To Heaven by Water Page 25

  ‘It’s amazing how quickly they come and go,’ says Guy contentedly.

  ‘Jesus, Guy. Have you done that before?’

  ‘Once or twice. They’re usually bluffing.’

  ‘And if they are not?’

  ‘Ah well, that’s the chance you take.’

  David sees that there is no bravado, just a sort of matter-of-factness about facing down a huge rufous elephant.

  ‘Breakfast? Then we can follow them.’

  ‘Do you think following them is a good idea? Don’t you think they will recognise us?’

  ‘Do you want to see them or not?’

  ‘I have seen them. Way too close.’

  ‘You go and get some acacia twigs and we’ll brew up.’

  David is too shaken to walk down to the trees. God knows, there could be more of them arriving on their mysterious migrations.

  ‘I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you go down there for the wood, while I get the breakfast stuff out? Do you want wiener sausages?’

  ‘Love some.’

  His brother wanders naked down to the trees: As he came forth of his mother’s womb, naked shall he return to go as he came. David finds a tin of sausages and some beans and pours water into the blackened kettle, which has a ritualistic importance on this journey. Soon Guy returns with some firewood.

  ‘I’ll just put on some clothes,’ he says.

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘By the way, you didn’t tell me there were young. I saw the tracks.’

  ‘No, for some reason it slipped my mind.’

  ‘They can be more dangerous when they have young.’

  ‘More dangerous? Than what? What’s more dangerous than being shunted into a ravine by a 10-ton elephant?’

  The fire, the kettle, the slippery little sausages, the beans with more than a suggestion of the can infusing them, the rooibos tea in the chipped metal cups, the weaver birds busy in the hardy trees, the bee-eaters flashing their carmine and blue as they leave their burrows, a lizard approaching with reptilian curiosity, the platoon of Maoist ants (seeking testicles), the overwhelming dryness which causes the snot in your nose to grow hard and granulated, the thin wisps from the fire (our sacred fire), as delicate as the smoke of paper money in a Buddhist temple being sent heavenwards, the sky turning from its deep morning blue – the colour of their mother’s beloved willow-pattern china – to a whiter, bleached duck egg blue; the sound of crickets tuning up in the dried scrub, the whisper of a parched wind riffling the pods in the acacia trees, the immensity of the landscape already stunned by the new day – all this, David sees, with blinding clarity, is Guy’s reality. What does it matter to him that his younger brother received the Royal Society of Television’s Gold Award or that Gordon Brown will be forced from office or that the colours for next spring’s fashions, according to the fashion experts, will see a return to the natural; in fact, intense colours like red and pink and violet will have a monochrome sheen? More than once he has reported on fashion from Milan or Paris but there was no mention of that in the elaborate calligraphy decorating his Gold Award. And yet, David knows – he has always known – we all make what we can of what is to hand.

  And now, as they sip rooibos, which he has learned to like, he wonders if the urge for redemption isn’t universal but expressed in many unconscious ways; in his brother’s case (mercifully he has his rugby shorts on again) this is the mystical-poetical, the morning’s minion, the crazed longing to understand, how all’s to one thing wrought. And in the end it all does come down to one thing, death.

  For himself it’s the death of Nancy, which has become fixed in the pathetic image of her in the degrading hospital gown – a shroud – and her cruelly exposed buttocks. She turned to him, and waved, just once, utterly cowed, from some way down the wide, sinister corridor – a deadly boulevard – and he waved back in chipper fashion, a fool. A fucking idiot.

  Death was semaphoring.

  ‘Guy, what you did was incredible. When I saw you stark bollock naked waving at that elephant, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.’

  ‘The elephant or my bollocks?’

  ‘One thing’s sure, the elephant didn’t like your bollocks.’

  They laugh. Even as he looks at his brother, the elephant man, with new respect, perhaps humility, he nonetheless sees looming that strangely complex, just-off-true nature and the stubbornness that he used to think spoke of a closed mind. The hedgehog and the fox. The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing. No doubt who is the hedgehog in this brotherly relationship: all his life Guy had been striving for some way of knowing the mind of God. David remembers Richard Burton and his real anguish when Mephistopheles said, I, who saw the face of God. For Burton, Dr Faustus was not a play, but a terrifying presentiment of the hell into which he was knowingly descending.

  ‘Shall we go and look for eles? They move deceptively fast. And could you just wash up the plates a little?’ He says this with a stoical weariness. ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you. You have to be organised on a trip like this. You’re just as untidy as you were at fifteen. I’m going to take a crap.’

  His diet has caused a chronic slow-down in his metabolism, but he has faith in alfresco evacuation. He heads for the trees, taking his own toilet roll.

  David could point out that his brother’s one and a half rooms at the back of someone’s garden in Cape Town are filthy and piled with yellowing press cuttings – the pale iodine colour of his buttocks, he now realises – and cans deep in fungal growth, and that the spare bed, which he proudly revealed by hitting a sofa with a brick to release the mechanism, exposed a family of striped and understandably rattled field mice: ‘Harmless little buggers, although they attract snakes, so I don’t really encourage them.’ He could have said many things, but of course you are saddled with the family myth and at this late stage it’s probably pointless to put anyone straight, least of all his brother.

  They set off along the riverbed. At first his brother had derided the air conditioning in the hired Toyota as a tragic pandering to the spoilt and decadent. After all, for tens of thousands of years man has lived without it. But now he has become a prince, the nabob, of cooled air, constantly adjusting the flow to reach those parts of his body that need attention. Actually, his body seems to be in some discomfort as though various regions of it are at war. Often a pained, preoccupied look and a high colour seize his face and he appears to be suffering; his eyes narrow as if trying to shut out memories, in the way that people shut out bright sunlight. But suddenly he is liable to jump nimbly out of the Toyota to study tracks or dung in the riverbed.

  ‘They’re about twenty minutes ahead of us,’ he says. ‘They’ve settled down, and will probably rest under the nearest big trees as it gets hotter. Jeepers, this air-con is top notch. I think I will be going to get one of these.’

  ‘Good idea. Trade in the hen coop, chickens included in the price, as part exchange.’

  ‘Great car, don’t knock it. Do you want a beer?’

  ‘From the icebox? The one you said was for – what was your word? – oh yes, I remember, cissies?’

  They are happily adolescent, drinking beer and jeering amiably, the way they used to be, as they drive down the river course in pursuit of the elephants. It’s as though the only relationship they can resume is fifty years old. Guy motions David to stop and gets out on to the riverbed to examine a large pile of dung. He pokes his finger into it.

  ‘They’re quite close. I had better drive,’ he says, wiping his finger on the rugby shorts.

  They find the elephants in a valley carved by flood waters and shaded by cliffs and trees.

  Guy turns off the engine.

  ‘The secret,’ he says, ‘is to know that you have an exit. You can never tell with eles, particularly these ones. Sometimes they can be as quiet as mice and sometimes they will charge. As we saw.’

  They watch the elephants at rest. Deep in the sand is a hole they have excavated and they kneel in tu
rn to drink. The calves are in playful mood and wrestle with their trunks.

  After about ten minutes, Guy turns to his brother.

  ‘Davey, as you already know, I am dying.’

  It’s the first time he has used his childhood name. He speaks awkwardly, his mouth full of unknown substances, and perhaps with regrets. And now he has a soft, collapsing mien. He’s been struggling, it seems, to get to his subject.

  ‘I knew that you weren’t well. Frans told me. How long have you got?’

  ‘A month. Six months. That’s not the point. I’m not going to wait for them to take me in and pump me full of drugs.’

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m a goner. But I wanted to talk to you and this is as good a place as any, the end of the line.’

  David watches the elephants, unable to look at his brother.

  ‘I’ve made a helluva mess of my life, in one way. Family, children and so on, total balls-up. In another, I’ve followed my interests. But there’s nothing to show for it. None of my papers or theses has ever been accepted. I have no money to give to my kids, no home. Nothing.’

  ‘I’ll look after them.’

  ‘Now look, I’m not asking you to do anything for my women or the youngest children or anything.’

  ‘I will help them, whatever you say now.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He is humiliated, because he has had to ask for help.

  ‘Guy, you’ve had a fantastic life. These last few weeks have made me deeply envious. I have never been happier.’

  ‘Thanks. I’m sorry I didn’t know Nancy properly...’

  ‘It’s one of those things. Guy, I have had a truly incredible time with you.’

  ‘With your crazy brother.’

  ‘With my crazy brother.’

  ‘That’s something. Davey, I have always been very proud of being your brother, even though you are an argumentative little bastard. All I want is that if I die before we get back you just bury me under some stones. Do you promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  They embrace, something they have never done before. Despite his size, Guy has an insubstantial feel, as though he has been winnowed out. Even at this moment, they are unable to sustain the embrace.

  ‘Keep your pecker up, bro,’ says Guy. ‘I am going now.’

  ‘What do you mean? Where?’

  ‘I’m just going for a walk.’

  Guy climbs out of the Toyota with some difficulty. From behind he has an unsteady, old man’s roll, requiring a few shuffling steps before he can get moving, placing his feet like a duck’s – actually like a ballerina’s, like Rosalie’s – pointed outwards, flat on the sand of the riverbed to ensure steadiness. Why have I never noticed this before?

  His brother disappears into some trees, and then appears again, walking along the riverbed towards the elephants; he has gathered a respectable speed and he does not apparently feel the need to look back.

  20

  SOME MONTHS LATER, IN LONDON

  It’s another four months before David gets back from Africa. As he leaves Heathrow in a taxi, he finds that he has adopted his brother’s perspective of the metropolis, or possibly Fritz Lang’s: the terminal building is an ant’s nest; the road out of the airport is impossibly, pointlessly busy. The skies lack ... What do they lack, exactly? It is winter and they are host to politely jostling, obese, grey, dull clouds, great udders of rain. Rain is falling right now, grudging, but persistent.

  He decides that the skies lack majesty. Out in the desert, just before he left for Cape Town, the clouds were slashed and electrified by lightning for a few days. It was truly the twilight of the gods. The Huab River, whose course he was following all the way to the sea, flooded: water, streaming red and brown – Christ’s blood – roared down in a solid wall 10 feet high. From a ridge, he watched the river carrying away the red topsoil and a few small animals. The elephants had spread out into the desert some time before the rains came; elephants sense that sort of thing. Guy’s body, crushed and bruised, buried under rocks as he had asked, would have been washed away and – he guessed – been eaten by hyenas or jackals. Perhaps even the ants, with their undiscriminating appetites, have joined in the recycling.

  The cab driver’s chubby face looks unnaturally pasty as it appears in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Been somewhere nice?’

  ‘Africa.’

  ‘Orright is it out there at the moment?’

  ‘Yes, thanks. Lovely.’

  As they approach London in the grim dawn, he feels that England is unnaturally cramped: the sky is low and the landscape is demure and he finds the buildings, particularly the new industrial parks and housing estates, tacky and presumptuous.

  He is seeing things the way Guy saw them, but he thinks that is not so bad.

  The Camden house has been on the market for four months, but there are no takers. Lucy has described her new boyfriend, Nick, in texts and an email; she and Nick have been looking after the house and showing the few prospects around. It doesn’t look as though it will sell until the spring when things – the agent says, via Lucy – will undoubtedly pick up. The agent has also said that the house will ‘show’ better with less clutter. Ed and Rosalie are in Geneva. Rosalie is pregnant; the baby is due in twelve weeks. He’s been away for almost exactly six months.

  After what seems like hours, the cab finally approaches Camden. He thinks this is exactly what the painter Sickert saw, the scarcity of light, the oddly damp buildings, the air of apathy. Lucy has put flowers in the house. He’s touched. Nancy loved flowers. He wondered exactly what they represented to her. Many people appropriate values from natural objects. His brother believed that the landscape and the wildlife out there were speaking to him: the message was never completely clear, that was the problem, but he never ceased from looking to the Bushman paintings to yield up the answers.

  The elephants had dealt brutally with him. The body was horribly bruised and broken. Two of his ribs stuck right through the canoeing T-shirt. He hopes even now that it was a quick death. He dragged his brother’s body out of the riverbed and laid it under a huge acacia and used the shovel from the Toyota to dig a shallow grave. He pulled the body into the grave and piled rocks on top of it, as Guy had requested. He had underestimated his length, and had to dig an extension. If he were a more practical man, he would have made a memorial, but there was anyway nothing to use for a headboard. Instead he recited the whole of his brother’s beloved ‘The Windhover’, which he now, perforce, knows by heart.

  As it happened, there was a falcon (or perhaps a hawk) hovering overhead, drifting on the thermals; for his brother’s sake he hoped that it was his spirit creature arrived to accompany him. He tried to fix this spot in his mind, and took some photographs of the mound of stones under the tree. He noted the coordinates on the GPRS in the Toyota, in case there were questions from the authorities or from the family.

  Lucy calls to see if he has arrived. She says she’s coming over immediately. There is milk and bread and orange juice, fruit and single cartons of soup. Everything seems excessive, overorchestrated, even a little confusing. Guy believed that the West was ‘spoilt’ and David recognised one of their parents’ favourite rebukes. Another was ‘showing off’: ‘You’re showing off,’ was a devastating criticism back then. David suspected that his parents thought he was showing off when he first began to appear on the news. Later they were very proud of him. He once heard his father tell an old friend that he was afraid his son had inherited the gift of the gab from him. Looking uncertainly at all this furniture, all these things that he owns, the mountain of mail, the absurd little soups of artichoke, three types of Italian bean, and winter lentil and bacon – and bathed by the scents of perfect flowers – David thinks that he has been purged in the desert. (In the eremitic tradition, from the Greek, eremos, of course.) All this around him seems to be unnecessarily lavish. He thinks of Guy dipping wieners into the ketchup and inexpertly cooking anony
mous chunks of meat on the fire, and farting in the back of the Toyota. Lucy has stacked his mail neatly and he rifles though it half-heartedly – hundreds of letters and bills and offers – until he spots Simon’s handwriting. Strange how you can identify handwriting. He announces that the Noodle Club is invited to his bookshop, the Owl and the Pussycat Books, for a reading by Adam. Simon asks if he will drive Adam. He also says that Julian has died, from a second stroke. David thinks of him with his permafrost pubic hair in the changing room. Brian is away in the Far East but should be back in time; some of his investments are going down the tubes. The reading is just a few days away; he calls Simon immediately. Simon is relieved, because the last he heard David was in the desert somewhere.

  ‘I’m relying on you to get Adam here, sober. We’ve sold a hundred tickets.’

  ‘I’ll try. I’m just back.’

  ‘Adam’s saying you’re his only friend and he won’t come unless you drive him as you promised.’

  ‘He doesn’t mean it. When did Julian die?’

  ‘Five weeks ago. He was on a trip to Como with his wife, and he suddenly had a massive stroke. She’s devastated because she thought he had recovered.’

  But he has other matters on his mind.

  ‘David, do you think quails’ eggs are all right? They are the thing, are they?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, I’ve been in the Kalahari. I’ll be there with Adam, no need to panic.’

  He rings Adam.

  ‘The rover’s return. How are you, my old chum? Wiser?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘How long have you been away? Two months?’

  ‘Six.’

  ‘Six. Fuck me. How time flies, et cetera.’

  ‘I’m coming to get you next Tuesday.’

  ‘You heard that Julian’s died?’

  ‘Yes. Was there a service?’

  ‘There was. Utter crap.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Some snivelling little shits of grandchildren read sentimental memoirs of Gramps, written by their parents, a whole fucking procession of whey-faced turds from the Foreign Office made banal remarks, a bearded rabbi and a little paedophile priest both talked ecumenical bollocks. Either you believe in all the religious mumbo-jumbo or you don’t; there’s no fucking point in trying to update it. Julian, in these accounts, was someone you and I didn’t know. We were celebrating a total fiction. It was sickening. Still, the usual hypocrisies are maybe what you want when your time is up.’