Watson, Ian - Novel 10 (19 page)

 
          
The
tussocky ground wasn’t too hard, but a chill clung to it which Jim hadn’t
noticed while they were walking. After a while, hesitantly he fitted himself
right up against Weinberger, who appeared to be asleep already. He tucked his
buttocks into the other man’s belly and folded the hollows of his knees around
the other man’s knees. Before, in Egremont, they had been Sleeping Beauties;
now they were the Babes in the Wood.
Creaky old babes.

 
          
Jim
was still wondering how he would ever get to sleep, when he realized that it
was already daylight.

 
          
He
had dreamt troubled, wakeful dreams: complicated, guilty racings of the mind
upon the theme of how to switch off those same racings. There existed a maze of
switches to do this. As soon as he threw one switch, though, this gave birth to
a whole subsidiary maze. Eventually mazes and switches towered to the sky.

 
          
And
that sky was now bright with the morning sun. He blinked, wondering where all
that complex of apparatus had gone to. Surely it couldn’t have packed itself
back into his skull? But it had; and he had spent his hours of sleep like a rat
in some old torture laboratory, which happened to be his own brain.

 
          
Weinberger
had gone. Jim sat up in dizzy panic. A bird — but he was not very good on birds,
so that it was simply ‘a bird’ — twittered on a branch then flew off suddenly
as Weinberger came up through the pines back to the crag.

 
          
Weinberger
sniffed the air appreciatively.

 
          
“Lovely morning, Jim.
Good to be alive, as they say.”

 
          
Jim
shook his head, to clear it of the last switches and mazes. He sniffed the air
too — it was like a cool green drink — and he sneezed. Twice, three times,
explosively.

 
          
Weinberger
chuckled.

 
          
“Cut
it out. You don’t catch cold from lying on the ground. Cold is a virus.”

 
          
Jim
shivered, and sneezed again.

 
          
“Stop
it!’’

 
          
Amazingly,
Jim did stop sneezing.

 
          
“When
did you wake up?”

 
          
“I
told you: I don’t use much sleep. I’ve been scouting. There’s a spring down
there — fully certified for washing and drinking. Freshen up, take a leak, and
we’ll open one of those cans you brought. Oh, it’s just like the old days —
give
or take a tent.
And a fire.
We
can’t light any fires up here. No fire without smoke. Go on, lazybones,
git!
I let you sleep in this morning.”

 
          
Jim
groaned, and massaged his legs.

 
          
At
mid-day, when they had covered another six or seven miles, they stopped to open
another can and eat some chocolate. Both men were ravenous, and Jim realized
that the groceries he had brought would hardly last through the next day. When
Jim mentioned this, Weinberger airily reminded him that he intended to catch
fish with the line and hook he had told Jim to buy. He promised a feast of
edible fungi too, which would taste like steaks — and be topped with sweet
blackberries. But Jim saw only spruce and pine, grass and sky.

 
          
They
sat on a spruce-clad ridge, eating. The breeze was very fresh, despite the
continuing sunshine. A squirrel scampered up a tree and sat watching them
intently,
clutching some trophy in its paws, ready to dart
to the far side of the trunk. Steep green valleys

 
          
lay
ahead — and somewhere in the distance a thin waterfall
tumbling from its crag into a hidden lake or pool.

 
          
Hearing
a buzz in the sky, they took shelter behind the squirrel’s tree, sending it
leaping to another.

 
          
A
mile westward a white monoplane flew into view. It veered this way and that. It
circled.

 
          
“Peace
Service plane,’’ remarked Weinberger. “So that means they’ve found the
runabout, and the cone of search points this way.
Can’t win
‘em all!
But that’s a hopeless way of looking for someone. They’d be
lucky to spot us even if we were up a tree waving a red sheet at them.”

 
          
Gradually
the monoplane moved away.

 
          
Later,
a second monoplane passed almost directly overhead,
then
swung back towards the north-east. This one had wing-tip floats instead of
wheels.

 
          
“That’s
from Bamaby,’’ said Weinberger. “
Hence the floats.
That’s because of all the lakes they’ve got over there. It was just a
coincidence passing over us like that. They didn’t see a thing.”

 
          
“If
they do see us —’’

 
          
“They’ll
drop officers in by parachute, the same as they do for fires.” Weinberger
scanned the horizon. By now it had gone into mourning with black crepe along it
beneath white cauliflower domes. “Don’t worry. The weather’s going to foul up
in another hour or two. Let’s reach a lake. Our supper ought to be able to tell
the difference between a few raindrops and a wriggly worm.”

 
          
A few raindrops.
This was sheer bravado. When it did start
to rain steadily a couple of hours later, with grey clouds dredging along below
the tops of the slopes, both men were soon soaked through and shivering despite
their capes. When they finally did arrive at a lakeside, the lake seemed like a
mere local thickening of the water which already filled the air.

 
          
Though
partly occupied with feeling miserable, Jim had neverthe-less — under the lash
of the rain — managed to track down a certain quality of, call it, inattention
about their escape into the forests. They had brought food along, yes, and a
fishing line, and a couple of capes; and so on. But they were just not geared
up for a trek to the border. Therefore
they
were not really going there.
He

 
          
understood
this now, while the rain dripped off him, and
through him. The border was an alibi, a lie. They had paced themselves for a
sprint, not a marathon. It was all they were good for: a sprint lasting two or
three days at the most . . .

 
          
‘Give
us two or three days, and we’ll damn well prove we’re right!’ As to afterwards,
why, the non-existent Gods could see to that.
Or Justice, or
Fate, or even, incredibly, Truth.
Unconsciously, they had made this
bargain: this magical, infantile bargain.

 
          
Jim
found himself remembering an old German poem in favour with the Houses:
Friedrich Holderlin’s
To the Fates.
More accurately, Norman Harper’s version of it was in favour. But out of
curiosity Jim had once accessed the original back in Gracchus. The original
petitioned the Fates to grant another summer and another autumn of life to
ripen the poet’s song. To Jim’s ear the German original sounded very hectoring,
but Norman Harper’s ‘translation’ was something of a misrepresentation, to say
the least . . .

 
          
Norman
Harper called his version
Windfall
.
It was another of his rare departures from a rhyme scheme. Jim whispered the
‘translation’ to himself sourly, trying to remember the bargaining German
voice that lay hidden beneath Harper’s verses like some buried Troy.

 
          
‘Will
you let me fade in the
Fall
,

 
          
My kindly Powers That Be?

 
          
My
poems will be ripe for plucking,

 
          
Heart’s
pollen will be all sweet honey
For
the next year’s
folk.

 
          
‘Hullo
there, Stillness, how
are
you?

 
          
I’m
goodly glad, even if I’m not to hear
My
own voice
versing any more.

 
          
In
my own way I’ve lived like Goethe.

 
          
But
you know
,
apples overripe go rotten . . .

 
          
‘Why
don’t you pick my windfall, now?’

 
          
Which would have been all very well, and autumny, earlier in the
day when the sun was still shining!
But of course, it was a different
kind of bargain that Norman Harper was intent on striking. Harper bargained not
with the Fates, but with the State. Not for a little more lease of life, but
for a good death. It was the Httlderlin sort of bargain that they were into
now: for a few more hours of freedom, to produce something.

 
          
Jim
shook water out of his hair.

 
          
“We’re
going to chase Death home soon,” he said. “All we need is somewhere to shelter.
Nobody can creep up on us in this weather. Afterwards — we’ll see.”

 
          
Weinberger
nodded wetly, like a dog after a swim. He seemed to share Jim’s feelings about
the journey. They were heading towards a different border entirely, and over
it, and back again, with the truth, with evidence. That was their real journey,
not this farce of a hike.

 
          
“I
think that’s a hut over on the other side, isn’t it?”

 
          
They
peered across this lake, into which the sky melted.

 
          
A
quarter mile away as the crow flies a little shack hunched vaguely.
A mile or more around the banks of the kidney-shaped waters.
It would be a kennel to dry off in.

 
          
It
took half an hour of slipping and sliding and detouring to reach the shack.

 
          
Inside,
piled in a corner, were two delapidated mattresses with their stuffing coming
out. Empty, cobwebbed shelves lined one wall. The roof leaked in a few places,
and there was no glass in the single window that overlooked the rain-lashed
waters. But here was shelter, and even a sort of luxury. A three-legged chair
lay toppled on the floorboards; its fourth leg had walked off elsewhere long
ago.

 
          
Jim
broke the chair up and began to scavenge anything else that would burn. He
prised the shelves loose. He pulled up a broken floor plank, then another —
their nails as loose as a radiation victim’s teeth. He scooped dry earth from
under the hut to serve as a fire base, and began to splinter wood. He
discovered a pile of yellowed old magazines under a sack. They would light the
splinters, which would light the larger pieces of wood.

 
          
Faithful
to his promise of fish for supper, Weinberger went out into the rain again with
the hook and line.

 
          
Jim’s
clothes were steaming on his body beside a decent fire when the other man came
back twenty minutes later. The smoke billowed out of the window, losing itself
in the smoke of rain.

 
          
Weinberger
winked broadly. From behind his back he jerked out a sagging speckled trout,
its mouth wide open in horrid surprise.

 
          
“Three
pounds, if it’s an ounce!”

 
          
Weinberger
gutted the fish, spitted it on a stick and handed this to Jim to cook.

 
          
“Pity
we haven’t a quart of whisky with us!”

 
          
Even
without whisky they feasted royally, burning their fingers. Then they dragged
the mattresses closer to the dying fire, as the day too — already submerged by
rain — drowned through dusk into darkness.