Crooked Vows (7 page)

When Sabas had been ten years in this monastery, being eighteen years old, with the leave of his abbot, he went to Jerusalem to visit the holy places, and to edify himself by the examples of the eminent solitaries of that country. He passed the winter in the monastery of Passarion, governed at that time by the holy abbot Elpidius. All the brethren were charmed with his virtue, and desired earnestly that he should fix his abode among them; but his great love of silence and retirement made him prefer the manner of life practised by Saint Euthymius. He cast himself at the feet of that holy abbot, conjuring him with many tears to receive him among his disciples.

When he was thirty years of age he obtained leave of Saint Euthymius to spend five days a-week in a remote cave, which time he passed, without eating anything, in prayer and manual labour. He left his monastery on Sunday evening, carrying with him palm-twigs, and came back on Saturday morning with fifty baskets which he had made, imposing upon himself a task of ten a-day. Thus he had lived five years, till Saint Euthymius chose him and one Domitian for his companions in his great yearly retreat in the deserts of Rouban, in which Christ is said to have performed his forty days' fast.

They entered the solitude together on the 14th January, and returned to their monastery on Palm Sunday. In the first retreat Sabas fell down in the wilderness, almost dead from thirst. Saint Euthymius, moved by compassion, addressed a prayer to Christ, that he would take pity on his young fervent soldier, and, striking his staff into the earth, a spring gushed forth; of which Sabas, drinking a little, recovered his strength so as to be enabled to bear the fatigues of his retreat.

Macpherson intervenes.

'No doubt there is more, but we might leave the story here.'

Thomas closes the book and lays it on the bulky leather-covered armrest of the chair. The doctor leans forward, elbows on the desk.

‘That's fine. Now close your eyes and relax. You read that story only a few weeks ago. Think yourself back into that time, that place. You put the story of Saint Sabas down, and you look around. What do you see? What do you feel, or hear, or smell?'

Thomas sinks back in his chair. He feels the smooth leather surface of the chair-back. And remembers. There is something different against his back: something massive and rough. An enormous tree trunk. Behind closed eyelids he looks around. Trees are all around him: giants of a size he has never imagined. Sitting on the ground with his back against one of them, he looks up the trunk of another directly in front of him. It has a few feet of rough bark near the ground, and above that it is smooth and pale. The smooth pale trunk goes up a long way; he can't guess how far it is up to the first branch. Maybe seventy feet, maybe eighty, maybe even a hundred. He had no idea that such trees existed.

Macpherson prompts.

‘That's good. Now look around a little further. What else do you see? Or hear, or smell?'

Smell, yes. The smell of smoke. Not wood smoke, more like burning oil. And something else. A smell like burned meat. Charred black. Horrible. He pauses for a few moments, eyes still shut.

Of course. How can all of this have fallen out of his memory? He looks at the main section of the plane—or what is left of it. The wing on the near side has been ripped off completely, and most of the remnants of it are wrapped around one of the immense tree-trunks. Smoke is pouring out of jagged holes in the larger part of the fuselage, and a few flames, but nothing like the smoke and flames of half an hour earlier. The rear section is a short distance further away, clear of the fire. We were at the back and we escaped alive. The others—he can almost taste the harsh smell of the burning flesh now. And hear the roaring of the flames. And the screaming—the intolerable screaming. As if people are being torn apart into small pieces. It goes on and on. He doesn't know how long it is before the screaming finally dies away. He feels the horror of the pain, the terror of the others, trapped inside the mass of roaring flames and black smoke.

Macpherson interrupts the flow of memory. There is a more urgent tone in his voice than before.

‘“We”'. You said “We have escaped alive”. Who else is there?'

‘There is a girl. A young woman.' Thomas stretches, finds a more comfortable angle for his legs.

‘Does she have a name? Do you know her name?'

Thomas hesitates.

‘Not at this moment. I only found out her name later.'

‘Well, then. To be true to your memories we should for the moment just think of her as a young woman. But how do you come to be sitting against a tree?

Thomas shuts out the immediate scene: the shelves packed with serious books, the big desk with the older man leaning forward over it. He has a vague memory of staggering away from the wreckage of the tail section, looking down and finding he is clutching his book, still open at the story of Saint Sabas. Of course. He was reading it in the plane when the engines abruptly cut out.

Cries for help come from the main section of the fuselage, but as he approaches it suddenly bursts into flames. For a few seconds he is unable to move, unable to decide what to do. The blaze flares up more fiercely. The calls for help change to agonised screams, but a blast of heat forces him to back well away.

As he circles around the wreck, frantically looking for an opening to make a rescue dash in, the fire swiftly engulfs the whole plane, dense black smoke churning skywards in an ominous column. He watches with horror as a face appears momentarily at one of the windows: a woman's face, surrounded by flames, hideously distorted by pain and terror, mouth open to let out an inhuman soundless shriek, silenced by the roar of the burning wreck. Then she disappears within the inferno. This is hell, he thinks, and she is trapped without any possible way out. His sense of helplessness becomes unbearable as does his certainty that he has to run for his life before he, too, is overwhelmed by the conflagration.

He reaches safety fifty or sixty metres from the disaster. With heaving chest and thumping heart, he drops to the ground behind a huge tree trunk, crouching, eyes tightly closed, hands over his ears, trying to shut out the dreadful reality. But there is no way of escaping the hideous mixture of smells from burning fuel, plane parts and human flesh. A long time later, he has no idea how long, he becomes aware that the noise has abated and the flames have subsided into a smoking tangle of wreckage.

Macpherson sits back in his chair, his eyes fixed on a point on the wall somewhere above Thomas's head.

‘And the young woman. Where is she, and what is she doing?'

Thomas remembers finally opening his eyes, looking around and seeing her sitting on a log a few yards away. He can picture her quite distinctly, this first moment of focusing on her. She might be much the same age as himself. She is wearing a short-sleeved shirt, showing rather slight shoulders and arms. His attention is drawn to her legs. Weeping silently, she has pulled up her blue and white skirt a little way to rub her left leg, and winces as she rubs it.

An impulse comes over him to walk to her, to speak to her, to try to do something to console her. But what would be the right thing to do? Should he sit down close beside her? He should say something—but what? Should he put his hand on her hand, or on her shoulder, or an arm around both shoulders? He notices her hair—fair, and quite short. Should he touch her head? The situation is so far outside his experience. He can't make the first tentative move towards doing any of these things. He can't even imagine himself doing any of them. Someone else, yes, he can visualise that. But himself—he feels a paralysis of indecision.

Macpherson prompts. ‘Please tell me about what happened next. Or what happens now: that is the way to think about it.'

Thomas sits back in his chair, closes his eyes, and takes himself back to the remembered scene. He is standing, feeling a tremor in his legs, taking shaky steps towards the rear section of the plane. There are two people—two bodies—among the twisted and torn debris on the ground between the sections of the fuselage. Are they complete bodies? He tries to turn away from them as he passes, but can't control the impulse to look. Confronting him are torn faces, heads caved in, half a leg, an arm missing, scorched, blackened. Blood. The horror is like nothing he has felt before. There is a churning nauseous feeling in his stomach. He looks away, trying to see no more, trying to control what he is feeling.

He clambers through the jagged opening into the tail section of the plane, looking for something. What is he looking for?

The rear seats, one on each side of the narrow aisle, are more or less intact. Behind the seats is a bulkhead with a narrow access door which has sprung open from the impact; and behind the bulkhead is the baggage compartment. Cases, boxes and bags of various shapes and sizes, some intact, some split apart, spilling a jumble of clothing, shoes, belongings of all sorts, across the small space.

His own rigid black case has sprung open, disgorging grey and white striped pyjamas, spare collars, black socks, black trousers, white shirts, a black cardigan in case of cool south-coast weather, white underwear. They stand out against the jumble of brighter colours spilling out of other passengers' baggage: holiday clothes, mostly. He stuffs his own belongings back into the case and closes it, and continues rummaging through the confusion.

At the back of the small baggage compartment, under a scatter of clothing spilled from a split suitcase, something different appears: two rucksacks, well filled, with heavy walking boots tied to them. The preparations for a pre-Christmas hiking holiday that is not going to happen. He drags them out of the ruins of the plane and carries them back to the log on which the young woman is still sitting, moving them one at a time; they are heavy. He is anxious to sit on the log at an appropriate distance from her, but unsure what distance would be right. He picks a spot tentatively, a metre away, worrying that this might be too close. Putting the rucksacks on the ground, he sits on the log, and rubs his hands together between his knees.

She looks towards the smoking ruins of the plane and shudders. There are tears spilling down her cheeks.

‘Those poor people.' She sobs, takes a deep breath, and steadies the tremor in her voice with an effort.

‘What a terrible way to die. And us, being here, seeing, hearing everything—but no way to help.'

Thomas turns away from her, silent for a moment. ‘I couldn't … I can't …'

He is unable to continue, unwilling to revive and confront in his mind the sights and sounds of horror, so turns his attention instead to the baggage he has retrieved.

The two begin sorting through the contents of the packs. The boots are too big to fit either of them. They pull out socks, men's underwear, shorts, shirts. Near the bottom of both packs some more basic essentials appear. Standard hiking rations: nuts, dried fruit, biscuits. And water bottles. Half a dozen small bottles in total, but only two of them are filled. He tries to estimate how long that much water will last. It will surely be finished tomorrow.

Thomas clambers back into the tail section of the plane to retrieve his own belongings as well as the young woman's travel bag. He returns to the log and they sit for a few minutes in silence.

She turns slowly to him, breaking the silence after a few moments of hesitation. Her voice is unsteady, almost inaudible. There is a sharp edge of fear in it.

‘What can we do? Where are we? Do you have any idea? What direction could we go for help?'

Thomas shakes his head, looks around the small clearing where they are sitting. There are colossal trees in all directions; massive trunks in the foreground, and behind and between them more and more, receding into the background until any distant view is completely blocked out. The fear in her voice focuses his attention on their danger. Is it possible that he has survived the crash and the inferno to die slowly of thirst and exposure? The muscles across his shoulders are tense. The hairs on the back of his neck are standing up.

The crash site slopes up on one side towards the top of what must be a small hill. He stands abruptly, speaks abruptly. He'll walk up to the top of this hill. Possibly he'll see further afield from there. Maybe there are farms, or a house or at least something to give them an idea of where they are. He'll only be a few minutes.

He trudges up the slope, picking his way over long-fallen branches and around the buttressed bases of the enormous trees, aware of the awkwardness of his feet in their black, thick-soled shoes over the uneven terrain. However it's not a long climb, and the view from the top gives him at least a little of what he's been hoping for. One of the biggest of the trees has fallen, toppling down the other side of the hill, opening up a clear line of sight in that direction. Thomas looks out between the ranks of standing trunks on each side, and sees that the terrain changes suddenly and radically beyond the foot of the slope. The ground is flat, low-lying, covered with scrub rather than tall trees, stretching to a distant line of brilliant white marking the horizon. Coastal dunes. Here and there, where the line of the dunes dips lower, there are slivers of blue. The sea. He stands at the top of the hill scanning the scene fruitlessly for any sign of human presence. To left and right the low scrub is unbroken by cleared land or fences or buildings or roads as far as he can see. Wilderness. He shivers in spite of the warmth of the early summer afternoon.

Thomas picks his way back down the slope to where the young woman is still sitting on the log, rubbing her leg. She looks up at him, asks, with the same tense, sharp edge in her voice, what he found. Could he see any houses?

He shakes his head. No sign of people at all. But he could see through the trees to the sand dunes and the sea. At least they know they're near the coast.