The Paper Men (11 page)

“The great outdoors.”

“Surely. Then sometimes, you know, you lie awake and listen to no noise, though that’s rare nowadays—but sometimes you can listen to no noise—positive no noise and go out and out and out, searching—”

“Nature mysticism.”

“No, sir. It’s just how living is. Then there’s music. Oh my God. But I hadn’t the talent.”

“Had to settle for the groves of academe.”

“Yeah. No—I mean, sincerely no!”

“Let’s get on.”

Rick came towards me, his cleft chin out where it belonged now, as if the sound of water was a cure for diffidence. I had one of those moments, not so much of thought as rapid reflection, a split second in which possibilities, alternatives were considered and dismissed. I dismissed. Was a cleft chin a sign of weakness? No. Was it the sign of a divided nature? Absurd. Was it a delay in the hardening of the bones, a hint of foetalism, as the biological boys used to say and perhaps still did?

He held out his hand, and it seemed natural to take hold and allow myself to be pulled up off the low rock. The careful Swiss had inlaid hollow trunks in the road so that though the path sloped slightly up, the water ran straight across it. To get across was no more than a step. We crossed into a place where it seemed there was no solidity but a dimly seen rail on the left hand and tree roots on the other.

I stood still.

“For a scenic stroll, it’s spectacularly null.”

“This’ll clear.”

“If it weren’t for the silence, we might be strolling in Regent’s Park. I come here in expectation of scenery and all I get is a white-out.”

“The manager said it was unusual for the time of the year.”

“Every two hundred years.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“I must have been to dozens of places where they swore to me it was the worst weather for two hundred years. Always two hundred years. Cairo, Tbilisi—”

“Now, now!”

“Remind me to tell you some time about the highest tide for two hundred years.”

“Tell me about the highest tide for two hundred years.”

“I crewed for a man once in his yacht. Highest tide for two hundred years. I ran him aground on it.”

Rick laughed, a genuine, unservile, happy laugh.

“If he was skipper, it was his doing.”

“No, no. I claim the distinction. Curse this fog.”

“We start climbing again soon. I guess we’ll climb out of it.”

“Quote, mother, give me the sun, unquote.”

“The medics say he got his facts wrong.”

“He got everything wrong. Stagey old twit.”

Rick gave a scandalized guffaw. He was having a real good time. I could see his mental notebook. All the same—

“I know! I know! Gee!”

“Like Wagner.”

The guffaw prolonged itself. There was a sudden extraordinary twisting of the vapour before our faces, a humming sound in the air, a wooden knock on the left, then somewhere down in the fog a mighty thump.

“Oh my!”

“It’s the mountain, Rick,” I said, not yet too scared to play the imperturbable or, if you like, insensitive Englishman. “It’s the bloody mountain, old fellow. He, she or it is throwing rocks at us. We ought to be flattered. Are you flattered?”

“I want out.”

He turned to go but I caught his sleeve.

“This is a sheer gift for a writer. Just think, Rick. Now we can describe what it sounds like to be missed by a cannon ball. What wouldn’t Tennyson have given?”

“We better get back, Wilf.”

“What’s the hurry?”

“There’s no knowing what might be going on up above, Wilf. I know mountains. I was born—why, it could be a real slip, real dangerous.”

“Currently.”

“Yeah.”

“As of this moment in time.”

“Yeah.”

“The lightning never strikes twice in the same place. We ought to see where it struck.”

Securely prevented by the dense fog from experiencing the hideousness of the drop, still unperturbed and wishing to
show
this young man who had unexpectedly revealed a too profound concern for his own safety, I stepped to the rail.

“Aw—c’mon Wilf!”

“I can’t see a thing.”

Still unperturbed, I put my hand on the rail and leaned out. The rail went with me.

The next few seconds can be described in a few words or a few hundred. My instinct—voluble as ever—is for the hundreds. It’s not just that I make my money by selling words but that these seconds were very important seconds as far as I was concerned. The first of them, I have to confess, was an hiatus, a nothing. The second was a contraction, a shock too immediate to be called belief or even apprehension. It was, if you like, the animal body’s awareness, alerted to death so near, the falling to it. The third second was more human in a way—the rail now moving out and down faster and more easily—was blind terror which I became, awareness of blind terror, blind terror aware of itself and, shot through the terror, incredulity. Then the animal took over, every nerve, muscle, heart beat, at top energy and speed, bent on denial of destruction. My wits were gone. My hand, as it clutched and fell with the rail, was vitalized to the point where it might well have squeezed the wood small to its own crippling deformation but nowhere was the wit that would have made me let the thing go. My other hand struck out blindly to where there might be solidity, found it, clutched what felt like a plant and my body turned head over heels so that I landed against the cliff on the other side of the rail with a blow that knocked the breath out of me. The rail dropped away from my one hand as the shock opened it for me. That hand, without asking any permission, grabbed. I was on my back, heels dug in, hands gripped. I was sliding steeply, inch by inch.

A hand was holding me by the collar at the back of my neck. I stopped sliding and inspected the red blotches and blurs that whirled before my eyes and were all I could see. There were, I now felt in every nerve and artery, five points of attachment and support between me and smash. Four of these points were only minimally effective, hands and heels dug into soft earth, left hand clutching a sappy stem, right hand scrabbled into wet mud. Then there was the choking grip of a fist on the suede collar at the back of my neck. The four other points of attachment might be a help, but there was no doubt that I was suspended chiefly from the fist so hard against my nape. That was what held me in this opaque and pendant space. As for the world, but just now so silent, it was noisy with the thumping of my heart, the roaring in my ears and the gasps that came as of themselves out of my chest. Terror was as much an element as space. Here was no dalliance of the mind with the worthlessness or worth of life. The animal knew beyond all question what was precious beyond everything. All that was conscious was a wish that wished itself, for the terror—like the bombing, the shooting, the soughing of shells—to stop. Behind and beyond the fist someone else was gasping too.

I was moving down. The gasps behind me quickened. I dared to shift a heel and dig it in an inch or two higher, but the soil slid away and I felt how the effort had diminished the friction that helped to keep me from falling into the fog.

Rick articulated.

“Hold still.”

I stopped moving down.

“Root above left hand.”

I dared to let go of the plant slowly and allowed my fingers to crawl. The root was there, thick, slimy but graspable because of its contortions.

“Pull.”

There was undreamed of strength in my left hand. The only limit was the strength of the root. I could have lifted myself with anvils hanging from my feet.

“Turn over—real slow.”

I did that, and the fist turned with me, my collar twisting but not too much. Now there was something to see. There was perhaps eighteen inches of earth, coarse grass, small stones and small roots. The slope was close to the vertical. Rick was flat on the path, his left hand hooked round the upright post that had held one end of the fallen bar. His right hand held my collar. The upright post was bowing outwards very slowly, earth and stone dropping from its base.

“Jesus!”

Rick articulated again.

“I won’t let go.”

Inch by inch. I had such hope of safety now that the mixture of hope and fear was almost more agonizing than the instant terror, for Rick was moving with the post, it was what held him, that and his weight against my weight. We were looking each other in the face, an eyeball confrontation, his beneath a frowning forehead. He seemed extraordinarily calm, as if this idiot caper played with our destruction was a small problem of tax or admin.

Inch by inch. Heel, fingers, hand, fist— Then I had a hand on the path, then an elbow, then I lurched forward on one knee as the post fell and thumped somewhere in the fog. We were tangled on the path. I scrambled across it and my body huddled itself against the roots and solid rock of the mountainside. I didn’t say anything. I began first to crawl, then stagger, back along that path, keeping close to the left-hand side like a tramp or a drunk needing the security of a wall beside him. I stumbled through the little stream and fell on the rock where I had sat. I could see Rick’s boots in front of me. The deeper voice of the stream had consumed the lighter one. It was as if the mountain was speaking with the same deep tone that had been audible and now, in the mind,
visible
round the falling lump of rock. I started to giggle.

“Shiver and shake. Alfred Lord Tennyson.”

“Take it easy, Wilf. You’ll be all right.”

Of course he would know, Eng. Lit. and all that. Shiver and shake along the country road, a treat for the local lads.

It seemed to me that I could feel the indifferent threat of the earth through the soles of my feet, the volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, terrors of nature’s fact, the ball flying through space. That was what the water spoke of, not
Gaia
Mater
but the space rock balanced between forces so that gravity exhibited itself with this ghastly indifference.

“Here.”

Irresistible hands were grasping me. I rose, as it might be propelled by a force of nature, I came against wool and warmth. There was strain in my arms. My cheek was ground into skin, hair, the muscles of a neck. We were moving slowly at first, then briskly. A horse, a horse! That huge creature had my passive body in charge, had lifted me into its aura of strength and warmth. It was the warmth that was most disconcerting, now another human manifestation like the smell of shit that stung my nostrils, for he was cantering, there is no other word for it, down through the meadows and into the home stretch. Then I was being lowered. There were voices and other hands and presently I was in my own bed. I opened my eyes saw two thick columns of trouser, and at the juncture of those columns the bulging flies above me. I shut my eyes again. I heard him move and dared a look through one eye. Now he stood at the foot of the bed, looking down. There was a slight smile round his lips. I thought it was friendly enough but there was something else in it. The smile widened.

I shut my one eye again. There was no doubt at all. The smile was a smile of triumph.

“You OK?”

The manager was at his shoulder. They consulted. Rick talked of brandy.

I interrupted him in a voice which I heard was normal enough.

“I don’t want brandy. I want hot chocolate.”

Nursery stuff. But the manager hurried away. Now I was sitting up, my shoulders felt as if they had been racked. Every now and then I had the shakes again. A sensitive type, Wilf Barclay! I shut my eyes, screwed them up and endured the agony of this added link in some chain of farce, this unbudgeted addition to a whole store of recurrent memories, the time Wilf Barclay fell off a cliff and was held up by—

“I didn’t lose my trousers. I hadn’t a round, red nose and ginger hair and a painted squint.”

“Lie down again, Wilf.”

“The very thing, the last bleeding—the only bloody thing that could have happened to reverse everything. How do I do it? What does it? Oh fuck!”

“You better lie down.”

The manager hurried back. He had a cup and saucer. Rick took it from him. The manager hurried away. From outside I heard Mary Lou’s voice.

“Should I come in?”

I shouted, “No!”

Rick put the cup down on the little bedside table. I came over dizzy and lay back. There was a long pause in which doors opened and shut several times, then another pause.

A heavily accented German voice spoke by me.

“He is in some shock, I think. The chocolate was good. The body has its own voice.”

Then I realized that my pulse was being taken. The voice spoke again.

“It is not so bad. How old?
That
old! Well. Drink your chocolate, Mr Barclay. Professor Tucker? Yes. Just rest, I think. He has the physique of a far younger man.”

I could hear Rick muttering. The doctor spoke again.

“I will send something. Yes, now, it is only a few yards. Do please remember, even in the Weisswald we say the green fields kill more than the white.”

But under my shut eyelids I was stretching antennae of horror out to the edge of the universe. The dice were rolling, three sixes or three ones. They were large as planets.

“I’ll wait to give you the stuff, Wilf.”

He was large as a planet, entering my universe with his necessity and his warmth and his smile and dainty bed-piece all drawn along by that gravity of an ambition not worth suffering for. I opened my eyes to get away from the rolling dice and there he was, large as his life, smiling anxiously by the foot of the bed. I examined myself and found I was in vest and shirt. I sat up, lifted the cup and saucer to me as they rattled against each other. I did not care to look at him.

“Let me—”

“Leave me alone!”

Ungrateful bugger, Wilf Barclay, and now enjoying his ingratitude the way he might enjoy cruelty if he had the courage. Ingratitude and sadism all mixed up—what nonsense! But Professor Tucker still stood there, while my cup and saucer rattled in my hands and I managed at last to drink. It did immediately calm me with its nursery taste and nursery memories. I was able, as they say, to take a hold of myself. I went on drinking until I had finished the lot, then held it out to Rick.