The Lanyard (5 page)

"Do you think there could be other piles like this one near?" he asked later, after the tents were up.

"Huh?" his father said, arm deep inside his backpack.

"Other cairns."

"Well, I'd be surprised if there weren't."

"Can I look for them?"

"Now?" he withdrew his arm from the bag holding a white brick of fire lighter. "Aren't you hungry?"

"I mean after."

He thought about it for a moment.

"I'm not sure I like the idea of you wandering of when it's getting dark."

"Oh, please. There'll be time."

"We'll see. Maybe tomorrow. Here take this."

The boy took the white square and held it at a distance to avoid the smell of chemicals. "Dad?"

"I know you don't think it sometimes, but I am trying my best," he said, burrowing a small hole in the middle of the pile of twigs he had assembled.

"To make the fire?"

"To help you. It's tough..."

"Why?"

"Because. I know I have to allow you to be what you want to be, who you want to be. But it's not easy."

"".

"Look at me."

"Dad?"

"I mean it."

The boy stopped and half-glanced at him, feeling the uncomfortable stare of eyes focussed into his soul before he even saw it.

"I have responsibilities too, you know, like I shouldn't just let you go off on your own." He narrowed his gaze as if to try and sense if any of this was getting through.

"I only wanted to--"

"I don't just mean right now, around here."

"Then what?"

"...I'm talking about is the wider world, all the things that are out there that you might not expect. It wouldn't be right not to teach you about that, to just let you stumble into it, but like I said I don't feel like I can just tell you what to do, where to go, who to be, what side to fight on. God, so much. But I have to. I have to -- I'm not sure the best word for it -- prepare you. It's a no win situation. Chicken and the egg."

"Then don't talk in riddles. Just do it."

"I am. I'm trying. It's just not that simple."

"Why?"

"Because I feel I can't just say watch out for X,Y,Z as that would also be telling you."

"So how can you prepare me without telling me and without letting me discover on my own?"

"I don't know. It's a no-win, like I said."

"I don't mind if you just say."

"I know. But it wouldn't make it right, not in my mind anyway."

"".

"It would be too tainted by what I believe, and then you wouldn't so much be growing up to be yourself, but growing up to be me."

"So, let me explore?"

"Right, you're right... But like with those people we met back down the way, with the girl, I get this feeling you would have wandered off with them if you'd have had a say."

"I didn't even see them."

"But if you had... Like I said. I understand."

"I would not... Would I?"

"Well that's the thing. Who's to say which the right move was. They might have been friendly, cautious but friendly, or they might not... They might have been just like us."

"Or they might not."

"Right. How are we meant to know?"

"You just have to trust them, I guess."

"So you would have?"

"I don't know."

The boy put the fire lighter down by his feet and crouched to fiddle with his own backpack for no reason other than it being near him. He fastened up the clip and then opened it again, watching his fingers all the time, imagining them growing until they were adult sized, so much larger than the plastic snapper that would ever remain unchanged, designed to fit within its slot and nothing else.

His father laughed at him. "Well?"

"You actually want an answer?"

"You might not have this long to decide in real life."

"Well, alright... They seemed ok."

"So you'd trust them?"

"Yes. I say they were just like us, doing what we're doing, only one more."

"Right, one more. That's the thing isn't it."

"So you think they were bad?"

"I don't know. But I think I made my choice based on that, numbers. Subconsciously at least. I didn't take the time to think about it. You don't have that sort of time in these situations. You have to follow your gut. There were more of them than us."

"So?"

"So I lied. And I think I was right. They were one more and I thought they wanted to talk a bit too much. Too many questions, too much interest."

"People aren't allowed to talk?"

"They wanted to know where we're from, where we're headed, things like that. Imagine if I had told them the truth. Two on one. Three on one."

"Three on two."

"You were in no position to do anything."

"Pffft. You should have opened the trunk!"

"Alright forget the hero narrative won't you. It's done."

"I'm just trying to learn."

"I know... Guess I'm a terrible teacher."

"No."

"You're too kind."

"Or naive?"

"Funny."

"Biased?"

"Alright, I get it... Can I maybe make it up to you with a good meal?"

"Always."

"Pass me that brick then."

The boy handed it over and his father took it from him and then stumbled around for the box of matches that turned up in his back pocket and lit it. The brick covered in flame and he tried to turn it to keep it turning to guide the fire away from the corner he held as he lowered it into place, pushing the small twigs back on top of it when he let go and leaning over close to the pile as if listening for the crackle.

"Are you hungry?" he said, standing up.

"Sure," the boy replied.

"Here, sit."

He went to the line of trees at the edge of the clearing and returned with some snapped branches, still covered with leaves. He waited for the fire to poke its head out of the first layer of sticks then put these branches on so they began to squeal in the heat, smoke turning white and coming on thick, same colour as the mist in the sky.

"I wanted to show you an old trick my dad taught me," he said, pulling a couple of eggs out of a beaten-up box that was also inside his backpack.

The boy's eyes became wide. "Where did you get those?"

"That's a secret."

"I didn't know we had eggs."

"Well, you do now... Watch."

He placed the box of eggs down by his feet and removed two brown paper bags and a plastic bottle with faded lettering from the side pocket on his pack. He sat the bags down so that they stood open. He squirted the bottle into both of them from a height, exaggerating the act, putting on a show, and then used his fingers to spread the liquid around the insides until the outside of the bags started to go damp.

"What is that?" the boy said

"Just a little oil."

"So where did oil
and
eggs come from?"

"Don't ask too many questions, alright?"

"Tell me!" the boy sat forward as he spoke and then rocked back.

The man paused, bottle still half-pouring. "Your mother, ok?"

"Oh."

He turned away, put the bottle down and then picked up the eggs again, splitting them on one of the rocks before he let the insides of each fall into a separate bag. "I hope this still works." He put the bags down on the large stones he had moved into place, adjusted the branches he had laid over the small twigs into a grid. So that the fire could not show its teeth through this thatch. He put the bags onto the grid, upright, and stepped back.

"
Won't
they burn?" the boy said.

"Not if it isn't too hot."

"Oh."

"Yeah. At least, it shouldn't... Old camping trick. The cool thing is we'll know that it's ready when the grease from the oil gets about half way up the sides. Watch. It's a bit like a timer."

The boy sat enrapt by the scene. As the first scent of cooked eggs got to his nose, his stomach started to turn on itself, each side of him become an army of flesh that wanted to charge the other and clash in the middle. He was hungry as hell. He looked at the bag with all his attention as it began to steam, and the wet patch at the bottom climbed the sides as his father promised.

"When my Dad showed me this we would have bacon too. You ever tried that? I can't remember."

"I don't think so..."

"Well you'd know if you had. It's this greasy but delicious meat. It's pig. My Dad used to drop that in the bottom of the bag before he put the eggs in. I think the grease helped the whole thing to cook if I'm honest, but we'll see."

"Was it tasty?"

"To be honest it didn't cook that well for him, it didn't get crisp, but I can still remember it, yeah. I guess like with anything, somehow being out in the open eating tastes better."

"Yeah... Why is that?"

"Um... don't know."

"You might not have this long to decide in real life," the boy joked.

"Funny. Maybe it's not so much being in the open, but being colder, maybe it feels good because your stomach is full of this warm stuff and your outside feels cold? How about that? What do you think?"

"I think I'm starving."

"Good answer. Me too. It's almost done. "

After another couple of minutes he grabbed the top of the first bag and handed it over, taking the other for himself. They ate out of the bags, and soon they were both chewing, silent, pulling out long strings of egg and dangling them into their mouths all the way down to their guts, warming like a wriggling yellow worm, like the sun reduced to a springy hot yellow strip.

"So you want to go exploring?"

"It's alright," the boy replied, feeling like it would be bad to abandon his dad.

"I think you should. I think I should task you with scouting out the trail we seem to be in the middle off. Tell me which direction it goes in and where it appears to come from, how's that? I did tell those guys we were scouting." He swallowed some egg. "Wouldn't want to lie."

"Right now?"

"Well, no. Enjoy your food. But tomorrow. I think we did good for a first day, don't you."

"I do."

"Good. And I wanted to say thank you."

"What for?"

"For helping me see... I mean, you're right, I should let you experience thing. Not just for you, for me too. I should take the chance to learn from you. Maybe that's why I've been messing things up so much."

"You haven't--"

"Yeah, I have. But that's alright. You know, being out here... I mean, isn't it just incredible. This is what living should be, you know, like going back to nature, not crawling through broken up houses." He held up his arms and watched the glowing bugs that were circling around the food get disturbed like a circle of water and then settle back into their flow.

"What would Mom say to that?"

"I have no idea... But she can't say anything when she can't see us, right?"

"Right."

CHAPTER S
IX

The sloping orange fabric of the tent had caught the sun and appeared more like the inside of a burning loft. The night must have walked over the boy without a nudge. It must be morning. He knew moonlight was too white to create such intensity, like trying to see by reflected teeth. He leaned forward to inspect his toes beneath the sleeping bag. The air felt thick. He tried to move but his arms were pinned to his side, the thick track of the zipper not splitting until near the top, and he struggled to extract himself, fumbling for the fastener and pushing it away as far as he could whilst on his back. Only then did the heat drop. He put his hands on his face and crushed the large droplets of sweat that had formed on him. The light from outside faded, as if cloud had formed suddenly. As if the sun had never been there at all. He rubbed his forehead and was surprised by more damp. What had happened in there? He pulled his legs out of the sleeping back and sat on his knees, waking up.

He must have been dreaming. He closed his eyes to try and remember what it was, switching instead to the memory of the campfire that he had stayed up late stirring with a twig, watching sparks leaping out as he wound the base the same way his father and he had used an old key with a single tooth one time to revive a clock. The sparks had landed on him, but had not burned. He had been scared of this touch of fire at first, but soon tried to catch more and more sparks like a wolf looking for droplets of snow with its tongue. Some of these sparks had followed him into the tent when he closed his eyes, piling one on top of the other at the base of his vision. Now he remembered, that was it, that was the last thing, these heaps of sparks in his head, become drunk and heavy, impossible to shift, as if his eyelids had been pierced by needles and he had been left out to stare into the sun, become a million firebugs that lulled him, drawing a curtain of flame across his view, become the boy who looked too long at the fire and burned out from the inside, watching the outline of a troglodyte made of flame, sitting on a rock as hot as the sun, beckoning to him with a red finger, that he had followed into the night, across the plain scattered with trees, to the mountain, to the cave, so black like the centre of an eye, so high that the air ran out and yet he could breathe something else, as if taking in the mist in slurps, smoke, filling his spirit with the blue thunder, that he had followed and then tumbled down the crevice at the top, into the soft-cushioned lullaby of sleep.

Sleep.

He had fallen asleep but then what? What had caused this sweat that clung to him, that he could not dry on the ripstop nylon? What visions had taken hold while he was under the spell of fire. He couldn't be sure. Somehow he got the impression that the sparks he had watched might have turned into stars after his eyes shut. They did not have to change size to do such a thing; he just had to change perspective. Had he thus dreamt of a thousand different worlds, of a thousand different possibilities? Or perhaps not stars but the electrical lights they had watched in the dark? Had he dreamt of following their string, of leaving his father behind, marching towards them? Had he dreamed of breaking through the metal walls that displayed small leaks of potential, of pulling those strands of light ever tighter around him as he passed inside?

He stopped. He could have dreamt of anything; last night was no different from any other. Why torture himself trying to see that far back when sleep stories had always managed to elude him? Maybe he had floated free, held up by the orange fabric that now engulfed him? Maybe he had soared? Maybe he had sunk? It didn't matter. For all he knew he might not have dreamt at all. There was no guarantee. Perhaps his dream had been a singular vision. A flat colour like the top of the tent, the way the world might have ended, or so his father had said, with the ocean of light above the sky, blue wasn't it? An ocean of blue light gone red.

He opened the front of his tent to let the outside world return. His limbs were stiff. They ached as if far longer than one night had passed. He guessed that without some way to tell the time, or some person to ask there was no way for anyone to know how long they had really been away, and he wondered if it had been such a long time, and if his father was already awake, though he could not see or hear him through the gap. Perhaps the sun had peaked and now began to set.

The boy moved outside. The air was so much more comfortable on his skin than the atmosphere in his tent. He stayed down low, he crawled, as there seemed no pressing reason to stand tall given the green wall of trees that surrounded the clearing. His father's tent was green and shaped like a yurt, tethered at the edges. He checked it for signs of life. There was no sound, no movements, just the flicker at the top as it rippled this way and that in the breeze.

He moved to what remained of the fire, turned into a large dinner try made of charcoal. He nudged one of the larger pieces of burnt wood so that it rocked to one side, scraping his finger along it. He withdrew his hand and stared at the black smudge on his skin. A spot of light followed him around as he moved his wrist. He smiled and rubbed the finger over his cheek following a valley that started at the top of his nose and down to the corner of his mouth. He pushed his finger down into the fire again to get more smut, convincing himself as he rubbed the embers, that it might still be warm. He went over the first line he had drawn on his face, and repeated the pattern on the other side until it felt like he had good markings on him, good markings to explore, to scout. The scent of the ash overpowered the evergreen spit and he breathed it in, pressed his lips together as if about to duck
under water
and pushed his teeth forward. He stuck the finger in his mouth and sucked it. It had a good taste, a good smell, and it stirred something in his stomach. Maybe some of the oil from the bags had remained, awakened by his touch, ultra-fine droplets from the fire, falling around him like sparks from a smelter, bouncing and collapsing like bugs buzzed by the hot lick of the desert sand.

He walked down from the plateau without waiting for his father, figuring he'd spend some time starting to get a handle on the location of any nearby cairns that he could later follow. He had with him his small backpack, which contained a blunt pocket knife, a plastic bottle half-filled with water, a couple of bandaids, a sanitising tablet, a length of uncuttable rope, a comic with a scary story about a secret submarine base in it, three clips to fasten things to the outside, a plastic bag to keep things dry, a broken LED flashlight, a pocket video game that had never worked, and the lighter he had found the day before.

It didn't take much time until he found another cairn. This one was in the shade a few hundred yards away from the tents, under a solitary tree, and the stones on top wore green moss that appeared to have flecks of seeds and fur on them. He figured this meant the rock piles were indeed old, but he couldn't be sure; what if they had been built out of old rocks? Either way, it intrigued him how the stack had been put together, how the rocks piled one on the next all just seemed to fit, how each individual stone had the opposite curve of the one on top, and he smiled as he imagined some burning meteorite shattering against the mountain many years back, only for someone to come along and reconstruct it by chance. One thing was certain: his father was right to scold him for kicking one. It was bad to destroy something like this, something that had been put together with love and care like how he imagined how families might once have been.

But what route could they have marked out?

He started to scan for the next one, reminding himself that his father had said they were in an old national park. These stones may plot the route of a scenic walk. He wouldn't know for sure without at least trying to follow. Perhaps if he managed to uncover a whole sequence he could judge whether there was anything to the trail beyond good views. Maybe he should just pretend. He thought of all those days trapped in the yard. Now he was free of that. Free to follow the route, or even better, free to make one. For a while at least. Yes, he could envisage following this trail to the end and then continuing it, going off on his own, building his own cairns in the hope that someone would one day follow him...

He turned to face the trees, looking back to the camp, trying as best he could to construct a line that joined the cairn near his feet to the one up by the camp. This was all he could think to do -- create a straight line and follow it until he found another. It might not work, but it was that or stumbling along at random. He couldn't rely on the existence of obvious paths -- he looked down at the grass beneath his feet -- those paths would have long grown over.

He would construct his line and follow it, then. He stood on tiptoe to get the best view he could of where the trees raised up around the plateau. He imagined a pin stuck in this point and wrapped a thread around it, took it in his teeth and turned to face the second cairn, moving his feet as close to it as he could without touching it, feeling the tension in his invisible cord.

He started to walk.

He had no idea how well he could navigate straight ahead, but trusted himself to do it, kept his bite tight and visualised the line. He didn't get far before a tree approached. He held firm to his direction, looking over his shoulder to see the furrow in the blades of grass. He stooped under the branches of the tree, broke out from under it, and went further, towards an outcrop of rocks. Even here, rather than go around, he decided he should climb up on top. But this group of rocks was more of a challenge than the gentle
slope
back up to the camp. He brushed off his hands and took a run at it, making easy progress over the first few steps before he hit a line of loose grit that had somehow beached high on the crags.

He slipped back but managed to fall forward so he ended up leaning against the side, digging his fingers into the soil to pull himself up, battling the weight of doubt, making it a few inches before he jumped just enough to see over the top. For a moment, he felt like he could see the next pile of rocks. But the soil at his shoes turned loose and he slipped and slid around, peddling to keep his position but falling back all the time, a little like how he imagined white-watering down a river, only with a stream of particles and not spray; microscopic bundles of soil, decayed matter, clay that formed bigger bundles as he pressed into it, the twisted ends of roots come off, all thrust back beneath his foot.

He paused to rest, turning around and
lying
against the rocks with his arms spread out. He hadn't expected to get this tired from the effort, as if they were at altitude. The motion of his chest pushed him into the stone and the various undulations jabbed into his back, making it hard to stop but hard to continue. He wanted to sit down. But there was no space, and he might easily slide all the way back to the ground. So he hung there and gathered his breath. He took his backpack off and slung it up onto the top of the rocks. Now he had to go up there. He spat on his hands and rubbed them together for one big push, turned, and inched himself along the rock just enough, holding out his palms to support himself. He looked up at the sky one more time and then ran at the last side of rock as hard as he could, jumping up, pulling the roots, clawing at it, kicking at it, pounding his hands against it, and just got enough of a hold on the top shelf to drag himself up.

He was right. There was another cairn up there. He smiled, almost laughed, tried to clean off his clothes, and spent some time sitting with his backpack in his lap as if he was petting it, reassuring it. At least, he thought it was meant to be a cairn. In a way it was less qualified, seemed to have broken down like an old ruin. But ruin or not it was not a natural gathering of rocks; someone had put it there. And this meant that his idea of drawing a line was correct. So now, where was the next? He was hooked. The other side of the rocks was less imposing and he let himself run down it in his ill-fitting shoes, heading towards a long line of trees with no sun underneath. He saw the next one at the foot of a large trunk that slanted down, tipping over, pulling up the earth.

The closer he got to the trees the more a wall of brown and black stretched over his eyes. All the way to the top of the sky. All the way to where the grass lost its colour. He began to doubt if he should cross into this darkness. Yet there was something that begged him to keep on. What if his father now decided it wasn't a good idea after all. What if he never got to see where the trail of rocks led?

He paused to take stock of the view behind him, so that he might find it again for the return. He looked back on the outcrop of rocks he had just climbed and past it to where he felt like the raised trees made the plateau. He looked down at the pile of rocks at his feet and dared to bend down and turn the top rock, which had a slight point on one end, so that it aimed back to the camp. And then without worrying about it more he pressed on, ducking down and under the trees to where the sky disappeared except for specks and the going was tough with so many dense twisted branches reaching over him like witches' fingers.

He pushed in the direction of the line in his head as best he could. His steps were accompanied by the snap-snap of twigs breaking at random, twigs he couldn't even see for his eyes were closed a lot of the time to stop them being scratched out. The ground beneath had lost its colour anyway, covered with leaves that held small pools of water in their cups that ate them up and turned them first to mush then to tiny flies that could only leave through the gaps in the trees where the last of the sky was, and the smell of all this began to overpower him, and he could sense his skin turning green. The urge to rub his face free of dust accelerated but he could not; if he did then the green would only rub in deeper, and it would itch harder, and the scratch would never stop until he bled.