Submergence (2 page)

Being in the dark, in the heat, being so often sick, bitten by insects and rodents, with visitations of light, made his mind unsteady. There was
an uncertainty in him which held that the executions by axe in Tudor England and the executions with curved swords in Saudi Arabia and with a dagger in the face in Somalia resembled one another and that the blood spilled by each of them was commingled.

It was a solitary confinement. He spoke Arabic, but had no interpreter for Somali. They had not allowed him a phone call. There was no talk of a ransom. His captors were nothing like the pirate gangs in Haradheere and Hobyo, or the Taliban factions he had worked with and against in Afghanistan who would sell any captive for money.

He ran on the spot. He performed headstands. He made a list of the books he would load onto his electronic tablet when he was freed. His name was James More and he was a descendant of Thomas More and he supposed he would read
Utopia
again. He put together all that he had learned or surmised about the group holding him, with the goal of delivering it in person at a debriefing at the Secret Intelligence Service building in London. Legoland. In this work his mind was not at all troubled. He memorised the faces of the fighters who were not Somalis, their skills and the Arabic they spoke, one to the other.

In some hostages the memory of their life before goes away, or else there is a sense of suspension, as there is during a severe hospitalisation. For him, it was as if some faces were safer than others, and some memories more important. Many intimate details he could not dwell on, yet others were insistent. His subconscious was trying to make sense of a whole that was turning and guttering and shedding itself like a planet in its infancy. There were passages of thought about things he had never paid attention to, such as companies who used to advertise widely and had since disappeared. What had happened to Agfa, for example?

He wondered why it was that street kiosks in Africa had not created their own product lines. Why could you not buy a compliment from a vendor in a slum the way you bought a stick of gum or a cigarette? The smallest coin might buy a folded piece of paper with a handwritten
note:
you are gentle
,
you are gorgeous
, or,
your future achievements will overshadow your past achievements
.

At other times, he set his mind the task of playing back the sound and images it had stored. It helped to be patient. He put himself again in the winter forest, breathed out, and looked up. Snowflakes drifted down. Slowly, music came to him. Pop, punk, fragments of symphonies and jazz sessions. Finally, there were films and television shows, sports events; a match point, a rugby try. He became his own multimedia player, although there was nothing automated about it; it was biological, twitchings in red mud, with stanzas missing; moving pictures were fragile, they flickered, and then were gone.

The sunbeam from the water pipe hole moved across the wall during the day. He followed it. He could see it strike the wall only if he turned to face it. If he did that, he could not see it coming in. It bothered him. Every human being faced forwards. Walked forwards. Ran forwards. Looked out through socketed eyes. Time ran forwards. One day added to another. Addition and subtraction. Danny said that subtraction was the least part of mathematics because it was the taking away of what was. He banged the back of his head against the wall. Just hair. Skin on bone. He averted his eyes from the mosquitoes dancing in the light. He adjusted the cardboard. He said to himself, because of charity and love you should never allow death to rule your thoughts.

He crouched in a corner and came to terms with the volume of the room. Before, he had seen every room by the furniture and decorations in it, and by the light coming in through the windows or from electric bulbs. Here, hollowness gaped all around. The air was fouled, oily, beaded; he was sunk to the bottom, on a floor of excrement, and the ceiling was the underside of the surface of a strange sea.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting
The Fall of the Rebel Angels
shows us there really is a force to subtraction: you subtract from an angel until you end up with a demon. If you download an image of the painting onto your computer, or better yet see it hanging in the Royal Museum of Arts in Antwerp, you will notice how the rebel angels fall from heaven at the top left of the canvas to hell at the bottom right. Their wings are at first subtracted for the lesser wings of bats and dragons. Towards the earth they are reduced to moths, frogs and other soft things. They are driven together by the golden angels of heaven armed with effulgent discs, lances and swords, whose task it is to sanitise our world. You will see how the rebel angels continue to change their forms as they are driven into a sea, whose opening is an obscure drainpipe. They lose their legs, wings, all hope of surfacing and become fish, squid, spawn and seeds of trees never to be planted. Underwater they continue to be subtracted from their former selves until they are at last incorporeal and see-through at the bottom.

It would be interesting to show a print of this painting to a jihadist fighter, who may never have known anything so visually imaginative, and see if he would stand aghast or applaud the angels, who spear and prick the swollen creatures.

She took a TGV from Paris and changed at a country town for a single-carriage train which rattled over seemingly narrowing tracks, and not unpleasantly – indeed, rattled in such a way that she could no longer work on her laptop, and so closed it deciding that her holiday had begun. She glanced at her fellow passengers, typecast fishermen’s wives and farmer’s children of a ruddy complexion, and stared out at
the land. This part of France was coming to a standstill. It was the week before Christmas, the time of hard Gothic frosts and the first snow that stayed. The leaves were all blown off the trees, the streams and rills covered in thin ice and the ditch water beside the tracks frozen thick with air pockets on the underside, as though beaten out by the paws and mittens of panicked animals within. She saw the austere beauty in all of this, and the mathematics also. Suddenly, the sea presented itself between two smooth breast-shaped hills. She smiled: she was always returning to it.

Her stop was more of a halt than a station. She helped a pensioner off, then went back and took down her bag. The platform was of the kind that sloped away at both ends. In the centre was a plastic shelter like a bus stop. She stood in it out of the wind. A timetable was pasted up: there was a notice from the church, another from the cycling club, and a handwritten offer for goose liver. Graffiti had been sprayed on one side, four tags in a single colour. It was uncomplicated, but she was grateful to be standing there in the calm, not in London in the noise.

To many of her acquaintances it was not clear which country Professor Danielle Flinders belonged to, or if she was the sort of woman who would ever find space in her life for a long-term relationship. There was something obscure about Danny, they said, something hard, something striated. There was some truth in this assessment, not least the fact that, arresting as she was, she enjoyed sex on her own terms and was inclined to regard her sexual partners as to some degree disposable, like squash partners. But on the broader point of belonging, it is fairer to say that, as the youngest tenured professor at Imperial College in London with a visiting lectureship at ETH in Zurich, she was representative of those modern achievers who have lived in so many places there is none they can call home. It can be further said that any friend who thought her inconstant was no friend at all, because loyalty was one of the traits she inspired. Her mobility was not in any case a question of running away from the past, abandoning an ill-fitting childhood, being emotionally unstable,
or anything like that. On the contrary, it was her parents who had set her in motion. Her father was an Australian, her mother a Martiniquan. She had brothers. It was a happy and close-knit family. She had grown up in London, on the Côte d’Azur and in Sydney, and had been formed by all these places. In her complexion and variety of dress and habits and manners there was something of her mother’s Creole background. Language was important to her. She would have considered it a betrayal to choose English over French for the sake of convenience. She was broadly scientific, in the Enlightenment sense of requiring the humanities to touch upon her thinking. Her detractors must never have seen her at work, for what she lacked in rootedness she made up for in vocation. Many individuals struggle to know how to apply their minds to existence, but Danny was dedicated to a branch of maths called biomathematics. By way of abbreviation it is enough to say that she was trying to understand the pullulating life in the dark parts of the planet at a time when, up above, mankind was itself becoming a swarm and setting off in ever more artfully constructed but smaller and more mindless circles. She might have admitted that the perspective she sought to bring was too complicated and threatening to command a wide audience, but not there, on the railway platform, on the first day of her Christmas holidays.

A horse and cart entered the gravel car park behind the platform. A young man jumped down and waved. She walked out to him. He took her luggage and helped her up and arranged a blanket over her knees. His breath was milky, his cheeks pocked. She could not remember him from last year.

‘We will journey slowly,’ he said. ‘Now. Off we go.’

She breathed in the air. It was softer, earthier. ‘It’s good to be back.’

‘For someone else we would have sent a taxi, but the manager said, no, Madame Flinders will enjoy the cart. See, we even have the shopping in the back.’

She turned and looked. There were pheasants, a boar, sacks of coal
and post. They went out onto the main road. The young man held the reins loosely. She decided she knew him, she just could not remember his name. She was a regular guest at the Hotel Atlantic, arriving after the departmental Christmas party and returning to London by Eurostar on Christmas Eve. It was hardly past lunchtime, but the sky was dark. It began to sleet. A Renault with yellow headlights came at them, passed them, ploughing slush. Its wipers were moving too fast, she thought.

They turned onto a frozen rutted track between fields. The furrows were filled with snow. After some long quiet way they crossed a metalled road and past a sign bearing the hotel’s name. Down they went, down a drive with sheep fenced into large meadows on either side in the English parkland style, and oaks and a drystone wall shooting into a wood like an arrow. A fog had closed in, obscuring the sea. She gave a hurrah when they came to the hotel. She got down, then hesitated. The first decision of the holiday was important. Everything in London was paid for in time, as well as money. She made do with showers in London. Here, her hands and face already numb with cold, she decided to walk to the beach. She would check in on her return, then go to her room and run a hot bath. No work. No, she said to herself. After the bath she would watch a film and take an early dinner in the dining room.

‘Would you take my bags in, Phillipe,’ she said, remembering his name. ‘I am going for a walk.’

‘Shall we light the fire in your room?’

‘Yes, thank you. And could I have tea’ – she looked at her watch – ‘in about an hour?’

‘Of course, madame. We will look for you returning.’

She tied her scarf, zipped her black wax jacket to the collar and went down over the lawns to the pines. They were a spare stand of trees, prettier and more vulnerable than last year, with climate change, with storms, the salt on resin. She liked the sensation of the frost giving under her boots in the shadows. At the far side were towering dunes
in shades of yellow. She scrambled up them and saw the beach stretching out of sight below. It was curved, tan. There was a dark slab of rock in the centre of it which she adored. She ran down and walked the length of it. She thought of it as an altar, or else the lips of the beach. The edges of it cut into her wellies. I forgot that, she said to herself. She had remembered the swirling around the rock, not its sharpness – the way it sliced and defined. She took a half-step into childhood and tried to see the rock pools through childlike eyes. She saw starfish and crabs and refused to name them. Her knowledge of marine life was such that she had to be careful to block out the details: the way the saltwater leeches articulated head over tail, or the colours indicating the numberless microbial lives undertaken in each fold of the rock.