Fugue for a Darkening Island

by Christopher Priest

  In the morning it drizzled again, and the countryside was still.

  Reluctant to move, as if the act of doing so would reinitiate the violence, Sally and I stayed in our bivouac until the last possible moment. Then at ten o'clock we packed our gear hastily and set off towards the station. We arrived at just before eleven. This time there were no soldiers. The station had been bombed, and the railway track itself had been blown up in several places. We looked at the ruin in desolate horror. Later, I threw away the receipt.

  That evening we were captured by a detachment of the Afrim forces and taken in for our first session of interrogation.

  Isobel and I lay together in the dark. We were on the floor. In the room above us her parents were asleep in bed. They did not know I was there. Though they liked me, and encouraged Isobel to see more of me, they would not have been pleased if they were aware of what we had been trying to do in their sitting-room.

  It was after three in the morning and therefore essential we made no noise.

  I had removed my jacket and shirt.

  Isobel had taken off her dress, her slip and her brassiere. At this time our relationship had developed to the point where she allowed me to remove most of her clothing while we kissed, and to fondle her breasts. She had never allowed me to touch her in the region of her pubes. In the past, most of the girls I had known had shown a liberal attitude towards sex, and I was puzzled at Isobel's apparent lack of interest. Her reticence had been alluring at first -- and continued to be so -- but now I was beginning to see that she was genuinely frightened of sex. Although my interest in her had been initially almost entirely sexual, as we grew to know one another I had developed a deep liking for her and had made my sexual advances to her more and more gently.

  The combination of her physical beauty and her gaucherie was a continual delight to me.

  After a prolonged session of kissing and petting I lay back on the floor and allowed Isobel to run her hand lightly over my chest and stomach. While she did this I found myself willing her to slide her hand into the top of my trousers and caress my penis.

  Gradually her hand moved down until it was rubbing lightly against the cloth of the waistband. When her fingers did eventually explore the cloth, they came into contact with the end of my penis almost at once. Evidently unaware to that moment of my tumescence, she snatched her hand away at once and lay at my side, facing away from me, trembling.

  "What's the matter?" I whispered to her after a minute or two, knowing both that I would get no reply and that I already knew what had happened.

  "What's the matter?"

  She said nothing. After a while I put my hand on her shoulder and found her skin to be cold.

  "What's the matter?" I whispered again.

  She still made no reply. In spite of what had happened, I remained erected, unaffected by the trauma she experienced.

  In a while she rolled back towards me and, laying on her back, took my hand and placed it on her breast. Like her shoulder, it was cold. The nipple was shrunken and lumpy.

  She said: "Go on. Do it."

  "Do what?"

  "You know. What you want."

  I didn't move, but lay there with my hand on her breast, not wishing to create a positive movement by either doing as she said or taking my hand away altogether.

  When I made no response, she took my hand again and thrust it down roughly to her crutch. With her other hand she dragged down her pants and laid my hand on her pubes. I felt warm, soft down. She started shaking.

  I made love to her at once. It was painful for both of us. Pleasureless.

  We made a lot of noise; so much so that I was scared her parents would hear us and come to investigate. As I climaxed, my penis slipped from its place and my semen went half inside her, half on to the floor.

  I pulled away from her as soon as I could and lay away from her. Part of me remained detached, seeing wryly my experienced sexual artistry reduced to fumbling adolescence by the encounter with frigid innocence; part of me lay curled up on the floor, unwilling to move. .

  In the end it was Isobel who moved first. She stood up and switched on the low-powered table-lamp. I looked up at her, seeing her slim young body nude for the first time, denuded for the first time of sexual mystery. She pulled on her clothes, kicked mine across to me. I put them on. Our eyes didn't meet.

  On the carpet where we had laid there was a small patch of damp. We tried to remove it with paper tissues, but a faint stain remained.

  I was ready to leave. Isobel came over to me, whispered in my ear that I was to push my motor-cycle to the end of the road before starting it up. Then she kissed me. We agreed to see each other again the following week-end. As we walked out into the hall we were holding hands.

  Her father was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs dressed in his pyjamas. He looked tired. As I walked past him he said nothing to me, but stood up and held Isobel tightly by her wrist. I left, starting the engine outside the house.

  We had not used any form of contraceptive. Though Isobel did not become pregnant from that intercourse she did conceive a few weeks before we were married. From that time we had sex together very occasionally, and to my knowledge she attained orgasm only rarely. After Sally was born, what sexual dependence on one another that we had ever had grew less, and in due course I found myself turning to other women who were able to give me what Isobel couldn't.

  In the good times, I would gaze at Isobel across a distance, seeing again the pale blue dress and the youthful beauty of her face, and a bitter regret would well inside me.

  As the days passed since the abduction of the women by the Afrim soldiers, it seemed to me that while my own quest grew stronger that of the other men diminished. I found myself questioning whether we were moving on in the eternal search for a safe place to camp and somewhere that we may obtain food, or whether we were still pursuing our search for the women.

  They were mentioned less and less frequently, and since the visit to Augustin's brothel it was sometimes as if they had never been with us. But we were reminded forcibly of what might have happened to them on the day after we met the African guerrillas.

  We came to a group of houses that were marked on the map as being a hamlet called Stowefield. At first sight it appeared to be no different from any one of a hundred others we had come across in the past.

  We approached it with our customary caution, determined that if the hamlet were barricaded we would retreat immediately.

  That there had at one time been barricades became apparent at once.

  Across the road at the side of the first house there was a pile of rubble, which had been pushed aside to make a gap wide enough for a lorry to pass through.

  With Lateef, I inspected the ground behind where the barricade had been and we discovered several dozen empty shotgun cartridges.

  We investigated every house in the hamlet and within half an hour had established that it had been evacuated. We were fortunate in finding canned food in several of the houses and were thus able to replenish our supplies.

  We speculated as to the identity of the men who had raided the village.

  It was probably prejudice which prompted the majority of us to assume it was the Afrims, but it had been our experience that this was the kind of action they would take against small settlements that they found barricaded.

  What had become of the inhabitants we had no way of telling. Later, as we searched the houses for suitable billets, one of the men discovered something and shouted for the rest of us to come.

  I arrived with Lateef. As soon as we saw what was there, he shouted at everyone, telling them to wait downstairs. He indicated that I was to stay.

  There were the bodies of four young white women in the upstairs room.

  Each was naked and each had been assaulted sexually. My heart had begun to beat faster at my first sight of them, as the fates that could have befallen Sally and Isobel had been prominent in my imagination for some time. It took only two or
three seconds to establish that these women were unknown to me, but even so my heart continued at an accelerated pace for some minutes afterwards.

  My early alarm soon turned to shock and then to anger. Each of the women was young and had been physically attractive. Their deaths had come after a long period of helpless agony: the torment was embedded in their expressions.

  Each one was tied hand and foot, and had evidently struggled to escape from the bonds in her last few minutes of life.

  The men who assaulted them had disfigured their bodies with either bayonets or knives, slashing them many times in the region of their genitals.

  There was blood all over the floor.

  Lateef and I discussed what we should do. I suggested that we bury them, but neither of us relished the task of carrying the bodies downstairs. The alternative that Lateef suggested was to burn the house. It was set apart from the ones nearest to it, and it did not seem likely that the blaze would spread to others.

  We went downstairs and spoke with the others. Two of the men had been sick, the rest of us felt nauseated in the extreme. Lateef's suggestion was adopted, and a few minutes later the house was fired.

  We moved away to the other end of the village and set up a camp for the night.

  For a variety of reasons I was one of the few men who worked in the cutting-shop of the factory. In spite of the equal-pay legislation that had gone through in the last months of the government immediately prior to Tregarth taking office, there were still many different kinds of work which were exclusively or nearly exclusively the domain of women. In the bulk-cloth industry cutting is one of these.

  My only colleagues of my own sex were old Dave Harman, a pensioner who came in mornings to sweep the floor and make tea, and a youngster named Tony who tried to flirt with the younger women but who was treated by them all as a cheeky young urchin. I never discovered his true age, but he couldn't have been less than twenty. How he came to be working at the factory I never asked, and there built up between us a kind of male understanding that unified us against the vulgarity of the women.

  My own relationship with the women was acceptable once we had overcome the initial problems.

  It was thought, for instance, by a sizeable number of the women that I had been brought in as some form of supervisor or inspector, and whenever I attempted to speak to them I was treated with cold politeness. In this, my college-rounded vowels did little to help. Once I had established in my mind what was the probable cause of the friction, I went to great pains to let them know my position in the cutting-shop. When this was clear the atmosphere lightened considerably, though there were still one or two women who could not but retain a slightly distant air. Within a few weeks things had relaxed to the point where I felt as if my presence was taken for granted.

  With this relaxation came a growing vulgarity of behaviour. In my relatively sheltered life to this point -- sheltered in the sense that I had not mixed with large numbers of working people -- I had lived by the assumption that women were the more socially restrained sex. It may of course have been the developing national situation which encouraged a slackening of morality as a reaction against the new repressive laws, or simply that this group of women had known each other for years and were of a similar background. In any event, a typical working day was punctuated with obscenities, disgusting jokes and various direct and indirect references to either my or Tony's sexual organs. Tony told me once that shortly before I had come to the cutting-shop, one of the women, in a mock-serious kind of way, had unzipped the front of his trousers and tried to grab him. He told me this off-handedly, though I could tell he had been upset by the incident.

  There were several coloured women in the cutting-shop, and as the Afrim situation intensified I watched them when I could to see how they reacted.

  There were five Indians or Pakistanis, and seven of Negro stock. On the face of it, their behaviour showed no change, though during some of the more offensive sessions of banter, I noticed how they would remain silent.

  It was my custom during this period to eat for lunch the sandwiches that Isobel made for me. This was partly in order to save a little of our money, and partly because the quality of food available in public restaurants deteriorated considerably.

  I understood that the company was not receiving as many orders as it had once done, and consequently the work-load upon us was light. Following government restrictions it was not possible to make staff redundant, except at the cost of high financial penalty, and our labour-force was not reduced in any way. Shortly after I joined the firm the length of our break for lunch was increased from one and a half to two hours, and at the time of the first secessions in the armed forces it was increased by a further half-hour.

  Sick-leave was encouraged by our employers, though after the government's temporary withdrawal of National Health benefits absenteeism was rare.

  It became necessary to find ways of passing the surplus time in the social company of each other.

  Board games were brought in from home, and packs of playing-cards.

  Several women brought in such things as needlework or knitting, and others wrote letters. For my own part, I used the free time for reading, but found that if I did too much of it in the dimly lit room, my eyes would begin to hurt. Very few of us ventured out during the lunch-break. Once or twice, some of the women went out shopping together, but on the whole it was considered too hazardous to be done habitually.

  I don't know how it began, but several of the women used the time to get together around the top of a bench and play on an improvised ouija board. The first I was aware of it was one day when I was walking through the adjoining warehouse with the intention of stretching my muscles. The women were in a corner of the warehouse. Seven of them actually sat at the table and another ten or twenty stood around watching. The pointer they were using was an inverted plastic tumbler, and the letters of the alphabet were scribbled on scraps of paper around the edge.

  One of the older women was asking questions into the air, while the tumbler spelled out the answers from under the fingertips of the seven participants. I watched fascinated for a while, unable to determine whether the women were actually moving the tumbler voluntarily or not. Annoyed that I was unable to understand it, I walked away.

  At the far side of the warehouse, behind a stacked pile of rolls of cloth, I came across Tony and one of the girls who worked with him. Although they were both fully clothed, they were lying in the normal position for intercourse, and he had his hand inside the top of her dress, holding one of her breasts. Neither of them saw me.

  As I turned away there was the sound of several voices from the ouija table. One of the women, a Negress, broke away from the group and ran into the cutting-room. A few seconds later I heard her talking loudly to her friends, and then the sound of someone crying.

  By the end of the following week all the coloured women had left the firm.

  As night fell the house was still burning; a glow of orange a hundred yards away.

  The mood of the group had altered subtly. For me, and I presumed for the other men, the assault on the four young women represented a physical manifestation of our fears about our own abducted women. It is one thing to imagine an atrocity; it is something else again to witness it.

  Individually, I think we were all horrified and numbed. . . but working as a group our reaction was one of more directed determination not to become further involved in the civil war. The search for the abducted women was not mentioned; for my own part what I had seen in the house had only hardened my resolution in this respect. It was Sally I was worried about, for she was innocent. My daughter, not my wife, was uppermost in my mind.

  As darkness came on, I moved away from the main group of men and went into a house about twenty yards from the one we had fired. Behind me there was a glow of smouldering wood. The blaze had finished now, but it would go on smouldering for hours. There was a sweet smell of smoke in the air, obstinately pleasant.

&nbs
p; I sat by myself in an old armchair in a downstairs room of the house I had occupied and brooded about what I would do in the morning.

  Time passed. I became aware of the sound of engines, but I ignored them.

  They grew louder, drowning my thoughts. I leaped out of my chair and ran through the house and into the small garden at the rear.

  The sky was clear of clouds and a quarter-moon threw enough light to mark the ground. I had been sitting in the dark in the house (as was our custom when temporarily occupying evacuated property) and my eyes adapted at once.

  It took me only a couple of seconds to locate the source of the sound: it was a formation of helicopters travelling at a low height and speed from the south in a direction that would carry them over the village. As they approached, I dropped to the ground, my hand tightening over the rifle. I counted them as they passed overhead: there were twelve. They slowed even more in the next few seconds, and landed in one of the fields beyond the village.

  From where I was lying I was not able to see them. I climbed to my feet and peered over the hedge. I heard the engines ticking over together in a low, muted grumbling sound.

  I waited.

  For another ten minutes I stood still, debating whether to rejoin the others. There was no way of telling why the helicopters were here, or whether they knew of our presence. It was Unlikely that they had not seen the smouldering remains of the house.