Water Theatre (42 page)

In short, only by undergoing such ordeals of self-divestiture will our Hades Journey be completed. The demands it makes will not easily be answered. But without a willing acceptance of its claims on us we may live and die in ignorance of who we truly are
.

Impatient with such pompous rhetoric, I threw the pamphlet aside, and lay back on the couch.

After a time, as though someone was turning a dimmer switch, I sensed the room growing darker round me. I closed my eyes, shook my head and, when I looked again, could see nothing at all. The room was absolutely black, not a cranny of light anywhere, just this dense blackness pressing against my eyes, a blackness into which everything – the paintings, the walls, the vault, the couch on which I lay – had disappeared. And then, somewhere above me, a recorded voice began to speak.

After a moment I recognized the words as Latin verse, but I understood little of them until a second voice cut in over the first, and I was listening to someone translating Virgil's hexameters into English:

A glimmer of light returned, the room grew brighter again, much brighter than before, until the whole vaulted chamber became a radiant gallery in which the paintings glowed around the walls in lurid colour.

My first thought was that this must once have been a chamber where some ancestor of Gabriella's family had indulged his secret vices. But as my eyes took in more of the detail, I saw that many of the images were drawn from contemporary sources, that the work was recent, executed within the last decade or so, and evidently with an apocalyptic moral purpose.

I sat up under the gaze of an African woman who would have had all the solemn beauty of a Benin bronze had not one side of her face been eaten away, from eye socket to jaw, by the ebola virus. All about her were images that might have illustrated a medical encyclopedia – a horrifying freak show of frightening diseases. When I turned away from them, it was only to encounter the famished eyes, brittle rib cages and bloated bellies of starving men, women and children.

An entire wall was given over to the depiction of such suffering. Another to the obscenities of war – soldiers with stomach and
head wounds, helicopter gunships spraying fire, skeletal corpses crudely stacked or tipped in ditches, men dangling from scaffolds, bodies tangled in wire, frozen into rigid postures, mutilated beyond repair, with tanks exploding around them and cities in flames. Here and there I caught allusions to the work of other artists – the fiery landscape of Brueghel's
Mad Meg
, tormented figures out of Hieronymus Bosch, Goya's
Caprichos
and the mutilated corpses from his
Disasters of War
. But there were also people and places I recognized from photographs and newsreel footage – the man in the Balkans whose head was being sawn off by his grinning captors, the Chinese child with chopsticks pushed into her ears, the frightened eyes of the little Jewish boy with hands raised under the muzzle of a gun. Unquestionably I was looking at a late-twentieth-century vision of hell – the kind of inferno through which I'd been travelling for most of my adult life. And when I turned round to take in the wall at my back, I was faced with another kind of obscenity – a life-scale painting of an orgy in full swing.

Every conceivable mode of sexual congress, from the voluptuous to the worryingly sinister, was portrayed in shameless detail. People of every size, shape and race were bucking and humping, sucking, grasping and thrashing in a depraved, sometimes comical, more often grotesque tangle of organs, mouths and limbs. But the skin tones of these naked creatures gave off a weird bluish light, like that of rotting fish, so there was nothing remotely arousing in those images. If they were pornographic, it was a pornography that took no pleasure in its appetites and vices.

At the still centre of the orgy knelt an anomalous figure with her hands clasped at her breast. I recognized her immediately as another study of the naked woman kneeling in the desert – the figure I had first seen among the frescoes in the cottage, with silver-white hair gathered about her like a shawl. Her presence here confirmed what I had already guessed – that these murals were also Marina's work, that in the days before
her sight was gone, she must have spent many gruelling weeks transferring this infernal pageant from her imagination to these underground walls.

What I also saw was that this figure was intended as a self-portrait. It was how, presumably in some grave crisis of revulsion at the entire human condition, Marina had seen herself. It left me grieving for her, and yearning for her too.

I have described the pictures in the cellar of the villa at Fontanalba as I first saw them. I have not yet conveyed their hallucinogenic impact over many hours on my isolated senses. During the grim nights of imprisonment in Makombe Castle there had been six of us thrown together in that squalid cell, all frightened by the hideous sounds along the corridor. Here there was no one else to turn to, and nowhere to fix the attention except on the hellish vision of a world where – in stark repudiation of all our claims to progress – the apocalyptic horsemen, Disease, Famine, War and Death, still marauded among us unchecked.

Through long hours I stared at the images. The images stared back at me, and when I closed my eyes it felt as though the usual roles were reversed and I had become the object of observation around which representatives of the mutilated, dying and dead people I had filmed over the past thirty years were gathering to pity and to grieve.

At moments, too, I seemed to sense other presences in the room. To my left lay Hal Brigshaw – not the vigorous figure I had known in my youth, but the crumpled victim of a stroke, stretched out on the bed I had seen in the sitting room at High Sugden, breathing only with difficulty, unable to speak a word. To my right, confined in the darkness of the starvation bunker, Maximilian Kolbe, saint of Auschwitz, knelt in prayer. Yet, when I opened my eyes and looked to either side, neither of those figures was there.

At other times I was surfing on a sea of memories in a state between sleep and waking, thinking of Marina and of everything
she must have endured in order to be able to paint this terrifying vision on these walls. My heart ached to remember her as she had been in the early days – her passion for storms, her courage and candour, the easy way with which she had chatted to my parents on the day she had unexpectedly come to visit us in Cripplegate Chambers. Larry had joked that I had once been familiar with basements, and it was true enough; and here I was again, back in that cellar which had once been my home, believing myself to be some sort of underground creature, a troglodyte, living with the faint smell of damp and chilled by cold draughts blowing through the vaults.

Then I must have fallen asleep for a while, because I jumped up trembling from a dream that had shocked and frightened me. In the dream I was looking up at the dingy frosted glass in the windows of our cellar living room when I saw my father grinning back in at me, young, handsome and virile again.

“What are you doing?” I said. “You're dead. You've no business here.”

“That's what you think” – an unnerving green glint shone in eyes tricky with mischief – “but I've not been dead at all, lad – just hiding. And now I'm back!”

I jumped awake. Did I dream I was shouting, “Why won't you let me go?” or was I actually shouting it? Only gradually did the shock of the dream abate. What remained was a heart-wrung awareness of everything that had been left unresolved in my life – of that and of the uncrossable distance between the living and the forever dead.

In Vietnam I learnt to inhabit a strict exclusion zone of the emotions. After being picked up from a firefight and flown by chopper through an electric storm, I named that condition my “Faraday Cage”. It was where Crowther's Law prevailed while the intolerable voltage of warfare flashed outside. From there I saw what happens when villages are incinerated and mortar shells explode in close proximity to human flesh. I saw body bags filled with enough bits and pieces to make up the weight of a single son, and though I would never be inured to such sights, I no longer retched at them. But when news of Emmanuel's assassination caught up with me, it hit me hard.

That night I lay in sweaty fatigues, smoking dope as I listened to the stoical banter of a bunch of black infantrymen gathered round a radio. A rock band was driving a heavy beat across the airwaves. I took another drag on the joint and felt my brains scooped up and tilted backwards into space. Silently, with tears streaming down my face, I recalled each act of kindness the African had shown me, first in those snowbound days at High Sugden, and again, later, when he welcomed me as his friend in the Presidential Palace of Equatoria. I remembered his pride, his proverbs, his humour, his warmth. Yet the shock and pain of Emmanuel's death quickly blurred in the heat of the next day's action. I was twenty-eight years old then, and living in a world of phantasmagorical violence to which, with each adrenalin rush of terror and excitement, I was increasingly addicted.

Six weeks later I returned to a London in thrall to a delirium of its own. After Vietnam, the city's newly acquired taste for love and revolution felt about as likely to put right the structural
injustices of the planet as might the revels of an unruly street carnival. But it did offer scope to indulge my hyperactive senses.

More than a month passed before I travelled north to Calderbridge. It was my first visit to my parents in a long time, but I'd learnt that Hal was back at High Sugden, having escaped out of Africa alive. It was him I wanted to see.

From the moment of my arrival, I felt restless and estranged in my parents' new home. Since my father had been appointed warehouse foreman at Bamforth Brothers' mill, they had moved out of Cripplegate Chambers into a terraced house with two bedrooms and a small garden, which they rented from the mill. My mother fussed over me, while my father preserved his usual taciturn air of judgemental detachment.

My mother now worked as the cleaning lady for a family in Heathcote Green, who thought of her as their treasure. Though she seemed to take pride in the title, I told her there was no call for her to work, as I earned more money than I needed, and would be glad to send some of it her way. She answered that she wouldn't know what to do with her time if she gave up the job, and she was sure the family's two teenage girls, for whom she had become a trusted confidante, would be lost without her. Meanwhile, my father remained entranced by his television set, watching out the evenings after work more or less indiscriminately. On fine weekends they had taken to driving about the local countryside in their ageing Ford Prefect, of which they were very proud.

“I don't know why you go gallivanting abroad,” my mother said, “when there's all these grand places to visit round here!”

On Saturday nights, they joined their friends for drinks and Bingo at the North Vale Working Men's Club. I went with them and sat staring in rueful wonder at the warm, jocular world to which I'd once belonged, and which now regarded me with good-natured respect as a sort of celebrity: Jack Crowther's lad made good on the box. We played bingo and laughed at a comedian fallen on thin and boozy times, and the man in drag
who impersonated an opera singer. Each time his falsetto voice hit a high note, the glass earrings he wore lit up with a fiendish green glow.

I drank too many pints of ale and lay on my bed that night, surrounded by the bits and pieces from my boyhood that my mother had decided to save when they moved: the hand-carved model of an Arab dhow brought back from Mombasa by my dad, the banjo I never learnt how to play, a shelf of children's books. I felt unappeasably sad, as though each gesture of my parents' affection was a reproach for which I had no answer. It seemed fraudulent either to speak their language these days or to refuse to do so. My voice sounded forced and alien in my ears. But I'd made up my mind to get away without arguing with my father or upsetting my mother, so next morning I agreed to stay for Sunday lunch, which meant going to the pub with my dad while my mother put the roast in the oven.

“I know she won't have said owt about it,” he grumbled over his second pint, “but your Mam frets about you, you know. When you're abroad, I mean. She's worried you might get shot or wounded or summat. That's what upsets her most, but it's not just that. She goes on about what it's doing to your nerves.”

“She shouldn't worry. I'm used to it by now.”

“That's what I tell her. Think on what it did for me during the war, I say. The real war, I mean. Made a man of me, it did.” Giving me a quick glance, he conceded grudgingly, “Happen this war might be doing the same for you.”

I took in his barely qualified approval, wondering how he would have reacted if I'd admitted that for much of my time in Vietnam I'd been stoned out of my mind, and that my dreams still frightened me.

“I know a bit about what it's like under fire,” he said. “Just you remember to look after Number One, right? I don't want to see your mother wearing black.”

When I told him that I liked my arse well enough not to put its welfare at risk, he smiled and then changed the subject.
“The other thing she goes on about is wondering when you're thinking of getting wed?”