisals to threaten. And so, back to the summit. The summit, the lonely, conquered, obliging summit redeems all that. On the summit, you send your signals again. You are whole.

  Think, though: you’re alive to do this. You can still get up onto these hills, and feel your nostrils freeze and swallow the icy fog, the foggy dew. You can feel the snow on your lips and hear the wind screech and watch the gray veils of mist rolling over the rocks and the lichen and the peat moss. All this says: I’m alive and life is very very sweet indeed and when they take all this away from me, when IT takes everything away from me, then I’ll know what it was to be here and to have beaten IT one last time. The microphone is clipped to my collar and it voice activates. Because of the wind and the sound of the tent flapping in this appalling gale, I’ve set the voice activation at a fairly high threshold, which is quite technologically smart of me. But the reason I did it is so that I have my good hand free for Johnnie. Mix this one with a little spring water. Perfect. Except for the wind. Really howling. And the nylon flapping like a loose sail, rippling and crackling. Nothing I can do now. Rocks on the guylines. Pegs hammered in as deep as they’ll go. No cooking because no stove. Evening meal: peanuts and Kendal Mint Cake and (voice activation off).

  Gaza, then Jerusalem. Room 5 at the American Colony, with its big, high, wood-carved Ottoman ceiling, and cool, stone floors and the big double bed. Just outside the window, there’s the minaret of the local mosque. It’s only a stunted little minaret, not one of those great soaring spires you see in Cairo or Damascus or Istanbul—all those places where the sultans and the mullahs and the muftis built their huge tributes to Allah and his prophet untrammeled by anyone else’s notion of faith, or perhaps, like medieval cathedrals in Europe, to say: there really is only one God and we’ve got the exclusive rights of access, whatever you Buddhists or Hindus or Jews or Animists might have to say about it. But the thing about this little minaret in Jerusalem is that the muezzin turns up the volume of his morning prayer call during Jewish holidays so that in Yom Kippur it nearly blows you out of bed. Allah-uh akhbar, o yes. And don’t you forget it. The rest of the time it’s not so loud and you get used to the muezzin’s call and even look forward to it because it’s actually telling you that you are in an exotic, alien place where you don’t really belong and which cannot therefore impose any standards or norms on you. Cloud cuckoo land. Charlie charlie lima, as F called it—that hack sense of floating above other people’s rules and moving on, never being bound and immune to any consequences of any actions because the next plane out will take you to another country where the wench is not yet dead. The room’s big and airy, with cool stone floors in the summer and a big warm bed in the winter. The walls are immensely thick, in pale honey stone, protective and reassuring. Room 5 always was my favorite. Something about it. And special with F because after that time in Gaza, right at the beginning, with the sniper, that was where . . . no second prizes for guessing. But even then, especially then you had to have a special quality of trust—she demanded trust—she said: this is how I am. And when you said: but how can I know that I can trust this, place my faith in it, somehow, one day, feel secure with it, she said: well, no one can ever be sure that one day things won’t change, or something like that. She said, precisely, exactly: no one can guarantee that one of us won’t be tempted. And when I heard that, I knew I’d reach my limit with her at some stage when the sacrifice just got too big, the craziness too overwhelming to justify my trust in her.

  But when you love with that kind of intensity, you can never expunge the traces. The first real love never dies. It’s like some addiction just waiting to be reactivated, a DNA transplant so that you become part of another person and they become part of you and you can’t just shake that. You imagine all these little closed boxes from your past, all with their little locked doors and you know that, in most of them, there’s nothing. A memory, maybe. A liaison. An episode crumbled to dust. Motes. Nothing more. But in one box, with the door straining and cracking, there’s a demon, a monster, a great massive Love with a capital L, and you can’t keep the door closed. You try but you know that as soon as you open that door just the tiniest chink, you unleash the madness you were trying to lock away. The door bursts open, flies off the hinges, crack, kerpow, and you’re wrestling with feelings you shouldn’t be having because there’s someone else in your life you owe things to, but you can’t just shove this great raving beast back into its box and nail down the lid because—and this is the crux of the matter, Johnnie, me old mate—because you don’t want to. Like giving up smokes. You say you want to but yo
u don’t. You don’t want to abandon that sweet, heady rush with your coffee, or after sex, and when you’ve filed your story or when you’ve just got back to cover from some exposed bit of highway in Tetovo, some place where the mortars and the snipers can’t reach you. You say: I wish I didn’t need these things. But you light up your Marlboro and take the smoke deep into your lungs and you know it’s self-destruction but you can’t resist because you won’t resist. And that was Room 5. I guess. In Room 5, we opened the box again and now we both know what’s inside.

  OK, I shouldn’t have called her from the Mayo. But I was scared after what they told me. I didn’t want to tell Eva because I wanted to protect her and I thought—I admit it—I thought that she might not hack it like F would, that she’d think: shit where does that diagnosis leave me, not where does that leave old Joe Shelby? And I wanted 100 percent TLC because it shocked me, more than hearing my first bullet or seeing the first corpse. It shocked me because right up until then I’d been hoping that some wizard would weave a spell—or lift one—and it would be your standard third-grade-story ending: and it had all been a dream. But it wasn’t like that. The ending was: it’s not a dream, it’s actually a nightmare, and it’s only just starting. So I called F because I thought she would understand nightmares better than dreams and you were only deluding yourself if you thought that there could ever be any kind of script with her. When was there ever a script? Wasn’t that the whole point about it? Wasn’t it that vortex of chaos that drew you to her in the first place? When you went with F you tore up the script, the norms, the standards. But even by those standards, things went awry. For a start, it wasn’t in the script for her to rescue me like that, in front of the cameras and all. Was that in the script, Johnnie? No, sir, it was not. And it sure as shit was not in the script to go back to the Colony with her. And it was just a chance that they had given me Room 5, but she always did like her omens. She traveled with a black juju doll from the Congo in her camera bag and some talisman on the cord round her neck next to her coke spoon. So she thought it was an augury, I guess, that the Colony had put me back in the room where it all started. I could have said: no entry. I could have said: look, Faria, it’s different now, I’m with Eva, I have an illness and responsibilities and there shouldn’t be any treachery. But what the hell. It’d been on TV. Sheep as a lamb—the old cock-driven logic of many a male—it’s come this far, my guilt is already assumed, so why not go for it. Why not be hung for the whole goddam flock of animals instead of just the lamb. So I said: come into Room 5, Faria. Hold my hand. Hold me. I need to talk. I need.