Grazing The Long Acre (14 page)

” land of our birth our faith our pride

for who’s dear sake our fathers died…”

The naive sentiment of words and music comforted her.

We came over the rail. Braemar turned around. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sackey, who had rowed us out, mugging abject apology. Her people were everywhere—confederation of the dispossessed, the colonised.

How strange that I had seen her as acting the role of her self. What I had seen was Braemar undercover, recreating her old effects for a new purpose. Did she really need an accomplice? She could probably have managed alone: but Braemar couldn’t change that far. It couldn’t be the Major either. His response might be the same in the end. But Braemar wasn’t going to wait for his kind to find specious justification for their reflexes.

“Where are they?” I cried frantically, “Are they alive?”

“I think so,” said Braemar, without so much as blinking. “I was still getting readings of warm things moving around inside the lifepod, when I placed the charges.”

Johnny’s stunned silence made her furious.

“Don’t you judge me, Johnny!” she shouted. “Or judge me if you like, I don’t care. I know I’m right. This is self defence. Oh, I know they won’t mean any harm, not at first at any rate. But you, you and I and our whole world and history, we will still be worse than dead: meaningless.”

“They could be ordinary,” said Johnny. In the voice of a child at Christmas, dreaming of walking snowmen, talking animals. “They could be our friends.”

“If they’re so ordinary, how come they’re here? You need to lie to yourself, Johnny. I don’t. That’s the only difference between us. I can call them human, call them innocent: and still do what has to be done.”

I began to move in, carefully. The talking was a good sign.

“Where’s the detonator, Brae? Please, come on, tell…”

I risked a glance at Johnny, signalling him (I hoped) to grab her while I lunged for that bag. His face was blood drained.

“Braemar, you can’t be serious,” he whispered. “You know I never meant this—”

She began to sob.

I lunged. Johnny grabbed me…

Across the water the shore rose into a low red cliff, crowned with trees. As I fell headlong, I saw the bottle glass surface under this cliff burst open. Water leapt into the air. Trees shook, ran like liquid: tons of earth and greenery began to topple. Everything was shaking. I lay on the deck with my hands clasped over my head.

The soldiers were waiting for us. Strange meeting—it’s difficult to recall the details of that aftermath. None of us said a word about aliens. We were escorted to the trail, put into an army jeep. Our personal baggage, which had been left in the Mercedes, came back to us minus the recording equipment. Eventually Major Derek appeared, got in beside the driver and we drove away.

Later, we had a debriefing. The military had found nothing: no aliens, no crashed nuclear fighter. The ‘landslide’ had been a natural occurrence. There was no story at all.

Braemar recanted the lifepod. She returned to the military hoax story. She was a secret agent for peace: the rest, she said, had been a ‘smokescreen’. Her eyes, while she explained this, were supremely cynical, the eyes of a clever coquette who knows no one will ever untangle all her lies. She walked out of the hotel in Maiduguri and disappeared into the African crowd. I suppose I will meet her again in a year or two—pale-skinned, immaculately feminine. She will expect me to have forgotten everything, I will know this without asking.

After she’d gone, Johnny told me the other version. The secret network of the faithful, who knew that the aliens had already arrived and went around protecting them from the authorities. He had played along,—’suspending disbelief,’ he said. It had seemed like another of her games. And now neither of us knew what to believe. Was there actually a secret organisation, devoted to stamping out alien intelligence wherever it appeared? It was just too far-fetched, we agreed. Already, like the military, we had resigned ourselves. Already we began to suppress and deny our own memories (so that now, as I write, I do not know what really happened). My tapes are gone. They would have shown nothing anyway, nothing but a certain atmosphere…

But as we travelled home together I could barely bring myself to speak to Johnny Guglioli. I still remembered that he had grabbed for me, not Braemar…Maybe the aliens were never real, but that moment of choice was. He would never admit it but she’d recruited him all right. Without even trying, she’d shown him exactly what happens to the colonised. Her cheating ways, her sly subservience: habitual, automatic self-contempt. When he was actually faced with it, Johnny was ready to kill the innocent strangers. Because he didn’t want to be a nigger. He didn’t want to be a woman for the rest of his life.

I sat staring out of the plane window. At least I didn’t feel pregnant anymore. But Johnny and Braemar haunted me: that doomed encounter between self and otherness. I saw my face in the glass, looking solemnly in from the empty air. And I wished that I could darken every window in the world. So that every clear, hard barrier would become a mirror, and no one who looked through would be able to see anything out there but their own face, looking back.

BALINESE DANCER

There comes a day when the road…the road that has served you so willingly and well, unfolding an endless absorbing game across the landscape, throwing up donjons on secret hills, meadows and forests, river beaches, sun-barred avenues that steadily rise and fall like the heart-beat of the summer, suddenly loses its charm. The baked verges sicken, the flowers have all turned to straw, the air stinks of diesel fumes. The ribbon of grey flying ahead of you up hills and down dales is no longer magically empty, like a road in paradise. It is snarled with traffic: and even when you escape the traffic everything seems spoiled and dead.

The cassette machine was playing one of Spence’s ancient compilations. The machine was itself an aged relic, its repertoire growing smaller as the tapes decayed, sagged and snapped and could not be replaced. They’d been singing along to this one merrily, from Avignon to Haut Vienne. Now Anna endured in silence while Spence stared dead ahead, beating time on the steering wheel and defiantly muttering scraps of lyric under his breath. They hadn’t spoken to each other for hours. Jake lay in the back seat sweating, his bare and dirty feet thrust into a collapsed tower of camping gear. He was watching The Witches on his headband, his soft little face disfigured by the glossy bar across his eyes; his lips moving as he repeated under his breath the Roald Dahl dialogue they all knew by heart. Anna watched him in her mirror. Eyeless, her child looked as if he was dead. Or like an inadequately protected witness, a disguised criminal giving evidence.

“Got one!” barked Spence.

They were looking for a campsite.

It was late afternoon, the grey and brassy August sky had begun to fade. Spence had been following minor roads at random since that incident, in the middle of the day, on the crowded
route nationale
, when Anna had been driving. They had escaped death but the debriefing had been inadequate—corticosterone levels rising; the terrible underlying ever present stress of being on the road had come up fighting, shredding through their myths and legends of vagabond ease. Spence, in his wife’s silence, swung the wheel around: circled the war memorial, cruised through a pretty village, passed the ancient church and the norman keep, took the left turn by the
piscine
.

‘Swimming!’ piped up Jake, always easily pleased. He had emerged from tv heaven and was clutching the back of the driver’s seat.

But the site was full of
gens de voyage
, a polite French term for the armies of homeless persons with huge battered mobile homes, swarms of equally battered and despairing kids, and packs of savage dogs, that were becoming such a feature of rural holidays in La Belle France. They usually kept to their own interstices of the road-world: the cindered truckstop lay-bys and the desolate service areas where they hung their washing between eviscerated domestic hardware and burned-out auto wrecks. But if a bunch of them decided to infest a tourist campsite, it seemed that nothing could be done. Spence completed a circuit and stopped the car by the entrance, just upwind of a bonfire of old tyres.

‘Well, it seems a popular neighbourhood. Shall we move in?’

Some hours ago Anna had vowed that she was sick to death of this pointless, endless driving. She had threatened to get out of the car and
simply walk away
, if they didn’t stop at the next possible site. No matter what. She kept silent.

‘They shouldn’t be here,’ complained Jake. ‘They’re not on holiday, are they?’

‘No, kid, I guess they’re not.’

Spence waited, maliciously.

‘Do whatever you want,’ she muttered.

Anna when angry turned extra-English, clipped and tart. In half conscious, half helpless retaliation Spence reverted to the Midwest. He heard himself turning into that ersatz urban cowboy, someone Anna hated.

‘Gee, I don’t know, babe. Frankly, right now I don’t care if I live or die.’

The bruised kids, and their older brothers, were gathering. Spence waited.

‘Drive on,’ she snapped, glowering in defeat.

So they drove on, to a drab little settlement about twenty klicks further along, where they found a municipal campsite laid out under the eaves of a wood. It had no swimming pool, but there was a playground with a trapeze. Jake, who believed that all his parents’ sorrows on this extended holiday were occasioned by the lack of ponies, mini-golf or a bar in some otherwise ideal setting, pointed this out with exaggerated joy. The huge rhino-jeep and trailer combo that they’d been following for the last few miles had arrived just ahead of them. Otherwise there was no one about. Anna and Spence set up the yurt, each signaling by terse but courteously functional remarks that if acceptable terms could be agreed, peace might be restored. Each of them tried to get Jake to go away and play. But the child believed that his reluctance to help with the chores was another great cause of sorrow, so of course he stayed. Formal negotiations, which would inevitably have broken up in rancour, were therefore unable to commence. Peace returned in silence, lead home by solitude; by the lingering heat and dusty haze of evening and the intermittent song of a blackbird.

While they were setting up, a cat appeared. It squeezed its way through the branches of the beech hedge at the back of their pitch, announcing itself before it could be seen in a loud, querulous oriental voice. It was a long-haired cat with a round face, small ears, blue eyes and the colouring of a seal-point Siamese, except that its four dark brown feet seemed to have been dipped in cream. Spence thought he knew cats. He pronounced it a Balinese, a long-haired Siamese variant well known in the States.

‘No,’ said Anna. ‘It’s a Burman, a Burmese Temple Cat. Look, see the white tips to its paws. They’re supposed to be descended from a breed of cats that were used as oracles in Burma, ages ago. Maybe it belongs to the people with the big trailer.’

The cat was insistently friendly, but distracted. Alternately it made up to them, purring and gabbing on in its raucous Siamese voice: then broke off to sit in the middle of their pitch, fluffy dark tail curled around its white toes, staring from side to side as if looking for someone.

Spence, Jake and Anna went for a walk in the gloaming. They inspected the sanitaires, and saw the middle aged couple from the trailer walking towards the little town, probably in search of somewhere to eat. They studied the interactive guide to their locality that had been installed beside the toilet block. As usual, the parents stood at gaze while the child poked and touched, finding everything that was clickable and obediently reading all the text. There was a utility room with a washer-drier, sinks, and a card-in-the-slot multimedia screen, so you could watch a movie or video-phone
maman
while your socks were going round. Everything was new, bare and cheap. Everything was waiting for the inexorable tide of tourism to arrive even here, even on this empty shore.

‘Since everywhere interesting is either horribly crowded or destroyed already,’ said Anna, ‘obviously hordes of people will be driven to visit totally uninteresting places instead. One can see the logic.’

‘The
gens de voyage
will move in first,’ decided Spence.

Beyond the lower terrace of pitches they found a small lake, the still surface of the water glazed peach-colour by the sunset. Green wrought-iron benches stood beside a gravel path. Purple and yellow loosestrife grew in the long grass at the water’s edge; dragonflies hovered. The hayfields beyond had been cut down to sonorous insect-laden turf; and in the distance a little round windmill stood up against the red glistening orb of the sun.

‘Well, hey: this isn’t so bad,’ Spence felt the shredded fabric coming together. They would be happy again.

‘Lost in France,’ murmured Anna, smiling at last. “That’s all we ask.’

‘What’s that silver stuff in the water?’ wondered Jake.

‘It’s just a reflection.’

When they came closer they saw that the water margin was bobbing with dead fish.

Jake made cheerful retching noises. ‘What a stink!’

They retreated to the wood, where they discovered before long a deep dell among the trees that had been turned into the town dump. Part of it was smouldering. A little stream ran out from under the garbage, prattling merrily as it tripped down to pollute the lake. The dim but pervasive stink of rot, smoke and farm chemicals pursued them until the woodland path emerged at a crossroads on the edge of town.

‘Typical Gallic economy,’ grumbled Spence, trying to see some humour in the situation. ‘Put the dump by the campsite. Why not? Those tourists are only passing through.’

Anna said nothing, but her smile had vanished.

 The town was a miniature ribbon development, apparently without a centre. There was no sign of life, the two bars and the single restaurant were firmly shuttered. They turned back, keeping to the road this time. Spence put together a meal of pate and bread and wine; fatigue salad from lunch in a plastic box. Anna took Jake to play on the trapeze. Unable to decide who had won the short straw on this occasion, Spence moved about the beech-hedge pitch, fixing things the way he liked them and making friends with the long-haired cat, which was still hanging around. He named it the Balinese Dancer, from an old Chuck Prophet song that was going around in his head, about a guy who had a Balinese dancer tattooed across his chest, like something, someone he couldn’t quite recall in a Bogart movie…He couldn’t remember what the point of the song was, either—probably something about having an amenable girlfriend who’d dance for you any time—but it gave him an excuse to restore his own name for the cat. Anna’s inexhaustible fund of general knowledge annoyed him. Why couldn’t she be ignorant: or even
pretend
to be ignorant, just once in a while? It was thin as a rail under the deceptive thickness of its coat, and though it obviously strove to keep up appearances its fur was full of hidden burrs and tangles. He looked across the empty pitches to the playground and saw his wife hanging upside down on the trapeze, showing her white knickers: a lovely sight in the quiet evening. If only she could take things more easily, he thought. A few dead fish, what the hell. It doesn’t have to ruin your life. The middle-aged couple from the trailer were standing by their beefy hunk of four wheel drive, heads together, talking hard. They looked as if they were saying things that they wouldn’t want anyone to overhear. Probably having a filthy row thought Spence, with satisfaction. He meditated going over to improve their camping-trip-hell by asking them why they didn’t take better care of their cat. But refrained. The Balinese Dancer was still with him when Anna and Jake came back. It had reverted to its sentry duty, sitting alert and upright in the middle of the pitch.

‘He’s a lost cat,’ said Jake. ‘Can we keep him?’

‘I thought we decided he belonged to those guys over there,’ Spence pointed out.

‘No he doesn’t.’

‘It doesn’t,’ Anna confirmed. ‘Jake asked them. They have no cat.’

‘I think he was left behind. Did you notice, our pitch is the only one on this terrace that people have used recently? There was a caravan and a tent here. About a week ago by the look of the marks on the grass. They went and left without him. That’s what I think.’

Over his head, young Sherlock’s parents exchanged an agreement to block any further moves towards an adoption application. 

‘No, I bet he comes from that place up on the road.’ Spence pointed to a red-roofed ranchero that they could see over their hedge, the last house of the town. ‘He’s probably discovered that tourists are a soft touch, and comes here on the scrounge.’

‘Can I go and ask them?’

‘No!’ snapped Anna and Spence together. Jake shrugged, and gave the cat some pate. It didn’t have the manners of a beggar. It ate a little, as if for politeness’ sake, and resumed its eager watchfulness.

The child was put to bed and finally slept, having failed to persuade the cat to join him inside the yurt. The parents stayed outside. The air was so still that Anna brought out candles, to save the big lamp. They lay wrapped in rugs, reading and talking softly; and made a list for the next
hypermarché
: where, it was to be hoped, there’d be cooking gas cylinders in stock again at last. And batteries for Jake’s headband tv, the single most necessary luxury in their lives. The cat came to visit them, peering sweetly into their faces and inviting them to play. It showed no sign of returning to the red-roofed ranch.

‘You know,’ said Anna, ‘Jake could be right. It’s weird for a fancy cat like that to be wandering around on the loose, like any old moggie. It’s a Tom, did you notice?’

‘I thought toms were supposed to roam.’

‘Cat breeders keep their studs banged-up. They spend their lives in solitary, except when they’re on the job. An inferior male kitten sold for a pet gets castrated. Let’s take a closer look.’

The Burmese Temple Cat was a young entire male, very thin but otherwise in good health. He had once worn a collar. He now had no identifying marks. He suffered their examination with good-tempered patience, stayed to play for a little longer and then resumed his vigil: staring hopefully into the night.

‘He’s waiting for someone,’ said Anna, finishing her wine. ‘Poor little bugger. He must have gone off exploring, and they left without him. Pity he’s not tattooed.’

‘Libertarians are everywhere,’ Spence reminded her. ‘That’s probably why he still has his balls, too. No castration for me, no castration for my cat. I can see that.’

‘What can we do? I suppose we could leave a message at the
gendarmerie
, if there is one. Any one who lost a cat like that’s bound to have reported him missing.’

‘We can tell the gardienne in the morning, when she comes to collect the rent.’

Next day started slowly. After lunch Spence and Jake walked into town to look for the Post Office. Spence needed to dispatch the proofs of the
The Coast Of Coramandel,
latest of the adventures of a renowned female pirate captain: who, with her dashing young mate Jake and the rest of the desperate crew, had been keeping Patrick Spencer Meade in gainful employment for some years. The postmistress greeted them with disdain and pity, as if tourists were an endangered species too far gone to be worth your sympathy. She examined his laptop, and refused to admit that her establishment possessed a phone jack that he could plug into. She told him he could use the telephone in a normal manner, but she was afraid that connections with England and the United States were impossible at present. She told him to go to Paris. Or Lyons.