The Black Halo (83 page)

‘Yes,’ said Iain. ‘I saw the edge of the coffin and it was almost touching the patch on your trousers and then I ran.’

‘Gosh,’ said Daial, ‘that’s something. You must have the second sight. It almost touched me. Gosh. Wait till I tell the boys tomorrow. You wait.’ And then as if it
had just occurred to him he said, ‘You believe in ghosts now, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I believe,’ said Iain.

‘There you are then,’ said Daial. ‘Gosh. Are you sure if they don’t touch you you’re all right?’

‘Cross my heart,’ said Iain.

We enter the small chair, we glide along the rails. The faces of the present disappear. We are in a room: it stinks, I hear voices, they are talking Norse. There are leather
skins, the face of a dead fox, needles, women knitting, men hunting. This is a rank rank room with the smell of grain, of blood. There are hens, chickens. Two women gossip in a strange dialect.

Who is that in the helmet with the nosepiece protecting him? He is saying, perhaps, We shall stand to the end in the ring, till it fades like the moon, till we are bones among the cans of
Coca-Cola, till the workmen emerge out of the dust with shovels, till they beat at our heads.

See, we are bargaining. The city walls protect us. We bring vases, ornaments, we bring the sniff of the future. They cannot protect themselves from that, from everything else but that. The wind
is shrieking through the walls, it is changing the fashions; after it has been there there will be no more farriers, no more fletchers, no more guilds.

The children are playing a game that we do not understand. Look, their heads are thorny. The side of one head is shaven, the colours of the other are orange red and blue. They are punching at
computers in the dung, with the dead stinking oxen beside them. The dog raises its head, lowers it again: the cat comes in with a rabbit.

What are they saying to each other, these two with the portrait of the Queen beside the television set? The war has ended. There is shouting, there are helmets, there are horses, leather skins,
their wireless is beating out a great Norse victory against the English. In their ring of iron they lasted till the end. The women rush out to meet them, they are reading newspapers covered with
dirt, dung. They are holding iron coins in their hands. There is a sermon whose words are unintelligible. It blows like the wind.

The boat is covered with skins. There are dead rotting fish on the shore.

Sigurd has died. The men are drinking lager and above them is an advertisement. The words are written in Norse. It is a Norse code. It flickers on and off, banks of lights.

I have brought you this gift, my beloved, it is a deer, it is meat from the butcher’s. Sit down and eat it, my beloved, though the worms are dangling at your mouth and the spider’s
web hangs and quivers. Eat the deer, my beloved, we are safe from the animals, from the shouting hooligans with their flags of red white and blue painted on their bald heads. We are safe from their
language. We can hide. Their thorny heads, their shaven heads, are not ours.

Among the new ones we watch the television motor cycles chase each other, charge at bony chariots. The helmet lowers, I have come back from the war. They fought well but we burned their books
and ornaments, their saints, their coloured pages and threw them into the sea, we burned their house and smashed their windows. Their trains were attacked with arrows and catapults. But still the
trains are bringing new fashions, new luggage.

We cannot avoid them. There is a fresh air coming in here.

It must be the workmen with their shovels. One of them is smoking, spitting on the floor where you are sitting, my beloved.

I have walked among the blossoms. I have seen the litter. I have seen the leather shoes, the fragments of leather left over. I have seen the brooches curled like snakes. I have seen the moon on
which men in armour clumsily walk and jump. Bend down, touch the can, I do not understand it, it has writing on it. What is it, a gift from the gods?

You are standing among the women, my beloved. You are wearing leather, a fresh blouse. You are wearing a hat with flowers on it. Your bone needles are in your hand. The dog sniffs at them.
Something is attacking us which cannot be defended against by walls. There are people making gaps in the walls, they are standing at the gates, they are holding out new jewellery, stunningly
beautiful. We fasten watches on our hands below the iron ringlets, circlets. They have the faces of the gods on them.

You are not dying, my beloved. No one dies. I kneel by your bed in this crowded dungy room. You are reciting words to me that I cannot understand. They are not Norse. Are you feverish? Your face
changes, it becomes narrow and then your body changes, it becomes like an arrow pointing in one direction. Your smell, my beloved, is of perfume. The dog has disappeared, where has the cat
gone?

Astronomy of night, sound of engines, the owl blinking with a mouse in its claws. The hens rush hither and thither, and there I see the eggs in the straw.

My beloved, you shall not die, not ever. I know it. I shall follow you towards the light where the shovels are, where a man is leaning smiling. Who is he? Does he think he is immortal? I have
seen the dead talking on television, I have seen a camera showing blankness; faces slowly coming on the screen; where have they come from, filling the whiteness? We are here. Listen to us. We are
all together in the stink, the perfume, the dung.

We talk in the salons with the bone needles in our hands. Our eyes glitter and flash, we are intelligent. The fox stands at the window looking in. So does the wolf. So does the beaver, the
badger. And they all stink beyond the tiny coffee cups.

We slide on the rails. You in front of me, why are you wearing a helmet, why are you so joyous? Has a battle been won? You turn towards me. Your nose-piece is long and dark. You are my enemy,
you are saying, I shall kill you, kill you, kill you. In the ring that will not die, that will not break, in the circle that will not break, in the circle that is decorated with the face of the
god.

You, my beloved, are sitting, sewing. In the sunset that will not fade. I see your body under the skins. It is white and pearl-like. I have wished for you for many years and then suddenly you
were there. In the doorway. You are coming towards me. You are removing your blouse, your tights, your legs are clear to me. They have the trace of leather on them, of thongs.

We meet in the darkness. I hear the cries from outside. The thorny-headed ones are shouting, are rioting again. Their hair is like needles, there are holes in their trousers, they are
dancing.

In her senility she would say to him, ‘Who are you? I don’t know you. Where did you come from?’

He didn’t like this one little bit though their daughter would sometimes find her mother’s odd statements amusing. Of course she was a nurse and had worked in geriatric wards: but he
wasn’t used to this sort of thing. And he didn’t like it.

Most of his days he had been a sailor, and had travelled all over the world, Singapore, Sydney, Auckland, you name it, he had been there. And now he was seventy years old. All those years he had
been away on voyages she had waited and waited, and he would send her postcards and bring her gifts. His children had grown up without him: he had hardly seen them.

And now she had grown senile.

‘I used to live in a house with a name like that,’ she would say, pointing at the wooden plaque which read greenview. He had paid ten pounds for that sign. ‘But this
isn’t the house. I don’t know why it’s here,’ she would say in her sombre almost girlish voice.

Sometimes she would say, ‘I used to know Robert Mason. We would go to dances together.’ And Robert Mason was his own name. But she would say to her daughter, ‘What’s that
man doing here?’

Those sunny mornings; the ship racing through the sea leaving a white wake behind it. The immense illimitable distances. Those breezes.

He couldn’t understand how he couldn’t convince her of her errors, but there was no way that he could, since they were now fixed in her mind. He hated the fact that he couldn’t
get through to her. It was like being a wireless operator who couldn’t make sense of the replies to his messages. Her mistakes infuriated him. His anger grew so large that it sank his pity.
It was as if she was trying to irritate him. He was a ship in the middle of the sea not knowing where he was, without longitude or latitude. It was all wrong, obscenely wrong.

Sometimes he felt like shaking her. But then she would look at him and say, ‘Have you seen Robert Mason? I would like to speak to him.’ Good God, he thought, this is terrible, this
is awful. Here he was in the middle of the sea without sextant, without communications.

‘Don’t worry about it too much,’ his daughter would say to him. ‘She’s perfectly happy.’

‘How can she be perfectly happy?’ he would say. ‘How can she be perfectly happy when she doesn’t know what is happening.’

Of course she wasn’t perfectly happy. She should be dragged out of her dreams into reality where other people lived. How could one be happy unless one was living in the truth, not in a
chaotic dream.

He was writing a postcard on the deck of a ship on a fine clear breezy day. ‘I miss you,’ he wrote. But the truth was that he didn’t miss her at all. No, he was perfectly happy
sitting in a chair on the deck with the breeze whipping about his bare legs, for he was wearing shorts. The truth was . . . What was the truth? The postcard winged its way home over the blue
waters. Did she sense that what he had written was not the truth? Did an odd instinctive sixth sense tell her that?

The sea was all around him, there was not another ship to be seen on the blue sparkling expanse. And he was perfectly happy. At that moment it was a fulfilled perfect day.

One night she said to him, ‘I can hear a baby crying. I can hear it in this room. You brute. Why aren’t you helping the baby? Robert Mason would help him, but I don’t know
you.’

‘Go to sleep,’ he had told her, ‘go to sleep at once. Do you know what time it is?’ The illuminated clock at the side of the bed told him it was two in the morning. But
she didn’t want to go to sleep. Not at all. She had to get up in her nightgown to find the baby. That voyage of hers through the dark. How strange it was. How lonely. Later she had come back
to bed and had gone to sleep like a child, her hair grey on the pillow.

Like a wave of the sea on a rock.

Oh terrible terrible things happened to people, he hadn’t realised how terrible. Not when he was on the ship he hadn’t. You could say what you liked but it was with a deep sense of
relief that one left land behind with its infections, its insoluble troubles, and sailed away happily into the blue.

And now here she was talking about babies and signs that didn’t belong to the house, and not recognising him. He would never survive it. He hated her for her senility. Why had she become
like this in their old age which was meant to be sunny and relaxed? Why couldn’t she have retained her firm efficient mind? He had been cheated at the end. She was trying to torment him. She
knew perfectly well what she was doing. She was pretending all the time, she was deliberately torturing him.

All the time she had been getting his blue postcards she had been growing old. All the time he had been sitting on a chair on the deck writing his letters she had been wrestling with the
children, with the cares of the world.

This was actually worse than death, much worse. Death was a clean break, but this went on and on. It would never end.

And he never felt at ease. One day she packed her case and made for the door. ‘I am going home,’ she said. ‘I am going back to my husband.’ And he had to wrestle the case
out of her hand for she was very strong, though her mind was weak, sending out its maimed flashes as from a defective lighthouse.

‘You are not going anywhere,’ he said angrily. And she had struggled and then finally given up. It was as if he was keeping her prisoner.

If he didn’t watch he would become like her himself, for she wasn’t allowing him to sleep. In the middle of the night she would hear voices, her mother for instance calling to her.
He couldn’t keep this up. He wouldn’t survive it. The doctor told him that he would have to find something to take his mind off her, otherwise he would become like her.
‘You’re not getting any younger,’ he said. ‘And you say you don’t want to put her in a Home.’

No, he wouldn’t do that. If he did that she would remain in her forgetful state forever. So he began to make little ships, as his eyesight was still strong. Tiny ships with sails set, and
rigging hoisted. He found that his concentration on his ships was helping him and sometimes he completely forgot she was there. Life became almost peaceful for them and she would sometimes touch
his ship and say, ‘Pretty, pretty,’ just like a little girl. She would watch him as he worked, using thin thread for ropes, and her eyes would light up as the ship took shape. He had
never been involved in anything in his life so deeply. The tiny ship was so real it looked as if it might set sail.

And now he said to himself, I must try something really difficult. I must try and put my ship in a bottle. I have never tried that before. So he folded the tiny sails and slid the ship in and
when it was in he manipulated the threads to raise the masts and sails again. The ship sailed motionlessly inside the bottle.

His wife came over and touched the bottle gently. She was staring at the ship motionlessly carved inside. Tears began to flow from her eyes. ‘The poor ship,’ she said. ‘The
poor ship.’ He put his hand around her waist. He didn’t know whether she was weeping for herself or for him. The ship was like a magnet which had drawn the tears from her eyes.

It wasn’t sailing anywhere, he knew. Never again would it see other countries. Never again would it race through the sea. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, patting his wife on
the shoulder. ‘It’s all right. It’s quite happy inside the bottle. Perfectly happy.’