Inner Circle (8 page)

‘Things. Things that keep coming back to me. . . .’ Joker’s moon face was in full ascent. ‘I think there was a pond on the other side of time and I sat in a blue plastic saucer. A cat came along and asked for milk.’

‘You know what, Dover. . . .’ Leeds sounded knowing and his arm lay with weighty confidence on September’s shoulder. ‘The road to the tree has been paved for us.

All we have to do is to step on those heads.’

‘Oh, no!’ I heard Rain.

‘In the stampede style, Dover, if you see what I mean.’

‘It’s like swimming with both feet on the surface,’ Sailor said and Joker nodded.

They were both prepared to follow Leeds and I didn’t expect September would linger behind them. What was I to do? Stay with Rain? try another route or back out altogether.

‘Funny, the light . . .’ someone whispered and I couldn’t recognize the voice broken off by fear.

‘We’re going blind.’ Rain was now close to my ear.
‘You
were right, Dover, we shouldn’t have looked.’

The last thing I saw was Leeds’s neck straining its sinews in all directions to inform us in time how deadly that death of ours was going to be. Then the neck, the rock, the still horror in the water, everything switched off in a second. From the dark two female hands grabbed me.

‘The circle! We must make a circle.’

‘Get hold of my belt,’ I answered Rain’s cry. ‘The hooks !’ But my brothers, who had more practice in finding the hooks, were already at my side, then Leeds fell in, pulling September with him. Their voices came after the touch, identifying each grip as it tightened.

‘Rain, where are you?’

‘My feet are sinking into the sand. I can’t move, Dover.’

At that moment the whole sky rushed to free my eyes. It glittered with stars, it foamed downwards in white streaks, it chased the slender moon on the water. Clouds of scent broke with the waves, then almost hurt in the nostrils. The noise, too, seemed to push and bruise. More sky, more scent. And our circle split at its joints. Joker and Sailor were lying on their hacks, unable to turn over. The light from the open sky seemed to nail them to the ground. Leeds and September had fallen on the prostrated body of Rain. Neither of them could move.

‘Rain! Rain! Rain!’ I shouted again and again, thinking that s he was the first of us doomed to die.

‘She’s warm,’ Sailor answered me. ‘I am trying to get up. She’s trying, too. It’s no use.’

‘What is the sky gaping like that for?’ Joker said and then kicked the air with both his feet. ‘It should be asleep at night. I don’t like the look of it, do you, Sailor?’

‘When I get up I’ll tell you, not now.’ And to his own surprise, he got up and didn’t say a thing. With his hand at the level of his eyebrows, he was now scrutinizing the state of nautical affairs. Quite inaudibly, he muttered something long about the tree and the heads, then sighed and picked up his brother from the ground. Nothing else could be got out of Sailor, I knew that, for, faithful to his habits, he linked arms with Joker and both were sound asleep in a couple of minutes.

The moon chase on the sea continued, making it impossible for me to distinguish either the rock or the heads paving the way to it. I had forgotten about Rain who needed help, as I had forgotten about death and our momentary blindness. Instead, a new sensation took possession of my mind. I could only think of food. Where would I find it, how would it taste when found? Should I dig for it or dive into the sea, or beg the starlit air to fill my stomach? Like my brothers and my wives, like Leeds my would-be kinsman, I must have been overwhelmed by hunger and sudden sleep.

When I opened my eyes, I was back in my circle, standing, of course, as the custom and necessity demanded. And the hollow of hunger was gone. I felt I had eaten during my sleep.

‘They were juicy, weren’t they?’ said Joker, rubbing his eyes with his own and Sailor’s hand, for the circle kept revolving and we were all linked together. I noticed Rain on my right.

‘Fell straight into our yawning mouths, didn’t they, those flakes?’ Joker nodded to Sailor in solemn appreciation. Then September spoke, all gratitude and wonder, but in a calm unhurried voice:

‘I can see the last of the domes receding.’ Yes, it was still visible, a green line, immersed in clouds at one end. ‘They came at dawn, you know, as far as the sea-shore, and one of them, the blue dome, opened just over my head. I hadn’t slept, not even for an hour, I must have expected them without thinking. I don’t know why. They did come, you see.’

‘Yes, my dear,’ Leeds had to give her and us his official confirmation. ‘As I always say, we are being well looked after, remarkably well judging by the recent events.

There isn’t and there never was a serious food shortage over this happy island. I once worked out the actual rate of flake-fall per second and per head, but I wouldn’t dream of tiring you with statistics. Nothing builds confidence better than confidence inside the tum.’ His belly received a few pats and the congratulating hand returned to our circle.

‘Tum-turn-tum.’ Both my wives laughed with him. ‘Now let’s cross the quaint head bridge, shall we, my sweet ladies.’

Leeds pulled a really stupid face as he said this, for there were no heads in the water. Nothing floated between the sea-shore and the rock, and the rock itself had a belt of haze at the top. We couldn’t be sure, not even Sailor, that the tree was still there.

Perhaps they took the poor little tree with them, Joker said, but none of us felt like speculating further, because it would have meant deciding who those ‘they’ were-the heads or the domes.

For some reason, difficult to explain, my thoughts detached the domes from the skymen, as previously I had tried to accept the floating heads apart from the bodies which must have supported them from below.

‘I think I’d like to swim,’ Sailor announced, and waited for Joker to give him a push.

‘How far does one drown, if there’s two of us, Sailor?’

‘Only that far, up to your cat’s whiskers,’ Sailor answered and this time he pushed his brother out of the circle. Leeds called after them: ‘Brave lads! That’s the spirit. I’ll give a big yell if you get too far off your course, so keep your ears dry.’

Sailor entered the sea at the point where the brown weeds formed a floating ring.

Joker stepped right into it. We saw their heads close to each other, two hairy bubbles, now large now very small, then they seemed to knock at the waves, two quick knocks at a time, finally they vanished.

‘Shall I give them a big yell now, Dover?’

‘They’re on course, Leeds.’ I thought the tip of the rock emerged for a moment, but the sunlight was in my eyes. ‘Or they have sunk,’ I added, without meaning to upset the women. Rain and September grew pale, and Rain, who now trusted her movements more than her words, flapped both arms in imitation of Sailor’s first gesture on entering the water.

‘I wish we had made use of those heads yesterday,’ said Leeds. ‘Ah, how very obliging! there they are again.’ I couldn’t, of course, twist my neck as well as he could operate his turret, but 1 certainly tried, and noticed nothing resembling the horror we had seen. Only something like a dark line shifted on the sea surface, and once again the light of the sun confused me.

It was September who decided to see for herself. She believed everything Leeds chose to tell us from his turret heights, and seemed eager to prove that she did. Now she rushed towards the shore, and I marvelled at both her resolution and the strength of her knees. They didn’t weigh her down. Neither did her hands need a support. Strange that we should have crawled on all fours not so long ago.

Leeds was a master of indirect experience: he preferred to learn from September’s risk. Admittedly, I also stayed behind, being, as it appeared, responsible for my less irresponsible wife.

Standing near the patch of weeds, September bent and lifted something from the water.

‘Clever girl,’ Leeds said over my head, ‘she needs so little guidance, doesn’t she!

A mere hint is enough for a wife of her potentials. We can be truly proud of her, Dover, I mean the two of us.’ I disliked his obvious familiarity. Then he stepped between me and Rain, and took our hands. ‘Let’s go!’ He squeezed my wrist. ‘We must see what the clever girl has found down there.’

Very carefully, eyeing us both in turn, Leeds moved his feet forward. We were slow in arriving, but when we reached September, she stood with a wet rope in her hand, watching the heads of Sailor and Joker out in the sea, safely above the water.

‘Someone untied the rope at this end, that’s why we couldn’t get hold of it at the start. And Joker thought it was a long piss tube, the longest that ever ran away to sea.’

Sailor had much to tell us after emerging from his natural element. And he looked most virile with all those muscles glistening in the sun.

‘The heads, you know. . . .’ Joker began and immediately grabbed Sailor by the leg to keep himself steady as he came out. ‘They sure tried to hang on to that thing, but you can’t swim with your teeth biting ropes in the water, can you now!’

‘What is it attached to at the other end?’ I asked him.

‘To the tree.’ Sailor answered for his brother.

‘There isn’t anything else on the rock.’

‘Perhaps they wanted to pull it out with all the roots.’ Rain was speaking of the vanished heads, and a moment later I saw pain in the corners of her mouth as she observed her own feet pressing against the wet sand.

2

Even my two wives found the crossing easy. The moon had paved our way: the tide was at its lowest and the rope at its straightest. We could see it ahead of us, touched up with silver and almost resting on its own reflection. The moon also showed bits of rock sticking out from the shallow waters. Joker and Sailor kept the conversation going by reminding each other how very dangerous it all was the other day, though they had swum as if it wasn’t in the least dangerous.

Leeds boasted from time to time that he could, of course, have carried September on his back and Rain in his arms, had the water been higher, but in fact he wanted us to wade on in a sort of circle, three on this side and three on the other side of the rope.

Before the crossing he had made quite a fuss about the knots: would they withstand the pressure? who would dive in an emergency to retrieve the sinking rope? and so on. Soon, however, I heard his belly rumble, and Leeds listened to his own music, first with curiosity, then with concern. Even his neck stooped and stayed like that, which was an unusual sight.

I must have been the last to pass out on reaching our destination, for I later had a vague memory of Sailor quarrelling with Joker over our exact whereabouts, and of Rain kneeling in the sand, with her arms up. Whether the others had lost consciousness like me or merely slept I couldn’t make out from their gestures and snippets of monologue.

Everybody became talkative and jumpy, even Rain, who would suddenly remember her kneeling posture only to abandon it in the next minute for a giggly chatter. I, too, found myself exchanging silly laughs with Leeds, who got stuck in one honey-coated phrase and couldn’t pull his tongue out of it.

‘My dear fellow, my sweet dear friend, the best brother-in-law a lawyer could ever have, how my heart beats and bleats for you, because you’re such a darling curly lamb, pure wool, pure honey. My dear fellow, my dear sweet . . .’ and the whole thing oozed again out of his mouth.

Very likely, I repaid him in kind, with rotating compliments, but I only seemed to be working on my grins.

‘Real rain doesn’t what?’ September asked herself, puzzled and provocative.

‘Real baby doesn’t stain, is that how it goes? Dover, Dover, do remember to lie over my September. Leeds on Rain grinds with pain. Remember, remember: what’s there to remember?’

‘Things that keep coming back . . .’ Joker nudged his brother. ‘Remember, Sailor, how they packed us into those Underground trains, from June to September, or the other way round! Going round underground, from Leeds to London, from class to class, always on the rails, jog-jog-jog, green turns to red, or the other way round. Mobile education, in the Tube from the tubes. Remember, Sailor, those other tubes! I wish I could have one now to spend a penny. What’s a penny, Sailor! Things always coming back from down below. And you hung my cat, you know.’

‘I didn’t, I didn’t!’ Sailor broke into Joker’s monologue. ‘I don’t remember travelling with your cat on the Inner Circle.’

‘I once carried a pussy asleep in my arms.’ Rain turned towards me. Now all our monologues were crossing one another. Joker picked up his quarrel with Sailor; September tossed rhymes into the air, I congratulated myself with a laugh or two, Rain repeated her old threats that she would change into a tree.

Then like a voice of reason unimpaired by other reasons, Leeds boomed over us all, pointing to a slight silhouette above his own turret of a neck.

‘Now listen! my cousins in motion, my circular fellow-travellers! Observe this tree above you. It is a genuine and unique specimen. It has roots, bark, branches, needles, cones and other natural accessories, all real, fresh, nourished by Mother Earth herself.

This tree, whatever else we may think about it, certainly deserves to be visited on foot, by land and water, as we have done to our undeniable risk and peril. It also deserves to be eaten alive. Let’s enjoy life while it grows, and, to quote my own saying. . . .’

Leeds stopped abruptly because he noticed what we had already noticed, a neat inscription carved at the bottom of the rock. It read:
Do not trespass. Place of execution.

There were also some strange characters in two columns on the left of the inscription.

‘It’s in Chinese,’ said Joker.

‘How do you know it’s Chinese?’ Sailor said.

‘How do you know anything?’ Joker replied.

And they went back to their quarrel about the Underground memories from their adolescence.

We were somewhat disappointed that the tree was so fragile, its twigs bowing to every breeze from the sea. It didn’t look edible, no matter what Leeds meant by his rhetorical phrase. Gaping from all sides at this unique specimen of nature, we moved in our habitual manner, the first, the second, the third round and within our encircled space which usually was empty, stood a tree.