Mountains of the Moon (37 page)

“I just guessed.”

“You guessed my name?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But you could have guessed anything,” she says.

I feel along the hot front line of cigarettes for a candidate to smoke. Robertson doesn’t smoke.

“What, you just guessed?” she says.

There’s some hilarity among the others as her porter delivers his shaggy dog punchline.

“You’re making it up.” She pushes me, laughs, brays, long and loud out into the mountain range. Then there is silence. Everyone is smiling.

“I haven’t laughed like that,” she says, “since…”

“Grandma fell off the roof?” I suggest.

Beyond the shelter, lightning flashes.

“I’m really glad you’re here,” she says.

There’s a candle on the floor between our beds.

“This small!” Robertson says. “This small.”

A long-necked beaky shadow bird flies across the wall behind her. The dry acoustic in the hut seems to draw the sobs out. I look at her hanging lower lip and slick chin where tears have mixed with snot. It’s not anger or self-pity, more of a bitter disappointment, twisting her lips, pulling up at her cheeks. The ruin of her face was so unexpected, the flooding of her eyes so sudden. We seem to have come so quickly to this.

I shone the flashlight around the hut for Robertson to see the mice scatter. Pete’s white vest, hanging under the slats of a bunk in the far corner, threw her for a moment.

“I thought you were by yourself,” she whispered, sounded disappointed.

I showed her my wet clod of sleeping bag and the writing on the wall:
Jesus came here to learn how to walk on water—after five days anyone can do it.
She chose the bunk next to mine and had a spare, dry everything. This sleeping bag is filled with feathers; she produced it like a dove from up her sleeve, in the dark empty barrack hut it took flight in the beam of my flashlight. She had an inch of candle which she lit and placed on the floor between us. I was finally warm in the feathers; lay listening to her talk about the ice caps and how she saw the lunar eclipse mirrored in the glacier. Then this.

“I’ve never told anyone before.”

I swallow a lump in my throat and for lack of what to say wait for her to continue.

“I didn’t mean to say all that…now you think…”

“What about your dad?” I help her out.

“He’s wonderful. I was always my dad’s girl…I don’t know why I told you all that…I think that’s why I’m so upset; it’s such a relief to talk.”

“It’s this place,” I say. “It draws out everything. Are you an only child?”

She lies down again, propped on her elbow.

“I’ve got a brother,” she says. “He tries to mediate, he’s OK. Have you got any?”

“Two. Philip, he’s nearly forty now. Graham is twenty-seven years old but I still call him Baby Grady.”

“Do you see them often?”

“All the time.”

“I’m really glad you’re here,” she says. “Have you warmed up?”

“A bit. I’m finding it quite hard to breathe actually, like a weight on me.”

“It’s me, I’ve burdened you.”

“No, I was burdened before you got here.”

“You might be feeling the altitude. Have you got a headache?”

“A bit. Are we very high up?”

“Four thou’.”

“What does it mean? Four thousand what? Are we bigger than Ben Nevis?”

“Here, about three and half times Ben Nevis. I’ve climbed mountains all over the world but this…this is…this…this is…”

“Like nowhere else on earth?” I suggest.

“Beautiful,” she says. The knowledge, the word, cheers her up. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“Is it?”

“You’ll see,” she says, “first thing in the morning. Just for a few moments. Beaut…” She falls asleep, falls clean off the top of the word.

I sit up and light a cigarette, leave it suspended in my mouth, haven’t got the energy to draw on it or lift it up and down. Hear the rain knocking on the side of the hut, woodwind. Robertson is so innocent. So sincere, so dear. Frightens me. I gasp at my own existence, it frightens me, it frightens me.

What am I doing here?

“I don’t know, Lynn,” I said.

“Have you come to try and find yourself?”

“No.” I tried to lighten the mood. “I’ve come to try and lose myself.”

She tried to laugh but it tipped into tears and how small her mother makes her feel.

She’s dreaming. I imagine snowfields, chipping into ice, bashing nails into rock, trusting a harness and a rope. Her eyes will be puffballs in the
morning. I
has
to be kind. Could have done without the emotion, though; the lump in my throat has slipped painfully to my chest. Feel hollowed out and afraid suddenly as the candle pisses itself out. A double handful of feathers rise. Afraid I’ll rise. My breath shorts, throws back its head, paws twice at the floor with a small round hoof. Darkness takes my breath away, gives me Pete’s vest, Pete’s chest, booming. Imagine I have shouted his name, Peter, across a mountain range and an ocean. Listen. His voice comes back to me pitter-patter with rain on the roof.
I’m night-blind. In the dark I can’t see anything.

Robertson hasn’t moved. It’s only just coming light. No sounds. Soundless. No rain. Nobody called my name but it seemed so close and clear. The floorboards make no sound under my bare feet. I open the door to lasers of twisting colored lights. Water drops on moss, cushions and pillows and bolsters of moss. Moss climbs scant trees, spectrums of green and yellow, pinks and purples. I pass our guides and our porters still asleep in the shelter by the ashen fire. Boom! My heart! But it’s only Emmanuel’s trilby slipped on the top of his staff. The trees seem related to heather, the roots ground hugging, foot tugging and slippery. They lean crippled, tripping over long sage beards. There’s a pathway of rotted logs braced to carry weight over the swamp, they sink and roll under my feet. The colors keep starring in the light. There’s a level clearing in the rot of sloping woodland, great sweeps of everlasting flowers. I know this plant, helichrysum, but it is unimaginably huge.

Christ, what are those things?

Plants. A rank phallic display, their blue-green solid color seems to throb. Rude. Guessing by my height they are eighteen feet or more. They guard a ring of rock seating, a meeting place for giants. Moss couldn’t resist it, overflowing masses, inviting touch with colors like a fabric shop. I sit back on a giant’s chrome throne. I sleep for a minute or an hour, wake up with beads of rain streaming down my face.

Robertson.

Robertson is coming, picking her way toward me with two steaming mugs.

“Worth getting beaten up for?” she says. “Tea. I thought you might want your cigarettes with it.”

I dry my face on my wet pajama sleeve. She’s in her swimming costume and shorts and flapping remains of boots. Black mud has curled up between my bare toes. She smells of toothpaste and soap.

“I was thinking about my grandad.” I take a mug and the cigarettes from her. “He used to tell me stories about the Mountains of the Moon. I thought he invented it all, but he didn’t; he must have read about it in the
National Geographic
or seen something on the television. A tussock army protected the swamp; giant plants guarded the slopes and wandered about, searching.”

She’s bent backward looking up. I light a cigarette and blow the smoke sideways.

“What are they?” I ask her. “They look so familiar.”

“Groundsel. The microclimate fosters giants, gigantism.”

A great shadow steps over my head, but it’s only the passing black eye of a cloud.

“Is that what’s going on with the beards, and the moss? What do they call this other stuff again?”

“Lichen.”

She ruffles water from the turquoise moss and sits down on the giant’s footstool. Around us beads of water sit cupped in frills and whorls. Lichen patterns rock, blooms in limy stars and peachy roses and blue-gray spots.

“What were they looking for?”

“Sorry?”

“The giant plants were searching, you said; what were they looking for?”

“A kiss.”

“What happened if they found one?”

“I don’t know. They never, ever did.”

“Kiss one,” she says, “see what happens. Might turn into a prince.”

“That’s what worries me.”

She puts her tea down and stands up to try it. Which plant and how
to approach it? Her hair is perfectly combed and plaited. She sinks in bog and beanbags and bolsters of moss, climbs up a staircase of mounting blocks and gives the plant a puckered peck.

Nothing happens.

“You mustn’t kiss them more than once.”

“Why, won’t it work if you keep on trying?”

“They get wore out,” I say, in my voice, except smaller.

The forecast is bleak. Every crevice and crack in the black rock is billowing green steam. My pajama top has stuck to my back and my tongue to the top of my mouth but there is no sun, just a midday night and rain with teeth regrouping. We take a route up the middle of a river, stepping on boulders, shoulders above the swell.

Robertson looks like an ad for “go faster” swimwear.
Don’t go with the flow.
She spends a lot of time in Scotland, by the lakes and forests, runs up and down Ben Nevis on a weekend just for something to do. She does hill running in the Lake District and sea canoeing around Mull, wherever that island is, with o’mist rolling in from the sea. All day she has been turning to share something with me, a wave, a smile, a hand-picked detail; segments of a miraculous orange.

“Did you see that?” she says so bright and breezy.

Only thing flying up here is Jurassic imaginings.

“When we get back down to base tomorrow we can look it up. I’ve got a book,
East African Flora and Fauna
. Tell you what I’ve got as well. Chocolate eclairs. I have. Two of them. And I might let you have one of them. If you’re lucky.”

Emmanuel, her guide and the boys have stayed at the hut so that we can explore locally. Lynn finds the sopping echoing bleakness beautiful; me, I long for greenery, for the life in it. It’s very quiet, unnatural. The rainmakers are up to something. We head back up a steep branch stream, happen upon a mountain pool with blue-green other-worldly water and a slim powdery waterfall. The altitude has turned my blood to treacle. I kneel down on a rock by the pool and lap water up like a big cat.

“Do you swim?” Lynn says.

“Only if I’m drowning.”

She brays with her hands on her hips, it’s so instant, with the gap and all. A woman in the water looks me in the eye. Over my shoulder Lynn’s face is reflecting in the water too. She’d like to ask about the four scars on my cheek, but she won’t, nobody has ever dared. Any minute now—mountain pool waterfall nymph.

“Will you?” she says.

“There’s not enough light,” I say with my camera to my eye.

She takes off her boots, rolls her swimming costume down. Nakedness comes easy to her. I look away, find breasts and fannies revolting, something too mumsie about them. She snaps her one tooth into place. Smiles at me.

“Power shower, nice and refreshing,” she says. “You don’t fancy it?”

“I’m not all that warm to tell the truth.” I lie, have to keep my body covered.

“Ready?” Lynn says. “Can you take one of me under the waterfall and—”

A thunder drum roll interrupts.

“And one in the pool? Ready?”

“Ready. Now the tricky—” She slips, falls into the pool with a side slap. Zoom in on her cold, winded grimace. Click. Wind on. A lower angle draws her legs out pale and lifeless, distorted by the depth of the water. Click. Luminous white bosoms, floating and spread, click. Hhuck!

“What was that?” Robertson gasps. “Did you throw a rock?”

Click. Daylight is being wiped out. Click. Like an eclipse. Around my feet pink static leaps like fairies over the stones. She can’t stay in another second.

“Did you get me?” She shivers blue-lipped and bullet-nippled back into her swimming costume. Slips her feet back in her boots.

“Do you think the pictures will come out nicely?”

“I think Moss Nymph this morning was more successful,” I say. There is a terrible sound to the left of us, hell’s hounds. We turn to see a black pack of rain, coming baying toward us through the trees.

“Oh–Woof-woof!” I says.

Then Lynn and me run for our lives.

Hours ago we said goodnight. Hours ago we blew out the light but I keep shuffling backwards and forwards through a deck of dreams searching for a place to sleep, beneath a grand piano…an elderberry…a greenhouse bench…shush…

“Are you awake?” Robertson swirls in summit cloud. Her voice comes and goes. The wind pulls and flaps at her words, climbing walls, mountains, walls, mountains, walls.

“Ravenous,” she says. “It can’t reach me here.”

Lightning strikes the tin on the hut, my heart gets up. Scarlet running on the edge of a blade turns me over to spades and corridors of doors, of door, of doors and of beech trees and arms and arms and of window bars…knock three times on the door frame…ha-ha-ha, joker…cup of tea? I look in the lions’ eyes, back at my digital watch; my spear turns into a bamboo cane with a peeling tinfoil blade…champion, pet…

“It’s no good,” Robertson says. “The floor is drenched this side.”

Place your bets…on a cracked tongue…hello, Mum. Ace—
I’d walk a million miles for one of your
…come on then, I scream down the tunnel, but the train takes me back to marigolds and burning sparks and into a blizzard of searing pains…coming, ready or not…the fly agaric screams when I pick it…I think you done it this time…I sees Pip walking down the road, whistling and drumming on change in his pocket. Red double-deckers. No-no I’m ram-jam full…I don’t want to know your name I just want to get on the bus…I went to the doctor the other day…We could go and eat up the road…no thanks I’m sick of tarmac. Thank you very much you’ve been great. I sees the double doors swing on a pub. And I know it I know it. He’s still a piano man.

Oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah. That’s how it goes. I sees Pip walking down the road, whistling and drumming on change in his pockets. I have to run to keep up with him. Philip. Imagine I’ve shouted his name, Philip, across a mountain range and an ocean.