Sexing the Cherry (17 page)

It's almost light. She wants to lie awake watching the night fade and the stars fade until the first grey-blue slates the sky. She wants to see the sun slash the water, but she can't stay awake for everything; some things have to pass her by. So what she doesn't see are the lizards coming out for food, or Orion's eyes turned glassy overnight. A small bird perches on his shoulder, trying to steal a piece of his famous hair.

Artemis waited until the sun was up before she trampled out the fire. She brought rocks and stones to cover Orion's body from the eagles. She made a high mound that broke the thudding wind as it scored the shore. It was a stormy day, black clouds and a thick orange shining on the horizon. By the time she had finished she was soaked with rain. Her hands were bleeding, her hair kept catching in her mouth. She was hungry but not angry now.

The sand that had been blond yesterday was now brown with wet. As far as she could see there was the grey water white-edged and the birds of prey wheeling above it. Lonely cries, and she was lonely, not for friends but for a time that hadn't been violated. The sea was hypnotic. Not the wind or the cold could move her from where she sat like one who waited. She was not waiting, she was remembering. She was trying to find out what it was that had brought her here. What it was about herself. The third is not given. All she knew was that she had arrived at the frontiers of common sense and crossed over. She was safe now. No safety without risk, and what you risk reveals what you value.

She stood up and walked away, not looking behind her but conscious of her feet shaping themselves in the sand. Finally, at the headland, after a bitter climb to where the woods bordered the steep edge, she turned and stared out, seeing the shape of Orion's mound, just visible now, and her own footsteps walking away. Then it was fully night and she could see nothing to remind her of the night before, except the stars.

On our way back to London Jordan apologized to me for talking so little.

'It was never my way,' he said, 'nor yours either.'

I was perplexed by this, since I like to think of myself as a cheerful person, ever ready with some vital conversation. Had not Jordan and myself talked for ever when he was a boy?

Then he said, 'On my travels I visited an Indian tribe known as the Hopi. I could not understand them, but in their company they had an old European man, Spanish, I think, though he spoke English to us. He said he had been captured by the tribe and now lived as one of them. I offered him passage home but he laughed in my face. I asked if their language had some similarity to Spanish and he laughed again and said, fantastically, that their language has no grammar in the way we recognize it. Most bizarre of all, they have no tenses for past, present and future. They do not sense time in that way. For them, time is one. The old man said it was impossible to learn their language without learning their world. I asked him how long it had taken him and he said that question had no meaning'

After this we continued in silence.

Whilst Jordan was at the Crown of Thorns, dressing himself to present his pineapple to the King, I busied myself as a good woman should, cleaning the hut and brushing down the dogs. He had not seen his home for so long, and I wanted him to be surprised, for I have risen in the world myself these last years. I have begun to sell my dogs to the nobility, and I hope tonight to interest the King in a fine hound with ears that can hear across two counties and legs to make a concubine envious. I have fenced off a plot of garden at the front of my hut, and with all the skills I learned from Tradescant in those six years at Wimbledon I have made a fine greenery with a vine curling up the side wall.

I intend to hide the hound beneath my skirts, and when I am presented to the King I will let it out a little and throw myself on his mercy, acting as though I had not known it to be there. Then, if all goes as it should by rights, the King will weigh the dog's head and note the eager slant of his body and his tail like a weather-vane in the wind. Then he will ask me if he can buy it and I shall become as coy as I am able and refuse and refuse, saying he is only a pet. The price will rise, I know, and then all the rest of the silly sheep will follow suit of the King and order more hounds than I can breed. I see I have a flair for enterprise. It was ever with me, but smothered, I think, under my maternalness and the pressing need to do away with scoundrels.

There is something to be said for this childless quiet life.

And now the bells are striking and I must drape on my pearls and get ready for Jordan. I have washed my neck.

Jack said, The trouble with you, Nicolas, is that you never think about your future, you just live from day to day.'

He was visiting me on board
HMS Gauntlet.
He was smart and confident. He was the youngest stock analyst in the City. I looked at him mildly and he continued.

'You'll be out of the Navy in a year or so and you don't know what you want to do. You'll turn into a loser, Nicolas, I'm only trying to help you.'

'Do you remember those afternoons in the park, Jack? You always brought your computer magazines and your father's copies of GP. One week you brought a canvas windshield and lay with your face to the sun.'

'And you brought those boat things.'

This is a boat thing, Jack, only bigger.'

'You can't make a career out of a hobby, Nicolas.'

And you? And you?

I
tried to make sense of him as he sat at my table, his face in a scowl, his hands fiddling with the newspaper he'd got out of his briefcase. Outside sleet smeared the window.

'If you really want to know, I'm thinking of sailing round the world. The same route as Drake took in the
Golden Hind.
I'm going to do it alone.'

Jack looked up and gave me a flicker of attention.

'Will you break some record or other?'

'How should I know?'

He stood up and threw down the paper.

'See what I mean? Even when you have a chance to do something useful you don't. What's the point of sailing round the bloody world if you're not going to break a record? You could go round the world in a plane if that's all you want.'

'I want to sail it. They used to think, certainly Christopher Columbus used to think, that the world was five-sixths land and one-sixth water. It says so in Esdras, a book of the Apocrypha. It's two-thirds water, though. You wouldn't know that if you travelled everywhere by plane. Planes make you think the world's solid.'

'And I think the world's divided into two sorts of people.

Those who do and those who won't do.'

'And I won't do, Jack?'

He didn't answer, just fixed on the paper. Then he swore.

'Stupid, some woman's at it again.'

He started storming round the cabin, smacking at the sleet sticking to the outside of the window, with his rolled-up newspaper.

'You'll never hit them,' I said, 'they're on the other side.'

It was the wrong thing to say. He launched into a tirade against all of us who were holding up progress and industry and the free market.

'Stupid woman's camping by some tiny river in the middle of nowhere and moaning on about the mercury levels. What does she want? Does she think industry can just pack up and go home? They've got to put it somewhere. It's not as though they're chucking it in the Thames.'

At the risk of sounding like the Buddha, I said, 'All rivers run into the sea.'

He didn't hear me. He opened the paper again.

'There's going to be a television programme about her, and an inquiry. God, the media's irresponsible. People are stupid. They panic. Before you know it they'll be selling shares and the company'll probably go under. And why? For some loony housewife and a few fish.'

'I don't know what's the matter with you, Jack.'

He came close and swung the chair round so that he was sitting on it cowboy style.

'I'll tell you what's the matter. I work twelve, fifteen hours a day at what I'm good at and I'm getting tired of nosy people poking about in the private business of perfectly respectable companies. Everybody wants jobs and money. How do they think we make jobs and money? There's always some fall-out, some consequence we'd rather not have, but you do have them and that's life.'

He checked his watch. 'I have to go now. Come to lunch some time?'

I nodded. He threw his paper at me. 'Here, keep up with the world, even if you don't want to join it.'

I flattened the springy newspaper when he'd gone and tried to find the article which had upset him. I remembered something he'd said after I'd decided to join up - what was it?

'Typical of you to make a career in the Navy after the Falklands crisis.'

I read the article. Surely this woman was a hero? Heroes give up what's comfortable in order to protect what they believe in or to live dangerously for the common good. She was doing that, so why was she being persecuted? The article said her tent had been mysteriously fired at on a number of occasions. I tried to understand her through her photograph. She was pretty; I felt I knew her, though this was not possible. Before I realized it I stood up and took down my kit bag.

I would find her.

God's judgement on the murder of the King has befallen us. London is consumed by the Plague. The city is thick with the dead. There are bodies in every house and in a street south of here the only bodies are dead ones. The houses are deserted, their shutters banging open in the night.

I took some soup to an ailing friend of mine, and as I kicked on the door to open it I saw the cart making its way slowly down the street, filling with corpses as it went. The men who pushed it were convicts. If they survived their daily labour they would be granted their freedom at the end of one month. Newgate was emptying but no criminals roared in their new-found liberty.

The men were bent double, the street was rutted and potholed and as the cart became heavier they could hardly move it. They were thin and ragged themselves, and one had the greenish hue that is the sure sign of rot.

I put down my soup and made to help them. I have no fear of the Plague. My body is too big for sour sickness to defeat it, and if it is a judgement on us all then surely I am the last to be judged?

I went in every house and pulled out bodies stiff with death. Most were wrapped in filthy blankets but some were still on their knees in the attitude of prayer. A grisly sight they looked, propped up in the cart, hands together.

At my friend's house I went inside with the soup, expecting to find her as I had left her, weak but tolerable. She was dead.

The carters were so exhausted by this time that we sat together round her table and ate the soup.

'Where are you taking the bodies?' I asked.

'To be burned,' they said. There is no way but burning. The grave-diggers have no strength left, there are too many for them. Only the moneyed may be buried. For us it is the pit.'

I went with them to the pit, carrying my friend over my shoulder. I wanted her going to be more dignified than it could have been in the cart. The closer we got, the more terrible became the smell. Dark smoke curled from a crater of the kind that must be on the moon. Around the edges of the pit were numerous carts which were tipped in from time to time. As soon as they were empty the miserable carters trundled away with them back to the foul streets.