The Dream Archipelago

‘Just a view of the sea. Who cares?’

  ‘Your family presumably does. Otherwise why should they live here? Why should they build this villa?’

  ‘You know how it is,’ she said dismissively. ‘You should ask them if you want to know. Like you, I’m only visiting. You didn’t leave the party with me to look out there at the view.’

  ‘I thought I did. You suggested I follow you. I followed you.’

  ‘We’re alone here. Come and sit with me.’

  Because of the bright sunlight beating down painfully on his unprotected head, and only for that reason, Sheeld went up the four wooden steps to the balcony and sat down on the end of the swing chair. It rocked back, moving unevenly. An expanse of cushion lay between them.

  Alanya reached up and released her hair, swinging it free with a movement that reminded him of Borbellia. She too had kept her hair tied up for formal occasions, and made a play of shaking it out when she wanted some fun.

  ‘Come nearer to me,’ Alanya said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Do I need to tell you?’

  She swung her legs down, and slid purposefully across the cushioned seat towards him, smiling invitingly.

  Sheeld moved smartly, stood up and stepped away from her. He stood at the rail of the balcony, looking out towards the sea, embarrassed by her. He wished again that he had left the funeral immediately after the service at the crematorium.

  That should have been a sign to him. Something unusual was going on, even by their standards. The Mercier family were magnifying his feelings of alienation, with the patois they spoke, the customs they observed. He was aware of Alanya behind him, the seat still rocking to and fro as a result of their sudden movements. He glanced back at her and saw she was again reclining full length along the seat, resting her head on her hand, looking up at him with a coy smile. She did not seem in the least annoyed or angered by his reaction.

  Again, he was reminded by her behaviour of how little he knew of island ways. Where he came from women did not act in their relationships with men the way Alanya had been doing. That was not at all to say the women were sexually submissive, but Sheeld could not think of anyone he had known in the past who would throw herself so blatantly at a man she had only just met. Indeed, in this case she appeared to have approached him with the sole motive of throwing herself at him.

  Everything here in the islands was still too strange to him to enable him to make safe generalizations about what he saw or encountered. For all he knew Alanya Mercier was acting as any other island woman might towards a man she had met only an hour or two earlier. On the other hand, she might be abnormally impulsive and demanding, known by her close friends and family for going in for such overt sexual behaviour, a social embarrassment to them.

  ‘I’m going to walk back to the house now,’ he said, the last thought having helped him to the decision.

  ‘You’d never find the way on your own.’ A touch of scorn.

  ‘I don’t see why not. I’ll go the way we came.’

  ‘Come and make love to me, Graian Sheeld.’

  He was briefly tempted: the animal magnetism she radiated was still there, but there suddenly came to him a factual presentiment of what it would be to take advantage of her. He imagined going to her, kissing her, touching her, pulling her clothes off, feeling her doing the same to him … then later, not long from now, twenty minutes from now, half an hour away, a familiar feeling of regret and shame and loss. Just sex with a stranger. There had been too many times before in his own life: thoughts of the aftermath had a proactively detumescent effect on him, unless the woman was someone he really wanted to be with.

  ‘I don’t want what you want,’ he said simply.

  ‘How do you know what I want?’

  ‘I thought you said you needn’t tell me.’

  ‘Now you’re humiliating me,’ she said, and she pouted. He stared at her, thinking of pre-teen children and how little he wanted any of this.

  ‘I don’t intend to humiliate you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if it seems that way, but you surprised me. We don’t know one another. I’m in a strange country—’

  ‘But you must realize what happens at funeral ceremonies like this.’

  ‘What happens? No, actually I don’t.’

  ‘Then why did you come? It’s a family occasion. Outsiders …’

  ‘Outsiders what?’

  ‘They normally stay outside.’

  ‘I came on behalf of a member of my own family. I’m here to represent—’

  ‘Yes, yes. Your uncle,’ she said. ‘You told me all that.’

  He was beginning to dislike her – perhaps he should have done so from the start. Almost everything she said had an implied second meaning, a riddle. Sheeld detested riddles. Alanya Mercier rarely spoke directly. He walked down the wooden steps and crossed the short strip of levelled ground towards the edge of the cliff. He glanced back only once, to see Alanya still sprawling as he had left her. She looked slightly ridiculous, an amateur vamp denied her reward.

  He retraced his steps, intending to return to the house as quickly as possible, then depart. There was no point remaining.

  He walked along until he came to the sloping path. He climbed it and the steps beyond and followed the ledge as it regained the top of the cliff. The vertiginous drop to the sea dizzied him, but he climbed briskly. Without a backward look at the view he strode into the forest.

  Almost at once he was uncertain which way to go.

  It was clear that three separate tracks diverged from this point. When he had walked along here with Alanya a few minutes earlier he had not noticed it, as a convergence passed when coming the other way. The route they had walked by, the one he seemed to remember and which looked the most direct way through the trees, was the central path, striking away from the cliff at approximately a right angle. He started along it but almost at once he came to a halt. Two large trees had fallen across the path and he was sure they had not had to clamber past them on the way here. He went back.

  The left-hand path went nowhere. It started promisingly, but curved around after a short distance and led to another viewing position on the edge of the cliff. Sheeld was certain he had not passed this. He went back. The third path, the only one remaining and the one that went to the right, again seemed at first to be the one he and Alanya had walked along, but after following it for about five minutes he was no longer sure. The path twisted several times, then came to a deep, overgrown gully where the only way down was by way of a flight of steps hewn out of the ground.

  He returned to the junction of the three, close to the clifftop, and stood there in agonized indecision.

  As he passed in front of the cabin he saw Alanya standing by the door, working a key in the lock. It turned with a faint scraping noise and she went inside without acknowledging him.

  A narrow alley ran alongside the cabin, created by the proximity of the wall to the rising face of rock. Sheeld walked through the alley, then as the ground immediately widened he scrambled up the slope beyond. A clear path lay ahead, winding up through the trees and striking away from the sea. He strode along feeling optimistic, because although it was not the way he had come the path was wide and it had clearly been created to lead somewhere. He imagined that if it did not take him back to the house or the grounds, then returning to a public road would be as good. He could presumably find a lift into Trellin Town.

  However, after five minutes of easy walking he saw that the path ahead began to narrow and soon he was moving along a dirt track hemmed in with thorns and leaves which brushed stiffly past his legs. The texture of the path softened, and he saw that his feet were squeezing up outlines of muddy water around the soles of his shoes. Because he could see the track winding on ahead he continued along it, hoping that it would widen again.

  At one point he had to clamber around another fallen tree, one with its roots pointing jaggedly across the path. Keeping an eye on the ground, to make sure he didn’t lose his footing, Sh
eeld noticed how the soil had been worked into a loose scattering of muddy mounds, as if something small had been burrowing through it.

  He stepped back at once, until he was standing on firmer ground. The thought of exactly what might have been burrowing around exposed tree roots was enough to change his mind about everything. The tree completely blocked the path. Its fallen branches extended a long way to the side, buried in the massing foliage of the forest. On the other side, the ground fell away into a swampy morass. To continue would mean clambering through the roots, unavoidably stepping where burrows had been made.

  He hesitated a little longer, then with real reluctance began to retrace his steps. At first he walked slowly, not wanting to see Alanya Mercier again, but it was not long before he realized that without her he could spend many wasted hours trying to find his way out of the forest.

  He walked more quickly, climbing the slope back towards the cliffs, sweltering in the long tropical afternoon.

  As he emerged from the forest and walked through the narrow alley between the cabin and the rocky face, Sheeld saw Alanya pacing along the levelled area of ground in front. She heard him approaching and turned at once.

  ‘I said you would not find the way. You were thinking about me, and what you wanted to do with me, as we came here. You should have been remembering the route we took.’

  ‘I was being polite. I was following you to see where you would take me.’

  ‘Yes, so you were. And you were frightened of our large insects, and you were thinking about having sex with me, and the money my family owns, and all the things you no doubt came here today to take from us.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Isn’t it true? You came after me because you thought I would be easy to seduce, and afterwards you would blackmail me for my family’s money.’

  He gestured with irritation and despair.

  ‘Nothing could be further from the truth,’ he said. ‘I want none of it. If you would show me how to retrace our steps to the house, or show me the way to a public road, all this can end.’

  ‘So you feel nothing for having humiliated me.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I meant no harm.’

  ‘Was that true in the past?’

  ‘The past? My past? What do you know of that?’

  ‘Everyone leaves traces behind them,’ she said. ‘The profession of the Merciers has been to follow such traces. You do not come to our islands with clean hands, Graian Sheeld. We know about you, knew about you before you arrived today. I thought you would try with me what you have done in the past with others.’

  ‘You set me up? You were trying to provoke something from me?’

  ‘Your words.’

  ‘I came here on family business,’ he said.

  ‘Our family too has business. Still, I think you will be fortunate today. You have done well.’

  ‘I’ve passed some test of behaviour.’

  ‘You know what we normally do with people like you, on the island where I was born?’

  ‘I don’t.’ Nor, he thought, did he much care.

  ‘We’re interested in revenge.’

  ‘This is so ridiculous.’

  ‘That is what many of us also say, because we’re not primitives. I’m one of them. Revenge is ridiculous, uncivilized. What our ancestors used to do to their enemies is embarrassing to those of us who are living in the modern world. But the custom of the islands is also for us to speak our minds.’

  Sheeld stared around. The high fringe of the forest, the dizzying narrowness of the paths at the top of the cliffs, the heady view of the sea and the islands. A place to die, perhaps.

  He felt unable to form words that were not clumsy, so used those anyway.

  ‘You and I both made a mistake,’ he said. ‘You wanted something, I was unsure. We are both adults. Can’t we share the responsibility?’

  ‘You are no islander!’

  ‘You know that. What difference does it make?’

  He felt himself still to be floundering, a caricature of an expatriate mainlander, falling back on irrelevant manners and reasonableness to try to negotiate around some obscure island custom. Friends had warned him of it before he left, the way hostilities could be accidentally aroused: there was a long history of island exploitation by the north, and old memories and grievances had been revived by the war.

  Sheeld had thought before he left: I can avoid all that. I’m young, free-thinking, unassertive, self-controlled. I can live a quiet life, not aggravating the island people I meet, not letting them aggravate me. I can slip imperceptibly past the memories, be who I am and what I am without having to explain or defend myself.

  Thus his rationalization of himself to himself, but it was all untested theory. It had worked after a fashion while he lived on Foort: the islanders there seemed incurious about him and he felt he had started to assimilate quietly into their way of life. Then came the visit to Trellin and the first test of his theory. When he agreed to attend the funeral he had not thought, had never expected, to be confronted by a situation like the one Alanya Mercier had created.

  He was out of his depth in manners and traditions and habits in which he was unpractised.

  But how significant could such matters be? This was a funeral. A man dies suddenly; his family mourns; friends and acquaintances from a wider circle are moved to pay their last respects at the man’s funeral. One of them asks a proxy to attend on his behalf. There is a service, a wake. All these were surely universals, amongst civilized people?

  They were still standing there, locked in the impasse that had arisen between them. He wanted only to find an end to it. She wanted … what? He couldn’t imagine. An apology, an abasement, some symbolic island gesture to appease the wrong she imagined he had done her?

  ‘I show you the way back,’ she said. ‘It’s not difficult.’

  ‘I couldn’t find the path on my own. It looks as if I do need you.’

  ‘That’s why I waited.’

  He glanced up at the sky: the sun was still high, and the hot air beneath the trees seemed immovable. He was dressed unsuitably for the climate, another matter that had revealed his ignorance.

  ‘Is there any fresh water in the cabin?’ he said. ‘I’m thirsty.’

  ‘There is a little. I’m dry too. But I was going to show you, on the way back. We have a fruit that grows here. It’s in season now. To eat it at this time of year is more refreshing than cold water.’

  ‘I’d rather have water. May I have some of that first?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She led him back to the cabin, unlocked the door. She left him on the porch while she went inside but returned a few moments later with an unsealed bottle of mineral water. It was cold, from an icebox, but there were only a couple of fingers of water at the bottom. He removed the cap and emptied the mouthful of water into his mouth.

  ‘Do you always swallow water like that?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘You drank it in one gulp.’

  ‘I was thirsty! You only gave me a mouthful.’

  ‘In a hot climate it is better to sip over a long period of time.’ She locked the door. ‘Now we return to the house,’ she said. ‘If you want more water to gulp, you will find it there.’

  Seething with irritation, Sheeld followed her along the path up the face of the cliff.

  The mystery of the apparently lost footpath was soon revealed: the first path he had tried was the right one, but the real way forward involved stepping over some spreading shrubbery at a point where a levelled path forked to one side. Beyond the wildly growing shrub, the path continued on, heading more or less directly towards the main house. Looking back he remembered going that way, but as she had reminded him, he had been thinking about Alanya, watching the back of her body as he walked.

  Now beside her, Sheeld began to regret his bad temper with her, realizing that he was as much the initiator of the problem as she was. He should simply have made a token appearance at the f
uneral and left immediately it was over. He should not even have returned to the house for the wake. Why he had followed her at all was now a mystery to him, however clear it had seemed to him at the time.

  The path led uphill and Sheeld felt increasingly hot and thirsty. He became intent only on returning to the house, finding something to drink, then leaving as quickly as possible. He no longer even cared if he gave offence by doing so. Once away he would never see any of these people again.

  Somewhere along the way Alanya’s dress was snagged by a thorny bush. She turned, bent, unpicked the thin material from the tiny spikes. He stood behind her, waiting patiently. When she had finished she did not straighten but for some reason stood that short distance in front of him with her head and shoulders bowed. She twisted her head and smiled up at him. The angle of her face made her mouth look as if it had distorted into an unpleasant rictus. There was something so odd and perverse about her posture that a tremor of fear ran through him.

  She held the expression.

  He said, ‘What is it?’

  ‘What is what?’

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘Do you know what is on the ground beside you?’

  Instantly he looked down, but could see nothing. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I thought I saw a thryme.’

  He leapt back in a reflex. Then, as he realized exactly what she had said, he stepped back again.

  ‘Where is it?’

  He hopped and stumbled across the path, beating at his shins and ankles with his hand, shuddering in terror. He could so easily imagine its soft repellent body pressed against him, the thick black legs scuttling over him, the mandible sinking into his skin, the loathsome larvae flowing into his bloodstream …

  Alanya had not moved, other than to give up her perverse angular stance. Now she was standing erect, watching him with frank interest.

  Shuddering, he said, ‘Are you lying to me?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Don’t do this! Is there really a thryme near me?’

  ‘You’re terrified, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’