Sacrament (19 page)

'No, no,' said Hugo. 'Not blames. Connects. That's it, you see. She makes these ... connections.' He shook his
head, mouth drawn down in disgruntlement. 'She'll snap out of it eventually,' he said. 'But until then we just
have to live with it. God knows.' Finally, he swung his leather writing chair around and looked at Will between
the piles of papers. 'In the meanwhile, please do your best not to get her stirred up.'

'I don't do

-anything. I know. And once this whole tragic nonsense is over and done with, she'll be on the mend again. But
right now she's very sensitive.'

'I'll be careful.'

'Yes,' said Hugo. He returned his gaze to the gloom beyond the window. Assuming the conversation was over,
Will rose. 'We should really talk more about what happened to you,' Hugo said, his distracted tone suggesting
that he felt no urgency to do so. Will waited. 'When you're well,' Hugo said. 'We'll talk then.'

iii

The conversation never happened. Will's strength returned, the interviews ceased, the television crews moved
on to some other corner of England, and the sightseers went soon after. By Christmas, Burnt Yarley belonged to
itself again, and Will's brief moment of notoriety was over. At school, there was the inevitable gauntlet of jokes
and petty cruelties to run, but he felt curiously inured against them. And once it was plain that the name-calling
and the whispers were not discomfiting him, he was left alone.

There was only one real source of pain: that Frannie kept her distance from him. She spoke to him only once in
that period before Christmas, and it was a short conversation.

'I've got a message for you,' she said. He asked from where, but she refused to name the source. When she told
him the message, however, he didn't need the name. Nor, in fact, did he need the information. He'd already had
a visit from Lord Fox. He knew he was part of the madness, for as long as he lived.

As for Sherwood, he didn't come back to school at all until the third week of January, and when he did he was
in a much subdued state. It was as if something had broken in him; the part that had turned his lack of mental
grasp into a strange kind of attribute. He was pale and listless. When Will tried to talk to him, he clammed up,
or started to get teary. Will quickly learned his lesson, and left Sherwood to heal at his own speed. He was glad
that the boy had Frannie to look after him. She protected Sherwood fiercely if anyone tried to pick on him.
People soon got the message. They left brother and sister alone, just as they left Will. This slow aftermath was in its way as strange an experience as the events that had preceded it. Once all the hoopla died down (even the Yorkshire
press had given up the story by early February, having nothing to report) life resumed its usual even pace, and it
was as if nothing of any consequence had happened. Of course, there were occasional references made to it
(mainly in the form of sick jokes passed around at school) and in a host of minor ways the village had changed
(it no longer had a butcher, for one; and there were more people at church on Sundays), but the winter months,
which were brutally cold that year, gave people time to either bury their sorrow or talk it through, all behind
doors that were often blocked by drifts of snow. By the time the blizzards receded, folks had finished their
grieving, and were ready for a fresh start.

On the twenty-sixth of February, there was a change in the weather so sudden that it had the quality of a sign. A
strange balm came upon the air, and for the first night in ninety there was no frost. It wouldn't last, the
naysayers at the pub predicted: any plant foolish enough to show its nose would have it nipped off soon enough.
But the next day was just as warm, and the day following, and the day following that. Steadily, the sky began to
clear, so that by the end of the first week of March, it was a gleaming swathe of blue above the valley, busy
with birds; and the naysayers were silenced.

Spring had arrived; the gymnast season, all muscle and motion. Though Will had lived through eleven springs
in the city, they were wan imitations of what he witnessed that month. More than witnessed, felt. His senses
were brimming, the way they'd brimmed that first day outside the Courthouse, when he'd felt such union with
the world. His spirits, which had been downcast for months, finally looked up from his feet and flew.

All was not lost. He had a head full of memories, and hidden amongst them were hints of how he had to proceed
from here: things he knew nobody else in the world would have been able to teach him, and perhaps nobody
else in the world would understand.

Living and dying we feed the fire.

Suppose they were the last.

Jacob in the bird. Jacob in the tree. Jacob in the wolf.

Clues to epiphanies, all of them.

From now on, he would have to look for epiphanies on his own. Find his own moments when the world spun
and he stood still; when it would be as though he was seeing through the eyes of God. And until that time, he
would be the careful son Hugo had asked him to be. He'd say nothing to stir up his mother; nothing to remind
her of how death had followed them. But his compliance would be a pretence. He did not belong to them; not remotely. They would be from this time temporary guardians, from whose side he would slip as soon
as he was able to make his way in the world.

iv

On Easter Sunday, he did something he'd been putting off since the mellowing of the weather. He retraced the
journey he'd taken with Jacob, from the Courthouse to the copse where he'd killed the birds. The Courthouse
itself had the previous year inspired much morbid interest amongst sightseers, and had as a consequence been
fenced off, the wire hung with signs warning trespassers that they would be liable to prosecution. Will was
tempted to scramble under the fence and take a look at the place, but the day was too fine to waste indoors, so
he began to climb. There was a warm gusty wind blowing, herding white clouds, all innocent of rain, down the
valley. On the slopes, the sheep were stupid with spring, and watched him unalarmed, only darting off if he
yelled at them. The climb itself was hard (he missed Jacob's hand at his neck) but every time he paused to look
around, the vista widened, the fells rolling away in every direction.

He had remembered the wood with uncanny accuracy, as though despite his sickness and fatigue - that night his
sight had been preternaturally sharp. The trees were budding now, of course, every twig an arrow aiming high.
And underfoot, blades of brilliant green where there'd been a frosted carpet.

He went straight to the place where he'd killed the birds. There was no trace of them. Not so much as a bone.
But simply standing on the same spot, such a wave of yearning and sorrow passed through him that it made him
gasp for breath. He'd been so proud of what he'd done here. (Wasn't that quick? Wasn't that beautiful?) But now
he felt a bit more ambiguous about it. Burning moths to keep the darkness at bay was one thing, but killing birds
just because it felt good to do so? That didn't feel so brave; not today, when the trees were budding and the sky
was wide. Today it felt like a dirty memory, and he swore to himself there and then that he'd told the story for
the last time. Once Faraday and Parsons had filed away their notes and forgotten them, it would be as though it
had never happened.

He went down on his haunches, to check one final time for evidence of the victims, but even as he did so he
knew he'd invited trouble. He felt a tiny tremor in the air as a breath was drawn, and looked up to see that the
wood itself had not changed in any detail but one. There was a fox a short distance from him, watching him
intently. He stood on all fours like any other fox, but there was something about the way he stared that made Will suspicious. He'd seen this defiant gaze before, from the dubious safety of his bed.

'Go away!' he shouted. The fox just looked at him, unblinking and unmoved. 'D you hear me?' Will yelled at the
top of his voice. 'Shoo!' But what had worked like a charm on sheep didn't work on foxes. Or at least not this
fox.

'Look,' Will said, 'Coming to bother me in dreams is one thing, but you don't belong here. This is the real
world.'

The fox shook its head, preserving the illusion of its artlessness. To any gaze but Will's, it seemed to be
dislodging a flea from its ear. But Will knew better: it was contradicting him.

'Are you telling me I'm dreaming this as well?' he said.

The animal didn't bother to nod. It simply perused Will, amiably enough, while he worked the problem out for
himself. And now, as he puzzled over this curious turn of events, he vaguely recalled something Lord Fox had
mentioned in his rambling. What had he said? There'd been some talk of Russian dolls, but that wasn't it. An
anecdote about a debate with a dog; no, that wasn't it either. There'd been something else his visitor had
mentioned. Some message that had to be passed along. But what? What?

The fox was plainly close to giving up on him. It was no longer staring in his direction, but sniffing the air in
search of its next meal.

'Wait a moment,' Will said. A minute ago, he'd been wanting to drive it away. Now he was afraid it would do as
he'd wished, and go about its business before he'd solved the puzzle of its presence.

'Don't leave yet,' he said to it. 'I'll remember. Just give me a chance-'

Too late. He'd lost the animal's attention. Off it trotted, its brush flicking back and forth.

'Oh, come on-' Will said, rising to follow it. 'I'm trying my best.'

The trees were close together, and in his pursuit of the fox, their bark gouged him and their branches raked his
face. He didn't care. The faster he ran, the harder his heart pumped and the harder his heart pumped the clearer
his memory became

'I'll get it!' he yelled after the fox. 'Wait for me, will you?'

The message was there, on the tip of his tongue, but the fox was outpacing him, weaving between the trees with
astonishing agility. And all at once, twin revelations. One, that this was not Lord Fox he was following, just a
passing animal that was fleeing for its fieabitten life. And two, that the message was to wake, wake from dreams
of foxes, Lords or no, into the world

He was running so fast now, the trees were a blur around him. And up ahead, where they thinned out, was not
the hill but a growing brightness; not the past, but something more painful. He didn't want to go there, but it was
too late to slow his flight, much less halt it. The trees were a blur because they were no longer trees, they'd become the wall of a tunnel, down which he was hurtling, out of memory, out of childhood.

Somebody was speaking at the far end of the tunnel. He couldn't catch hold of precisely what was being said,
but there were words of encouragement, he thought, as though he were a runner on a marathon, being coaxed to
the finishing line.

Before he reached it, however - before he was back in that place of wakefulness - he was determined to take
one last look at the past. Ungluing his eyes from the brightness ahead, he glanced back over his shoulder, and
for a few precious seconds glimpsed the world he was leaving. There was the wood, sparkling in the spring light
- every bud a promise of green to come. And the fox! Lord, there it was, darting away about the business of the
morning. He pressed his sight to look harder, knowing he had only moments left, and it went where he willed,
back the way he'd come, to look down the hillside to the village. One last heroic glance, fixing the sight in all its
myriad details. The river, sparkling; the Courthouse, mouldering; the roofs of the village, rising in slated tiers;
the bridge, the post office, the telephone box from which he'd called Frannie that night long ago, telling her he
was running away.

So he was. Running back into his life, where he would never see this sight again, so finely, so perfectly-
They were calling him again, from the present. 'Welcome back, Will ... somebody was saying to him softly.
Wait, he wanted to tell them. Don't welcome me yet. Give me just another second to dream this dream. The
bells are ringing for the end of the Sunday service. I want to see the people. I want to see their faces, as they
come out into the sun. I want to see-

The voice again, a little more insistent. 'Will. Open your eyes.'

There was no time left. He'd reached the finishing line. The past was consumed by brightness. River, bridge,
church, houses, hill, trees and fox, gone, all gone, and the eyes that had witnessed them, weaker for the passage
of years, but no less hungry, opened to see what he'd become.

He Meets The Stranger
In His Skin

i

'It's going to take time to get you up and moving normally again,' Doctor Koppelman explained to Will a few
days after the awakening.

'But you're still reasonably young, reasonably resilient. And you were fit. All that puts you ahead of the game.'

'Is that what it's going to be?' Will said. He was sitting up in bed, drinking sweet tea.

'A game? No, I'm afraid not. It's going to be brutal some of the time.' 'And the rest?'

'Merely horrendous.'

'Your bedside manner's for shit, you know that?'

Koppelman laughed. 'You'll love it.'

'Says who?'

'Adrianna. She told me you had a distinctly masochistic streak. Loved discomfort, she said. Only happy when
you were up to your neck in swamp-water.'

'Did she tell you anything else?'

Koppelman threw Will a sly smile. 'Nothing you wouldn't be proud of,' he said. 'She's quite a lady.'

'Lady?'

'I'm afraid I'm an old-fashioned chauvinist. I haven't called her with the news, by the way. I thought it'd be
better coming from you.'

'I suppose so,' Will said, without much enthusiasm.

'You want to do it today?'

'No, but leave me the number. I'll get around to it.'

'When you're feeling a little better-' Koppelman looked a little embarrassed. '-I wonder if you'd do me a favour?
My wife's sister Laura works in a bookstore. She's a big fan of your pictures. When she heard I was looking
after you, she practically threatened my life if I didn't get you back to work, happy and healthy. If I brought in a
book, would you sign it for her?'

'It'd be my pleasure.'

'That's good to see.'

' What?'

'That smile. You've got reason to be happy, Mr Rabjohns. I wasn't betting on you coming out of this. You took
your time.'

'I was ... wandering,' Will replied.

'Anywhere you remember?'

'A lot of places.'

'If you want to talk to one of the therapists about it at some point, I'll set it up.'

'I don't trust therapists.'

'Any particular reason?'

'I dated one once. He was the most royally fucked up guy I ever met. Besides, aren't they supposed to take the
pain away? Why the hell would I want that?'

When Koppelman had gone, Will revisited the conversation, or rather the latter part of it. He hadn't thought
about Eliot Cameron, the therapist he'd dated, in a long time. It had been a short affair, conducted at Eliot's
insistence behind locked doors in a hotel room booked under an assumed name. At first the furtiveness had
tickled Will's sense of play, but the secrecy soon began to wear out its welcome, fuelled as it was by Eliot's
shame at his orientation. They had argued often, sometimes violently, the fisticuffs invariably followed by a
sensational bout of love-making. Then had come the publication of Will's first book, Transgressions, a
collection of photographs whose common theme was animal trespassers and their punishment. The book had
appeared without attracting a single review, and seemed destined for total obscurity until a commentator in The
Washington Post took exception to it, using it as an object lesson in how gay artists were tainting public
discourse.

It is tasteless enough, the man had written, that ecological tragedies be appropriated as political metaphor, but
doubly so when one considers the nature of the pleading involved. Mr Rabjohns should be ashamed of himself.
He has attempted to turn these documents into an irrational and self-dramatizing metaphor for the
homosexual's place in America; and in doing so has demeaned his craft, his sexuality and - most unforgivably -
the animals whose dying throes and rotting carcasses he has so obsessively documented.

The piece sparked controversy, and within forty-eight hours Will found himself in the middle of a fiercely
contested debate involving ecologists, gay rights lobbyists, art critics and politicians in need of the publicity. A
strange phenomenon rapidly became evident: that everyone saw what they wanted to see when they looked at
him. For some he was a mudspattered wheel, raging around amongst prissy aesthetes. For others he was simply
a bad boy with good cheekbones and a damn strange look in his eyes. For another faction still he was a sexual
outsider, his photographs of less consequence than his function as a violator of taboos. Ironically, even though
he'd never intended the agenda he'd been accused of promulgating, the controversy had done to him what the
Post piece had claimed he was doing to his subjects: it had turned him into metaphor. In desperate need of some simple
affection, he'd sought out Eliot. But Eliot had decided the spotlight might spill a little light on him, and had
taken refuge in Vermont. When Will finally found his way through the maze the man had left to conceal his
route, Eliot told him it would be better all around if Will left him alone for a while. After all, he'd explained in
his inimitable fashion, it wasn't as if they'd ever really been lovers, was it? Fuck-buddies maybe, but not lovers.

Six months later, while Will was on a shoot on the Ruwenzori massif, an invitation to Eliot's wedding had found
its tortuous way into his hands. It was accompanied by a scrawled note from the groom-to-be saying that he
perfectly understood Will wouldn't be able to make it, but he didn't want him to feel forgotten. Fuelled by an
heroic perversity, Will had packed up the shoot early and flown back to Boston for the wedding. He'd ended up
having a drunken exchange with Eliot's brother-in-law, another therapist, in which he'd loudly and
comprehensively trashed the entire profession. They were the proctologists of the soul, he'd said; they took a
wholly unhealthy interest in other people's shit. There had been a cryptic telephone message from Eliot a week
later, telling Will to keep his distance in future, and that had been the end of Will's experience with therapists.
No, not quite true. He'd had a short fling with the brotherin-law; but that was another adventure altogether. He
had not spoken to Eliot since, though he'd heard from mutual friends that the marriage was still intact. No
children, but several houses.

ii

'How longs this going to take?' Will asked Koppelman next time he came around.

'What, to get you up and about?'

'Up, about and out of here.'

'Depends on you. Depends how hard you work at it.'

'Are we talking days, weeks-?'

'At least six weeks,' Koppelman replied.

'I'll halve it,' Will said. 'Three weeks and I'm gone.'

'Tell your legs that.'

'I already did. We had a great conversation.'

'By the way, I got a call from Adrianna.'

'Shit. What did you tell her?'

'I had no choice but to tell her the truth. I did say you were still feeling woozy, and you hadn't felt like calling
up all your friends, but she wasn't convinced. You'd better make your peace with her.'

'First you're my doctor, now you're my conscience?'

'I am indeed,' he replied gravely.

'I'll call her today.'

She made him squirm.

'Here's me going around in a fucking depression thinking about you lying there in a coma and you're not! You're
awake, and you don't have the fucking time to call me up and tell me?'

'I'm sorry.'

'No you're not. You've never been sorry for anything in your life.'

'I was feeling like shit. I didn't talk to anybody.' Silence. 'Peace?' Still silence. 'Are you still there?'

'Still here.'

'Peace?'

'I heard you the first time: you are an egocentric fucking son of a fucking bitch, you know that?'

'Koppelman said you thought I was a genius.'

'I never said genius. I may have said talented, but I thought you were going to die so I was feeling generous.'

'You cried.'

'Not that generous.'

'Christ, you're a hard woman.'

'All right, I cried. A little. But I will not make that mistake again, even if you feed yourself to a fucking pack of
polar bears.'

'Which reminds me. What happened to Guthrie?'

'Dead and buried. There was an obituary in The Times, believe it or not.'

'For Guthrie?'

'He'd had quite a life. So ... when are you coming back?'

'Koppelman's pretty vague about that right now. It's going to be a few weeks, he says.'

'But you'll come straight home to San Francisco, won't you?'

'I haven't made up my mind.'

'There's a lot of people care about you here. Patrick, for one. He's always asking after you. And there's me, and
Glenn-'

'You're back with Glenn?'

'Don't change the subject. But yes, I'm back with Glenn. I'll open up your house, get it together for you so you
can have a real homecoming.'

'Homecomings are for people who have homes,' Will said. He'd never much liked the house on Sanchez Street;
never much liked any house, in fact.

'So pretend,' Adrianna told him. 'Give yourself some time to kick back.'

'I'll think about it. How is Patrick, by the way?'

'I saw him last week. He's put on some weight since I saw him.'

'Will you call him for me?'

'No.'

'Adrianna

'You call him. He'd like that. A lot. In fact that's how you can make it up to me, by calling Patrick and telling
him you're okay.'

'That is the most fucked up piece of logic.'

'It isn't logic. It's a guilt-trip. I learned it from my mother. Have you got Patrick's number?'

'Probably.'

'No excuses. Write it down. Have you got a pen?' He rummaged for one on the table beside his bed. She gave
him the number and he dutifully jotted it down. 'I'm going to speak to him tomorrow, Will,' Adrianna said. 'And
if you haven't called him there'll be trouble.'

'I'll call him, I'll call him. Jesus.'

'Rafael walked out on him, so don't mention the little fuck's name.'

'I thought you liked him.'

'Oh he knows how to turn on the charm,' Adrianna said, 'but he was just another party-boy at heart.'

'He's young. He's allowed.'

'Whereas we

-are old and wise and full of flatulence.'

Adrianna giggled. 'I've missed you,' she said.

'And quite right too.'

'Patrick's got himself a guru, by the way: Bethlynn Reichle. She's teaching him to meditate. It's quite nostalgic
really. Now when I see Pat we sit cross-legged on the floor, smoke weed and make peace signs at one another.'

'Whatever he's telling you, Patrick was never a flower-child. The summer of love didn't reach Minneapolis.'

'He comes from Minneapolis?'

'Just outside. His father's a pig farmer.'

'What?' said Adrianna, in mock outrage. 'He said his Dad was a landscape artist

-who died of a brain tumor? Yeah, he tells everybody that. It's not true. His Dad's alive and kicking and living in
pigshit in the middle of Minnesota. And making a mint from the bacon business, I might add.'

'Pat's such a lying bastard. Wait till I tell him.'

Will chuckled. 'Don't expect him to be contrite,' he said. 'He doesn't do contrite. How are things going with
Glenn?'

'We putter on,' she said unenthusiastically. 'It's better than a lot of folks have got. It's just not inspired. I always
wanted one grand romance in my life. One that was reciprocated, I mean. Now I think it's too late.' She sighed.
'God, listen to me!'

'You need a cocktail, that's all.'

'Are you allowed to drink yet?'

'I'll ask Bernie. I don't know. Did he try and put the moves on you, by the way?'

'What, Koppelman? No. Why?'

'I just think he was smitten with you, that's all. The way he talks about you.'

'Well why the hell didn't he say something?'

'You probably intimidated him.'

'L'il of me? Nah. I'm a pussy-cat, you know that. Not that I would have said yes if he'd offered. I mean, I've got
some standards. They're low, granted, but I've got 'em and I'm proud of 'em.'

'Have you considered becoming a comedienne?' Will said, much amused. 'You'd probably have a decent career.'

'Does this mean you meant what you said in Balthazar? About giving it all up?'

'I think it's the other way round,' Will said. 'Photography's done with me, Adie. And we've both seen enough
bone-yards for one lifetime.'

'So what happens now?'

'I finish the book. I deliver the book. Then I wait. You know how I like waiting. Watching.'

'For what, Will?'

'I don't know. Something wild.'