Heaven's Edge (21 page)

I couldn't live without Uva, but if I was to die without her, I would have to come back and start again. Samandia was the only safe place I knew she knew. We have to live in hope. It was clear to me then that I had to help the animal to survive. I stripped off my shirt to use as a sack to carry it. Only when I lifted the creature up did I notice one of its legs was also hurt. It was not going to be easy.

Back at the house I cleaned the wounds with lime and gunpowder extracted from a cartridge. I even made a cradle for it out of coconut fronds.

The monkey was too feeble to do anything. I gave it water, and tried to feed it fruit.

‘You'll waste away,' I said when it refused to eat, idiotically pleased to be able to address another even with this dire warning, even if it had no understanding of my words. I had made my choice.

Although I still felt a little ill, by evening I was able to coax a small banana into the monkey's mouth. It seemed grateful, and I felt grateful myself for its presence, its vulnerability.

With the monkey dependent on me, my priorities became clear. I thought we would both sleep better on the upper floor where the air was fresher. In a cupboard I found a set of mosquito nets and I rigged one up from a roof beam. I lugged up a mattress for me and a basket for the monkey. It was like becoming a child again, when novelty could so easily displace anxiety.

I felt safer on a solid floor that had escaped the tug of the earth. I wanted to defy the earth. To live with the weightiest things floating above the ground: to bring boulders and
rocks, a bathful of water, tubs of flowering shrubs, a garden plot, anything and everything upstairs. All to float in a world above a world. To live in the gracious memory of our antenatal flights; our seeking of natural light.

The next morning, rested and collected, I could see a whole day's work fall into place. How I would have to stamp my own mark on the house, shape it to my needs. I felt I should redesign the whole place, become an inventor, an artist and a carpenter. Become my own Kris – even a Crusoe: plunder the wreck, explore the surroundings. There could be other houses around, possibly even inhabited. I felt an urgent need to know more, and to be in control once again. I felt a strength I had not felt before.

The path I had first cut from the lake was still plain to see. Perhaps too plain. Fortunately fresh leaves were beginning to unfurl at the edges, and in the bare patches new life had emerged: oddly shaped black beetles, a line of tottering leaf-cutters, corrugated caterpillars. I picked my way warily around the edge of the lake in case it had already become a trap, but there was nothing to fear.

Pulling the half-beached aircraft right out of the water, I saw again how painstakingly Kris had installed the two solar panels on the wings using bright brass hexagonal screws, how he had replaced the rubber wheels on the fuselage and renovated the padding in the cockpit. It was not so long ago, but already these were the very things that needed to be removed. To be utilitarian – to recycle, to waste not – seemed undeniably right, and yet required a measure of ruthlessness which seemed mercenary. I had to look at everything in that way; those were the values I needed to survive. Need now for ever.

Then, just before I closed up the cockpit, I saw a small parcel lodged between the seat and the safety harness; a piece of silk tied around it.

I had to force the lump in my throat down, hard. Picking up the parcel I slowly unwrapped it.

My first thought was that this time the knife really was Uva's. But again her symbol was not on it. It had to be Kris's. He must have died without it. It floated in my hand, a pair of furled wings. A gift? I climbed out of the aircraft and, once on the ground, flicked it open the way I remembered Kris, and Uva before him, do; like an eye flashing. I stared at it as though by looking I could decipher all its secrets, return all the blood it had let: to the soldier in his workshop, to the bats in the cave, to the old couple in Farindola. By the water's edge I knelt and rinsed the blade. Closing it firmly I placed it in my breast pocket and felt an echo of Uva's hand on it, as though she had reached through the skin of another to touch me again. Warm and close. She would want me to be a survivor; she'd be relying on me to be here. This time I knew I must.

Within a few days I managed to fix the pantry door, refit the pulleys for the broken tat, clear the drains and even re-hang the metal gates, buckled as they were, discovering practical skills I never knew I had. I went back to the aircraft and completely dismantled it. Every mechanical bit, every scrap of wire, wood, strut and bar that might come in useful, I brought back to the sheds around the house and stacked up in a stupendous jigsaw puzzle never to be reconstructed. I made birdhouses to entice barbets, the way Eldon did for
his robins and finches, and feeding trays and birdbaths. ‘My father must have been the robin,' I quipped to my speechless companion as work displaced despair. ‘And I am the son.'

Engrossed in these functional tasks, I didn't worry about what might lie ahead. There had been no sign of any other inhabitants; no sign of any danger. All I was concerned with was to make this place my home and hers: a magnet for our endangered souls.

When the monkey grew strong enough to move I let it wander about the garden. It never wanted to stray very far. It limped about, mimicking me by collecting firewood, bunches of beans, brinjals and bananas.

It wasn't long before I felt the need to tackle the walled crop garden and bring it under proper control too. There was so much I could have learnt from my grandfather about gardening, but all I could recall then was the old man's enthusiasm for watering and for pruning.

‘These green suckers have to be taken out,' Eldon used to say, carefully parting the roses. ‘Otherwise the whole bush turns to jungle.' As a child I would watch him open his red secateurs and clip the bright new shoots bristling with giant thorns and chuck them to the side of the lawn. ‘You see, my boy, you have to look after the old if you want to foster the young.'

He was so proud of his rose garden. He had about two dozen rose bushes: Nymphenburgs, Nur Mahals, Golden Wings and Moonbeams. He was not an expert, but he enjoyed his flowers and tended them with real care. Every month, and sometimes even more frequently, he would visit Kew Gardens to check how well his roses were doing in comparison with those propagated by the professionals. He
would pick up tips from the rose beds by the Palm House and marvel at the regimental discipline and unwavering control displayed there. I remember the year he managed to beat the pros for the first bloom. He had celebrated with a chilled bottle of Cava from his local wine shop, where he couldn't stop himself from mentioning it to the young sales assistant. I was with him, choosing a packet of crisps for my treat. ‘The bloom,' he had said raising the bottle. ‘For the bloom.'

For him the passage of time was marked in a hundred different ways: by plants that blossomed perennially, biannually, diurnally, bushes that fixed the seasons, buds that breathed by the week, the day, the hour, and over them all every few minutes aircraft, kin to his own, that would swing like the carriages of a galactic wheel. He had been a pilot training pilots for most of his life, and a gardener for only his last years. Every four minutes, then every three, and sometimes every two minutes, the roar of a passing aircraft brought back to him his lifelong involvement with the sky, just as each bud in the garden drew him down again to his abiding earth.

‘The future,' he was fond of saying, ‘is not something you can imagine. You can only rearrange the past in your mind, you know, to look like it is still to come. We have to bathe in a pool of memory, and play little tricks with its surface, just to live another day. We think we are going forwards, but really we are always on a journey going back to find something that we might once almost have had.'

Thinking of my own future, I set about locating the cinnamon and the turmeric that I was sure were growing somewhere around. I found chilli and tomato. I needed more nourishment. I cleared an area bigger than the whole
of Eldon's old garden and squeezed seeds wherever I could. I wanted to tame the plot to produce all that I needed, and exactly when I needed it, as ambitious agriculturists the world over have done so often before. All that was required, I believed, was time and keen observation: measurement and calculation, skills I reckoned I must surely have inherited from my fastidious forebears.

By the end of the day I was exhausted; my hands were sore from digging and my skin stung, but I could see I had made a real impression on my surroundings: the ploughed land exuded a sense of real vigour from those wilful acts of ownership. The wilderness was in retreat, but even Uva could only commend me on the flowering it was bound to leave in its wake.

In the days that followed, I became obsessed: planting, replanting, transplanting. I cut an irrigation channel from the well so that even the runoff from my daily wash-bucket ended up watering the crops. I became expert in recognising subtle variations in the podzolic soil. I uncovered a store of rock phosphate in a shed and worked out how to use coconut husks for moisture retention, fibre as mulch, recycle waste through organic compost-generation. I dreamt of domesticating the jungle fowl I had seen running around the lake. I made traps and plans for extensive re-fencing, bringing more and more of the land under my care.

Occasionally I came across useless huts and only once another house of a more substantial nature. I immediately stripped it of fire-lighters and stores. The whole area had been completely depopulated, but it didn't dishearten me. I wrote my initial wherever I went, convinced that one day Uva would come and see my mark and know that I was here,
faithfully waiting. With Kris's knife I carved the letter like a bush-lark's wings on tree trunks, I drew it with charcoal and even wrote it in the sand.

During the nights, though, doubts did return. How would she know I'd escaped? She might have thought that, even if I had, I would never make it this far. Maybe I had been too slow in getting to Samandia, just as I had been too slow to save her at our Palm Beach Hotel. The odds were against us there. I should have realised it. The odds were against us all along.

In daylight I didn't let such thoughts deflect me from turning the whole plantation into a self-sustaining refuge. A garden husbanded for her: full of flowering bushes, arboreal vines, thick yellow-bordered, succulent leaves. I embedded red crabclaws in between and arranged bursts of blue tumefied lances in the pots.

Working with the trails of pink and orange and purple that wafted in the warm breeze like butterflies nourished me; those translucent wings gave me a pleasure unlike any of the more utilitarian tasks I had done earlier. Sometimes I would see Jaz in the lazy lift of a dazzling arm, or catch Uva's moist perfume in the cracks between the petals.

I wanted space and order, light and colour. I wanted the place teeming with a hundred different types of birds, of bees, of squirrels. I wanted them all to come, drawn by a lodestone of passion and the heady, overpowering scent of a garden in the middle of a jungle; to bring Uva with them, and if she could not come here, I wanted the garden to become her.

*    *    *

Each day I cut a notch on a tree by the well; each night I worked on a crude map using an old table-top and ink made out of charcoal and water.

I dreamt of building a cistern, with an intricate network of bamboo aqueducts hovering just above ground level, perfectly pitched to achieve an overall gradient of a few centimetres. I wanted a smooth even flow which, with little valves and contraflow switches, would measure out the right douche for every one of my favourite plants. I imagined opening the watergate, like an olden-day rajah, as the sun collapsed releasing a perfect benevolent flood. The small electric motor from the aircraft would have been ideal for pumping up the water from the well, except that I couldn't get it to work. I fantasised about harnessing a team of wild oxen to an Archimedean screw, but the practical solution I finally came up with was a windmill to power the spindle on the well.

I designed a set of four sails out of palm fronds and bed linen. I made them to fit the broken propellor from the plane, planning to fix the whole thing to the coconut tree by the well. Only when all the components were in place, on the ground, did I realise that I hadn't worked out how I would get it up high enough. I was furious with myself. While I vented my frustration, the monkey scuttled away to the breadfruit tree at the end of the garden. But my luck held, it seemed then, once again. What was it the old man used to say? ‘The difference between the impossible and the possible is sometimes simply a matter of geography.'

The breadfruit tree was fifty paces from the well; with its graduated limbs, it looked like a stairway to the sky. The branches were prodigious: the gnarled limbs more solid than the earth itself. They offered easy footholds and the tree hardly moved as I hauled myself up. I clambered
one more level and edged towards a little gap of clear air. It seemed perfect. I took one last look and was horrified to see the glint of a steel blade hacking through the saplings on the other side of the stretch of open scrubland.

A small figure in khaki emerged wielding the machete. I could see a gun slung over one shoulder, The figure moved slowly, testing each step, each breath of air. The monkey huddled up to me. I didn't know what I should do. I only had the little butterfly knife with me, more a talisman than a weapon.

The figure stopped, unstrapped a knapsack and perched on a boulder. The gun was placed next to the knapsack. With the cap also off, it looked like a woman. Her hair fell to her shoulders. She consulted a small device from her knapsack, tapping at it. I was desperate to shield the house, the garden, my fruit trees and crops. If I had my rifle, I thought, would this be the time to use it? To stalk, get close, and then shoot to kill? Wasn't self-protection my right.