Terroir (26 page)

They brought me here in winter in a blue van with seats that smelled of plastic and petrol. Dad came with me because Mum couldn't bear the betrayal, the shame, her own flesh and blood abandoned, and he sat next to me smoking and pointing at things outside the window as they went by. Dirty snow in all the side roads and the driver going slowly, taking the wide road out of town and into the countryside. Old stone houses, ice frozen to trees, a waterfall, red horses in a field, their breath like steam from the mill. Dad smiling and huddling into his big coat because it was an adventure to leave home, like going for a soldier when he went into the army to build a railway in Burma far from here, where snow was sliding away from the rooftops and the van went down a hill into a little town with smoke coming from all the chimneys and then here to the hospital with tall iron gates. To keep me safe Dad said.
To keep the world away.
All windows and black stone and O'Donnell waiting for us in his white jacket and grey moustache, shaking Dad's hand and winking at me like Jimmy in the school van, just waiting to be on his own with me to show me what was what. The right way and the wrong way.
That's all over now, you little twat. Welcome to paradise.
Dad kissing me and his face wet again like when he sat in the hospital watching me, breaking his heart to see me suffer because of that stupid bitch and not being able to keep his cock in his trousers.

Mum came to see me after that. Came on the long bus ride. Sundays usually. Rufus, too sometimes. Getting bigger and not knowing anything to say.
Dumby
. I couldn't look after him any more with fits and leg irons and days and years staring out of the windows, watching time go by in the clouds, in the sun and stars and moon rising and falling into the hills. Nurses coming and going home, then work, then home again. Day shift and night shift. Then Rufus stopped and Mum stopped and they told me she'd passed away. Then that man coming saying about Dad, looking like someone with a red mouth. All the time, O'Donnell tormenting us in the showers, in the dorm, in the toilet block where no one could see. Until the day the princess came. Lady Di who died in a crash on the news. She came to the village in a long car and walked to the hospital through a crowd, all painted and smelling now, and the staff meeting her on the lawn and giving her flowers. She came to help us in a long frock and flowers in her hair, smiling for everyone.

I got the wheelchair to the corridor, pulled myself out with my good arm, strong as anything and swung on my good leg to the door. When they looked up I was there at the top of the steps.
Larry!
Larry!
Then me letting go, tumbling down in front of them all. To let them know that hurting pain didn't matter. That wasn't it. What mattered was our lives locked away.
You dense cunt, Larry, I'll fucking get you for that.
But he never did. He died before he got chance. A stroke in the pub, like a stroke of lightning or stroking Jimmy's dog or our Jack Russell or Rufus when he was little in bed and frightened. That's what Bernard said. He died being stroked, ordering a drink. No one else knew what I'd done on purpose even though it did no good, just O'Donnell dying like that afterwards. All that time ago and me still here, watching the days go round and never ending.

There's Puck at the window again like every bright night, moonlight dusting his face white. Moon low on the hill. Shadows trembling. His hands flickering in the light. There's a big star low down. A planet my dad said, Mars or Jupiter, taking me through the fields in the dark away from the fairground lights and the hurdy
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gurdy music. The smells of everything. Sweet candyfloss and sick down my jumper that Mum knitted from Dad's old one. Weeing in the field together and wetting my legs and looking at the sky all stuck with stars.
Like your mum's pin cushion
Dad said, laughing and rocking on his boot heels, pissing out the sweet beer smell, spraying my legs.

They're talking in the office now. Smoking outside the window, smelling of ciggies and flower perfume. That's Alice, nice Alice, her voice warm like her tits and bum and breath pressing my face as she tucks me in. O'Donnell is dead. And my mum and dad and the woman with the red mouth and black hair and gold tooth at the fair and the goldfish in the pickle jar.

All dead. The fortune
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teller and nigger boxer and the drunken boys he knocked down. And the man who came one time, all that way to tell me something not true. All gone into a place where times go and get forgotten. Where stories go. O'Donnell is dead and always unforgiven. Forever. Never to be loved. Dead today, dead tomorrow. There's Puck, trying to catch the moon and pull it down, bleating small sounds from his mouth like bubbles. The moon bigger every night until it falls into a shadow like a voice into quietness. Then he'll sleep, Little Puck. A sleep with no words.
Blessed
, they said on Sundays. Blessed sleep. Deeper because of no words.

Come on now, Larry. You silly old bugger.
That's Alice, whispering close by, taking Puck to bed again, stroking his hair, patting my face like pastry on a board.
We're watching over you. Sleep now.
Today becomes tomorrow becomes today, turning like a fairground wheel with hurdy
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gurdy light bulbs, stars, coloured planets spinning in the black. Today is now and angels do that watching, if only I could say it.
This is the life, eh?
You're a long time dead.
A rusty old stove and the smell of newspapers and tar burning on wood. This is the life.
Pigeons making that over and over noise with their throats, then their wings crackling like fire from the roof in the next plot. My leg all stiff and eyes blurry. Thinking I saw that woman's face at the window through the cobwebs and dust, come to say something.
Something important, Ted, please.
Tapping on the window like birds scratching the roof to get in. But Dad wouldn't let her. Then she was crying, her voice shaking, banging, the door locked. Then she was gone, the stove smoking in the room and Dad's face wet like afterwards at the hospital, his arm round me tight as a barrel hoop.

THE GLOVER

He was woken by the sound of water. The distant thrumming of a great river and the closer, lighter sound of rain against leaves and thatch. He lay still for a moment. His pillow was soaked in sweat and he turned it over to find a dry patch, plumping it in his fists. Reaching to his right, he found a small cane table laid out with his things: spectacles, a glass of water, a torch, the pistol in its holster, a blister pack of tablets he took to keep his cholesterol down, another for malaria, a novel with a cigar wrapper as a bookmark. He'd smoked one cigar before turning in. A small vice, perhaps. He'd watched bugs circling the hurricane lamp he'd brought to the veranda, organza wings stiffening as they fell. There was something beautiful in their quest for death, for light. He took up his spectacles and sat for a moment with them in his hands. He knew all his things by touch and was fastidious by nature. Each time he laid them out in exactly the same way so that he could find them in the dark.

When he was a small boy his nanny had been a French girl from Languedoc. She'd taught him to play chess blindfolded. He remembered their fingers touching, the faint blonde hair on her arms. She had blue eyes and small ears with jade studs, the first woman he'd loved after his mother. He swung his legs from the damp bed to face the window. He could see the outline faintly – no glazing, but steel bars and mosquito mesh. He'd been bitten on the arms yesterday as they brought him to the compound. He wore impregnated shirts that were supposed to prevent that. Now he was surrounded by the night sounds of the forest: the rubbery belching of bullfrogs, cicadas chafing, the piping of tree frogs.

He sighed and put on the spectacles. The room brightened a little and he stood up in his boxer shorts, slipping his feet into flip
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flops that lay under the bed. He slung the pistol over his shoulder and felt his way to the bathroom. No lights. He found the toilet, wrinkling his nose; sat down to pass water, never turning his back, the pistol against his thigh. He was distracted and it took a long time. Sometimes he had a stricture and sat there unable to piss, thinking things more intense than that need. He wiped himself and rinsed his fingers at the sink, finding the foot pedal that pumped water. When he returned to bed he laid the gun down and lay listening to water running outside in the forest. The bullfrogs were a macho chorus, boasting, threatening, beguiling. He thought of their throats pulsing with all that spunk, all that sex. And water, yes. That was a good metaphor for what he did – it was reassuring, essential, even beautiful, but it flowed under constant pressure. And it wore things away, imperceptibly, until they were changed or gone.

He checked his watch. The luminous hands showed up in faint light that was gathered at the mosquito screen. Four
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thirty. He was tired after the flight. The Cessna had followed the brown coils of a river into the jungle, dipping low over the trees, making him feel queasy. There were columns of blue smoke where illegal settlers were clearing the mahogany. They'd put down on an airstrip near a frontier town: corrugated iron shacks and makeshift bars. Whores by a dirt road. Trucks stacked with timber. An unmarked helicopter had taken him deeper, the pilot swearing in Greek, keeping low over the green canopy before dropping him into a clearing. Then a rutted track, the jeep jolting, wheels spurting mud, a driver who wouldn't stop talking and two soldiers in the back: helmeted, capes and combat fatigues soaked in rain. Their faces were impassive, their rifles laid across their knees. They were mixed race. Negroes with a lot of Indian blood in them. Dark eyes, without pupils or expression. They, at least, were silent, touching their helmets in a half salute. That always surprised him. Though he was a specialist, he had no rank.

One of the soldiers was a sergeant. Things must be changing in the army.
They carried his bags to the boat for him: a canoe with an outboard motor that sputtered white smoke as it started out over the tea
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coloured surface of the river. Two bright red and green parakeets hurled from the tree line, twin grenades startling him. The prow of the canoe cut a wide vee. The river was still more than a kilometre across here. Rain gathered on a leaf, dripped to another leaf then ran to the forest floor. A trickle became a rivulet, a stream a tributary, then the river was formed from many small rivers, like a language made of water. The compound lay close to the jetty, invisible from the shore. He'd been here twice before. There were other camps like it scattered across the country.

So he was awake again in the jungle, its dark interior like past time that was gradually being eroded, revealed, civilized by the future. It was primeval. It had its own rules and outcomes. In the city, he lived in a four
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bedroomed apartment with his wife, a Filipino maid, two sons. He was anxious because one of his sons was having trouble at school with a new teacher. Anxious because Justina, his wife, had been bleeding again and had to have some medical tests. Ultrasound and MRI scans. His own mother had a hysterectomy at the same age. She'd been a cream
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skinned beauty, brought out into society in the 1950s. She'd even danced with the President before he came to power. Maybe more than danced. But she'd aged quickly after the operation, becoming grey
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skinned and gaunt, spending her days ordering the cook about, staving off boredom, visiting her friends to play cribbage or bridge, drinking brandy, Crème de Menthe.

His father had taken a mistress. That was normal at the bank. It was what they did in those days. If he even thought about that, Justina would take him to the cleaners. In any case, he still loved her and their two boys. Men of his age made themselves ridiculous with younger women. All that false masculinity. Like the bullfrogs out there, squaring up to each other with their machismo, their bullshit. He rolled over on to his side, listening to the pulsing layers of sound. They seemed to come in waves, from all sides though the humid air. It was unbearably hot, of course. It was always so. His lot was to endure the heat and humidity of places that didn't exist. If he couldn't settle his thoughts it was going to be a long night. And he had work tomorrow.

He placed his spectacles back on the cane table, touching the pistol butt. It wasn't that he fancied himself in a firefight. All logic was against that. And he was a man of imagination, not fantasy. The pistol was for himself, for his own use, as it were. On one operation, three years ago, he'd been woken by incoming fire. They'd used anti
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tank rockets and mortars. The compound had boomed and flashed with exploding ordnance. Then flares going up and tracer rounds fired off into the forest, a white
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hot chain falling into space. Some shell fragments had come into his room and he'd sat watching a disk of red
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hot iron spin and hiss on the floorboards. He'd had to consider that. To think it through to the final consequence. As far as he knew, he was untraceable. But in that operation security had been breached and two of his patients had been liberated. The others, beyond help, had been finished by their own comrades as they crouched, praying. That was the mercy of the jungle.

So, if they had made it out of there alive, he'd be on a list. Whether he had a name or not, he would be known. Most likely he was just a rumour.
The Glover.
He'd asked for the pistol the next day, after the attack. Keeping his arm steady as he squeezed the trigger, he watched each shot rip the pith out of a capirona tree. It was shocking, the kick of the gun in his hand – action here, reaction there – the sudden remote violence as bullets struck. Whenever he had to work away up
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country he collected it from a safe
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deposit box at the city bank, where his father had worked, where he'd been known since he was a child. There were no other traces. Not on his cellphone, not on his laptop or desktop computer. Just a pistol lying in the darkness of a steel box in a granite building with cool marble corridors and softly spoken staff to care for him. When he was needed, they sent someone in person to the Institute with a message. Then he'd meet another contact with train or air tickets, a false ID card that he destroyed as he completed the final stage of the assignment. By the time he got home he'd shed another identity to become himself again. Reborn. Born again. What was the difference?