Tomorrow

by Chris Beckett

  I enjoy their presence. Those living metal bodies are company of a sort for me, rather like the company of the other customers of the street cafés where I would sometimes go to work: they don’t know you, and make no demands on you, but are still deeply reassuring just by being present.

  Funny to think of my former self down there in those streets, sitting outside cafés and bars, climbing on and off trams, driving or being driven in cars. You’re looking around you all the time, when you’re there on the ground. You don’t look up because all the things you want are at your level, and so are the things you need to look out for. Once in a while, an aesthetic impulse – a self-conscious impulse I’d trained myself to have – would make me turn my attention briefly upwards to the higher storeys of the buildings around me, like an intelligent fish glancing up at the silvery slither of sky to remind itself that its little pool isn’t everything and there is another whole world out there, before it returns to the real business of watching out for pike and hunting for water fleas.

  So yes, I occasionally looked upward and, though I can’t say I remember it, I surely must sometimes have wondered what went on behind those ranks of windows above the shops and restaurants and bars, but if you’d told me about some elderly person lying on a bed up there, wandering between dreams and ruminations, and trying to avoid thinking about their more or less permanent queasiness, or about the pain that is always either present or creeping back again like a distant discord that they know will in due course be screeching at full volume into their ear, or about the inoperable mass that’s drawing them all the time in the direction of the final oblivion that lies, not years away, but weeks or months . . . well, I would have listened politely but it wouldn’t have meant much to me, and I would have changed the subject as soon as I could. I knew this was the fate of all of us. Well, of course I did – I’d known that since I was perhaps three or four when, as it happens, I pondered a great deal the dreadful fact that having once been born I had no choice but to die. But by the time I was an adolescent I didn’t take it very seriously, and, even now that I’ve arrived here, it’s hard to believe that my turn has finally come.

  ‘On my death bed,’ I whisper to myself in order to hear the sound of it. I remember it being a fairly conventional observation that one should do this or that – and perhaps even compile a checklist of thises and thats to be completed while one could – or one would regret it on one’s death bed. It doesn’t really work like that, though. Down there we didn’t understand how remote the rest of our lives would seem from this perspective. Those people below me in their cars and trams might not be interested in me up here, but neither am I much interested in them. This is where I am now, and this is where I’d be whatever life I’d led.

  She is lying curled up on her right side, with a black halo congealing round her head. I’ve never seen a dead body before unless you count the Egyptian mummies that were the highlight of our childhood visits to the National Museum, and, in my hyped-up, bruised and trembling state, I weep. Poor Guinevere, poor poor Guinevere, she was so young, and so determined to do good and not to waste her life. She must have been at least ten years younger than me, which helps to explain why actually she was a bit intimidated by me and my . . . well, right now it just seems like cynicism, though I’d prefer to call it realism. She was so young and hopeful. I weep for her, and I weep at the thought of her poor parents, who worked so hard and so long to bring her up. How could I have questioned the authenticity of her feelings, or sneered at her sacrifice, when my own insistence on purity means I never do anything useful at all?

  ‘Because she and her friends fucking kidnapped me, you idiot!’ I answer myself out loud. ‘Because they beat me, and pointed guns at me, and shut me in a cage, and treated me like I was evil, when I only did what most of them would have done – other than maybe St Guinevere here – if they’d happened to be born with the privileges I was lucky enough to have. The bastards wouldn’t even do me the kindness of letting me know what was happening.’ I pick up her gun and then suddenly the bottled-up resentment erupts inside me from weeks of captivity without knowing where I was, or how long I would be there, or what lay on the other side of it, and I begin to kick silly, priggish, joyless Guinevere as hard as I can, not just once but many times. Her body is already stiffening, and I eventually stop because I realize I’m hurting my foot, already bruised by kicking the frame of my cage. I’m about to wander off when I remember I need the ammunition from her backpack, and kneel down to remove it. I have to force her left arm to get the strap off and the other strap is pinned beneath her, so I have to pull her over, which reveals the fact that most of the right-hand side of her head is missing, so I can see her white brain with its various folds and lobes picked out in dry black blood.

  I retch. Around me is jungle. I have no idea where. They stuck a sack over my head. I only know there was a boat journey, and a march, and several hours in the back of a truck, and another march.

  I should go back into the cave and see what food there is. I wish I’d thought about that on my way out, but I was too confused by my freedom to think straight, and all I’ve brought with me is the grubby pack of playing cards that I’ve kept in my pocket ever since they brought me to this place. I also ought to get away from here. Guinevere might be dead, but there’s no sign of Jaco or Rubia or Carlo, or of the various others who came and went, and they may well be alive and coming back soon. In fact, probably the first thing I ought to do is work out how to use this gun.

  My hands are trembling. My fingertips are raw. Having broken one of the struts of my cage by repeatedly kicking it, so as to give me a bit of slack, I spent many hours bending bits of wire back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, working one strand until it broke, and then on to the next one a centimetre away, and then the next until I had a hole big enough to crawl through.

  If I can find the army, I’ll be all right. In spite of the several demos I’ve been on back in the capital to protest the army’s appalling track record of atrocities against poor and indigenous people, I know that, when it comes down to it, they’re on my side. I don’t even have to think about it. But there’s no sign of them. The cave mouth is almost at ground level and they obviously didn’t spot it or they wouldn’t have moved on elsewhere after the firefight. Quite possibly they came by helicopter, and are already a hundred kilometres away or more. They might not even have been looking for me. It could well be that they just happened to spot Guinevere and the others when passing overhead on the way to somewhere else.

  I can’t bear to go back in there. But I need food. But that means feeling my way back down that black tunnel, and I could be another half-hour, and the others might come back and I’d be trapped. And what about this gun? Until I know how to load it, it will give me no protection at all. But first I should get away from here. But what am I going to do for food?

  I’m paralysed by the need to make a choice. Each alternative seems such a thin and impoverished thing. And Guinevere is no help at all. She lies there vacantly like a doll that’s fallen to the floor, her arms still sticking up where I pushed them to get off her pack, her eyes half-closed and just showing a pupil-less strip of white, her head opened up like a diagram in one of my father’s instructive biology books.

  Perhaps the contents of her pack will help me. With my clumsy, trembling, raw-tipped fingers I fumble it open. There are two spare magazines for the gun, a box of tampons, half a packet of mint sweets, a half-full water bottle, a hunting knife, a small biscuit tin containing a sort of first-aid kit (some sticking plasters, a bandage and a tube of water-sterilizing tablets), a cigarette lighter, half a pack of cigarettes and a mobile phone . . . Oh God, please let there be a signal here, I pray as I try to switch it on, though the chances of that must be pretty much zero, and it turns out that, in any case, the battery is flat . . . There are also four biscuits wrapped in silver foil, and a can of sardines, a pair of nail scissors, and a little photograph in a clear plastic disc, the size of a
largish coin, which looks as if it was once part of a keyring, of a middle-aged couple with kind, gentle faces, beaming presumably at Guinevere herself as she took the photo. The woman looks to me as if she might be a social worker or something of that sort in one of the poor neighbourhoods, the man maybe a lecturer in a technical school, and, as decent people with a social conscience, no doubt they brought up Guinevere to be aware of the moral burden of her own privilege, imagining that she would join some sort of helping profession like their own. But she decided that, for all their good intentions and hard work, they were really part of the problem because by doing the jobs they did, they created the impression that something was being done – an idea that was indeed very comforting for people like my parents – even though they didn’t really change anything at all, since they were failing to address the underlying structural oppression.

  Back in the city, people like us found all kinds of stories to tell ourselves, usually involving comparing ourselves with others more obviously reprehensible than ourselves, that would allow us to feel we were really on the side of good and against an oppressive system, even though we ourselves were beneficiaries of that same system. But you had to believe in your own story, at least to some degree, for it to work, and once you saw through it, you had to find another story.

  (Question: but why am I thinking about this now, when I’m all alone and lost and in terrible danger? Answer: because thinking about almost anything is preferable to actually accepting that this is where I am, in the middle of a jungle, with no map and almost no food, and enemies out there who’d happily hurt or kill me, who might come back at any time.)

  I replace the contents of the pack and sling it on my own shoulders. I’m not going back into the cave. The first thing I’ll do is climb the weathered outcrop of rock, shaped like the top ten per cent of a crumbling buried sphere, at whose base the cave lies. Perhaps I will be able to see something in the distance, like mountains, that will help me get a sense of where I am, and if an army helicopter appears, I can wave to it.

  I am still holding on to the photograph in its little plastic disc. They can be my parents now is, I suppose, what I’m vaguely thinking as I put it in my pocket.

  I know that as soon as I start to climb that rock, I’ll realize that it was the wrong decision and that I should have done something else. But, whichever option I chose, the same would be true.

  I cook Amanda pasta with beans in a tomato sauce. We drink some river-cooled beer. I take her for a little tour of the area around my cabin and she has a few polite puffs on a joint, though it’s very obviously not really her thing. She’s uneasy, I can tell. She likes me but she’s uneasy about what I’ve made of my life out here. And she’s made me feel the same because when she stood in the doorway of my cabin, I saw it through her eyes. I’ve let it get squalid and, while I’ve been telling myself that this is good because it means I’m not adhering to small-minded conventions or worrying about what other people might think, I can see, or think I can, that she’s wondering what this says about me and my relationship with the world and with myself, and there’s a part of me that can’t help agreeing with what I imagine to be her conclusion: namely that there’s nothing that’s really liberating and joyous about all this at all, and actually what’s happened here, if not from the beginning then certainly in recent weeks, is that I’ve sunk into a kind of unproductive stupor, and that what I still like to imagine is a state of calmness and reconciliation with the world has become closer to numbness or indifference.

  She talks about her work, about how difficult it is to teach pupils whose parents have never been to school, and have no concept at all of what education is even for. How do you persuade children whose parents rely on a combination of practical experience, superstition and tradition that one can find truths about the world by experiment and reason? How do you get them to see that the roles played by men and women in their particular community are not determined for all time, and can be questioned and overturned? I find myself being awkward and repeatedly challenge her assumptions – in the same kind of way, I suppose, as she challenges the assumptions of her pupils. How do we know that what we educated city people have to offer is better than what indigenous people already have, given that their way of life has evolved over many thousands of years to cope with this environment? ‘After all,’ I say, ‘it’s our science and technology, our notion of the human individual as the supreme being, our capitalism, that is laying waste to the world, not their folk knowledge and traditions.’

  ‘Absolutely right,’ she answers at once with great seriousness. ‘Absolutely right! There’s so much to value about their culture and so much that we can learn from them, so much, but there are a lot of problems too. Their marriage customs, for instance, really are quite oppressive, as is the way they police gender roles and traditional norms by socially ostracizing anyone who refuses to conform.’

  She’s trying to show that she understands my point and agrees with it, but my strong impulse is to go on arguing. It seems to me that she’s trying to have it both ways, as we liberal types are prone to do, insisting on our great admiration for the common people (and especially indigenous common people), while at the same expecting the common people to fall in with our idea of what common people ought to be like. But I decide to leave it at that. The truth is I don’t trust my own motives. I know that my slight irritation with her fairly conventional stance is not purely based on doubts about its intellectual underpinnings but is driven in part by jealousy, guilt and defensiveness, and that, if I continue, those ugly feelings will become increasingly evident to her as well as me. Also, let’s face it, she knows quite a bit about the topic from direct experience, dealing every day as she does with predominantly indigenous children and their parents, while my direct experience is basically zero. I have an uneasy feeling that this uncomfortable fact might be the source of my jealousy.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I say. ‘We should respect them but not idealize them.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she says, and smiles. ‘Oh look, a parrot.’

  A small black parrot with a red beak has landed at the railing of my veranda and is watching us with a sharp, interested eye.

  ‘Oh yes, it comes here most days. I’ve no idea what kind it is.’

  She tells me the local name for the species – an indigenous word full of consonants, which I can’t get hold of – and adds that these birds are venerated in the mythology of the Upper River. ‘It was once a minor god, apparently, but it disobeyed the other gods in order to steal fire from the sun for humankind, and so they turned it into a bird as a punishment, and condemned it to be nothing but a thief until the world ends.’

  ‘It certainly is a thief. It’s taken food from my table before now when I’m actually sitting there. It seems to be able to tell when I’m sufficiently distracted. It once took a pencil, too. It was red and shiny, so perhaps it liked the colour.’

  ‘Well, if you believe the story, you have to forgive it. It gave us warmth and light.’ She looks at her watch. ‘I ought to head back now. I guess it’ll be quicker going with the flow, but I want to be sure of getting there before dark.’

  We part a little awkwardly. I watch her in her boat as she heads off down the river. She sits up very straight, facing forward, determined to meet anything that comes along with her accustomed positivity, but after a while she glances back in my direction, and it seems to me, quite possibly mistakenly, that she does so with a certain reluctance, and that when she sees me watching her and waves and smiles, her undoubted friendliness is qualified by complicated reservations.

  But then she’s gone and I return to my seat on the veranda to roll myself a smoke. Having flown off on some other errand, perhaps to check some alternative food source that it’s also monitoring, the parrot returns and watches me as I light up, its head tipped quizzically on to one side. I feel lonely, which I haven’t been conscious of until now, except in the middle of the night. I almost feel glad of the creature’s company.r />
  I draw in smoke, hold it for as long as possible, exhale. The parrot observes me. I don’t know much about animals, but I’m stronger on cultural history, and I know that the figure of the fire thief appears in various forms in many mythologies, including cultures that have had no contact with each other for a hundred thousand years. Which surely demonstrates that these aren’t just stories, they are attempts to describe something that actually exists.

  I inhale again. And I decide, admittedly in that rather suspect way that happens when one is stoned and patterns form super-easily and often completely spuriously, that the fire thief is simply a description of life. Life is a fire thief. The law of the universe is that everything runs downhill from complexity to bland disorder, yet life finds a loophole that allows it to flow in the other direction, and become more complex instead of less to the point that it is able to know itself, and eventually to rival in complexity the universe itself: The man has become one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever.