SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (31 page)

And that's why she bought the last-minute airline ticket to Bangkok, at a price so low it made her laugh. Thailand, where she had been once before, many years before, but she could still remember the astounding politeness of the men, the agile beauty of the women, the blazing colours of their clothes; the glorious beaches. Ah yes, those glorious yellow beaches.

She'd had an affair. Was that the right word for it? Can an affair only last a fortnight? Sexual relationship sounded so clinical. How many years ago was it now? Ten, twelve? One of the smiling young men had come up to her and introduced himself. Exquisitely mannered as he was, he had peered with undisguised curiosity at the flesh her bikini left uncovered. They had slept together in her little rented hut that night. His first blonde western woman; so she reckoned anyway, despite his insouciance about it all. It struck her as pretty likely that another like him might come along now. She deserved him, after all, what with Owen, Tom Helsey and all the rest of it. Even though her body had spread a little here and there - outgrowths of flesh, simultaneously soporific and wayward. She had stayed home and worked for the last five months. But she had eaten too. And had the odd bottle of wine. No matter. Once he was into the softest part of her, she would make him happy, whoever
he
was. And he wouldn't notice in the dark, not once she got going. She might give the bikini a miss though, just for the moment. Keep herself tantalisingly covered in white and blue muslin. She looked in the mirror. She didn't have anything to worry about yet, except possibly impregnation, by the wrong party at the wrong time. But then all that needed seeing to anyway, didn't it? So it didn't seem very likely, just at the moment. God, when was she going to sort all that out? Not now, that was for sure. Might be some serious work needed there. Poking around inside her with their pincers and blades. But not now. Not now.

She arrived safely enough, but God she was tired. Something about flying, speeding you up and wearing you down at the same time. Was it the cosmic rays at great heights - didn't they move through you with unexpected rapidity, leaving you seriously sieved-out and wonky? Owen had had some sort of theory about it, which he'd often treated her to, but then Owen had had theories about lots of things.

She was on the beach called Khao Lak, gazing at her book of images when the noise finally reached her. The birds had fallen silent hours before, dogs had all set off inland, quietly, their tails twitching down like dowsing sticks, but no one had noticed this on December 26th 2004. Now the tsunami was hurtling towards her at five hundred miles an hour. She looked up and saw how the ocean had risen to its full height and started running. It was arriving back in a terrible hurry to swallow the earth once more. In the last few seconds she had time to stand, register the panic of all those around her, turn and start to make her escape along with the rest of them, but she travelled no more than a few feet before the deluge covered her, sweeping her along in its raging current. Her lungs were filling with salt and water. She was soon unconscious. One of the thousands of bodies swirled about with all the cars, wooden houses and telegraph poles; the desks, chairs, bicycles and beds; the swollen bodies, both large and small, before the sea surged back out once more, most of its human inventory still undeposited on earth. So many bodies moving with the currents somewhere, rising and falling.

Coda

You can't grieve for a void. That's why weeping relatives on the news ask for the bodies back, so they might be properly buried and mourned. That's why widows travel half-way round the world to see where their soldier husbands fell in battle. Even a little urn filled with ashes will suffice. Something to put down in the earth, somewhere to cut words in stone. And that was why Sylvie's mother wept each day on the phone to Owen when he called her. He even drove over to see her; though they had never much liked one another.

'She must be dead, mustn't she? She would have contacted us by now.' At sixty-five, Sylvie's mother had dyed her hair orange. This, it seemed to Owen, made her look even madder than she had before. She had always alarmed him. Hardly surprising Sylvie's father had divorced her.

'She must be dead, my little Sylvie. It's been four weeks. I managed to get through to the British Embassy over there, but they didn't seem to know any more than we do. She's dead, Owen. She is, you know My daughter's dead.' She wept, and Owen found himself on the verge of tears too. Sylvie had already exited his life, but he really hadn't wanted her to leave everyone else's too. Not like this.

*

So they'd buried her already in their minds. Poor Sylvie. Then they had to get their mental shovels out and dig her up again. Despite the battering she received from the flood, Sylvie survived.

She realised who she was again one day in a shanty hospital, hastily constructed, ten miles inland from the coast. She was surrounded by human wreckage of one sort or another, and found it very hard to walk at first. When a British official finally turned up weeks later, she had the greatest difficulty speaking to him. She was flown back to England. A visiting lecturer had been given her courses to teach, using some of the notes which Sylvie herself had posted on the university's website, but she assured the dean that she would be giving her own courses again very shortly, even if she could only keep herself upright with the help of a walking-stick. She had already managed to start driving again, which was how she had arrived at the Riverside Gallery. She'd quelled her mother's wailing finally, and the day before she'd had her reunion with Owen and
John
. So now she had come over to see Henry, without telling him of her visit beforehand. It was a very rainy day and she could no longer distinguish the rain from his tears as he stood out in the drive with his arms about her; he had seen her through the window making her difficult way down the drive and had run out to meet her.

He held her by the shoulders and looked at the marks on her face. She would never look quite the same again, that was for sure. The ravine across her forehead mapped out the point where she had collided with something very hard, with all the force of the tsunami behind her. He led her under the awning, out of the rain, and pulled her towards him as they stood in silence for what might have been minutes. Sylvie had no idea; she had lost all sense of time.

'You really did get a battering, didn't you? It must have been terrible.'

'Don't remember anything about it, Henry, to be honest. It's as though it all happened to someone else, someone who was travelling under my name at the time. For weeks I remembered nothing. I just lay there and hurt. Then bits of me started to come back. But not the tsunami. That's never come back. Maybe it was too big to remember. No space inside large enough to contain it. If I could only find a photograph of myself being
swept
along in the water . . . You always had the right idea, watching out for the flood, but you were looking in the wrong direction, my love.'

'Knew it was going to take something precious from me. Always knew that. Strange, isn't it? Didn't expect it to ever bring it back though.' He kissed her, very gently, on her bruised and cratered cheek. 'Can you really remember nothing about it?'

'Nothing. I've started looking through photographs. As if, if I could see the pictures of it, I might meet myself coming the other way. Can you understand that?'

'Yes. I think I can. Something to do with the persistence of vision?'

'What isn't?'

Then the children started filing out of the bus and down the drive. Sylvie looked at Henry, and Henry smiled, almost apologetically.

'It's the talk I do for Shropshire schools, remember. On Picasso.

Today's the day.'

'Mind if I stay and listen?' Henry shook his head.

So Sylvie sat on the chair he provided for her as Henry did his usual number. It was all carried off with good humour and a deft lightness of touch, but he couldn't disguise the formidable knowledge that lay beneath it, as he spoke of Ambroise Vollard and Picasso. He went through the etchings and engravings one by one, pointing to details and encouraging the children to think about why the artist had made the choices he had. He explained to them that they themselves were the young people staring at the minotaur, and that the minotaur took many forms. Some of them might be destined to become minotaurs one day. In which case, they'd find that they were both hunters and hunted.

'We live inside this dark place, all of us, and the future is only ever an inch away. The future is all those people approaching with lights. So where do we find the strength to step out into the future? By swallowing the past: that's the secret. You mustn't ever let the past swallow you. You can check this with your biology teacher when you get back, but I think you'll find that time swallowed turns to energy inside you. Digest it slowly, then let it transmute inside your intestines. Your acids can dissolve it, don't ever doubt that, even a rhinoceros skin properly cooked will go down through the heart of you and come out; it might even come out as one of these images. That's what he did, you know. That's why we're still looking at all these pictures you see about you. He swallowed the past and never let the past swallow him. That's the one thing everyone in this room can learn.

'So, let's try to imagine, shall we, on this very wet Shropshire day, what it might have meant to be Pablo Picasso. If only for that single moment of recalling how we once saw a minotaur, chased a unicorn, ate a lion, and swam with sharks. Look carefully at the pictures hung up on the walls around you and see if you might hear a distant roar still fading away.'

*

Two months later Henry Allardyce stared at the Severn in the darkness and wondered when it would rise again. Walls wouldn't keep it in for ever, he was sure enough of that. He drained his wine-glass and then turned from the river, back to the house where the lights were going out one by one. Soon enough Marie would be between the sheets and he'd be beside her. And when he woke at three or four in the morning, drowning in the invisible tide, she would hold him close and tell him not to worry. Tell him to stop thrashing about. There's nothing to worry about, Henry, she'd say. We're nice and warm here. And dry as a bone.

END

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