The Paper Men

  Chapter VIII

  I woke too early with a clear memory of the night before and the kind of parched distancing from reality which comes from considerable brandy. After the bathroom I went into the sitting-room and was not surprised to see that the brandy bottle was half empty. Strangely, though, apart from dryness, I had no hangover. Instead I had a thirst which I quenched with about six successive tumblers of mountain water. It seemed rather immoral to have drunk so much and not to be suffering for it, but the fact was undeniable, I was feeling physically as well as I had ever felt in my life. Rage and sorrow burn up alcohol. I remembered and examined my new thraldom and rebelled against it. Think no more of her is always the solution. For she had committed herself, there was no doubt of it, consented to shape her life on completing with him a charmed circle. It was all the more evident from the ludicrous and sordid non-transaction of the night before. Think no more of her, put that image out of the visualizing eye, for God’s sake, don’t be your age, that way madness lies. Think rather of him and his attempt at liming a literary bird—

  Well. I would teach Professor Tucker a lesson he would never forget. I would take to my own weapons. I would put him in a book, a story, with such a viciously precise delineation that even Mary Lou would blush for him and the strange rich man Halliday laugh him out of his life.

  Then, of course, the novelist’s truism popped out. It was no good putting the real, live Rick L. Tucker in a book. He had this in common with most of the human race—he was quite spectacularly unbelievable. There are things that novelists invent which they call characters but they aren’t. They’re constructs, shaved down out of some wood or other—a psychic plasma—into figures as like each other as Russian dolls. The only thing I could do was select, tone down, adjust, produce a comically loathsome figure, recognizable and tolerable because it was “only a story”.

  It came to me—and with an eighth glass of water—that I must do what I had never done before in my life. No more invention, only selection—I must actually study a living person. Rick should become my prey. Instead of trying to avoid him when boredom or anger set in, I must reverse our situation. All the time he thought he was finding out about me I should be finding out about him. It was all the exhilaration of the hunt. Yoicks! Tally ho!

  All the time, over breakfast then dressing, I was busy putting together what I knew of him and realized at last that it amounted to less than the police would want for a description. He was large, he was huge—how huge? The tall young man who had crouched behind our dustbin had filled out in every way. He was broad and thick. I called to mind the mat of hair, the forest of hair, I had seen all down his front. As well as that, there were thickets in his arm pits, small images of the same in his nostrils—probably the hair extended down his legs to end round his ankles like the feathers on a cob or, rather more aptly, on a cart horse. It grew thick and close over his head, thick on his eyebrows, thick and long as eyelashes. Had the hairy Ainu crossed by way of the frozen Bering Straits, or had later immigration brought this near-freak the other way across the Atlantic? Examined, rather than run from or derided, I began to see that Professor Tucker was not without interest. How much hair could the novelist get away with? Not quite so much—the bit down the front, the mop of black hair on his head, the eyebrows and eyelashes would be more than enough. Mostly the writer deals with the bits of his characters that stick out. The rest is silence—clothes, I mean. It was sheer luck I knew he was as shaggy between the legs as a Shetland pony.

  Skin. Oddly white, in itself, but where a beard and moustache might have been the area was covered with the black roots of hairs all cut off by pressure of the safety razor just, as it were, below ground level but still there and visible, giving, with the white, slightly oily skin, an effect of—what? Absurdly, my mind could find nothing but a quotation from somewhere, a quotation the aptness of which was not apparent—silence and old night.

  Hands, square, fat, white, the backs inevitably sprinkled with the standard Tuckerish hair. And so clean. Far too clean, the nails very nearly convex rather than—hell, which was which? They were dished, would hold rain water.

  He must be strong, of course. One of those hands could squeeze—made into a fist could hit—or wielding an axe—but they had never done so. The typewriter was their weapon.

  Those shaggy privates—no. Learn, old man, what is not to be thought, not to be touched on, what is nothing, nothing but sickness and pain. Forget. Let it be.

  So. To the hunt!

  Mary Lou?

  I would avoid her as much as possible, only tolerating them until I had all the relevant information on my pursuer. I would suffer a little but then she would be gone.

  Rick and I met in the foyer. I was in moderately heavy boots and anorak, Rick dressed, except for the skates, as if he were about to play ice hockey. He looked enormous. OLE ASHCAN was to the fore again. Yes, he was enormous.

  “How tall are you, Rick?”

  “A metre—”

  “Old style, please.”

  “Six feet three inches, sir.”

  “And you weigh—not in kilos but pounds?”

  “Two hundred twenty-five.”

  “Could you divide that by fourteen?”

  He did so. I whistled.

  “And you look it, Rick, every hunkish pound. What on earth got you stuck with academics?”

  “I wanted it, Wilf. Wilf, those boots, they wouldn’t last over rough country.”

  “They are not going to be taken over rough country.”

  “Maybe not today, but—”

  “Have you noticed?”

  “Yeah. Fog.”

  “They don’t advertise it.”

  “No, sir, they don’t. Wilf, I was really sorry not to see the stars with you last night. Mary Lou said it was truly inspirational.”

  “She did? Well, today we can see all of twenty-five yards. We are down to earth, Rick.”

  “Am I going too fast for you, Wilf?”

  “Not yet but it’s a kind thought.”

  “Maybe you wondered why I didn’t join you last night?”

  Mindful of my new role as hunter, I nodded.

  “Yes, why?”

  “We take this path to the left. My God, the fog’s thickening, Wilf. But don’t worry, there’s a handrail all the way. Even if the fog closes right in, we can feel along the cliff edge—”

  “Christ!”

  “I didn’t say anything last night, Wilf, but the altitude got to me too.”

  “You’re like her, Rick, you’re just not physical. I’ve never met such a truly spiritual pair. But this cliff: I warn you, I don’t like heights. I don’t even like that bloody balcony.”

  “Come to that, Wilf, I don’t like the way these fields smell.”

  “Stink. Doctor Johnson.”

  “Fertilizer.”

  “It’s shit, you fool. It doesn’t disappear for ever in the John and Jean. It’s human. They spread it around. They don’t waste anything.”

  Rick gagged and clapped a handful of Kleenex over his mouth and nose. He broke into a canter and soon disappeared into the fog a few yards further along the path. I peered up into the fog and could detect slightly more luminosity in it in one direction than another. Presumably the sun was up there still and moving towards midday. Later perhaps I should be able to see the cliff and decide whether I would go on or not. Meanwhile I strolled slowly between malodorous and invisible fields. I took my time. Some people can’t stand heights. Others can’t stand faeces. Chacun et cetera.

  Ten minutes later there was the hygienic smell of pines and the suggestion round me of their massive darknesses in the fog. Rick was waiting for me. At that point the air was clearing a trifle, so that as soon as I saw him I also saw tree tops on my left at eye level and pine roots in a bank on my right. Rick, I now saw, was leaning negligently against a railing on the left-hand side of the path.

  “Aw, Wilf—it’s solid as the rock.”

  Nevertheless he heaved hi
mself upright, adjusted his pace to mine. There was the sound of water rushing down the mountain somewhere ahead. It was strangely comforting, heaven knows why. I stared up into the fog and could make out now and then a silver penny racing through intense whiteness and inanity towards the zenith. I looked down and round me. The three tops had withdrawn, suggesting some increasing gap of air below us on the left.

  “Are you sure this path is OK, Rick? You’ve been along it? A solid rail all the way? No nasty surprises?’

  “No, sir.”

  We walked on together. The rushing sound was nearer and presently water came into view. It was a small mountain stream that dropped out of the fog on the right, splashed across the path and disappeared into the fog below us. Rick stopped before the stream. He raised a finger, hushing me. I stopped and hushed. He had more black hairs in his right nostril than the left. He was right-nostrilled.

  There was nothing to hear but the stream and, faintly somewhere, cowbells. I sat by the stream on a convenient projection of rock. I looked up at him, raising my eyebrows. For answer he pointed to the stream. I listened again, bent down and pretended to smell it, put a finger in but took it out again quickly, fearing frost bite.

  “Can’t you hear, Wilf?”

  “Course I can.”

  “I mean—isn’t there something real queer about the sound?”

  “No.”

  “Listen again.”

  It was true. The stream, a single skein of falling water briefly interrupted by the path, had two voices, not one. There was the cheerful babble, a kind of frivolity as if the thing, the Form, enjoyed its bounding passage downward, through space. Then running under that was a deep, meditative hum as if despite the frivolity and surface prattle the thing sounded from some deep secret of the mountain itself.

  “It’s not just single!”

  “Yeah. ‘Two voices are there, one is of the deep—’”

  I looked at him with surprise that turned to an unwilling degree of respect. There had been last night—and now this.

  “I’ve never listened to water before—not really listened.”

  “I can’t believe that, Wilf.”

  Also, my mind noted and put away in some drawer to be taken out later that there was a lengthy piece of prose to be written on listening to natural sound—listening without comment or presupposition.

  “How come, Rick, as you might say? I mean why you?”

  “I’m not making the connection, Wilf.”

  “Listening to a stream!”

  “I know how I must seem to you, sir. Just another sincere but limited academic.”

  “Oh my! Oh my giddy aunt! Golly! Dash it!”

  “I mean it, Wilf.”

  “Straightforward. Sincere. A man incapable of—”

  But Rick had gone on as if something I had not known in him had been touched.

  “I do listen. I always have done. Birds, wind, water—the different sounds of water. Sometimes I think in the sea you can hear the salt. The difference, I mean.”

  “The great outdoors.”

  “Surely. Then sometimes, you know, you lie awake and listen to no noise, though that’s rare nowadays—but sometimes you can listen to no noise—positive no noise and go out and out and out, searching—”

  “Nature mysticism.”

  “No, sir. It’s just how living is. Then there’s music. Oh my God. But I hadn’t the talent.”

  “Had to settle for the groves of academe.”

  “Yeah. No—I mean, sincerely no!”

  “Let’s get on.”

  Rick came towards me, his cleft chin out where it belonged now, as if the sound of water was a cure for diffidence. I had one of those moments, not so much of thought as rapid reflection, a split second in which possibilities, alternatives were considered and dismissed. I dismissed. Was a cleft chin a sign of weakness? No. Was it the sign of a divided nature? Absurd. Was it a delay in the hardening of the bones, a hint of foetalism, as the biological boys used to say and perhaps still did?

  He held out his hand, and it seemed natural to take hold and allow myself to be pulled up off the low rock. The careful Swiss had inlaid hollow trunks in the road so that though the path sloped slightly up, the water ran straight across it. To get across was no more than a step. We crossed into a place where it seemed there was no solidity but a dimly seen rail on the left hand and tree roots on the other.

  I stood still.

  “For a scenic stroll, it’s spectacularly null.”

  “This’ll clear.”

  “If it weren’t for the silence, we might be strolling in Regent’s Park. I come here in expectation of scenery and all I get is a white-out.”

  “The manager said it was unusual for the time of the year.”

  “Every two hundred years.”

  “You’re putting me on.”

  “I must have been to dozens of places where they swore to me it was the worst weather for two hundred years. Always two hundred years. Cairo, Tbilisi—”

  “Now, now!”

  “Remind me to tell you some time about the highest tide for two hundred years.”

  “Tell me about the highest tide for two hundred years.”

  “I crewed for a man once in his yacht. Highest tide for two hundred years. I ran him aground on it.”

  Rick laughed, a genuine, unservile, happy laugh.

  “If he was skipper, it was his doing.”

  “No, no. I claim the distinction. Curse this fog.”

  “We start climbing again soon. I guess we’ll climb out of it.”

  “Quote, mother, give me the sun, unquote.”

  “The medics say he got his facts wrong.”

  “He got everything wrong. Stagey old twit.”

  Rick gave a scandalized guffaw. He was having a real good time. I could see his mental notebook. All the same—

  “I know! I know! Gee!”

  “Like Wagner.”

  The guffaw prolonged itself. There was a sudden extraordinary twisting of the vapour before our faces, a humming sound in the air, a wooden knock on the left, then somewhere down in the fog a mighty thump.

  “Oh my!”

  “It’s the mountain, Rick,” I said, not yet too scared to play the imperturbable or, if you like, insensitive Englishman. “It’s the bloody mountain, old fellow. He, she or it is throwing rocks at us. We ought to be flattered. Are you flattered?”

  “I want out.”

  He turned to go but I caught his sleeve.

  “This is a sheer gift for a writer. Just think, Rick. Now we can describe what it sounds like to be missed by a cannon ball. What wouldn’t Tennyson have given?”

  “We better get back, Wilf.”

  “What’s the hurry?”

  “There’s no knowing what might be going on up above, Wilf. I know mountains. I was born—why, it could be a real slip, real dangerous.”

  “Currently.”

  “Yeah.”

  “As of this moment in time.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The lightning never strikes twice in the same place. We ought to see where it struck.”

  Securely prevented by the dense fog from experiencing the hideousness of the drop, still unperturbed and wishing to show this young man who had unexpectedly revealed a too profound concern for his own safety, I stepped to the rail.

  “Aw—c’mon Wilf!”

  “I can’t see a thing.”

  Still unperturbed, I put my hand on the rail and leaned out. The rail went with me.

  The next few seconds can be described in a few words or a few hundred. My instinct—voluble as ever—is for the hundreds. It’s not just that I make my money by selling words but that these seconds were very important seconds as far as I was concerned. The first of them, I have to confess, was an hiatus, a nothing. The second was a contraction, a shock too immediate to be called belief or even apprehension. It was, if you like, the animal body’s awareness, alerted to death so near, the falling to it. The third second w
as more human in a way—the rail now moving out and down faster and more easily—was blind terror which I became, awareness of blind terror, blind terror aware of itself and, shot through the terror, incredulity. Then the animal took over, every nerve, muscle, heart beat, at top energy and speed, bent on denial of destruction. My wits were gone. My hand, as it clutched and fell with the rail, was vitalized to the point where it might well have squeezed the wood small to its own crippling deformation but nowhere was the wit that would have made me let the thing go. My other hand struck out blindly to where there might be solidity, found it, clutched what felt like a plant and my body turned head over heels so that I landed against the cliff on the other side of the rail with a blow that knocked the breath out of me. The rail dropped away from my one hand as the shock opened it for me. That hand, without asking any permission, grabbed. I was on my back, heels dug in, hands gripped. I was sliding steeply, inch by inch.

  A hand was holding me by the collar at the back of my neck. I stopped sliding and inspected the red blotches and blurs that whirled before my eyes and were all I could see. There were, I now felt in every nerve and artery, five points of attachment and support between me and smash. Four of these points were only minimally effective, hands and heels dug into soft earth, left hand clutching a sappy stem, right hand scrabbled into wet mud. Then there was the choking grip of a fist on the suede collar at the back of my neck. The four other points of attachment might be a help, but there was no doubt that I was suspended chiefly from the fist so hard against my nape. That was what held me in this opaque and pendant space. As for the world, but just now so silent, it was noisy with the thumping of my heart, the roaring in my ears and the gasps that came as of themselves out of my chest. Terror was as much an element as space. Here was no dalliance of the mind with the worthlessness or worth of life. The animal knew beyond all question what was precious beyond everything. All that was conscious was a wish that wished itself, for the terror—like the bombing, the shooting, the soughing of shells—to stop. Behind and beyond the fist someone else was gasping too.