Burridge Unbound (36 page)

Food, feasting, music, chanting, wild dance, more slaughter and sacrifice, talk and more talk. Suli never stops, spills
supira
on herself as if it were blood, kisses the children, feeds the grandmothers, teases the young boys with their big feet and thin shoulders. She seems like a president now too, a president and a returning daughter, someone to curry favour with here, in this life. I watch her and eat, regardless of the food, vast quantities returning now from the many fires, spiced with fruit and burning peppers, strange sauces, cool jellies, more
supira
, always more
supira
. Every time I look up it seems more crowded, the air hotter, less room for any of us and our cumbersome bodies. Dancing now on the platform and in the field, dancing under the blackening sky, dancing crazily as the rain comes down, slashing, rivers of it, all heading here, in the pooling place, the waiting lounge, where we meet before death. Soaking the flowers and food, the fine clothes, the gifts, washing the blood into mud and the mud into blood that covers our feet and legs, splashes up our clothes the more we dance, soaks us all, washes us in the same blood-mud we came from, the same we’re heading towards.

A young woman loses her
saftori
, stepped on by someone: one moment it’s there and the next she is naked in the blood-mud. I’m startled, but she laughs, the others laugh. An older
man on the other side of the crowd hoists his
golung
in the air and then there are others. It seems exactly the right thing to do in this mud, in this rain, with this music and the
supira
and blood. Several women start laughing and calling because one of the men has an erection. It looks like a penis gourd from an old
National Geographic
, but no, it’s the real thing, the women laugh and point and the man is dancing, strutting. I turn to look at Suli, to ask her,
Is this what your folks do at funerals?
Where is she? We are all whirling and singing. I see her for a moment and lose her, then she is right next to me, her face filled with laughter. She bends to scoop up an armful of the blood-mud and hoists it at me, splashes my chest. I do the same to her, and then we’re rolling in it, blood-mud in our hair and faces, up and down our bodies. She pitches me onto my back and I see her now as an animal. I am erect as that other man, as all the men, and quick as any wildcat she pulls me inside her and before I can breathe or think I stream so painfully I cry out. She lurches off me, stays gasping on her hands and knees when another man washed in blood-mud approaches her from behind. I rise in a fury, throw him off, and then Suli turns on me again and drives me on my backside, spitting and laughing, the rain falling in torrents now so that I can hardly see what other writhing bodies are doing.

What other bodies are doing doesn’t matter. We kick and spin, circle, swim, laugh and ache and reach for one another again and again as the rain slashes and we are washed in tides of mud and blood and longing for this life and the next and the lives we’ve left behind.

A
t the community lagoon, not long after sunrise. A great flaming tree with red and orange blossoms overhangs murky brown water that smells of the rot of too much life. I feel it too, within my body, and it’s not just the ache of overindulgence. I’ve spent too much of my life too soon, and what’s left is tired and sore and brittle and badly used.

“You must turn your eyes away,” she says as she wades into the pool and begins unwinding her
saftori
. It strikes me as the first really funny thing I’ve heard in a long while. “I’m not kidding,” she says. “The villagers take this very seriously.”

“After last night men and women can’t bathe together?”

“That was different,” she says. “Turn your eyes away.”

A sleek grey snake lies quietly on one of the upper branches of the flaming tree. At first I think it’s a vine, then I notice its flickering tongue. Not looking at us, not looking away.

“Last night was not entirely part of our world and is treated as something separate from the traditions and decorum of everyday life. Did you notice any
huloika?”

“No.”

Her thin brown body glistens in the water, her shoulders so straight, her throat and neck–

“Turn your head away!” Emphatic. Then calmer: “They were dancing above us. I could just catch sight of a few.”

This terrible sadness, a bitter fatigue. I’ve laid down with the devil, with a blood-soaked angel, and it’s as if she has pulled from me the last ounces of my hope. Hope for what? For redemption, dignity, for this godforsaken country.

“Who are they?”

“The
huloika
don’t always connect to people exactly as we knew them. They’re something like amalgamations. One I thought was Jono and my father. They were so happy to see me, to be together again after so many years. That hasn’t happened in a very long time for me.”

“Being with your father and husband?”

“Being with their
huloika
. I’m sorry, you must think me a lunatic.” The sound of her light steps approaching, water gently splashing and dripping.

“I didn’t see any
huloika,”
I say. “But I’ll
be
one soon if I don’t get back on my meds.” What I don’t say is this: I was part
huloika
. Not last night, but in captivity. I was so near death I must have floated over the line sometimes.

“We’ll take the helicopter back to the capital in an hour. You can turn your head now. The water is yours.”

Her hair pulled back and sleek, face fresh but tired, in this light she looks fragile, losing the battle with age. She’s also sending out powerful female waves of longing – she wants me to embrace her, damn whatever the villagers might say, damn the sadness I feel in my bones. Her pull is as powerful as if she’d reached out with her hand. It’s a selfishness, a need to dominate, spoiled as everything else this morning. I walk past her, eyes down.

“I need to know about Dorut Kul. Why was he killed? What were you discussing with Sin Vello in that video he was so disturbed about?”

Silence. I step into the water, let the filthy
golung
fall from my own aching, aging body. Limbs back to their familiar trembling, stomach in its usual roiling state.

“You said you were going to explain everything.”

“I said everything will become clear.”

“It isn’t.” Immersing myself in the water, sickly warm. I wonder what diseases are lurking here, what leeches and snakes.

“I took you to the
onjupta
ceremony so that you would know that we live very close to life and death here, to the
huloika
. It’s all a much stronger part of our reality than it is for you. But now you’ve seen some of it. You’ve been part of it. And it is part of you.”

“Did you conspire to murder General Minitzh?” I ask. Surely this is why Dorut Kul had to be killed.

“There are enemies massing against us from every corner.”

“Did you and Sin Vello plot to kill the president?”

“There are shades of truth and night that do not bear too close an inspection,” she says. “They wipe out everything else. Make you think nothing else matters.”

“Did you have Dorut Kul murdered?”

She looks past me, as if she’s somewhere else.

“Why did you want me on your Truth Commission? To make you look good? A hobbled torture survivor who wouldn’t be up to examining things too closely? Why did you fuck me? So I wouldn’t ask these questions?”

She waits before answering, then simply repeats, with monumental calm, “There are shades of truth and night.”

There are shades of Suli Nylioko, too, that do not bear too close an inspection. My will for it evaporates, like the mist
from this scummy lagoon, like any forward momentum this country ever generates. I turn to watch her step away, her head erect, body swaying slightly, looking now like a twelve-year-old village girl walking back from the community lagoon.

Fresh clothes, a brown batik shirt and light pants, my rubber thongs cleaned of all the mud and blood from yesterday. The villagers move slowly, as if the air has been made gelatin and gravity increased. The grounds are littered with chicken feathers, animal fur, soiled clothing, fly-infested remnants of food. My stomach is in disarray, my head held together by cellophane.

Suli Nylioko killed President Minitzh. The angel of non-violence, probably in concert with – why not the Kartouf? Why not? Anything is possible. She evades and distorts and so it’s probably true. I haven’t a lick of evidence – a film and transcript I couldn’t understand and no longer possess, a dead body in my suite, a lover who will not deny any of it.

A lover.

Who sees spirits, stands in front of soldiers, calms thousands, makes me turn my head away. Who brings me back to life and turns it sour.

A lover.

Who’ll probably have me killed. Why not? Death is so close here anyway. What’s one less Truth Commissioner?

Lover
.

The word turns over in my mind as we lift off in the presidential helicopter and the village becomes a spot of brown nearly lost in the monstrous green surrounding it. And the delicate silver terraces – from up above they’re sheets of mica glinting in the sun, whole mountains’ worth, art not food. If I were a god looking down I’d want to pluck the entire valley as a jewel.

A lover. Reanimating my body, but with a trick of mirrors, I wake up in the morning and my spirit’s been sliced open. There were
huloika
all around me but I couldn’t see them. All I’ve been able to see is dead bodies: heads in refrigerators, bodies wrapped in garbage bags, brains on my floor. I couldn’t see the
huloika
. The other side. Where the mud and the blood meet, food and death and sex and rain, pouring rain, flowers and filth and the stink of it all. My battered body. I’ve been through everything, I think. There’s nothing else that can be done to me. Kill me? That’s nothing to fear. Not any more.

The lint now closing in on my brain. It’s been days since I’ve had any medication, I’ve been through too many shocks. Is this why I feel so oddly detached, why my chest feels like it’s being gripped in a vice? Why I can’t hate myself for what I’ve done with Suli Nylioko? She and Sin Vello had Minitzh killed. Minitzh the dictator, Minitzh the bloody murdering tyrant. President for life – he wasn’t going to leave any other way. So she had it done, and she put her own body between the tanks, filled us all with the hope and glory of peaceful revolution. And somewhere along the line a reporter got hold of a tape that would have shattered the dream completely. And he gave it to me, so he was sacrificed and left: in my suite as a warning.

A Minitzh-style warning, from the Angel of Kalindas Boulevard, or else from the IS, which now serves her, or wants to discredit her, or both. Or maybe the
IS
wants to frame
me
for the murder. Anything’s possible. The mud and blood are never too far away.

Now, from the clearest blue sky I’ve seen in my whole life, I look down on the island paradise. Where is all that rain? No sign of it today. Jungle and mountains, and we’re close enough to the coast to see the beaches, mile after mile of winding white sand, and the water a thousand shades of blue and
green. Such water! Tiny fishing boats, specks of white gull, a mile-long wave breaking on the shore, smoothing out then sucking back. Suli sits up front, near the pilot, spends the whole flight gazing out the window. She doesn’t look at me but at the splendour below. Really, what is there to say? This is God’s perfection, this tiny corner of this tiny world. A fridge full of heads? Microscopic. A couple of stray electrons in the giant scheme of things. We writhe in the mud and blood and are practically invisible.

It isn’t a long flight. Far too soon, it seems, the capital comes into view, a cancerous brown smudge on the edge of perfection, the air so hazy, like a mistake, like Patrick trying to get rid of something from his page using a bad eraser. The closer we get to the ground the greater my feelings of disappointment. This inexorable tug back into the filth.

Coming in for the landing. I see a small fighter plane first out of the corner of my eye, a flash of silver whose wave of pressure bounces us like we’re on a life raft in the wake of a much larger boat. Suli doesn’t notice but turns her head to look at me finally – the lover again. There’s no mistaking those eyes. Not just for last night. We’ve been lovers since her long day in the library in Kent. I see it now. She doesn’t turn away. Doesn’t regret a single thing she’s done.

The plane flashes by again. It must be some sort of escort. I think to ask Suli if this is normal – it doesn’t make sense with the ground so close – but the words don’t make it from my throat. Suli is looking at me and then she isn’t. There’s a flash of light and heat and the helicopter disappears. For the longest moment I’m alone staring at the most extraordinary infinite blue. Soundless, my face pressed against it, I can’t peer beyond but seem to get lost in it. It’s clear and forever and I have the most wonderful feeling of being free of my body – flying,
finally, effortlessly, I’ve left behind my broken-down shell.… But it should last longer than this. An odd thought. Forever shouldn’t pass nearly this quickly. Yet it changes like that, gets cold and dizzy. I turn back to look for the blue, but once it’s gone it’s gone, it turns into a sickening rush of darkness. If only I’d been able to stay on my meds, but I couldn’t, it wasn’t my fault, and now this pull is wrenching me back to my wretched body.…

I don’t want anything to do with bodies. Not live ones, not dead ones, certainly not severed ones. I’m sitting in the centre seat in the hearing room at
Justico kampi
trying to make Sin Vello understand. But he isn’t listening. He hasn’t plugged in his headphones. He’s whispering something to Mrs. Grakala but I can’t make out what they’re saying.

And then it smells awful, burning rubber and scorched plastic. Fumes so bad it’s hard to breathe. What’s happening? There’s no hearing room any more, it’s black smoke and this sudden silent, slow-motion confusion – trucks passing, people screaming but making no sound. “Don’t touch me!” I yell to the wrinkled little man staring at me on the tarmac, but he can’t hear, doesn’t move. I’m looking now for before the hearing room, for the endless quiet blue, but it’s gone, you can’t get it back, it turns brown and black and smothered in smoke. Soldiers running everywhere, but slowly, as if they’re all pushing through water. Helicopter wreckage twisted and steaming.