by Richard Gwyn
On waking, as so often occurs, I feel immediately refreshed and alert. For the first few seconds only, to be accurate, but for those few seconds I am irredeemably awake, super-conscious and endowed with fabulous sensory powers: I can hear the spider on the wall behind my desk weaving its silken thread; can hear, through the half-open window, the dew forming on the lawn outside; I can even hear the calibre of my own thought.
I also hear footsteps on the stairs …
The door opens and Alice steps into the library. I glance at my watch: it is a quarter to four in the morning, again. A coincidence? An intentional manoeuvre on Alice’s part? I experience a powerful sense that this moment has occurred, not once, but countless times before, and will continue to repeat itself infinitely, the door opening with a gentle creak, Alice stepping cautiously across the portal, the striped pyjamas lending a play of innocence to the scene, but also – a most unwelcome association – somewhat reminiscent of those monochrome clips from one of the darkest times in human history … how have I conjured that image?
I greet her with a nod.
Couldn’t sleep? I ask, putting aside my book, as though clearing a space for her.
She shakes her head and, folding her arms, walks toward the fire, which has burned quite low. May I? she gestures at the smoking hearth. First she stabs at the fire’s entrails with the poker, then lays a few pieces of kindling across the glowing embers and waits for them to take light before carefully laying down two fresh logs. She replaces the poker and settles in her customary position on the sheepskin rug. And although Alice has given no indication that the subject has been playing on her mind also, I return at once to the theme that is obsessing me.
If Megan gave you the tent, she can’t also have given it to O’Hallaran. And if she gave away two tents of exactly the same kind, then what has happened to yours?
She didn’t make two tents, says Alice. There is only one tent.
There is only one tent, I repeat, pedantically. I have been trying to get my head around this notion all night, without a great deal of success.
Yes, she says. One tent.
But presumably, I persist, O’Hallaran, wherever he was yesterday morning, packed up his tent, put it in his rucksack, and arrived here in the afternoon. Then he put up his tent in exactly the same place that you had left your tent. The same tent, if you are to be believed. And nothing about the logistics of the thing – the pitching of a tent where a tent already exists – quite apart from the simple logic of it, strikes you as weird?
Oh, it’s weird all right, says Alice, reaching down to fondle the ears of her canine chum, who has followed her into the library and settled at her side. I sit back in the armchair by the carved fireplace, sling my legs over the armrest. The fresh logs have now caught and are blazing in the grate. Shadows flicker across Alice’s face, the reflected flames deepening the red in her hair.
I never said it wasn’t weird, she repeats.
But its weirdness is not sufficient to make you question the whole sequence of events? How, for instance, Megan managed to give, as a gift, the same tent to two separate people?
Hmm, she says. Alice is smiling, while attempting to look thoughtful. This conflict of expression aptly encapsulates the ambivalence I myself am feeling. I am not sure whether she is messing with me, or flirting with me. Mixed messages, I am coming to realise, are part of the fun of hanging out with Alice.
She leans an elbow on my knee, and looks up at me, face resting on her forearm. She explains that the previous evening she had observed, from her bedroom window, the little scenario beside the tent, realised that something was amiss, and had gone out to the garden in receptive mood, determined not to act surprised as – she says – ‘it can be dangerous to meddle with the tent’s output’. Output, she says. She is aware, she tells me, that the tent can unleash ‘mysterious things’ and she didn’t want to leap to conclusions about O’Hallaran. But what she doesn’t tell me is how, after leaving me on the stairway, and taking a bath, she managed to transmute from a sickly, feverish girl into the healthy, composed woman who walked in on my argument with O’Hallaran.
Listen, says Alice, folding her arms now on top of my knee, and resting her chin on her wrist: why don’t you have a proper chat with him, with O’Hallaran? See whether he’s prepared to give you his story. You weren’t particularly nice to him earlier. In fact, you were horrid. Perhaps you should give him the opportunity to explain himself. And maybe he knows something about the tent that we don’t.
By ‘we’, she presumably means herself, as I know less than nothing about the damn thing.
The necklace with the scarab pendant swings at her throat as she looks up at me, awaiting my response. I am appalled at the magnitude of my feelings for Alice, and yet, when everyday reality is so cast in doubt, how can I trust the veracity of my own emotions? How can I be certain that she is even there, in flesh and blood, and she will not disappear, like a wraith, if I lean forward to kiss her?
17
The next morning, I determine to resolve matters with O’Hallaran. I will try to draw from him his story, and evaluate whether or not he is a trickster and a fraud, as I suspect, or whether – as Alice seems inclined to think – he should be given the benefit of the doubt. And if Alice is right, if it is the tent and not O’Hallaran that should be the focus of my concerns, what then?
I will have to deal with that matter as and when it arises.
At nine o’clock I venture over to O’Hallaran’s camp and ask him to join me for breakfast, an invitation he accepts with alacrity, and without giving the least impression of having taken offence at my behaviour the previous evening.
Tell me, O’Hallaran, I say, once we are settled in the kitchen, over cups of coffee, I wish to be frank with you. Would you tell me a little of yourself? Answer me something that has been perplexing me all night?
I never, says he, could have any objection to providing an honest answer to an honest question. It is the other stuff that galls me, the assumptions and prejudices that attach to me, as it does to all homeless wanderers, or gentlemen of the road, a term you employed in reference to myself – not without irony, I recall – last evening.
Well, I say, you will perhaps forgive me a degree of circumspection, when within the space of a couple of days I receive into my house two strangers, each of them claiming ownership of the same item: a particularly unusual item, I might add, and one which both of these individuals claim was a gift from the same person, my late lamented Aunt Megan. So my question is: how, precisely, did you acquire your blue tent from my aunt?
Very well, he says. And there is a long pause, as he rolls a cigarette, clearly much occupied by his thoughts. I give him all the time he needs, and I prepare another pot of coffee. It seems as though we are in it for the long haul.
– Many years ago, as I’ve told you, I worked as an agricultural labourer across southern Europe, travelling from place to place, picking up work on the cherries and peaches in the summer, on the grapes in autumn, the olive harvest and the oranges in winter. I usually worked in France in the summer and in Spain or Greece in the winter. And on the occasion I want to tell you about, I was working on the maize castration in the Gers, in south-west France. It was the month of August.
Perhaps I should explain something about working on the maize, on the castrage. If you imagine a maize or corn plant, around two and a half metres tall, the part you have to extract is like a bud in the fork of the plant, around shoulder height. You have to take it out to stop the next generation of maize from breeding an inferior crop; what the farmers call bâtardes, a term hardly requiring translation. Something to do with keeping intact a better strain of maize. Whatever. We were put into teams, équipes, as the froggies called them, like a football team. You’d work the rows together, don’t lag behind, want to be on the best team, all that competitive bollocks. Well, me and my team, which included my mates Igbar Zoff and Rhys Lucas – degenerates the pair of them, but honest souls – we didn
’t give a shite about all that, we just wandered down the rows at our own pace, plucking the male genitals from the plants and tossing them away. And there was always some blasted team leader, le chef d’équipe, chasing after us, egging us on, getting us to hurry up … Tedious, like most manual jobs, I guess, though at least you’re working outside and the weather’s nice, if a little too warm at times… Anyway, I came upon the blue tent because I had something that the tent’s owner wanted in exchange. An object that I had in my possession …
An object? I interrupt.
A thing without a name, he adds, unhelpfully. A unique artefact. But in order to tell you how that happened, I need to give you some background, do you see? So, the day I found this object, I was working in the maize field, going up and down the rows, carelessly ripping the buds from the plants, when suddenly I felt my toes come into contact with something hard. I stooped to pick it up, a steel or silver cylinder – I never ascertained what metal it was made of – like a short length of piping, a tad smaller than a modern mobile phone, which I guess it resembled, conceptually – and he pauses for effect, as though pleased with the analogy – although a million times more powerful, more informative. And of course back in the eighties there were no such things as mobile phones, as we know them now. Anyways, it was about the size of my thumb (here he holds up his own stubby, gnawed, appendage) and even though I had no idea what the thing was, it immediately cast a kind of spell over me, as though it were, well … animate. I held it in my hand, turning it over, and then I saw inside it. What I saw defied all rational explanation. At first I thought it was a trick of the light, but the closer I scrutinised the thing, the more I could see. It contained images, at first indistinct, then becoming clearer, of human faces, of streets, of entire cities, and of landscapes, grand and terrifying, of oceans and deserts and jungles and wild marshes, of animals and people of every kind. Everything was contained within its small screen. The whole universe, from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping or confusion. The whole of history was in it, viewed from all perspectives. It was – he added – as you might imagine, incredibly heavy to hold in my hand.
I realised I was in possession of a rare, unique thing. A thing unheard of. Finding one in a maize field in the south-west of France, on an otherwise unremarkable August afternoon, provided a significant fillip to my day’s labour.
A fillip indeed, I agree – although by agreeing with him, I know, I am only encouraging him in his folly.
It was like looking into – O’Hallaran pauses, as if choosing his words carefully – the standing still of recorded time.
I am impressed by his audacity.
No mean achievement then, you finding one like that in a field, I tell him. I think we have established that.
I didn’t mean to brag. I only wished to convey the quality, or measure, of my amazement.
You have, I assure him.
So, he continues, after my initial reaction of bewilderment, to be sure – and what with the leader of our équipe, a fuckwit of the first order named Alphonse hurrying us up about our tasks, telling us to get on with the next row – I slipped the cylinder, heavy as it was, inside my trouser pocket. I won’t say I forgot about it – how could I? – but, you know, out of sight out of mind, so I kept it hidden away and got on with the job.
That day, as it happens, was my birthday, the fifth of August. I decided the silver cylinder was some kind of a gift from Providence, that I had been blessed by the gods. There was no other way to get my head around it.
I had arranged with some friends, Lucas and Zoff and one or two others, Anto Walker from County Wicklow and Hubert Tsarko from Liverpool, all of them, like me, itinerant labourers, to go out to a certain bistro in Saint Mont, a restaurant not of the highest cast – that would have been way beyond our means – but a decent enough little eatery, where they serve duck in all its many guises, almost to the point of the ridiculous – hoisted by their own canard, you might think, if you will permit me the joke – (O’Hallaran seems to be enjoying himself far too much). They offer, he says, on the regular menu, duck with French fried potatoes, duck with chestnuts, duck with orange, duck in an Armagnac marinade …
Go on, I say – I get it. They served a lot of duck.
Quite so. In short, we had a good dinner. We all ate plenty of duck and drank sufficient of the wine, if not to excess. As we left the restaurant, whose name escapes me, a great fatigue entered my bones. The long hours in the fields under the blazing sun, followed by beers, then several ricards, all that heavy food, a surfeit of duck, an abundance I am sure, of bad jokes with old drinking buddies, and the good Madiran wine, a couple of Armagnacs to finish off, no wonder I was tired. The others, Lucas, Zoff, Tsarko and Walker – they sound like a firm of accountants, do they not? – were all in favour of setting off back to the town of Riscle, where we were based, and the Café du Soleil, our regular retreat, for a nightcap, but I said to them to go on ahead without me. You see, there was a lane leading up a small incline to the right of the restaurant, and twenty metres up the hill was a patch of green, and an eminently serviceable bench, which I thought I might utilise for a little nap before following my friends back to the café in Riscle, which was at a distance of five kilometres from Saint Mont. So I lay down to have a kip, and when I woke up, fully refreshed, I idled back down the road. It was a glorious summer’s night, so I decided to walk, even turning down a lift from a car driven by some local farm workers, and eventually arrived in Riscle. And this is where things start to get uncanny.
When I got to the Café du Soleil, there was no sign of Zoff, Lucas and company, which was a little strange, but I ordered myself a beer anyway, and sat at a table outside on the pavement. The café was busy, as it always was during the castrage, especially during the evening. I had been there for five or ten minutes when a white BMW pulled up outside the church across the street and my friends piled out, expressing considerable surprise at seeing me there, sitting outside the café. Why, they said, you just set off up the hill for a late siesta, what are you doing here? According to their story, no sooner had they left me outside the Saint Mont bistro than a car stopped for them, driven by one of the more affluent producteurs, whizzed down the lane to Riscle at a cracking pace, and deposited them outside, as I had just witnessed. It would have been a physical impossibility, according to my friends, for me to have arrived at the café before them. Yet here I was, having had a short rest, walked five kilometres, and then waited at the café long enough to smoke a cigarette and drink a beer.
Well, of course, I had no explanation for my miraculous appearance, but then I hadn’t told them about my find: I knew straightaway that the magic cylinder had a role in this mind-bending act of transportation. I can’t tell you how I knew, I just did. And by my friends’ startled declarations, I knew that their account was true, at least according to the regular laws of physics, and that I, despite leaving St Mont at a time significantly after them, had somehow contrived to arrive here in Riscle before them, as if the time I had spent sleeping on the bench at Saint Mont and walking between the two villages had simply been wiped out, gone, or else had taken place in another, parallel or alternative existence. I decided, foolishly, I now realise – and in spite of an inclination to conceal – to let my friends in on the secret, which I had until then, and throughout the course of dinner, kept from them. Fishing in my trouser pocket, I pulled out the cylinder and displayed it, my hand extended. The thing shone bright under the street lighting. Rhys Lucas stared intently at the cylinder, and Igbar Zoff, on tiptoe (he was a small man), gazed over Lucas’ shoulder, sceptical at first, but nonetheless I could soon tell that the object had cast him under its spell also. Looking into it, they each individually – as they later told me – saw their own lives flash by, and the lives of all that had come before them and will come after them. My friends’ faces were absorbed, their eyes enraptured by the marvellous things they could see in the silver cylinder, those fleeting, crowded images of a
ll history, in all places.
For the first few days I was over the moon, I was Master of the Universe, and I shared my find with my friends, allowing them to glimpse its wonders, but then gradually, over the following two weeks, I became defensive about the thing, and guarded it jealously. I descended into a terrible depression. I stopped speaking, at least I stopped speaking to anyone or anything other than the silver cylinder, to which I murmured softly, as to a lover. My friends could no longer tolerate me and they left. Zoff and Lucas tried to talk me into coming with them – they were off to Spain with their earnings, for a beach holiday – but I knew that they were all consumed with envy, and just pretending to be nice, and that, really, all four of them were sick to death of me. I knew that for sure. I spent all my time consulting my cylindrical treasure, watching the events of history unfold within its small yet infinite space, marvelling at the revelation of things to come, and of things that might have been – for it soon became apparent that the wonderful object contained all possible stories, and not only those that took place, as it were, in actual fact. However, what the magical object could not do, which differentiated it from some kind of genie or oracle, was inform me about my present circumstances, or enable me to act on the information it provided. It could show me outcomes, but I had nothing to trace them back to, if you see what I mean, no way of telling whether its projections of the future were any more reliable than its representations of the past. It mixed facts with fiction. It showered me with images of every kind. Thus I could see the world, for instance, from the point of view of Roger the gimp, who spent each morning sipping his Armagnac while gazing at Mimi’s cleavage; could witness the infidelities of the town rugby team’s coach, Jean-Pierre; participate in the bizarre existential enquiries of the postwoman, Aurélie; share in the dreadful fear of death that tormented the school caretaker, Fréderic; recoil at the paedophilic fancies of old Pane, the patissier. But were these things real, or merely reflections cast up by the imaginings of these protagonists? I must confess, the magical screen often seemed to home in on truly vile and ugly things. Unless that’s what it found most salient about human beings. Or unless it adjusted its revelations to suit the mind of the voyeur – a possibility that would not reflect well on me, I’m afraid. And though I could see all these things, and more, I was impotent to change any of it. It permitted only a detached observer. At the slightest inclination of the observer to take action, the screen, as it were, went blank. It knew, you see: it could read my mind.