The Pier Falls: And Other Stories

  “Carol…?”

  She can feel her hands and face blistering. She is going to die in here. Her father takes a couple of frail steps in her direction and lifts the oxygen mask towards her face. “Breathe. Trust me. Just breathe.”

  THE BOYS WHO LEFT HOME TO LEARN FEAR

  I did not intend to tell our story here. This notebook was meant for notes of a technical nature only. I assumed that we would be able to give our individual accounts at our own pace and in our own words when we returned home, but I am now the only person who can tell those stories and unless a miracle comes to pass I will not be returning home.

  There are people who will find some of what I have written distressing. I offer them my sincere apologies but I cannot dissemble. Leaving a true record of recent events is the sole remaining ambition I may be able to achieve.

  I have one personal request of whoever finds this book. Please ensure that a copy of this one page at least is forwarded to Christina Murchison, formerly of Dundonald Street in Edinburgh’s New Town in Scotland, if she is still living. I care for her more deeply now than I have ever done. She will be my final thought. My greatest fault was to give insufficient weight to her misgivings.

  I have lost track of the passing of days so I can no longer be certain of dates. Nevertheless I know that our final troubles began just over a week ago when we heard a faint roar and spied sunlight directly ahead of us. Emerging from the trees we found ourselves at the edge of a deep gorge of schist and migmatite. The far bank, where the jungle continued, stood some sixty feet away. Between the two banks the sides of the gorge fell sheer and slick to rapids which tumbled and foamed on jagged rocks. Downstream a rainbow hung in the spray.

  After a month of laborious progress through dense, unvarying jungle I felt drunk with space and light and had to sit down while my head spun. It was now a fortnight since the death of Nicholas’s brother, and images of Christopher’s last hours had haunted me ever since, but this panoramic view of our one, shared sky connected me to other people and other places and thereby lifted my spirits a little. I only hoped that it might do something similar for Nicholas himself.

  Bill attached a pan to the end of a rope and lowered it to the water, measuring the drop at two hundred feet and retrieving a gallon of liquid which tasted better than champagne. Edgar and Arthur then hacked their way through the undergrowth along the edge of the gorge in one direction while Nicholas hacked his way through the undergrowth in the opposite direction. They returned after an hour having discovered no easier crossing point. I built a fire and set myself to brewing tea and skinning and roasting one of the little monkeys we had caught the previous afternoon, and Bill applied his mind to the problem of engineering a bridge.

  His solution, like his solutions to all of our previous practical problems, was elegant and efficient. We felled and trimmed two ungurahui trunks, lashed ropes around one end of each, heaved them upright, threw the ropes over a high branch then cantilevered them across the gorge beside one another to make a rudimentary bridge.

  The monkey was gamey and fibrous but we were in a jovial mood so it mattered little. We finished our meal, repacked our equipment and began our crossing. Bill insisted that he be our canary and go first. The oily wood bounced a little but held firm and he gained the far side to universal applause. I followed him and was granted, midway, the most extraordinary view upriver to smoky, mauve highlands as if I were a bird suspended on the very air. I felt the giddiness coming back and dared not turn round to take in the opposing view. Edgar shouted out to me to “get a bloody move on, man” and I completed the journey looking only at my feet. I was followed in turn by Arthur and Edgar, leaving only Nicholas on the other side.

  When he was halfway across, however, the left-hand trunk cracked and split. As he dropped he threw his arms around the right-hand trunk and clung to it as the broken spar separated into two sections which fell beneath him into the rapids, bouncing several times, booming loudly upon each impact, before lodging themselves between the wet rocks.

  Every detail of the following minute is imprinted sharply upon my memory—the wood bending like a bow under Nicholas’s weight, his feet circling as if by sheer force of will they might conjure steps from the empty air. To my shame I stood motionless not knowing what to do. Arthur, however, threw his own pack to the ground, urged Nicholas to hang on, climbed astride the remaining trunk and began shifting himself out over the drop. Were he unburdened Nicholas might have been able to inch towards us, hand over hand, but he was carrying a heavy pack. It was Arthur’s intention, I believe, to cut the straps with his clasp knife. He did not arrive in time. The two men were still some ten feet apart when Nicholas’s remaining strength failed him. He looked towards us with what appeared to me to be an expression of embarrassed apology, his fingers loosened and gravity took him. I cannot help but wonder whether, if his brother had still been alive, he might not have clung to life a little longer.

  He seemed to fall very slowly. Perhaps it was a trick of the mind but I have a very clear memory of sketching out the elements of the letter we would have to write to his grieving parents during the one or two seconds of his terrible descent.

  I assumed that he would be swept instantly away but he struck a large, flat boulder which lay midstream dividing the current. He came to rest in a sitting position so that if you had not seen what went before you might have thought he was simply taking a rest while crossing the river, except that his thigh was folded sideways just above the knee. He did not move for half a minute and I hoped earnestly that he was dead for it was not possible to survive a wound of that nature this far from civilisation (his brother had died from an infection contracted after being scratched by a thorn, an injury which would have been utterly unremarkable in England). Then he began to move, rubbing his face and looking around like a man waking from a doze, surprised at where he had slumbered.

  Bill untied the rope from the remaining ungurahui and looped it around the nearest palm. Edgar asked him what he was doing and Bill replied, “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  Edgar told him not to be a fool.

  “So we are to stand here and watch him die?” asked Bill.

  Edgar drew his handgun and I thought for one awful second that he intended to shoot Bill for his insolence, but he did not point the gun at Bill. Instead he turned towards the gorge where Nicholas sat swinging his head slowly from side to side in the manner of an injured bear.

  Arthur cried out, “No!,” but Edgar did not pause. The shot was perfect. Nicholas seemed to shudder as the bullet entered the top of his head, then he rolled sideways off the rock, the foam was briefly pink and he was gone.

  No one spoke. The echoes of the shot died away until there was only the roar of the river and some nameless bird calling from deep in the jungle like a rusty wheel being turned. Edgar slotted his handgun back into its leather holster and refastened the buckle.

  “Dear God in heaven,” said Arthur.

  “It would have ended in no other way,” said Edgar. “Better that it was swift.” His voice did not waver. I heard neither sorrow nor regret, though Nicholas was a man he had called a friend for many years. “Perhaps one of you would like to say a prayer to mark his passing.”

  After a pause Arthur slowly removed his hat, took a deep breath then proceeded to recite Psalm 39 in its entirety and, as far as I could tell, without a single error. “I will take heed to my ways: that I offend not in my tongue. I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle: while the ungodly is in my sight…”

  When he had finished I asked him how he had been able to remember the words so perfectly. He said, “I wish I could forget them. My sister died of scarlet fever two years ago. I attend her funeral every night in my dreams.”

  “We should keep moving,” said Edgar. “We have only three more hours of daylight left to us,” and I had the unsettling sensation that he had removed a mask he had been wearing for many years.

  I began our expedition thinking that Edg
ar’s ambition, his sangfroid, his bravery and self-belief were admirable. I see now that it is possible to demonstrate these qualities to such a degree that they become an illness, dangerous both to oneself and to those around one. I came to understand that he had never possessed any genuine interest in the professed purpose of our travels and that if we were to find Carlysle and his men still alive deep in the jungle it would please him only if this involved some further adventure, such as rescuing them from violent aboriginals. The entire expedition was for him simply an arena in which he might try his courage and strength to their limits, and the greater our difficulties the more he relished them. He reminded me of no one so much as the eponymous hero of “The Boy Who Left Home to Learn Fear,” one of the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm which I had read as a boy.

  I realise now that when Arthur and I had rooms on the same staircase as Edgar at Oxford we did not really know him. In truth it would be more accurate to say that we were simply two among many people who were in awe of him. His not being an intellectual did not matter because he was the kind of man who made other men wonder whether being an intellectual was perhaps a little shameful. I can vividly recall the five framed Punch cartoons of his uncle, all of them featuring a globe, spinning on the man’s finger, crushed beneath his foot, served to him on a plate or subjugated in some other symbolic manner. Edgar talked repeatedly of his intention to surpass his uncle in some way and none of us doubted that he would succeed. He was almost comically handsome. He had a scar down the side of his face which he had acquired falling downstairs when he was four years old but he carried himself with such martial dignity that everyone thought of it as a duelling wound, even those of us who were party to the secret. He had been awarded Blues in both rugby and fives and was, in short, one of those men who take it for granted that they are liked and admired, that wealth and opportunity will flow naturally to them and that this is simply the nature of the world. Consequently they never learn how to make a compromise or earn respect, they never need to imagine how the world might appear from the point of view of another person, they never truly love and they are never truly loved.

  I did not understand these things until two weeks ago.

  The following morning, after a night of shallow and restless sleep, while Edgar was relieving himself and Arthur was shaving, Bill asked if he might discuss something with me. Bill was the only non-university man among us and we rarely shared small talk so I feared bad news.

  He sat close enough that Arthur might not overhear. “I fear that Mr. Soames has lost his mind and we’re here only so long as we’re useful to him.”

  I was shocked to hear him talking about Edgar in this manner.

  “I no longer think we can trust him.”

  I reminded Bill that whether he trusted Edgar was neither here nor there. He was, ultimately, an employee. I softened my rebuke a little by adding, “The drop was two hundred feet. The rope was two hundred and twenty. There was insufficient slack to form a belay and a cradle.”

  “Did he know that?” asked Bill.

  I said, “You would both have died. You may dislike him but you owe him your life.”

  Bill, I realised, was testing the ground in case he fell foul of Edgar. Might I be an accomplice, a co-conspirator? I found his presumption distasteful. I asked him what he would have done in Edgar’s shoes.

  “I would have discussed the matter at least,” said Bill, “before putting a bullet through a man’s head as if he were no more than a racehorse with a broken leg.”

  I said that democracy was not necessarily the best model for governing an expedition of this kind.

  “So we submit to a tyrant?” said Bill.

  “When your name is on the front page of The Times I suspect that you will not care greatly about what kind of dispensation we were briefly living under.”

  Bill got to his feet. “I have spoken out of turn. Forgive me. I did not mean to place you in a difficult position.” He turned and walked away.

  A few days after Nicholas’s death our compass readings began to go awry. Divining true north by means of the stars, however, a process which involved Arthur ascending tall trees, monkey-like, at night to broach the canopy, we were able by degrees to make our way towards the epicentre of the magnetic disturbances.

  Shortly after breakfast one morning Edgar called for us to come and look at a boot which he had found lodged at head height in a mass of creepers and vines choking a rubber tree. He took it down and turned it over in his hand, wiping away with his hat some of the feathery lime-green mould which had gathered on the putrid leather.

  Edgar spread his outstretched hand along the sole to gauge the size. “It must have belonged to the boy.” He put the boot back into the crevice between the vines as if he were a shop assistant and a customer had decided not to make a purchase. “Let us press on. If our luck holds we may find the cave by nightfall.”

  Later during the morning, as the two of us were walking together, Arthur said, “There is a possibility, of course, that they killed one another.”

  I said that after all this time, in this heat and this humidity, even if we were to find the bodies their manner of death would be exceedingly difficult to ascertain.

  “You would be surprised,” said Bill who was walking behind us. “I’ve seen many corpses in my time. They are more eloquent than you might expect.”

  I cast my mind back to the asylum, to Nat Semperson sitting in the director’s library, November rain lashing the casement and the panes rattling in their leads. His morning dose of laudanum had been postponed in the hope that this might sharpen his mind, the director explained; even so he very much doubted that we would be told a comprehensible story. Semperson rarely spoke, he continued, and remained as feeble-minded as he had been when the HMS Cadogan deposited him at Falmouth. He often cried out in his sleep and seldom slept a whole night without waking.

  Edgar asked what had happened to Lord Carlysle and the rest of the men. What point had they reached on their journey through the jungle? Were they still alive when he last saw them? If not, how had they met their end? Semperson watched the rain and seemed blind to Edgar’s presence and deaf to his questions.

  “He sometimes talks about a terrifying creature,” said the director. He had the air of a ringmaster, I thought, thumbs hooked into his waistcoat, a voice slightly too big for the room. I wondered how much of the story was concocted for our benefit in the hope of a second monetary donation. “He claims sometimes to have seen it approaching across the fields. Sometimes he is certain that it has broken through the doors and that we must arm ourselves.”

  Edgar pulled up a chair and sat in front of Semperson so that he was able to look directly into the man’s eyes. He explained that we were planning to travel to Jamanxim in search of Carlysle and the rest of his party. “The family will not rest easy until they know the whereabouts of their son. We will spend sixteen weeks in the jungle. If there are predictable dangers I would like to be forewarned. I do not wish our party to come to a similar end.”

  “To my knowledge,” said the director, “he has never spoken of what happened to his companions.”

  After a long pause Edgar got to his feet and replaced his chair. “This is a great disappointment.”

  Only I knew how great. Carlysle’s family would fund an expedition only if there were dependable evidence. Semperson was our last hope. We would now be forced to return to London and, within the month, Edgar would reluctantly take up the job at his great-uncle’s bank which he no longer had a justifiable reason for postponing.

  Struck by a sudden inspiration I asked the director if I might borrow a sheet of paper and a fountain pen. I removed the tea set, placed them on the tray and placed the tray in Semperson’s lap. He looked at them with his head cocked to one side the way a dog does when it is listening to a faint and distant noise.

  “Children learn to talk before they learn to write,” said the director. “I strongly suspect that we lose those faculties
in the reverse order.”

  But Semperson had taken up the pen in the shaking fingers of his right hand.

  “Go on,” I said gently.

  In my memory the room fell silent though this cannot be true for the storm did not abate until the evening, a fire was crackling busily in the grate and the tall-case clock ticked loudly in syncopation during our entire visit. Semperson’s pen began to move. The director, Edgar and I stood as still as if we were watching a stag enter a glade, knowing that it might bolt at the slightest disturbance.

  He drew for five minutes then laid his pen down.

  “If I may…?” Semperson did not respond so Edgar picked up the paper, carried it to the table and set it down in order that we might both inspect it. Whether Semperson had once drawn well I do not know. He now drew like a child. On the left-hand side of the paper was a map showing a tiny village, a forking river, two cataracts and a range of jagged mountains. Midway between the river and the peaks he had sketched a large X in the manner of a boy playing a game of buried treasure. In the centre of the paper was a separate drawing of a hill with a lopsided elliptical hole in its flank and a group of rudimentary figures in the opening which made me think of the Pied Piper stealing away the town’s children. On the right-hand side of the paper was a third drawing, a sketch of a monster—part man, part bear, part lizard—so preposterous that it made me laugh out loud. The whole was signed in the bottom left-hand corner.

  Edgar took from his travelling bag the slim volume belonging to the Royal Geographical Society. He opened it at the bookmark and laid it beside Semperson’s sketch. The maps were not identical but they were close enough to make the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

  “And how do we navigate through the jungle?” said Edgar. “This is a vast area.”

  “There is a natural lodestone in the cave,” said Semperson. His voice was small and timid. “Your compass will become useless as you draw near. The effect extends for some twenty miles about. It is quite extraordinary.”