August (2 page)

The car lurched and he was thrown into her. She screamed out, a blood-curdling challenge to the silence.

‘Sorry.'

His pain had grown indistinct, moving silently through the body like water searching out its leak. She blew hot air into his face. He could feel her forehead hot and clammy against his cheek. The rector had not prepared him for this.

‘So?'

‘Door's jammed.'

‘Yeah.'

‘Yeah.'

Tristan pulled at his mind seeking the ends of a conversation, but it swelled smooth and indistinct with pain. He waited.

‘I smell bad,' she said.

‘Doesn't matter.'

‘It matters to me,' she said.

‘There are better things to worry about.'

‘Like?'

‘Mortality.'

‘We just have to wait until it's light,' she said. ‘Then we'll be able to see what we're dealing with.'

‘Or someone will see us, from up on the road,' Tristan added, as one adds kindling to a fire, hoping to draw out the blaze. They were close now, to talking.

She rearranged herself so that the full weight of her head was against his cheek. As if they were on a date, wordlessly happy beneath a star-spattered sky. Beyond the piss and shit and blood and burning he found another smell. The smell of her, seeping through her pores, speaking to him. There was a way of making nothing else matter. The easterners had called it meditation, the schoolmen prayer. In the dormitories, where the boys whispered, its name was woman.

She wriggled and her elbow found a broken rib. The pain of it emptied his bladder. Tristan felt the warm trickle running over his stomach. Soon it would reach her.

‘Tell me how you got here,' she said.

‘The same way you got here. We skidded. The rest is physics.'

‘Before that,' she pressed. ‘What were you doing out in a car looking for a prostitute?'

It was impolite of her, to mention it. He had been prepared to pretend. For her sake as well as his.

‘Come on,' she prompted. ‘It's not like you're going to shock me.'

Tristan pressed his lips together, tasting blood again.

‘What do you want me to say?' he asked. Ridiculous that a suffering body would find the resources to make him blush, but he felt the familiar heat.

‘Tell me what you were thinking. Tell me why tonight. Was it to learn? I think that's it. You've fallen in love with a girl, and you want to appear experienced.'

He was in love. Three years it had been. But she was wrong.

‘You wouldn't understand.'

‘Explain it then.' Her voice was gentler.

‘It's a long story.'

‘The night will be longer.'

‘I hope you're right.'

There were things he would not tell her, that much he knew. Parts of his story once released into the world would never return, and without them he would be smaller. Five hours earlier that had not mattered to him.

He would not tell her of five hours earlier. The cold sweat as he buckled in, fastening himself to the evening ahead. The drive out into the wastelands, to these very mountains. He would not tell her of the way he followed the illuminated side strip through the settling mist, lost in the trance of switchback on switchback, or of piercing the cloud and seeing, across the eerie white glow of the valley, the great statue rising up above the fog, dominating the City. The Saint: calm, severe, glowing white,
Submission and Salvation
inscribed in the plaque at its feet. He could remember the first time he had read those words for himself.

Tristan would not speak of the way the cold seeped in beneath a stranger's jacket as he stood at the lookout and contemplated his future, or of the way the heathen settlements hummed on the horizon, hot and hopeful.

He wouldn't tell her of the strange calm he felt, standing and stamping to return the circulation to his aching feet. Of how it felt to cruise the streets, the pressing excitement as he practised again the words that would undo him.
What will
tonight cost me?
As if he didn't know.

He would not explain to her the way her scent filled the car, or that he could remember to the millimetre the point on her thigh where her dress ended, and how that point rose as she settled against the leather. How his throat went dry, or the way his knee locked as he fought to control the shaking in his leg. And that moment when everything he believed and everything he knew shook and shimmered, the animal within shifting its weight, preparing to pounce. He could not tell her of the fear, the perfect fear. That was his alone.

Tristan felt a sharp stabbing behind his right eye, a pulsing of pain that jumped like static to the back of his skull and exploded in a flash of light. Then it was gone. He strained to take hold of his story, as a drowning man might take hold of a rope. He was determined to drag them both through the night.

‘I don't know where to start,' he said.

‘At the beginning.'

‘I was born.'

‘And then what?'

‘When I was three, my mother died.'

He felt her head moving against his, as if she was making herself more comfortable for listening, or perhaps to empty her ear of liquid. She would not mention it and he would not ask; already rules were developing.

‘Were those events related?' she asked.

‘They were to me. They said it was the toxins. We lived in the workers' quarter.'

‘I can tell,' she said.

‘How?'

‘The way you talk.'

‘I've spent ten years trying to hide it.'

‘It's not long enough. Come on, your story.'

‘You have to stop interrupting me.'

‘Why?'

‘Because it hurts,' he told her, and he was not lying. The words came so puny and sharp he needed all his strength to keep them flowing.

Tristan's Story

By the age of six Tristan knew every dip and twist of the quarter's broken streets. While his father worked at the water treatment plant beyond the swamplands Tristan ran errands for Father Carmichael, delivering the priest's potions to the sick and dying. They paid in coins worn smooth with worry, and Tristan grew up with the smell of death never far from his nose. His father said the workers' quarter had been that way since the war.

Tristan danced down pock-marked streets, proud of the speed with which he could negotiate them. The roads in this part of the City of God weren't worth fixing; there was only the occasional delivery truck to worry about and the procession of floats on the holy days. What little fuel there was, gained in secret negotiations with the outside world, was controlled by the Holy Council, and its drivers had no business to attend to here. It was like living in another century now, Tristan's father said, and the words split his tongue, as if they were coated in acid. He thought he kept his pain hidden from the boy, but Tristan's nature was watchful from the start.

Tristan arrived breathless at the door of Madame Grey's house and banged a rhythm with his fists. Madame Grey was known throughout the quarter; short, wide and regal, she rolled through the streets as if she owned them. She called her home a boarding house but hospice was a better word. There was a bed there for those who could find no other place to die.

Somehow the diseases Madame Grey invited into her home found no quarrel with her. The other boys claimed she was magic, but then Tristan had claimed the same himself for the fun of it, so who knew where the truth lay? From the day of Tristan's first delivery his father had warned him never to set foot inside her house. But the warmth of her hand, the yielding of her great soft bosom when she hugged him, the smell that he imagined other boys found in their mothers—there were days he had turned down her invitation with tears in his eyes.

The door opened. Even with advantage of the small step Madame Grey had no more than a head on Tristan. Her hair was long and greasy, some strands black, others whitening, each falling where it would so that her eyes were veiled and she had to cock her head to look at him.

‘Tristan. What do you have for me?'

‘A package for Mr Simpson, Ma'am,' Tristan said, bobbing his head down in careful respect. He did not know why he did this. No one had ever told him to, but each time he faced her he felt it happening.

‘Mr Simpson passed in the night, Tristan.'

Tristan looked to his feet and muttered a reflexive prayer.

‘But no point it going to waste,' Madame Grey smiled. She thrust out her hand, her one visible eye daring him to argue. Tristan knew what was in the bag: he had seen the priest measuring it out. A dried herb for the pain, shredded like wood shavings, its scent sweet and pungent.

‘There will be others, Tristan, who can use it just as well. It will save you coming back here tomorrow.' With her other hand she pressed a carefully folded note into his small palm.

‘You are a good boy, that he can trust you in this way. A little extra for a prayer, Tristan, and say one for him yourself. May his soul reach heaven too quick for the devil.'

She touched her forehead in the customary manner and Tristan did the same.

There was movement within and Madame Grey pulled back to the shadows. Two young men, sleeves rolled up, manoeuvred Mr Simpson's gaunt frame through the doorway. Their hands were at his shoulders and his head lolled back, stretching the neck until Tristan was sure it should snap. Tristan backed away, both appalled and fascinated by the way the exposed skin dented to every touch and how the dead man's gums had receded, making his yellowed teeth appear unnaturally long. One of the men noted Tristan's interest and offered a conspiratorial leer.

Tristan turned and ran towards the darkening sky. There was rain coming. That was good. When it rained Father Carmichael let the boys shelter in the choir loft. When it rained Tristan got to watch the service.

The church was small and spare, well matched to its congregation. Tristan looked down on their ailing heads, the exposed scalps dry and flaking. Only those who could no longer work attended daytime services, and those who could not work did not have long to make their peace with God. There were four other errand boys in the loft. They busied themselves with the usual games, bruising the air with silent farts and shaping obscenities with their fingers. Tristan played along, but his mind was on the lilting sermon. He watched Father Carmichael's bony figure turn, splendid in its priestly robes, and heard his voice grow strong with authority. Father Carmichael was a man who mattered. When he spoke others listened. The exact opposite of Tristan's father.

Tristan loved his father, but he did not wish to become like him. He knew he would not be strong enough to carry the suffering.

Tristan looked at
The Holy Works
open on the altar, its pages extending wider than his young arms could reach. A person who could read a book like that would never need worry about his place in the world. A man with knowledge like that would never go hungry.

After the service, Tristan followed the priest into the sacristy.

‘Excuse me, Father.'

The old man turned.

‘Tristan, what are you doing back here?'

‘I have come to ask a favour.'

‘And what favour might that be?'

Tristan paused, understanding at once how important the answer would be.

‘I would like you to teach me to read, Father, please.'

Father Carmichael looked away as if he did not trust his first reaction and returned to the task of folding his vestments. Tristan watched the priest's hands. He had not noticed them before. The knuckles were sculpted huge by arthritis, making claws of the fingers. The skin though was smooth like a child's.

‘What good do you think such learning would do, Tristan?'

Still the priest did not meet the young boy's eyes.

Tristan considered the question carefully.

‘Will you die soon?' he asked.

‘I expect so.' A smile took hold of Father Carmichael's face. ‘But that does not answer my question.'

‘I will not die soon,' Tristan explained. ‘I am young. That is why you should teach me to read. That is the good it will do.'

Father Carmichael crouched and ruffled Tristan's hair. He stared, as if he had never seen a boy's face before. Tristan hopped from one foot to the other, bursting with not knowing.

‘What will your father say?'

‘I don't know. I think he might be pleased.'

Father Carmichael shook his head and Tristan saw sadness in his eyes.

‘You must ask him first. I need his permission. Do you understand?'

Tristan nodded.

‘And I cannot teach you if you do not practise. Do you promise me you will practise every day?'

‘Yes.'

‘Are there books in the house for you to practise on?'