Heaven's Edge (10 page)

‘What's that roar? What is it?' Jaz tugged at my sleeve, terrified.

A phalanx of molten spears engulfed us as the rain hit the vehicle, ploughing the earth bund and churning the waters of the tank.

‘Rain,' Kris bellowed. ‘It's only rain.'

I had never driven in rain like that. I was sure the bund would disintegrate and we'd go into the lake. I turned off and drove down away from it, between large granite boulders
that I could just about see. On the flat we came to a broken enclosure of a colossal rock. I stopped the vehicle. ‘There's a cave,' Jaz hollered. The downpour seemed to double; the pounding on the roof was deafening. I picked up a flashlight. Kris clipped another flashlight to his belt, next to his knife, and picked up his gun.

I led the way, sprinting.

Inside was dry, and the roar at least was not right in our ears. I shone the torch around the cave: there were remains of walls, stone plinths and neatly cut shelves. While I looked around, uncertain as to what to do next, Kris stripped off his clothes. ‘Hey,' Jaz started, wide-eyed, as Kris swung, naked, back into the rain. ‘Is he having a wash now?' Jaz's voice rose to the light, irrepressible falsetto he liked to play with.

When Kris reappeared he had a small plastic bottle of rainwater, and a sponge. He handed the bottle to Jaz, and then stepped aside to wipe himself with the sponge.

I pointed the light at it. ‘This you can drink,' I said to Jaz.

He swallowed the rainwater in big noisy gulps. Then he went over to Kris and took the sponge from him. ‘Thank you, Kris,' he said drying his back for him, tenderly.

The cave was large and had clearly been made into some sort of a temple. It felt safe, perhaps because it offered us shelter. Sitting there though, despite the dark, I felt there was something more to it. Something more benign.

When the rain finally eased, we collected the seat-pads from the cruiser, and some coverings, and brought them into the cave. I sat up on a ledge, watching over the other two, as they settled in a huddle like children.

I was exhausted but my body would not unwind. I remember thinking one of us ought to stay up on guard, even though I wasn't sure what good it would do. I stared
out as though by looking I could make Uva appear. I wanted to pray for her and wished I knew how. I wish I knew now, remembering.

The air seemed to cool as the storm moved further away. I reached over and adjusted the blanket that had slipped off Jaz's bare round shoulder. He was sound asleep.

 

I woke up remembering my grandfather crying. It was the last spring before the years of our evergrowing shadows, more unsettled than anyone had expected.

On that late May day, in the gardens along the Thames, everybody's roses were in bloom. The sun was bright, but the sky hazy and the roar of jet planes coming in to land seemed louder for their invisibility. I was spending a few days with my grandparents while my mother was away at one of her innumerable conferences. Blackbirds were chi-chi-ing incessantly and the maroon roses on the straggly branches, too high up the neighbour's wall for my grandfather to reach, blossomed where the sun had warmed the buds into heavy blooms with ball gown pleats and voluminous petals. My grandfather was resting on his rustic oak bench, feasting his eyes on the butterfly florescence of a deliciously yellow laburnum tree. It was mid-afternoon. The garden was a riot of colour. Eldon, nearly eighty years old, seemed completely at peace.

‘Granda, are you going?' I asked.

‘Where?'

‘To the show.'

He had been looking at a newspaper article on the Chelsea
flower show. ‘I don't think so. It's not for people like me. Anyway, the crowds will tire me out.' He sighed, as he often did, and lit another cigarette. He turned the page to the cricket which was his other restorative. His team – the old home team – was on a roll.

‘You want to play with the hosepipe?' He pointed a crumpled cigarette at a spool of green plastic tubing by the fence. ‘Those roses need water.' His tone suggested that the sight of the spray would revive him too: a gushing pipe in warm, still air. ‘Pull it out.'

On my way over, I spotted a mound of crumbly brown earth at the border of the lawn. I plucked a dandelion and poked at it with the furry stem.

‘What have you found?' Eldon called out. ‘Don't you want the hose?'

I reluctantly left the colony of alarmed ants and got hold of the pipe.

‘Turn the tap on,' he instructed from his resting place. ‘There is a control on the nozzle.'

The tap squeaked in my hand and bubbled. Stepping over a line of seedling cabbage, I unwound the hosepipe. A dribble from where the crosshatched plastic was locked into the red ring wet my feet. ‘It's coming, Granda,' I shouted holding down the trigger with both hands and tracing a silver line to the edge of his oval lawn. Water poured into the dry earth of the flower bed like a river. A muddy puddle quickly formed and a rich gurgle filled the garden.

‘Turn it some more so you get a proper spray.'

I wanted to run the water to the ants. A little trench quickly filled; a dark foaming head slithered towards the nest.

‘Do the roses, Marc. The roses. Give each bush a good
minute and a half. Count to a hundred, then move to the next.'

All of a sudden my arms went limp. I wanted to cry. ‘Granda, do ants drown?'

For a moment he looked blank, as though he was trying to work out whether ants breathed. Whether they had noses and nostrils. Lungs that might fill with water. Whether their tiny legs would flail, splashing about, before they sank down beneath the surface. He gazed at me as though I was somebody else. ‘Yes, son. Yes, I suppose they do.'

‘Have you ever killed an ant, Granda?' I wanted his hand to give mine the strength I could not find.

‘You mean deliberately?' He hunched his shoulders as though he was in a fighter plane, like my father, swooping down, with the gun muzzles on the wing blades jabbering neat lines of dust-puffs to match the spasms of a dying column. ‘I never flew even the Hurricanes,' he muttered.

I didn't understand. ‘What hurry cranes?' I asked.

‘I mean not into combat,' he added absently. ‘But what did you ask?'

‘If you ever killed an ant.'

‘No, never. Never deliberately.'

I was wondering about accidents when Grandma Cleo called out, ‘Eldon, telephone.'

He heard her, but it took him some time to return from his reverie.

‘Eldon, telephone for you.'

‘Right.'

I watched him stub his cigarette out on the side of the garden bench and slowly struggle to his feet. I followed him into the house.

‘Who is it?' he asked.

Cleo shrugged, spooning sugar. ‘Markee, you see nobody
pass here …' she sang to me instead, weaving the lilt of her childhood into mine.

Eldon waved a hand dismissively and picked up the telephone. ‘Hello. Yes. Speaking.' I could see him press the receiver hard against his ear. ‘Can you repeat that, please.' He shifted the receiver to his other side. Then I saw his whole body shrink until there seemed to be nothing left inside.

Beyond the French windows a robin hopped around the ivy and opened its beak; the spring in its throat uncoiled in a shrill insistent song. I looked back at my grandfather; he was clutching the back of a chair. ‘Are you sure it was his plane?' He waited for the crackle in the receiver to cease. Then he put the phone down.

I ran up to him and grabbed his hand. ‘Why you crying, Granda?'

I received no answer at the time.

With fire we live, with fire we die. There is no going back. In the crematorium my grandfather's coffin, my mother's and my grandmother's vanished behind a motorised curtain in a succession of heartbreak, suicide and old age; the flames of my father's aircraft, falling, flaring behind each of them, again and again.

The cave – our refuge – slowly filled with the light of a different star. I felt the sun's rays had burnt ulcers in my dream, but my two companions were still asleep. I carried my shoes in one hand and crept over to the entrance. Outside, the dawn was silent. The silence of aftermath: the emptiness of a spent storm. Climbing around to the other side of the rock, I found myself above a great reservoir with a view that dissolved in the morning's marrow mist. The air
was moist and chilly. Something in my brain slipped, like a wheel on wet grass. Pictures of my father, and of my grandfather standing against the same landscape, materialised. I imagined the two of them with me, at last finding a place where we might all be close together again, free of discord. ‘Look, can you see what I can?'

Eldon always said freedom did not come easy. ‘I remember the lyrebird's call to be free of the past,' he would complain. ‘But everyone seemed, even in those days, to want to replace one kind of past with another, cabbage with bortsch. I wanted to be an artist of the air not just a Fitzrovian intellectual, you know. An eagle soaring, not a damn peacock strutting.'

From my vantage point I could just make out the jade rim of the jungle on the other side. The flat, calm water was as still as paint, cleansed by the storm that had melded the lake and the sky into one. Clumps of trees, like steep islands, stood in shallow water; the platinum trunks of those struck by lightning bared, with not even an egret to ruffle the slowly evaporating shrouds. The morning light was turning the sky blue. Into my head flew the remnants of an illustration from Eldon's boyhood: grebes, sandpipers, red-shanks, green-shanks, golden plovers, scarlet minivets and high above, a cloud of whistling teal watched by fish eagles, marsh-harriers and brahminy kites. He used to tell me a story of a lakeland ghost who carried a dead child whom she offered to any man she encountered. If the man touched the child he would die, but if he refused to take the child the ghost would turn him into a swine. Eldon said that this was the avenging ghost of the original queen of the island spurned by her cross-water lover for a pedigree mate from the mainland. ‘She was our Circe,' he would say drawing a link, like Uva's father, to his other world, ‘too
often completely misunderstood, demonised for her natural heart.' I wondered if she still lurked there.

Then two gunshots reverberated around the rock.

I dashed back to the enclosure. Kris was outside with a gun in one hand, and a brace of dead bats in the other. ‘Yakitori.' He grinned at me and slouched over to a stone slab where he had placed a basin of rainwater. He squatted down and started to skin the bats with his knife, rocking back and forth on his haunches, humming softly to himself.

‘They might have heard you.'

Kris carefully peeled back the fur to expose the slimy, stringy flesh of the animal. ‘There's nobody here.'

I went inside the cave.

‘What happened?' Jaz was hunched up, on the far ledge.

‘Kris has been hunting.'

‘Hunting what?'

‘Breakfast.' I collected the seat-pads and took them outside. ‘So you won't starve,' I added.

Jaz sighed, immensely relieved. ‘But, darling, doesn't he know? I'm a vegetarian.'

Further along from where we had slept, Kris discovered a shrine room. Jaz claimed that he could smell oranges, or was it passion fruit? Kris lit a white flowlux that spread everywhere. The rock walls had plaster on them; the passion was sublimated into frescoes.

I had seen photographs of similar paintings in the outdated guidebooks I had studied before coming, but in the cave the images seemed much older than any I had read about. The pale russets, burnt ochres and delicate lilacs hovered in space like early holograms refashioning the contours of the most ancient gods. The figures seemed to shift with every
movement of the eye, reviving stories of long-lost times. I imagined old candlelight, flickering; our shadows moving among the protean pigment. These were the memories I had wanted to trace: history, myth, legend all defined in one supple line marrying the seen to the unseen, the spirit to the bone.

‘How come this place has not been zapped?' Jaz clung to me. ‘I was told all these icons, all the olden-day stuff, got completely destroyed.'

‘This cave must not have been known about at the time. Or was forgotten. This whole area was abandoned by everybody.'

Kris intervened. ‘We should go now.'

‘And where, Kris, are we going?' Jaz detached himself from me. ‘Do you even know where to go?'

‘Kris will take us to the hills, like he promised. From there I want to get to this place called Samandia. Uva will be waiting there.' I glanced at Kris, but he didn't react. ‘We go down south, yes?'

Jaz patted my hand, bemused. ‘You shouldn't say that, Marc … unless you really mean it?'

‘Why? Is it like going down into the underworld?'

Jaz pinched his lips together with his fingers to stop from laughing at another of his Carnival gags.

Near Samandia was the place, Uva said, where the first inhabitants of the island had been awakened by butterflies splashing dew at the dawn of time. The dew formed a lake and their wings a floating stairway spiralling up to heaven. It was here that the first human drowned and ascended to become a god or, according to others, where the first couple – Adam and Eve – were expelled to become real
lovers, descending on steps of mortal confetti; their loins swollen, their fingers entwined, their lives ignited. Once a realm of pilgrimage and veneration, it was forsaken after the neutering of the south-west, the devastation of the lower rainforests by rogue missiles and botched nuclear deterrents.

Uva claimed it is purely a matter of chemical balance in the body that makes us feel that the best may be behind us, or even yet to come. Touching my head with her fingertips, she added, ‘Or here, if the serotonin is spurting. Right?'

My scalp prickled. ‘Yes.'

That was the evening she showed me where the turtles were said to have laid their eggs in the old days.