Mountains of the Moon (35 page)

“Ninitwa Louise,” I say.

He nods his head. We will begin. He points the way with his staff. I had thought I’d follow Emmanuel or we’d walk together but he falls silently into the mist behind me. I look back; see his faint outline and a banner of mist trailing from the top of his staff. The roadway is wide and sandy-stony, follows a man-made watercourse lined it seems with aluminium and supported on a heft of wooden trellis work. Yesterday, coming up the foothills, I passed high-security cobalt mines; imagine that somewhere down the line this watercourse turns a turbine, for lighting underground. The sun is breaking through. I sense a sherbety fizzing dell and then drop steeply into a cool green hollow. I feel that my guide is in front of me, that the way is already known, but whenever I look back Emmanuel is still there, never gaining ground or losing it. I walk on, fording stream after stream. The sun comes out. The sky turns black. The Portal Peaks boom and disappear. The rainmakers clap. It goes pitch dark. The sun comes out. A rock wall appears in front of me. I look up at ladders of water staggered up through vertical shafts of light. Everything at first rejects the climb. I cough my guts up. Spit. Snatch at breath and foliage. The light turns on and it rains. Pours strings of pearls. The light turns off; the pearls turn into slender rods. The spectrum lights turn on and off, passing always through black and bloodshot. It rains in the pale. It rains cellophane. It rains rice and panel pins. It rains, pours, frozen peas—first appearance outside Chile.

Why “chilly?” I arst.

At the top of a steep rise we look distant, cross the landing at the bathroom. It rains, pours, drenching like a shower fitting. It stops. The plateau before us is flat and black in the acid light.

What are those things?

Bog humps.

Tussocks. The light switches on and off, on and off. In the caverns
beneath our feet the rainmakers are smashing on anvils. Forging. Manufacturing. Pans crash in the sudden larder. Lightning throws a sky net over us, filling the air with static and net curtain. The rainmakers launch a thunderbolt; it cracks the world, our skulls and the wall above the fireplace. The rainmakers have high pressure and hosepipes. My guide knows the way to the Mountains of the Moon, I follow the splashes left by his feet.

The splashing becomes a squelch. The plateau stretches for miles across the Bigo Bog and the garden. Is we twits? Turning slippery pirouettes, windmilling our arms, making spectacular leaps. The wet-mattress bog comes up, swallows my legs whole. In a chomp my arms is gone. The bog takes over my mouth, one nostril, one ear; I look up sideways with my one surfaced eye. Sees my guide smiling, dry-eyed, and Nanny sobbing on the path.

“Oh Biiiiiilllll! Bill! Biiiiillll!” she says.

The mess is like nowhere else on earth.

The fire is devilish, hell hot, cracking out carbon splinters of bark. Keeps changing shape and direction, the wind is a black thing, we all smart through the woodsmoke. Firelight blowing the other way leaves my face in a private blackness. Today has left them short of nothing. These are a soft, pretty-eyed people. The porters are children really, alive in the flames. Mountain boys, goat-legged, kid-skinned. Emmanuel is honored with a log to perch on and a dry blanket around his shoulders. The rain is petting on the roof of the shelter. They talk; seem to make polite enquiries, about families, the whereabouts of acquaintances. There has been some event, recently, up above our heads, something to do with ice axes, something slipping, a rope getting caught; something the boys can’t bear to imagine. Emmanuel shakes his head, smiles at the life that passed before him. He feels inside his suit jacket and produces a tiny leaf-wrapped parcel, tied up with banana fibre. Inside the wrap is a dice of raw red meat. He skewers it on a stick. I think of my onion to peel and chop, my rice to rinse and cook, my distant bag in the adjacent barrack-sized hut where I will lie down later, in my wet sleeping bag and my wet dry clothes
and my saturated skin and water-swollen bones. When I went into the hut my flashlight beam caught a scatter of mice among the ten empty bunks. It was so cold in the shed my breath made solid shapes that melted. Endorphins are pumping still inside every cell. This stillness, this bliss of stillness could tip, my head does. I’ve been in training for this all my life but I had to keep stopping to empty my soul, couldn’t raise my foot to another foothold, couldn’t lift a leg to step over, couldn’t shift my own weight forward, against the incline, against the rain. My knees couldn’t take another slippage, my hips not another boulder smacking; my hands couldn’t grab at another nothing or pull up on another tooth edge. When I hung blind, by the crook of my arm, sobbing from a hoop of root, my guide sat on a boulder sides me, said, Pet, it must be time for some dinner, said, Pet, your story is beautifully written.

“Hello.”

My stomach does a backflip.

“Nice surprise.” He tucks his hair behind his ear. “Fancy some lunch?”

I jump down off the angel pool. The velvit gentleman sticks out his elbow and I has to be a lady gain. Lady with a spear and holes in her hands; got rips in my red cloth, stitched it up with thorns. The palice hallway is still ghoulish. Arthur is still behind the door, int moved since last time. We go past the stairs, then turn and turn and go through a door says
Dining Hall
. It int proper, not with mouths full, and chandeliers. I skid on a slice of carrot. The velvit gentleman knows the way through the cigarette smoke and tables and hands waving knives and forks about dangerous. Everyone knows him.

“The caretaker’s daughter,” he splains.

We keep moving. The line int very long. I get a faint from all the food, looks up at the roof, a hundred thousand angels I spects is flying about in gold up there. A plate is waiting. And a dishing spoon.

“Fish fingers? Liver and bacon? Cornish pasty?” he says.

“Yes please.”

“Is that one after the other or all together?”

“With cabbige,” I says.

Anton goes around behind the counter and I has to follow him. The dinner lady smiles at us.

“I didn’t think you were coming today, Anton,” she says. “A visitor?”

“Mitten,” he says. “The caretaker’s daughter. Can we nip through, Beryl?”

Cept we already nipped and she don’t mind cos now she’s yelling seconds. In the back is a big kitchen, loads of metal tables and trolleys and sinks and shelves and towers of white plates. The back doors is open wide and I follow Anton out to a little corner of sunshine and paving stones and a white plastic table with chairs. Anton puts the tray down on it. Blue wisteria is flowering full pouring down the palice walls.

“Hang on.” He goes back in the kitchen, comes out with a dustpan and brush and sweeps up all the dog-ends. I wait with my fork ready. He takes off his gray velvit jacket and hangs it on the back of the chair. His black waistcoat is broidered with violets. Warm in the sun, he rolls his sleeves up out the way, case we is getting messy.

I never seen the sausages.

“Beryl cooks a few for me,” he splains.

“Oh,” I says.

My Cornish pasty int got no filling that’s how come I has to put my cabbige in it and pick it up with my fingers. He chops his sausages up and parks his knife on the side of the plate and does his dinner with a fork. His eyes is white and flashing, colors of pebbles underwater. He eats slow, chewing. He’s got girl’s hair, flicking up, and velvity lashes and eyeshadows. The lines on his face is especial perfect like someone chopped wood on it. I spects he is beautiful, looking at me, eating slow and chewing. My eyes is conkers, I rolls them. We listen to a train, fast, coming, makes a terrible scream.

“It’s to warn workmen in the tunnel and at the level crossing,” he says. “Sometimes I think the pitch will crack my windows. The four minutes past is the worse, going straight through so fast.”

We both has a glass of water.

“A hundred years ago supplies were brought in underground along a track from the main line. Steam engines then. Pit ponies used to pull the loaded wagons through from the station.”

He piles his fork up careful.

“Sometimes, when I meet George and some other friends to play cards, we hear a horse neighing under the floor of the Billiards Room.”

“Is there one stuck down there, case we can get it out?”

“We went and checked. We were so sure of what we kept hearing. But the tunnel is blocked with bars at both ends and we shone a spotlight straight through it.”

Don’t know if to tell him I seen a pony ghost. He’s looking at me.

“You were going to say something?”

I rub on the side of my mouth, where he’s got a bit of bean juice. He does a dab and rubs it off.

“The man that done this palice,” I says. “Who was he making a big impression for?”

“Thomas Holloway was a quack; he made millions from a health tonic. Having amassed a great fortune he had no idea what to do with the money so he advertised for ideas. It came to his attention that there was nowhere for mad rich people to go, to be cared for, to
recuperate
. King George had gone mad, you see, and they got interested in the subject, the Victorians built a lot of asylums.”

The holes in my hands is itching terrible, has to smooth the itches way on the edge of the table.

“Is asylums for nutters?” I arsts.

“Yes. But, they started to
differentiate
between the
chronically insane
and those who, given
treatment and relief
, were confidently expected to recover.”

Treatment and relief is tiptoeing words, one behind the other. I members my dinner, stabs a sprout. Still froze in the middle so I has to suck it.

“So, Holloway agreed to finance a sanatorium for the rich and ran a competition for architects to submit a design. He chose an architect called William Crossland to work with and they both got carried away.”

He lifts his plate way, lights a Benson Hedges with his flip-top lighter and blows the smoke way sideways.

“It’s all hand-painted. Apparently only the House of Lords was equal to it in
splendor
. The plan was to accommodate two hundred wealthy patients, in luxury, none of whom were to be
epileptic
,
paralytic
or dirty.”

“Epileptic. Paralytic.” I chews on the words and a bit of liver. I love the sun shining on us and the way Anton talks, picking words especial for me.

“They couldn’t decide about the Gothic.” His hands love each other. “Some people believed that Gothic decorations lead to a cure by the
distraction
method.” His eyes cross over a wicked monster’s smile. “Others thought that they might
weigh heavily
upon a
diseased mind
, that the classical or romantic was more soothing, more appropriate. They couldn’t decide, Mitten, so they just had all of it. “

“Same as me with my dinner,” I says.

“George is writing a book about it, he’s dug up all of the history. Now of course the East Wing is falling down and the West Wing is full to its hammer-beamed rafters, a fine example of Grade One overcrowding, neglect, filth and ruination.”

“Ruination,” I says.

A dinner lady comes outside with a packet of cigarettes, looking in her apron pocket for her box of matches. She sits down at the table with us.

“I’m all in,” she says. “Heat’s terrible coming off those cabinets. Have you had enough? There’s fish fingers left? Sure?”

We is sure. I’m still doing my liver and bacon, eyes was bigger than my stomach cos they int used to doing food. She takes her sandals off, puts her feets up on the spare chair and lights a No. 6.

“How’s things, Shirley?” Anton arsts.

She shakes her head. Things int good. Anton moves his chair around closer, pulls her in gainst his shoulder. Hanky-chief comes out silky, like a long trick from his top pocket. Int no crying sounds, just hunched over, shrugging her shoulders, all snot and fingers and silky green paisley. Things int good. Takes two trains to come and go fore she takes a deep
breath and comes up like from drowning. Lashes is wet stuck together. She sniffs hard, tries to smile, wiping under her eyes with her thumbs.

“I’ve had to stop wearing mascara.” She looks up in the sky. Then she looks at me. Long time she looks at me. One tear races down her face and hangs on her chin.

“What are we going to do?” she arsts.

Don’t know. Spects something will happen cos something always does.

“Is there no hope, Shirley?” Anton arsts.

“We went yesterday. There isn’t anything else they can do.”

“How did Trevor react?”

“He made jokes about it all the way home, ‘Could be worse,’ he said, ‘could be you.’ But in the night he woke me up. ‘Shirl,’ he said, ‘when I’m gone, I want you to marry Anton.’”

“Well, at least he’s still got his sense of humor,” Anton says.

And she’s all upset gain. The corners of the hanky-chief is twisted up terrible.

“Now he wants us to sell the house and get a Winnebago. ‘Think about it, Shirl,’ he said. ‘See how far we can get?’”

She was going to say some more but another lady comes in the doorway barking.