The Forcing, page 15
‘Kwes,’ I yelled, ‘you’re hurt.’
But he didn’t answer, just kept going, opening up space for us with sheer mass and muscle, pushing aside the old and frail. Gunfire rattled somewhere behind us, closer now, but more sporadic. A helicopter loomed just above the building tops, close, unbelievably loud. I could see the pilot peering down at us through the billowing smoke. And then a voice telling us to put down our weapons and disperse. But there was nowhere to go. We were wedged in, stalled. Kwesi roared and pushed into the crowd. More shots now, so close that I ducked my head and looked over towards the sound. When I turned back, Kwesi and Francoise were gone, swallowed up by the crowd. I kept going, moving along with the mass, hundreds of people streaming away from the noise and smoke, hemmed in by the buildings. Some were bleeding, hobbling along, propped up by friends or loved ones, others wandered in a daze, cast away from the world they had known and counted on to protect them.
I worked my way to the far side of the street and started down the alleyway I’d seen Argent disappear into. I remember the crumbling buildings rising on both sides and the smoke from the riot drifting around me and the thin strip of green sky above, and it was as if I was scrambling along a gassed battlefield trench in some forgotten war. I remember the wreckage piled up on both sides of the alleyway, punctured tin cylinders and pushed-in cubes of cardboard, the smashed planes of television screens, all the wrecked geometry of a doomed civilisation. And strangely, I remember a discarded washing machine. I still dream about it sometimes. The front door was gone, and its dark mouth gaped open in a silent scream. It reminded me of that painting by Edvard Munch. I think it is called Angoisse. Anguish.
I hadn’t gone far when I came across a small man with thick glasses. He was slumped up against the wall. Blood seeped from a wound to his abdomen, pooled fresh on the ground about his legs. Two gold coins lay cradled in his lap, as if someone had thrown them there, rich man to beggar. And clutched in his hand, blue light still glowing on its screen, something you didn’t see much anymore, a mobile phone. He stared up at me, tried to speak. Blood frothed from his mouth, bubbled down his chin onto his shirt.
There was nothing I could do for him. I started to run. And then, suddenly, I was alone. I was almost to the end of the alley when through the smoke I saw a figure hurrying up one of the fire escapes. He was dressed in dark clothing and carried a duffel bag. He was a long way above me now, sprinting up the last few stairs. As he neared the top of the building, he stopped and glanced back. It was just a moment, a fraction of a second, but long enough to be sure. I would have recognised that sneer anywhere. And then he was gone, up onto the roof.
Silent Thanks
Some things you never forget. The surroundings might fade, the faces blur, the circumstances of weather and place and time dissolving away as the decades pass. But other, seemingly random details somehow remain immune to the ravages of time and distance, and conscious, destructive will. Even now, thirty years and half a world later, those images come hot and brutal and bled through with fear. I double over at my desk, suddenly breathless, choking. I can taste the gas, smell the blood and the shattered glass, feel the smoke burning in my lungs. And I know that I am trapped, that I must continue, and that what comes next is worse yet than I could ever have imagined back then, when I was someone else and the world was becoming what I now realise it was always destined to be.
I slump to the floor and let it all shudder through me. Slowly, it ebbs away. The shaking stops. My breathing slows, deepens. I open my eyes, offer silent thanks to the sky and the hills behind the house and the miracle of the blue ocean.
I am here, now. Somehow, I have survived the transit of time and distance and the loss of the old world. Amazement is too subtle a word.
26
May returned to the apartment later that day. She was alone. Her face was covered in grime and streaked with tears. I tried to talk to her, but she pushed past me and retreated to Argent’s room. Argent appeared not long afterwards, still carrying the duffel bag I’d seen him with before. He scowled at me, marched to his room and slammed the door behind him.
Within moments I could hear May’s voice. I couldn’t make out the words, but I could tell she was angry. The argument continued for a while, half an hour perhaps, before he came storming out, slammed the door again and disappeared into the street.
Kwesi and Francoise were still not back. I waited a time and then knocked on the door to Argent’s room.
‘May, we need to talk,’ I said through the hollow particle board. ‘Please open the door. We need to discuss Lachie’s plan. There is a lot to go through. We need to talk about it and prepare, make sure we don’t screw it up.’
Silence.
I tried to open the door, but it was locked. ‘May, please. This could be our only chance. We have to work together.’
The sound of a closet door closing.
‘Go away. I don’t want to go anywhere with you.’
‘May, be reasonable, please.’
‘Fuck off, you coward. I have no intention of having anything to do with you.’
‘Even if it means dying here?’
A pause, and then: ‘Derek will look after me. He is rich, and he stands up for himself.’
‘Like today?’
‘Some people in the crowd got out of hand.’
‘Out of hand? It was a massacre.’
The muffled reply: ‘Leave me alone.’
‘Then why are you here, May? I thought you two had moved in together, found yourself a cosy little place in the Green Zone?’ Now I was being mean. I pulled back, tried to push down the frustration I could hear in my voice, feel in my chest. ‘It doesn’t matter, May. I’m sorry. I just want to get out of here. You heard what Lachie said.’ All of this through the door.
‘May, please.’
Nothing. Silence.
‘Kwesi and Francoise aren’t back yet. Did you see them?’
‘No. Go away.’
After all these years I knew better than to confront her head-on. ‘If you change your mind, just tell me. But come Wednesday night, I’m leaving, with or without you.’ I’d made that decision there in the alley contemplating the meaning of anguish.
By late afternoon, I had made no progress with May. Kwesi and Francoise were still not back. Neither was Lan. I waited till dusk, then set off to find them. The scene that confronted me is here with me still.
The streets are littered with the fallout from the demonstration. The authorities have managed to regain some level of control of the situation, but the curfew cannot be enforced. People wander the streets like refugees, alone or in small groups, dazed and bloody, searching for their loved ones. Bodies lie scattered singly or in small clumps along the roadside, bloated in the heat. Some have been dragged there and abandoned, others lie where they fell. It reminds me of the photos in the papers of the aftermath of the Atlanta riots. Except that this is real, in a way images or words can never capture. And yet, as with so much that has happened, I cannot quite bring myself to believe that it is real, that it was real, that the world I had known, grown up with, had been so completely obliterated.
I found Francoise slumped over Kwesi’s body on the side of the road about half a kilometre from the hospital. She had managed to drag him that far before collapsing exhausted to the ground. Kwesi’s hardened corpse lay in a pool of half-congealed blood.
I picked her up in my arms, like a bride to bed, and carried her home. She seemed so thin and frail. I laid her on the couch, washed the blood from her face and hands, and made her drink. She fell asleep almost immediately. I went out into the garden and pulled up two of the sturdy wooden poles we had used for her bean trellis, grabbed a blanket from my bed and set out into the gathering dusk to bring Kwesi home.
He lay where we had left him, alone and cold. I realised, as I sat on the kerb beside my friend and started to fashion a crude stretcher from the blanket and the two poles, that I was crying. I could not stop. And then suddenly it was as if some line holding me together frayed, then parted. I was sobbing uncontrollably, groaning under the weight of everything I had seen, of all I had lost and left undone.
By the time I pulled myself together, it was almost dark. Cursing myself, I set to work. With my knife I cut holes for the pole ends in the doubled cloth and cut lengths of paracord to fasten the blanket to the poles. I knelt on the pavement and heaved Kwesi’s lifeless body onto the stretcher. The flesh was cold and stiff, the ebony skin already the colour of weathered concrete.
Then I grasped the ends of each pole and pushed myself up. He was heavy. I steadied myself and started to walk, dragging the stretcher behind me across the pavement. The ends of the poles bumped and scraped over each rut and crack. After just a few minutes my shoulders and forearms were burning with the effort, the insides of my knuckles numb. I wondered how Francoise could possibly have moved him so far all alone, he twice her weight.
After three blocks I set down the stretcher. I was trembling, soaked from the exertion, despite the coolness of evening. I sat on the curb with my feet in the gutter and looked at my friend. I had known him for such a short time but had come to consider him one of the people closest to me in all the world.
I kept going. I’d gone maybe half a kilometre when a police car pulled up beside me. A young cop stared out of the half-open window, a shotgun gripped across his chest. His eyes were stretched wide. Fear etched his face, exhaustion too, and something else: disbelief. ‘Get home,’ the cop said. ‘You’re violating curfew.’
‘I’m close,’ I said.
The cop looked down at Kwesi and frowned. He couldn’t have been more than thirty, but everything about him seemed old. ‘Do it fast. We’re locking down the whole town. There’s a fallout cloud on the way.’
He saw the question form in my eyes.
‘There’s been a nuclear exchange in India. Four bombs they’re telling us. Dhaka’s gone, Delhi too, they’re saying. Stay inside. Once it passes over, we’ll give the all-clear.’
I heard the words, but they didn’t register. I had been to Delhi once, as a teenager, backpacking through India. It didn’t seem possible. All those people. All that magnificent squalor. Gone. The police car rolled away in the gloom, its tail-lights glowing in the darkness like the embers of a burning city.
I trudged on, dragging my dead friend across the fractured pavement, the poles scraping across the concrete.
It took me the best part of an hour to reach the Hamptons, and another two to dig the grave in the garden, next to Francoise’s wizened strawberries and shrivelled tomatoes, the dried-out tangle of peas and beans. Francoise stood weeping in May’s arms as I slid the big man into the dark hole in as dignified a way as I could.
I said a few words. I hadn’t known Kwesi long, but he was an honest man, a good friend and a loving husband. The god he believed in was just and good. And then, although I was not qualified to do so, I commended his soul to the hereafter, whatever that was, if it still even existed.
Francoise threw a handful of sand into the grave and collapsed to her knees, sobbing uncontrollably. It didn’t take me long to cover him over. When I was done, I drove a steel stake Kwesi had found on one of our foraging excursions into the soil at the head of the grave and stood looking down at the raised mound.
Lachie had been right. First Samantha, now Kwesi. It was intended that we never leave this place.
A Good Omen
I rise early, as usual, and set to work. Most days, I write from just before daybreak to sometime after noon. Once the sun begins its downward trajectory, fatigue starts setting in. The words become harder to find and then dry up altogether. By the time I set down my pen, I am drained, an empty shell. It takes me the rest of the day to recover. Exercise, manual labour, tending the animals and sleep restore me. And somehow, for now at least, when I wake again the next morning it is all there, ready to be transcribed. Today, I write well.
Later that afternoon, we receive a good omen. Juliette spots a pod of Right whales in the sound. We congregate, all of us, up on Chicken-Head Rock and watch them come closer to shore. It is a big group, well over a hundred individuals, the largest we have seen. Smaller juveniles dominate the pod, but there are a few large, older whales. When we first arrived here whales were scarce, like so many other creatures. And then slowly, about fifteen years ago, their numbers started to increase, and it became so we could reckon the seasons and the days of the month by their return. The humpbacks came too, and then the huge blue whales, and with them the seabirds arrived, and the dolphins too, and the pilotfish and yellowfin and all the other fishes.
We watch them for a long time as they transit the bay and then slowly head back out to deeper water. For now, the winds are holding, fair from the southwest. With any luck, Kweku will be nearing Albany soon.
27
I don’t know what it was – perhaps the shock of the riot, of seeing Kwesi lowered into his grave – but later that night May finally opened up to me, in a way she hadn’t done for a long time.
‘So much death’ she said into the darkness. ‘It’s as if I am surrounded by it.’
I waited for her to continue. My ears were still ringing from the explosions.
She set a canvas on the table. ‘I finished it just a few hours ago. The best thing I have ever done.’
I stared down at the painting, tried to take it all in. I breathed in hard, steadied myself against the edge of the table. Pigment burst across the canvas in shattered swathes. Broken bodies bled onto bare concrete, eyes wide like planets, mouths drawn in fear, the sky ripped apart by burning metal and flying glass.
‘May,’ I stumbled. ‘It’s … I don’t know what to say. It’s amazing.’ There it was, screaming from the canvas, everything I had witnessed. And more. So much more.
‘I tried to follow him,’ she whispered as if in a trance. ‘But he disappeared into the crowd. I looked for him everywhere.’ Tears poured from her eyes, caught the lamplight. It was then that I knew that she loved him.
And then a calm came over her. She wiped her face with her hand, steadied herself. ‘We’re taking him with us.’
‘What did you say?’
She faced me and took my hand. ‘The Broken Hearts are after him,’ she said. ‘We have to take him with us.’
‘You heard what Lachie said. There is only room for the two of us.’
She shook her head. ‘No, David. I am going to ask him tonight. I thought I should tell you first.’
‘Absolutely not.’ I could feel the anger rising inside me, more than anger. There was fear there, too, unmistakable. And something else. The sick pang of jealousy. Skin pain, Kwesi called it. ‘You said you wanted to get out of here, May. Well, this is your chance. If you tell him, you’ll jeopardise the only chance we have.’
She was sobbing now, shaking. ‘But you don’t understand. It’s because of him that I … I … I can’t leave him.’
I let her cry.
‘There has to be a way,’ she gasped.
‘We can’t tell anyone, May. Anyone.’
‘He has a place we can go,’ she pleaded. ‘He told me. Somewhere down south. Paradise, he calls it. Do you have anywhere to go?’
‘And you trust him? Where was he this morning, May? Do you know? While everyone else was getting cut down by the police, where was he?’
A confused look came over her. ‘I … We got separated. I couldn’t find him.’
‘That’s because he left, May. He ran. I saw him, climbing up to the top of one of the buildings. I’m pretty sure he shot someone on the way.’
‘What?’ she hissed. ‘You’re lying.’
‘No, May. I’m not.’
‘You’re jealous. You always have been.’
I grabbed her by the shoulders, shook her hard. Her head bobbed around on her neck as if she was drugged. ‘Are you crazy?’ I shouted. ‘You’ll ruin everything.’
‘Stop,’ she cried. ‘You’re hurting me.’
I let her go, aghast.
‘Leave me alone.’
‘May, I … I didn’t mean to…’
She stepped back, composed herself. ‘Then you stay,’ she said, crossing her arms over her chest. ‘You wanted to come here. You agreed with it.’
I pulled myself back, sought to regain control. ‘Look, May,’ I said, searching for a lower octave. ‘Please see reason. You don’t know where the rendezvous is, who we’re meeting, or how we’re getting out. You can’t do it without me.’
‘Give me the letter,’ she said. ‘It was for both of us.’
It was my turn for defiance. ‘I can’t do that. I won’t.’
She hung her head.
‘If you want to get out, meet me here in two days’ time, early evening. Pack light. Bare essentials only. And come alone.’ And then for the first time in my life, I turned and walked away from her.
A Moment of Reflection
I leave my clothes on the rocks and walk naked across the shingle. The sun warms me, shooting through between two banks of high cloud. The winds have continued to hold, and barring an unforeseen problem, Kweku is surely in Albany by now. I think of him walking up the main street from the harbour, strong and tall and sure, and I am proud of him, proud of the man he has become.
The water is cold, getting noticeably colder now with the slow glide of the year. I step carefully across the larger, flatter stones, feel the barnacles push into the soles of my feet. Soon I am up to my waist, feeling the cold track up my spine. And then I am in and under, and the familiar cold pulse comes, the pain in my temples that takes my breath away. I open my eyes, gaze through the clear water at the familiar underwater topography. A few strokes later and I am moving well, head above water, working my way out to the rocks that mark the edge of our little cove. A seal pops his head above the surface, watches me. His eyes are very big and round under dark lashes. Water beads bright on his long whiskers. I greet him, tell him that it is good to see him. And then he slips under the water and is gone.
