The Red Door (50 page)

‘I think, Lord, that I hate you. I hate you for inventing the world and then abandoning it. I hate you because you have not intervened to save the world.

‘I hate you because you are as indifferent as the generals. I hate you because of my weakness.

‘I hate you, God, because of what you have done to mankind.’

He stopped and looked at Colin as if he were asking him, Am I a good preacher or not?

‘You have said,’ said Colin after a long time, ‘exactly what I would have said. I have no wish to . . . ’

‘Betray me? But you are an officer. It is your duty. What else can you do?’

He looked at Colin from the pulpit and for the first time his hands came out from beneath the gown. They were holding a gun.

In the moment before the gun was fired Colin was thinking: How funny all this is. How comical. Here I am in a church which is not like my own church with the golden cross and the effigy of the
Virgin in front of me. Here I am, agreeing with everything he says. And it seemed to him for a moment as if the gold cross wavered slightly in the blast of the gun. But that might have been an
illusion. In any case it was very strange to die in that way, so far from home, and not even on the battlefield. It was so strange that he almost died of the puzzle itself before the bullet hit him
and spun him around in the wooden pew.

He plodded steadily on through the desert. Now and again out of the corner of his eye he could see a wedding or a funeral but he didn’t stop to watch, because they were
so far away and so diminutive. Advertisements in all the colours of the rainbow flashed past him. Some advised him to drink more and others to join the police. One read: Kant needs you for
philosophy. He was not surprised to pass a still life with two oranges and a tomato and at other times to find a sewing machine humming by itself. All the time vultures cast their black shadows
like sails over him. Once he heard two massed choirs, clad in innocent white, singing passionately about a glen: and another time he saw an illuminated horse, with T
ENNANTS
written on it, galloping into the sunset. Later he saw a man and a woman quarrelling. The man raised his fist and the woman began to dance, like a tall red snake, eventually turning into an
advertisement for Cleopatra.

The sun was almost intolerably hot and he didn’t know where he was going. He heard off and on Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture with fragments of the French National Anthem interrupted by
a steely cavalry charge. He had a vision of a soldier climbing the Heights of Abraham in a bloody battle which lasted for five days to the sound of trumpets provided by Louis Armstrong, and placing
at the top, instead of a Union Jack, a stone handbag. Night with its million stars never descended: it was always day and there were no clouds, only a sun which hammered on a steel anvil like a
giant at the opening of a film.

‘Do you love me?’ a voice was saying. The face from which the words issued changed continually. It was like a face from a spy story, made from liquorice, deceptive, and bearing like
a lamp its brilliant smile. Sometimes it said, ‘Do yer luv me?’ Sometimes it said, ‘Love me?’ Sometimes there was a body standing by a car dressed in a dazzling white vest
and white pants. He imagined it was autumn, everything was so brown, and there were hazel nuts on the trees, and a river with dark water which made the sound of crossed telephone conversations. At
other times he thought it was winter and there was a wolf waiting for him while he put flowers in a skull-shaped basket and snowflakes steadily fell.

Sometimes he thought that in front of him there was an enormous mirror, and he saw a saint all in green escaping through a church window. He took off his jacket by a mirage, and rested his
shirt-sleeved arms in it. As the day swirled around him he saw what he had come to see and had been seeing for years, and had been trying to escape from. It sat in the middle of the desert, a chair
and table, and on the table a clock and a packet of cigarettes. The clock made of black wood had a white face. On the table was an exercise book and pen. He sat down in the chair and picked up the
pen and began to write. The vultures flapped angrily round him as if they had been cheated. He wrote in block capitals: W
HAT ONE SEES IS WHAT ONE IS
. He looked at this for a
long time and then began to write: ‘He plodded steadily on through the desert.’

The house seemed solid in the wind and the rain, the gathering darkness. He was returning from the country of advertisements to this simple place in the autumn. His clothes
were old and worn and he looked like a scarecrow. Inside him was the sour taste of insults received, of swine guzzling, of his mouth at the trough. Over and over he kept saying to himself the
speech he had prepared, the part he would play; he would arrange his humble hands, his body like an arched bow.

In the stormy autumn day he could see no one, not his brother, not his father. The land too looked strange and dark and foreign. He did not feel as if he was going home. He felt rather as if he
were about to endure a sentence passed on him by a judge whom he did not know. He remembered large illuminated shops, prostitutes, people as bright as robins going home with Christmas presents.
Nailed to the slatted bench, he would see their legs, their trousers, their skirts, his own broken boots like windows. He had left those lights to enter the storm which was always there, swirling
about the bowed cottages, the battered plants. He walked on, his speech tolling in his head. There were no hens in the yard, there were no cattle or sheep to be seen. The land looked old and brown
and there were no trees anywhere.

He went up to the scarred door and knocked without thinking. There was no answer. He opened the door and entered. There was an old chair in front of him at an angle to an old dresser. He looked
at the chair, wondering what it was doing there in that particular space. That wasn’t where it used to be. It was gaunt and tall and wooden, with no cushion or softness of cloth about it. The
dark and white air moved about it. He looked at the dresser with the tiers of plates rising about it.

After a while he went up to his own room. The toys were still there, disarranged as if the storm had got at them. There were old fairy stories among them. Westerns. He sat down amongst them, the
trail of days without consciousness. A rocking horse swayed dustily when he touched it. He turned away from the mirror.

He began to repeat his speech to himself. ‘I was young and foolish, I did not know. I wished to make money and find fame.’ His unshaven face stubbled like a cornfield moved slightly
as he spoke through the gaps in his teeth. He was practising his role. Outside the windows the moon rose like a balloon at a feast, frail, stormily trailing from a loop of cloud. The wind howled in
the chimney: the rain lashed the windows. He could not bear to look at the road.

‘No,’ he thought, ‘I shan’t go back there. It’s too late.’ And at that moment he changed his role. He began to speak with his father’s voice. ‘You
can’t leave. We have work to do. We have something to build up.’ Frenziedly he began to tidy the room, to arrange the toys. He went through the whole house like a storm, tidying,
arranging, dusting. He arranged the photographs, chairs, tables, flicked away spiders’ webs. Scrubbed. He found a lamp and lit it. He felt as if he were holding a fort against a siege by the
darkness. He moved about the house, the light in his hand. He washed and cleaned himself.

After a long time he sat down at the table and took out the Bible and began to read it. He read it aloud as if there were some people listening to him; he took pride in his reading. The room was
clean and lit. Everything was shaped and new and clear. Beyond the house the wind and the rain raged and the moon veered drunkenly about the sky. Eventually, however, the wind died down and the
moon steadied, shining with a hard marbly light like a big white stone.

When he had read the passage from the Bible he went upstairs to bed, walking with a stately, heavy, dignified stride, solid and diminished. He hadn’t been able to find a calendar but he
would find one. He lay beneath the sheet which shone white in the darkness. He stretched out his legs. The moon made the whole floor appear white and hard as if it were made of stone. The rocking
horse with its small beady eyes was still. He padded across the room and pulled the curtains aside. There was no one on the road. In the far distance he could hear the voice of the stream and see
the white shapeless boulders. He walked back to the bed exactly like his father. He fell asleep quite quickly.

Starving and in rags he came out of the dark cave and, dazzled, confronted the sea from whose blueness and greenness the light bounded. He gazed with lacklustre eyes at the
seaweed which swayed languidly to and fro in the water, smelling the tart brine and the hot stink of flowers in the very hot day. He scrambled upwards among the large boulders and the tall thistles
towards the road and as he did so he saw the seagulls lying dead all around him. With worn boots he began to kick them away down into the sea below. There were hundreds of them, dirty and covered
with dust. Further up he came on a dead rabbit and various dead birds. He looked at them all without comprehension, merely walking over them and kicking them aside. There was dust on the thistles,
on the thyme, on the pink weeds which looked like foxgloves, on the marigolds. He climbed steadily, puffing angrily. He hadn’t eaten for a long time and not even the whelks he had found at
the beginning had sustained him much. He was ready to give up: his body knew it. He was ready to go back there. And that was what he was doing. But the dead seagulls and the other birds disturbed
him. And the silence. There were no bird sounds at all and when he got on to the road there were no cars. The only sound to be heard was that of the sea and an underground river. Otherwise nothing
at all. It was very strange.

No cars at all passed him in either direction as he made his way towards the town. However, he came on many stationary cars. Some were parked in lay-bys, drivers and passengers lying back in
their seats as if asleep. Some seemed to have stopped in the middle of the road: some looked as if they had crashed. One had its roof open and when he looked inside he saw bloody heads as if
something had been at them. He couldn’t understand any of it. His boots left clear marks in the dust which lay everywhere, even on the trees and the berries which grew at the side of the
road. He plodded steadily on. And all the time he was frightened by the silence. There were no insect sounds, no ordinary hummings of the day.

Still it was better than the darkness of the cave, waiting for people to come after him in the middle of the night with torches. With needles. And worse than needles. With their strange busy
voices, high like the voices of birds. Why couldn’t they leave him alone? He walked on through the dust. More stationary abandoned cars, motor-cycles, bicycles, dead people on the roads. And
the dazzling white stone ahead of him. On a day without sound, without scent. He touched his face: it was bearded. He felt unwashed and sweaty. He missed the music too: they used to let him have
his transistor. More dead rabbits, dead people, dead birds. More dust.

Till finally he came to the large notice which said W
ELCOME TO
. . . He couldn’t make out the name of the town because it was covered with dust. He made his way
past the first hotel into the town. And then for the first time he met them – the rats. The place seethed with them. They were like waves of grey water. And it was as if they were waiting for
him. He sensed an intelligence hostile to him, a bright glittering intelligence. A knot of them crouched around him, they seemed to have no fear. He picked up a large stone and broke the back of
one of them. They immediately savaged it. And then they moved back a little, watching him, an obscene vibrant circle. They seemed very patient, enigmatic, almost humorous. He cleared a space and
picked up more stones angrily as if he were being hemmed in, but they drew back as if they sensed that they had plenty of time. Now he could see skeletons everywhere, skeletons of dogs, skeletons
of people. He walked past the shops among the seething rats, gathering round him but not attacking. Sometimes he would lash out with a worn boot and one of them would give a high-pitched scream
like a child.

He passed the bookshop with all the books in the window. The door was open and there were rats inside the shop. Some were sitting round the books looking out at him with that extraordinary
quizzical look, whiskers quivering. The shop floor was a tangle of gnawed magazines and newspapers. He walked past the newsagent’s to the jeweller’s. Here the shop window, hung with
necklaces and watches, was empty of rats. The rats approached him on the street and he screamed and kicked at them in a frenzy of hatred, or threw stones. More and more cars with skeletons at the
wheels. More and more skeletons at shop counters, wire baskets at their sides. A cart with a skeleton of a horse. He looked up towards the roof of the church. Were there rats stationed there,
waiting?

He came to a grocer’s. In the window he saw fruits of various kinds, and tins of food. The door of this place was shut too and the rats hadn’t got in. He stopped at the door. The
rats were all around him in a ring but not advancing. He rushed at them screaming and mouthing curses, foaming at the mouth. Again they retreated in a seething wave of grey, and this gave him
enough time to get through the door, except that two of the rats managed to get in. He looked frantically round the shop and found a big window pole with which he chased them, determined to destroy
them. He set out after them screaming. He hated them with a terrible hatred. Nothing less would satisfy him than that he should smash them into pulp. They jumped frantically about but he was so
enraged, so clear in his mind, that he caught them one after the other and beat them into a slimy mess. When he had finished he stood panting at the counter. When he looked out the window the other
rats were perched on the outside, still looking in at him. They had watched it all and they were waiting.