Landscape of Farewell (20 page)

Cautiously I swung my legs over the side of the bed and with a gasp I stood up. My ankle was still tender but it held my weight shakily. Teetering unsteadily like an old drunk, I took my dressing-gown from the head of the bed and dragged it on over my pyjamas. I stood gathering my resolve, steadying myself with a hand to the bedhead, trembling and unshaved, my spectacles askew. I had not expected this wretchedness. Writing his story had been a secret and a nightly joy. I did not want to lose it. Alone with Gnapun and my journal I had forgotten this old age, this grief, this terrible decline and had lived again as a young man. No, I had not expected this euphoria to end with the end of the story, this sudden miserable fall into the banal realities of my poor existence. If it was a reward I looked for, then
I had already received it. I gazed unhappily at my journal where it lay on the covers. I would have gone on with the story, but there was no more to be said. The story was finished. The bird had flown. My little journey into fiction was over. The surprise, more impressive in its way than my disappointment, was that what I had done was no longer mine. By finishing I had not gained something but had lost something, and I did not know how I might remedy the loss, or fill the gap it left in me, unless I were to write another story and to make my escape again by this means. But what story? I knew no stories. I picked up the journal and, clutching the cursed thing under my arm, hobbled out to the kitchen with it. No doubt Dougald would loathe it and Vita, when she read it, would be offended by my presumption.

Dougald was working at the table on his laptop as usual, surrounded by the disorder of his papers. He looked up as I lurched across the kitchen towards him. A pile of our unwashed clothes lay on the chair beside him. Some of the dirty clothes had fallen to the floor and the grey bitch had made her bed on them. She eyed me with distrust. The sink was also filled with dirty dishes. In my absence the household had slid back into the state of neglect and disorder in which I had found it. I was anxious and felt intensely irritated suddenly for no reason. I did not want to hand the story over to Dougald. My reluctance was partly that he would disapprove of it, but more than that, I felt I had made the story my own and that he would not understand
it. I had
enacted
it on the page, word by word, night after night. I had
lived
it. I did not want to hand it back to him, just like that, as if it were merely his to receive and to thank me for, and there was to be an end of it. A job done. I resented both the possibility that he would calmly repossess it and that he would reject it. Neither would satisfy me. He did not look at me as I approached him but looked at the journal.

I set it on the table beside him. ‘There,’ I said. ‘It’s done.’ It was not the generous spirit that I had expected between us at this moment. I had written it for him, after all, not for myself. Why was it so awkward for me now, and so fraught with this mean-spirited reluctance to part with it? He had cared for me since my foolishness that night without ever once complaining. Indeed he had probably saved my life at the stinking waterhole. And had I not wept while he held me in his arms? Under ‘Massacre’ I had written, ‘A true story by Dougald Gnapun’. For it was not authorship in the usual proprietary sense that I was laying claim to, but something more private than that, something more intimate and intuitive. It was my
own
secret that I wished to keep, a thing not to be disclosed or shared with anyone. He looked up at me and I saw how he doubted and hoped and was afraid and eager all at once to know what I had done with his hero—I saw how he had waited these last ten days and nights, as anxious all that time as I was now. It seemed selfish and unfeeling of him to me, the way he took the journal then into
his hands without a word. I hated him at that moment, with the fierce hatred we reserve for our most deeply loved intimates—as if a match is struck in our brains and flares for an instant, leaving us ashamed and burned.

I stood beside him, calm enough it must have seemed, but wanting to snatch the book out of his hands and tell him,
You can’t read it! It’s not yours! It’s mine!
I felt certain he would not understand what I had written
as I understood it myself
, and would perhaps even find it offensive and a betrayal of the trust he had placed in me to preserve the truth of his story. I said nothing, however, but stood watching him read, compelled against my will to read with him:
To choose the moment of his own death. There was a nobility in that
… I could not bear it and murmured an excuse and hobbled out into the yard.

I stood on the concrete in the shade of the tree—it was a familiar haven, this place in the shade of the old tree; I had missed it. I was trembling and my heart was hammering with the confusion of emotions that had taken me so much by surprise. My two brown dogs watched me warily, as if they feared I might aim a sudden kick at them. ‘Oh, it’s all right,’ I said. ‘You needn’t look at me like that. I just need a drink.’ There was nothing to drink in Dougald’s house. Early in our acquaintance, when one of his people had been drunk on the telephone, he had expressed such a fierce abhorrence for drink that I had understood him to fear it.

In the absence of the goat, the weeds and grasses had overgrown the yard. The place looked uncared for and abandoned. The grass swayed in the light airs, just the way my uncle’s barley swayed when it was ripe and he and I stood admiring it and hoping we would get the reaper to it before a storm flattened it. And suddenly I could smell the sweet ripe barley fields of my childhood. I hobbled across to the shed and found a curved slasher among the hoard of tools there and I took it out into the yard and began to slash helplessly at the weeds. I had once known how to do this job efficiently. My uncle and I had reaped the headland swathe by hand before bringing the mechanical reaper into the field behind the horses. I bent from the waist and embraced an armful of the rank growth now and hacked at its base. Thistles prickled the palm of my hand and the blade was blunt. I kept at it.

My ankle was soon torturing me and my heart thudded so heavily I thought I must have a stroke or a heart attack. There was a perverse pleasure in defying the odds and keeping at it.
Go on, then, kill yourself and be done with it!
It was an attitude that amused my disdainful other self, who never did anything unreasonable or silly but preserved his dignity and his calm in the face of every extremity—he had not agreed with my original decision to kill myself and had mistrusted me ever since. But I was determined never to
be
him. I was sweating and threw off my dressing-gown and dropped it behind me. It amused me—the
real, the helpless, stupid me, I mean—to think of Dougald coming out of the house when he finished reading the story and finding me sprawled on the ground on my back like the leader of the white strangers, the reaping hook tossed aside and glinting in the sunlight, his great-grandfather’s spear sticking from my side. Was I the leader of the strangers? No. Never. I was only Gnapun in my dreams; in reality I did not possess his great soul. I knew that. But I was not the leader of the strangers … I bent and gathered one armful of the prickly grasses after another, gasping in the hot air, my mouth open, sweat streaming down my face and back. My pyjama top was soon wet with sweat and sticking to me. I tore it off and threw it aside and worked on, naked to the waist. I was not young. And I was not pretending to be young. But for this brief season with the reaping hook in my hand it would be
as if
I were young. My vision was blurred with sweat and thousands of insects flicked around me, touching my face and hands and sticking to my eyes. I kept working. There was a joy in defying old age and pain …

The touch of Dougald’s hand to my shoulder startled me and I straightened and stared at him. He withdrew his hand from my sweating skin and stood looking at me. My chest heaved and the sweat cascaded down my face, the reaping hook gripped in my hand as if it were the weapon of a berserker. He held my journal and looked at me. The air thickened in my throat and a terrible prickling dryness threatened to choke me.

With a solemn and grave astonishment, he said, ‘You could have been there, Max.’

Joy and relief swept through me—a little tsunami it was. And I wanted to repeat his words aloud—I
heard
them repeated aloud in my head. ‘Oh, you like it then?’ I said, my tone surprisingly conversational. A rush of wellbeing raced through my blood.

He stepped up to me and embraced me and held me strongly against his body, pinioning my arms to my sides. The point of the reaping hook was digging into my leg.

He released me and stepped away. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

I saw that he was greatly moved by what I had done for him. I wiped at the wet hairs sticking to my face and grinned at him foolishly. ‘I’m glad you like it,’ I said. ‘So, it’s okay then? That’s good. I’m glad.’

‘Oh yes, old mate,’ he said, and he laid his open hand on the cover of my journal. ‘It’s all here.’

I said, ‘Your approval means a great deal to me. I was afraid you might be offended by it.’

He smiled and reached out to put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a small shake, as if he forgave my foolishness and uncertainty. ‘As soon as that ankle of yours is up to it, we’ll take a drive down there to my country and pay the old Gnapun a visit.’

I said carefully, ‘But of course he is no longer with us.’

‘Gnapun’s still with us, old mate.’ He brandished my journal.
‘His story’s not over yet. We’ll go up to that cave of his in the escarpment.’ He was almost jubilant. Something real had happened. He had his wish. His precious story was preserved.

‘Will you be able to find your way there?’ I said. ‘I mean, after all this time?’

He touched his chest with the tips of his fingers, just the way I had imagined Gnapun touching himself when he told the leader of the strangers his name. ‘There’s a map of my country in here.’

I was under the shower and was singing the Beatles’ song, ‘All You Need is Love’—or is it all
we
need? I am never sure—when the obvious struck me and I fell silent. It was the superior voice of my knowing other self, of course, and it rang like a bell in my head:
So you have identified yourself at last with the perpetrator of a massacre
. Was there a note of triumph in this claim? A gleeful delight at having caught me out? It was true. But it had not occurred to me. I would have liked to ignore it. Not once during those long nights struggling to bring Gnapun’s story into being, those long nights of being him, the joy I had felt, the kindred intensity of my feelings, not once had I ever experienced the remotest touch of guilt-by-association with the terrible crimes of that day. You would think I would have flinched. But I hadn’t. By what knotted confusion of my unconscious
reasoning, I wondered as I stood there under the cascading shower, had I considered myself to be in the clear with Gnapun? He and I were both members of this same murdering species. It was a puzzle to me how I could have composed his story with such a sense of innocent detachment from the crimes, and yet with such an intense belief in the emotions of the motives that had brought those crimes about. Clearly the massacre of the strangers had been for me more than just the telling of a story. For once in my life I had not been constrained by the severe discipline of history, but had been at liberty to invoke the dilemmas inscribed in my own heart, inscribed there during my childhood, and which had haunted me ever since.

I turned off the water and stepped out of the shower. I had not found a resolution to these dilemmas, of course, but by writing Dougald’s story I had found a certain calm, and even a feeling of possibility, in relation to them that I had not known before. Was it that I had at last broken my silence about such things as guilt and innocence and the unreasoning persistence of evil? Now that I had Dougald’s reassurance about the worth of my story to him, could I dare to think of it not as something completed but as a modest beginning of something more complex, more ambitious, a larger project altogether that might occupy me for the rest of my life? The idea excited me. Winifred was the only person who would have understood the powerful claim on me of such a possibility. To a stranger it must have seemed a cheap
arrogance. But I was thinking of the carton of mouldering notes on my bookshelves in the study at home. I was not thinking,
I will do something with them
. Oh, no. I was just seeing them there. My mind flew to them but did not give me a reason for flying to them, it only gave me the emotion, the feeling of being, at that moment, happy.

After I had dressed I carried one of the hard-backed chairs from the kitchen into the yard and set it by the back door in the shade of the gum tree. I sat on the chair and supported my ankle on the block Dougald used for splitting firewood. The shower had greatly eased the pains and my body throbbed steadily, like an idling motor. When Dougald said to me, in that disbelieving, admiring tone of voice,
You could have been there
, they were the sweetest words I had ever heard. For, of course, I
had
been there. But only I knew that.

It was a week later and Dougald had been working all day on the engine of the truck. He was getting the truck ready for our journey south into the escarpments of the Expedition Range. He was determined to make the trip, but was nervous and anxious about this return to his country after such a long absence from it. That night I believe his habitual calm failed him. I lay awake listening to him traipsing around the house, the claws of his bitch tap-tapping on the boards, as if a blind harbinger announced him in his nocturnal wanderings.

In the morning, the purple caverns of his eyes were darker and more recessed than usual. He told me at breakfast that since reading my story—and he had reread it several times—he had begun to look on this indifferent world of his exile at Mount Nebo with the hope of a return to his own country, and that it made him anxious to be gone as soon as possible. ‘I feel as if I’m running out of time, old mate.’ I reassured him that he had plenty of time, but I understood his concern. As soon as we have something precious to achieve we begin to fear death, where before we had remained indifferent to it. To go back with assurance now to that place he had dreamed of all his life, that idealised place of his imagination which he had not seen since he was a youth, was a grave and uncertain undertaking for him. And he had never disclosed why he had not gone back sooner. This was to remain a mystery. Even when we are young there is a risk of disillusion in revisiting the scenes of our first joys and despairs. But to return to the place of our youth when we are old is surely to hazard our most cherished dreams. He was determined, however, that he and I would visit together the place of Gnapun’s last days. He spoke of it to me several times, his eyes alight with his dream of actually being there. ‘We’ll do it, old mate,’ he said, and must have repeated the mantra of this reassurance a dozen times or more, no doubt in order to convince himself of it as much as to convince me.