North of Nowhere, South of Loss (13 page)

“Hold his arm, Joe, while I jab 'im.”

Brian is wedged into the reef, he cannot move. He can feel the spiked coral, the way the panic fish dart, the clamshell pincer at his heart. Brian's under, he is fighting for his life.

I cannot have come to this,
Brian emails Philippa.
I cannot have come to this. This is intolerable. I do not believe I have come to this. I am having a nightmare. This is your nightmare, not mine. I've been keelhauled. I'll drown. I'll go mad.

He wears gray pyjamas, much too large, and the room smells horribly of disinfectant. A line stretches ahead and behind. Every thirty seconds it shuffles forward in its slippered feet. Brian can feel a small flock of screams, trapped, batting against the inner scaffolding of his ribs.

“Next,” Dr Someone says.

The screams' batwings are frantic. They whir and rise and beat so hard against the rigging that Brian has to press a hand to his mouth. The little hooks tear at him.

“Ah, Professor. How are we doing?”

Brian reaches behind him and arcs the pyjama coat over his head like pinions. A small cry vents itself, unbidden, but he manages to imbue it with contempt.

Dr Someone sighs. “If you could forgive yourself, Professor, you'd recuperate faster. The mind's a hard taskmaster.”

“Hands,” says the nurse, sharply.

Brian extends them, cupped, and the nurse fills one palm with a little cascade of pills, the other with a small paper cup.

“Down the hatch,” she says.

“Amen,” Brian says. And also with you, and up yours. He lifts his hand to his mouth and works the tablets under his tongue. He lifts the cup. Drink ye all of it, says the watchful eye of the nurse. Brian swallows.

“We'll see what this lot does,” the doctor says. “I'm experimenting with your dosage.”

Brian shunts the pills into the pink back pocket of his lower gum. “Me guinea pig, you Dr Mengele,” he says, incautiously.

“I'd advise against making trouble, Professor. We are not on your research team, and your obsessions have no currency here.” Then the doctor smiles. “You would do well to remember,” he says gently, “that resumption of your career rests entirely on my recommendations.”

“Blackmail now, is it?” Brian shouts.

“We know you're not taking your medication,” says the nurse. “If this continues, we'll put you back on injections.”

“Blackbirds and blackmail,” Brian sings, letting his eyes go blank. “All baked in a four-and-twenty pie.”

The doctor pats Brian on the shoulder. “Give it time.”

“Next,” the nurse says.

Every day I climb the masthead
, Brian writes in the log which he emails to Philippa each night,
to inspect the atolls and shoals. At present, I can see no way out, though I make a close study of the rise and fall of the tides
.

The tides rise and foam with white horses that pull cursors behind them, too fast. The reins are loose in Philippa's hands. She leans back in the trap. “Cook was a dreamer, you know,” she calls over her shoulder. “They say he had visions. His siren rode the whitecaps and sang up a storm and St Elmo's fire lit up the channels. That's how he got out.”

What bullshit, Philippa,
he emails, laughing. Blue fire shivers down the length of his spine. In fact, he believes, it is the natives who hold the key, because they know the waters so well. He studies them. There is one, a young woman, who hides her medication beneath her tongue for hours at a time before she spits it into the bushes during outdoor time.
We resisters are easy to spot, Philippa, in spite of our cunning Deadman's Shuffle. It's the sudden dart of the eyes that gives us away, at least to each other. We are too focused, too quick. She was crying this morning, silently. I could feel her sobs in my bones. So I whispered: “We can get out. But only if we play by their rules. ”

“I'm afraid I'll go mad before then,” she said.

“Me too.”

“How'd you get in here?” she asked.

“Hard to trace exactly.”

I tried to recall that glorious rush of wind, Philippa, when I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, couldn't stand interruptions, when I locked the door and unplugged the phone. I was almost there. I skipped a few weeks' classes, I think, but it could have been longer. Frantic students and all that, appointments to discuss dissertations and I didn't show up. No one could reach me.

“My colleagues thought a heart attack,” I told the girl. “And my ex-wife thought suicide. Next thing I knew, police were kicking in my door.”

“Oh, the police,” the girl said, rolling her eyes. “Yeah.”

“They arrested me,” I told her. It still astonishes me, Philippa. Charged me with ‘threat to my own safety'. I could have killed them for interrupting at such a crucial
…
“Don't get cute,” they said. “You're coming with us.” “What about my rights?” I shouted, dumbfounded. “You've forfeited your rights, mate,” they said. “There's been two people signed a form. You're being committed.”

“Yeah,” the girl sighed. “I know. Runaway, I was charged with. I said I'd kill myself rather than go back home, so then, you know
…
because that's a crime
…
”She chewed her hands. “Your mum's boyfriend, the police, anyone can hurt you,” she said. “Except yourself. And if you try to, no matter what reason … Those are the rules.”

“We'll get out,” I promised her. “They can't keep us long. They can't. Because we're so obviously sane.”

“I dunno,” she sighed. “I dunno anymore if I am. The policeman who brought me here … he felt me up in the car and I bit him.”

“There you go,” I said. “That proves you're sane.”

She stared at me and then she began to laugh. It was the most astonishing sound, like the sound of oakum and sheep's dung being slapped against a hull. I laughed and she laughed, we couldn't stop, and even the sleepwalkers stirred. Our laughter whirled us up through the rigging, and just before the orderlies came, I thought I glimpsed a passage between the reefs.

“God, it's good to see you,” Philippa says. “I was afraid we'd lost you. You were so manic the last time … you know, fidgeting, and knocking things over –”

“Me
knocking things?”

“I thought you were dangerously wound up about your research. I was afraid you'd … you know … ”

“Crack up?”

“I was afraid it was worse than that.”

“Nothing's worse than that.”

“I was afraid you'd have a heart attack in Japan or somewhere. It's been such a long silence. Two years!”

“I'm a bit hazy about timespans myself.”

“And not even your department or your ex knew where you were.”

“They did. Oh believe me, they did. They had me committed.”

“Brian!” Her hand flies to her mouth.

He shrugs. “They believed they had to. They thought it was for the best. Anyway, I'm seaworthy again. Less wind in my sails, but I manage. I'm patched up with oakum and sheep's dung, it works well enough.”

“Patched up with what?”

“Don't tell me you've forgotten Cook's journals?”

“Never read them,” Philippa says.

“You did so. We did extracts in school. You used to reel off dates and data like the obnoxious know-it-all you always were.”

“I did not, Brian. That was you.”

“I can remember the exact day,” he says. “We were fishing in pools on the reef.”

“I never went fishing with you. You never let me.”

“And you got up on your high horse and trotted off in a cloud of history-book trivia and dates. When did Cook get wrecked?”

She stares past him, and he can feel the fog of childhood settling in.

“Don't,” he says urgently.

“What?”

“Drift.”

“Sorry. I was thinking about those divers finding the
Endeavour's,
cannon on the reef. You know, from when they threw everything over, to lighten the ship. Did you see that on TV?”

Brian feels seasick. “All the stuff that's been lost,” he says, queasy.

“After two hundred years,” Philippa marvels. “It's eerie, isn't it?”

“Stuff that will never be recovered.” He buries his head in his hands. “How much went overboard? That's the question. I have no way of even knowing what's been lost.”

“It will surface,” Philippa murmurs. She puts her hand on his arm. “It might all be found again. One day. You never know.”

You never know, Brian thinks, stricken. You will never know.

FLIGHT

“Yes, I'm coming,” Cecily promises, breathless, hearing Robert's urgent voice above the wind. She runs barefoot, tripping on something in the early morning dusk. The wind beats against the bedroom window and beyond she can see thousands of dead leaves whipped into squalls, no, not leaves, she sees with astonishment, not leaves but birds, wheeling galaxies of small brown birds. The air is thick with them. The air sways and tilts with the soft spirals of their flight, a Milky Way of migration so dense she can see nothing but wings. She can hear Robert, she can hear the edge of panic in his voice, but she cannot see him. She can hear the other man, the passenger, the one they have brought with them. “I'm coming!” she promises, fumbling with the lock on the window.

The birds spin like a nebula. It must be winter that drives them like this: the sudden onset of frosts and the sharp unseasonable plummeting of the mercury; it must be panic.

The velvet folds of the birdswarm brush the glass. The sash window is old and heavy, she cannot lift it. Robert calls her name again, his alarm transposed up to a higher key. “I'm
trying”
she cries, almost sobbing. She hears the passenger, the man they do not know. The window is impossibly heavy. “I'm coming!” she promises, but very likely years have passed since the sash was last opened, and it will not budge. She hammers on the glass with her fists, a stammer of rage, because it is pointless, she will not be in time, she is never going to be in time, she will always be a second too late, there will always be the sickening thump, the shower of glass …

The sound, when it comes, is like gunshot.

She will not look.

There is blood on her arms from the glass but she ignores that, she crawls back into bed, she tosses, she wakes – she
wakes! oh, thank God
– but the waking brings no more than a second's relief. Her days come and go like birds, her dreams like days.

She shivers and reaches for her robe.

What time is it? What day? What week?

In the refrigerator she finds a loaf of bread flecked with blue and green and whitish circles, quite interesting. The bread gives off the yeasty smell of a forest floor. There is also a tomato delicately slumping into one corner of the vegetable drawer and leaking pale red fluid. I have to buy food, she thinks. I have to walk into the village to buy food. She frowns, concentrating. First I have to get dressed, she remembers. She concentrates again. Which language, which country? English, she remembers. England. I am in an old farm house near the Channel coast.

“This one's been round a bit,” the man in the General Store and Post Office says, proffering a postcard. “Crossed a few oceans. Been re-addressed three times. They ought to call you the Artful Dodger.”

Cecily smiles and slips into her flippant voice. Nothing in her wardrobe fits well anymore, but she can always make do with flippancy, a hitch here, a tuck there, the lightness is all. “Fleeing the scene of a crime,” she says. “Got to cover my tracks.”

“You Australians.” But he has no complaints with her shopping list, cans of this and that, Sussex cheese that smells like old socks, a jug of cider. “Don't you want to know what it says?” he prods. “The postcard, I mean.” She smiles at him. She is tempted to ask who it's from. Of course he has read it. Of course the whole village is involved in exegetical debate at this very hour in the Brewers' Arms. “Came five days ago,” he says with a hint of reproach. “Is it dust you're looking for?”

“Pardon?”

“Why d'you always run your fingers along the sides of my shelves like that?”

“Oh,” Cecily says, embarrassed. “Do I?” She studies the pink cushions of her fingertips vaguely.

“They've been asking about you down at the pub. We thought you must have moved on.”

“No. Not yet.” She tucks the vegetables into her knapsack, between the cans, and starts putting the apples on top. “But maybe now that my mail has found me.”

The old man throws his hands up in mock despair and laughs.

“Dear Cec
,” says the back of the postcard, in a neat minute hand.
“This photograph seemed appropriate. If I didn't know better, I'd say it was you. Bought it in Sydney on a back street in Glebe. Actually it leaped out from a rack in a bookstore and assaulted me, clobbered me, made me go weak at the knees, but since the setting's France and you're in south-east Asia (aren't you?), it seems unlikely. If you steam off the airmail sticker (didn't want to waste valuable space), the fine print will tell you the staircase is in Chateau Chambord. You have a doppelgänger in the Loire Valley, and what is she doing on the racks of a bookstore in Sydney? you may well ask
–
the jackpot answer being that some graphics company in Paris, bunch of art students, has cornered a niche market worldwide. Seriously. I read it somewhere. Artsy photo-cards selling like hot cakes from New York to New South Wales. Anyway, the symbolism seems just right.
FLIGHT OF FOLLY. WOMAN TRAPPED IN CAGE OF OPEN DOORS.
Hope this finds you. Hope you have a magnifying glass to read my wingèd words. Hope no one else is not missing you as much as I don't miss you. Hope your life is as shitty as the bottom of a birdcage, like mine. Hope somebody clips your wings. Hope the brakes fail in all your nightmares. As for myself, I'm down to one car-crash dream per month. Sorry, sorry, sorry, that is really below the belt, but that's what you get for running away. Hope you rot in the jungle, and afterwards I hope you come back. Love, Robert.”

Cecily does not believe in the postcard, in spite of the apparent external evidence of the old man in the general store. She knows the mind is a very queer bird and an artful dodger of exceptional skill. There are, for example, highly intelligent people who believe they can fly; there are others, well read and well travelled, who see revenants in doorways and under stairwells and tell no one; there are those who believe they receive messages from the dead; there are crazy people who read coded information in raindrops on a window or in the migratory patterns of birds.

She pins the trick photograph to her bulletin board, and stares at it. What is shown is a luminous corkscrew of nothingness, an arrangement of delicate openings in a curved limestone wall: the famous double spiral of Leonardo, the central staircase in Chateau Chambord. Through the openings, she sees stairs fanning upwards into light. In the upper left corner of the photograph, a bird is poised on a blur of wings. In the lower right foreground, framed by one of the openings, is the face of a woman, startled, her lips parted. She is caught in the act of turning towards – or perhaps away from– the camera.

At first the bird had seemed to Cecily to be there by design, well aware of the complicated updrafts of air and the whorls of light. There are complicated people, though Cecily is not one of them, who can step back inside the frames they once inhabited and decode the whirling updrafts of design. There are others who can step out of photographs to haunt us, and still others who are not so free to leave. (The wind changed, perhaps, as the shutter clicked, and the subject was stuck forever in the blink of a particular moment in time.) At first, it had seemed to Cecily, the bird was not at all trapped but was there by choice, by design, she remembers that, she remembers thinking that. She remembers thinking that the bird knew the stairwell intimately.

She remembers wondering how the passenger (a stranger casually met) could be following her so relentlessly, watching so closely, sending (out of malice or desire?) such heavy messages. She remembers fearing that her paranoia was out of hand.

She remembers thinking of the Venerable Bede, his monkish Latin winging by,
Talis mihi videtur, rex
, feathered words from the seventh century, a quick flash of history, King Edwin in the mead hall with his thanes,
This life of man, O King, is like the flight of a sparrow through a lighted hall
, and there is nothing like a well-shaped line to move through time, so Cecily thinks, so the Venerable Bede confirms,
and outside it hails and snows and storms
…
and the bird flyeth in one door, and while it hovers inside the hearth-bright wine-heated hall it knows nothing of winter, and it is warmed by the fire, and its wings are bright in the torchlight, but then it flyeth out through another door and the winter night swalloweth it again and we know not whither it goeth
… and where does it come from, all this arcane knowledge, where does Cecily keep this gilded bric-a-brac?

This is her problem precisely, she remembers too much, she cannot jettison knowledge, she has a brainful of junk, and what use is King Edwin? of what possible use are his thanes in his lighted hall? With respect to her present situation, Cecily is unable to list a single advantage springing from her intimacy with assorted medieval manuscripts, and therefore King Edwin's sparrow should put itself back in its venerable bede-box where it belongs as far as she is concerned, yes, it should fold itself quietly away because there is much that Cecily would like to forget. This freefall into photographs is for the birds, and she does not want to be there again, with the bird again, in the stairwell, there,
here
, at Chateau Chambord, because in fact, o tourists, this life of birds is like the short ridiculous flicker of desire and we know not whither it goeth.

The limestone, cunningly lit, is the colour of butter. Against it, the bird is like a quick black thought of death, and Cecily notes that it is bloody marvellous the way forbidden words will come winging in without any provocation whatsoever. Give them an opening in a stairwell and they stage a stunt-flying display at the moult of a feather.

Excusez-moi, excusez-moi,
a man says, and that must be a Portuguese accent, or Basque maybe, or at any rate from somewhere south of the Pyrenees, and Cecily must be making progress after all if she is detecting these finer linguistic shadings, or thinks she is, and please, she says, think nothing of it,
ça ne me gêne pas,
something I've always dreamed of, catapulting down a few hundred corkscrew stairs in the Latin arms of a stranger. No, really, it's nothing, monsieur, it's nothing, Pedro then,
enchantée,
really Pedro, don't give it a thought,
Cécélie, je m'apelle Cécélie,
Cecilia, Cecily, Cec, Cess (and Cesspool during certain early years in school), though Cecily embarrasses herself beyond endurance when she babbles on like this, and she does not think her ankle is twisted, at least not badly, and in any case accidents arrive, and the crowds are
affreux, schrecklich,
whatever, isn't it? she is sorry, she is afraid she doesn't know a single word of Portuguese, she's just recently arrived in France herself, from Malaya as a matter of fact, but this business of daily living, o pushers and shovers, is like wading through a cesspool, is it not? and this life, this life, o Pedro, is for the birds.

The bird brushes her cheek. From outer darkness to outer darkness, a feathered meteor through a moment of light, what a daredevil, Cecily thinks. What tenacity.
What comes before and after, we know not.

François I,
says a guide in too careful English, and Cecily has to flatten herself against the luminous outer wall to let the group pass,
was bringing Leonardo to France for this express purpose
…
the design of the staircase, it is his, Leonardo's, of the double spiral around the nothingness.

The bird is flirting with the nothingness now. It drops in odd little freefalls, hovers, flutters, plummets another meter or so, a plumbline down the pale gold windpipe of the double stair. It is level, now, with Cecily's eyes and she sees, with sudden anguish, that this has nothing to do with the sport of tormenting
her.
You poor little thing, she whispers, and leans out into the core, a precipitous and dangerous and altogether pointless move. “Here,” she murmurs urgently, “here, little bird,” straining across the limestone sill, offering her hand, her wrist – and then she sees the man at the opposite opening, on the opposite arm of the stair. Watchful. Watching. More than watching. Is it surveillance? No. She has no word for the meaning of his gaze or for its intensity.

His eyes, her eyes … she feels as helpless as the bird, and what is strange, what is frightening, what is as exhilarating and terrifying as a brush with death, is this weird sense of fusion, this sense that they have entered the same tailspin, she and the man, that it is not his freefall, not hers, not the bird's, but
theirs,
the same one, same delirium, same shock, same euphoria, same express trip to unknown end.

What comes before and after, we know not …

Days and months later she spins theories. It is possible, for example, that random arrangements of certain objects constitute some kind of magnetic field. It is possible that currents pass through the poles of such a field. It is possible that shifts occur, earthquakes, upheavals of the magnetic poles, irreversible changes … Or it is possible, yes, it certainly could be possible, why not? as good an explanation as any, didn't Leonardo himself, after all, believe in potent alignments and perfect symmetries and numer-ologies and arcane geometrical powers, so yes it is possible that spells are generated spontaneously from certain precise mathematical configurations, for example from the axis that begins with Cecily's eyes and passes through the hovering bird to the eyes of the man.

The man seems to be there by design. He seems to know her, and for a moment it seems to her that she knows him, that it is all happening again, that he is the passenger, that he was the man that she and Robert had brought with them, but no, no, actually he does not resemble the passenger in the least, she does not know why she thought that stupid thought.

The man in Leonardo's staircase continues to stare at her with a slightly stunned look, the look perhaps of a man who has loved a woman passionately, lost her, and is stupefied to see her again after many years. Cecily has the lunatic sensation that he must indeed know her. She has the impression that he comes here often, that he returns, just as she herself seems to return, for reasons private and dangerous, to places it would be wiser to forget.