The Pier Falls: And Other Stories

  Then he was no longer Edgar. He was Christopher dying, Christopher in those last hours, his sun-browned skin now red and taut and peeling, reeking of sweat and excrement, his eyes wide, as if he could see something dreadful in the distance, nonsense tumbling from his mouth—“Sit down, sit down, sit down…The key, for God’s sake…Horses this morning…” I tried to disentangle myself but he was holding on to me too tightly and I knew that he was going to die and take me with him.

  Then he was no longer Christopher. He was the creature in Semperson’s drawing, part man, part bear, part lizard, rotted meat between the yellow teeth, eyes like orange marbles, lice swimming in its fur.

  Then I was alone and back in the utter dark of the cave, frightened and cold, and I longed to return to my nightmare.

  There was a period of time. It was not like time spent sleeping, after which one is aware of the world having carried on in one’s absence, but an absolute vacancy, as if a chapter from the book of myself had been torn out and thrown away. I was naked and wrapped in a canvas sheet. It was night. I could see my clothes hanging in the light of a fire. I was simultaneously hot and cold. Two poles held up another canvas sheet over my head as a rudimentary shelter. I was not well. My life came back to me, as if I were examining a large diagram, homing in on the tiny figure that bore my name. I remembered that we had gone into the cave to look for Edgar and Arthur.

  Bill said, “We did not find them,” so I must have spoken the question out loud. He was squatting beside me. “Drink this.”

  I took hold of the warm enamel mug and sipped. He had melted the remains of the mint cake into hot water. “How did we get out?”

  “I waited for the bats. Then I knew the way.”

  I said, “I owe you my life.”

  He said, “I’m going to lance the bite on your leg.”

  The lump was the size of a chicken’s egg and nearly black.

  “I fear it contains something more than putrefaction.” He straddled my leg so as to hold it down and keep the cut both small and accurate. He heated the tip of his clasp knife in the flames of the fire. “This will hurt.”

  On the contrary I felt only a faint nick and warm liquid splash over my leg. Bill cut the sleeve from a spare shirt, washed it and used it to bind the wound. “You should sleep now.”

  I woke to sunshine which was some compensation though it did not drive the cold from my bones. There was no blood seeping through the bandages but my foot was numb and I could not stand. Bill served a breakfast of peanuts and a bitter yellow citrus fruit which I had not seen before and which I found hard to keep down. My mind was cloudy. I asked if Edgar and Arthur were dead.

  “We were in the cave for five hours,” said Bill. “It is now twenty hours since they entered.”

  I felt neither sadness at their loss nor any satisfaction at having risked our lives trying to save them, only a dull wretchedness.

  Bill left to investigate the graves further. I attempted to read more of the Ovid but my mental powers were not up to the task. Instead I took up this notebook and glanced through some of my entries—a sketch of a terrapin, a description of St. Elmo’s Fire, a rudimentary calculation of the volume of water passing over a nameless cataract—recalling the stories evoked by these details. After several hours Bill returned in possession of a new skull and a signet ring bearing the initials “JDC” engraved as three interlocking curlicues. “There are six graves in all,” he said. “This was in the last.”

  He departed on a second errand and reappeared carrying two bladders of water and some palm hearts. He roasted the latter and I ate them with a mug of weak coffee while he boiled and strained the water before pouring it into all our receptacles. He then set about sorting our equipment into that which was now dead weight and that which remained useful. I bridled to see him make himself so free with objects, some of them intimate, which had belonged to Edgar and Arthur but I was too weak to argue.

  Bill carried on working throughout the afternoon. He filled two packs with nuts, roots and more palm hearts. I assumed that he was preparing for our forthcoming journey home. Only when he was making supper did he say, “I have provided you with food and clean water for a week though I do not think you will last that long. I will leave you the whisky. I am only sorry that I cannot leave you a gun.”

  I felt like an idiot for not having predicted this turn of events. I had to think about it only for a few seconds to realise that it would be impossible for me to travel anything but the shortest distance through dense jungle. I said, “You are leaving me,” and was embarrassed to hear myself sounding like a child.

  He leaned forward and tenderly unbuttoned my shirt to the navel. “Look.” My torso was peppered with livid red spots. “My whole life since the age of ten I have served other men for small wages and smaller thanks. The coming few days are worth more to me than to you.”

  I recalled how I had upbraided him for questioning Edgar’s sanity, reminding him that he was merely an employee. I came close to apologising but even here, even now, I felt myself observed and judged by an invisible audience composed of those people whose good opinions I have always sought—my father, my schoolmasters, Christina, my friends—and I did not want to be seen as craven or obsequious. For the briefest of moments I was on the verge of tears, then I gathered myself and wished Bill luck on his journey. He seemed thrown somewhat and I felt stronger as a result.

  Darkness fell and the bats came out of the cave. I would see this spectacle only a few more times and be able to tell no one about it. I asked Bill whether he was going to take the signet ring and the skull to the Carlysles. He said that he had not yet decided. There was no financial reward offered and reputation alone rarely put a roof over a man’s head. If he reached the river’s mouth he might not even sail home. He had skills which, in this country, could make him, if not a wealthy man, then at the very least a man of business. He might simply keep the ring and the skull as mementos.

  We sat watching the fire. Every so often the wood spat and crackled and a bright ember was carried up into the dark as if we were cooking stars and adding them to the night sky one by one. I was going to die. I wanted very much to talk about this but I could not broach the subject. I thought of the ayah we had in Chittagong and how she would sit on my bed and ask, “What is the matter with the young master?” and I never needed to say what the matter was because the asking of the question itself was what I needed.

  The bats woke me at dawn. Bill was already gone. I had a headache and loose bowels. Starting a fire proved too onerous so I ate a handful of nuts, drank a mug of tepid, coppery water and lay wrapped in my canvas sheet watching the sun come up.

  I recalled the weekend two years previously during which I had returned to Merton for the Founder’s Supper. After an opulent meal I found myself walking in the gardens with Edgar. Pausing at the armillary sundial in the dying light we smoked a pair of cigars looking down over Christ Church Meadow towards the Isis. I don’t think, hitherto, that he had ever given me his full attention for more than two or three minutes. I was flattered, and when he told me the story of the Carlysle expedition and his plan to bring back news of the family’s missing son I was struck by how pitifully lacking in event my own life had been up to this point.

  The memory unsettled me. I drank some more water and added a little whisky to dull the pain in my head. My eye fell on my notebook and I realised that I must try to leave some record of our expedition. If it were never read by another human being it would nevertheless summon a few ghosts and I would be in great need of company over the coming days.

  And so I began to write.

  Towards the end of the afternoon I relit the fire using the flint and the sealed tin of dried moss which Bill had left me. I roasted another two palm hearts and watched the sun go down. I tried to write more but could not order my thoughts. I had a fever. My left leg was now completely numb and the livid red spots had spread down my left arm. The bats came out to hunt. If I moved quickly my head spun. I
drank the last of the whisky and closed my eyes and waited for sleep to take me.

  I woke thinking that we were still at sea and that we had run into a storm. Lightning ripped the sky from top to bottom and a vast ocean was lit up momentarily in a burst of white light. Then the world was thrown back into darkness and the thunder followed, like barrels rolling off a cart. Lightning struck for a second time and I saw that the ocean was made of trees, that I was not on a boat and that it was not pitching. There was a little canvas roof over my head but I was lying in water. I tried to stand but I could not make my legs work properly. I raised myself onto my hands and knees like a dog. There was another flash of lightning and I saw my notebook wedged into the open mouth of a pack that was filling with water. I pulled the pack under the canvas, extracted the notebook, stuffed it into my shirt and gave myself over wholly to the belief that if I could save the book then I could save myself.

  There was lightning, then there was darkness, then there was thunder. I lost the feeling in my hands and knees and feet. I fell asleep, my arms buckled and I was woken by my head and shoulder striking the hard, wet rock. I got back onto my hands and knees. I do not know how many times this happened.

  Gradually the gap between the flashes of lightning and the peals of thunder grew longer and both slowly faded. Then they were gone and I was left in complete darkness and pouring rain. I was going to die at some time in the next few days. Only the thought of the notebook gave me any desire to reach the morning alive. My teeth chattered. I saw Christina and her new husband seated on a terrace, their children playing cricket on a long lawn. I saw a flotilla of Spanish ships approaching over the ocean of trees. I was lifted up and carried into the cave by the surviving members of Carlysle’s expedition.

  The bats did not return. Perhaps they could not fly through heavy rain. At dawn a monochrome world became faintly visible. Over the next hour or so the downpour thinned and ceased. The low sky was dirty and grey like a cheap military blanket laid over the world. Drops trembled and fell from every object. The numbness had spread to both my hips. I was still shaking but no longer felt as cold as I had done. Whether this was an improvement in my health or the later stages of hypothermia I had no way of knowing.

  The fire was gone. Every piece of wood had become a little boat and sailed away. There remained only a shallow puddle. I took a rough inventory. The moss which I had foolishly left open to the elements had vanished. I could not see the flint. The rain had carried away an entire pack of food. I took the notebook from inside my shirt and opened it. The sodden margins were soaked and in places the paper had begun to disintegrate but I had taken the precaution of writing in pencil so no ink had run and for this I was grateful.

  Eventually the sun came out. The temperature rose and steam began to rise from the stretched canvas and the shallower puddles. I drank a little water. I put a handful of nuts into my mouth and chewed them to a paste so that they could pass easily down my constricted throat. I struggled out of my clothes and sat naked on the warming rock. Behind me rose the great opening of the cave. On every other side green jungle ran seamlessly to a misty horizon.

  I opened the notebook and waited for the pages to become dry. Then I took up my pencil and began.

  Now I can write no more. I have been blessed with a final day of brilliant sunshine. For that I am thankful. I hope I have used it well.

  The night is coming.

  I wish that this were a happier ending.

  THE WEIR

  He pops the catch and lifts the rusty boot. Quivering with excitement the dogs burst from the back of the car, squirm under the lowest bar of the fence and bolt across the field in great arcing bounds. Leo and Fran, big chocolate-and-white pointers. He drops the chewed and ragged tennis ball into one jacket pocket, the coiled leather leads into the other, grabs the tatty, gripless tennis racket and slams the boot. He beeps the lock and climbs the stile.

  Grass stretches into the distance. Twenty acres. There are no sheep this year so half a million buttercups hover just above the ground. He can smell the May blossom, the same chemicals in semen and corpses so he read the other day. Wytham Woods rise beyond the meadow to his left. Up there among the trees is the Singing Way, pilgrims breaking into song as they passed My Lady’s Seat and looked across the silver flood of Port Meadow to the inns and spires of the city. One of those spring days that seem warm and cold at the same time. Enough blue to make a pair of sailor’s trousers. Cirrus clouds overhead. Ice crystals at 16,000 feet. A pied wagtail lands briefly on the path in front of him then hops back into the air and is carried away.

  Leo races towards him and skids to a halt with Fran in pursuit. He barks and half prostrates himself, forelegs flat on the ground, hindquarters in the air. Throw the ball throw the ball throw the ball. He lobs it into the air, whacks it hard and both dogs launch themselves backwards, twisting in mid-air so that they land on all fours then run like racehorses in old paintings, the ball still up there, sliding round that big curve.

  To his right the river is full from last week’s downpour, the surface purling midstream as the water sorts itself out below the weir. A buzzard circles above the scrubby wasteland on the far side. He treads carefully over the twisty poles of the cattle grid and feels, as he always does at this precise point, that he has crossed an invisible boundary which marks the limit of the city’s reach.

  It’s now seven weeks since Maria walked out and he’s pleased at how well he’s coping. The dogs help, dragging him out on long walks like this. Having the time of their lives, probably. Plus the house is never empty. Knowing they’re downstairs when he wakes in the night and finds himself alone. He’s learning to cook for himself after twenty-six years: macaroni cheese; shepherd’s pie…And reading his way through the tower of books which have been glaring at him from the shelf above the TV for God knows how long: John Grisham, Philip Pullman, the one set in Afghanistan the author of which he can never remember…

  Fran returns with the ball in her mouth. They do a little dance of dodge and feint. She drops it, he picks it up and whacks it away again.

  If there are rough patches, that’s to be expected. Change gets harder, just as the body becomes less flexible. Today for example. The nagging feeling that his marriage is only the latest thing which has slipped away. The world shifting too fast in ways he doesn’t understand, values he’d grown up with become vaguely comic: being a gentleman; respecting authority; privacy; stoicism; reticence. When did holding a door open for a woman become an insult? Teenagers watching pornography on their phones.

  He wonders if it all comes down to Timothy, the friction which ended the marriage, this longing for things to be as they were. Or whether, when you have a ready-made answer like that, you use it lazily for every question. The fact that it might be malicious is what makes it hardest to handle, their son wanting them to suffer. Three years without a postcard, an email, a phone call. The anger he felt when Maria said it would be better if he were dead. Her own child. He has dreams of a blurred postmark. Lhasa? Marrakesh? Stepping off the plane into sauna shimmer. Hostels, cafés, a local police chief, feet on the desk under a lazy ceiling fan. The photograph in his pocket getting more dog-eared and less readable by the day, the hope that his son is somewhere nearby, a needle in his arm, maybe, some sign that this was not his choice.

  Fran returns yet again with the tennis ball. Leo is busy chasing something. So long as he doesn’t bring it back bloody and struggling. He hits the ball into the air. The satisfying boink of the taut strings, the sheer distance of it.

  She isn’t with someone else, thank God. Unless she’s hiding it. Which wouldn’t be hard, him being blind to so many things.

  There is movement at the edge of his field of vision. Someone is making their way along the gantry of the weir that runs between the farmland and the island. The lock-keeper, presumably, or someone from the Environment Agency. But when they turn he sees a bright red rucksack. It is a woman. She must have lost her way because as far as he knows yo
u can only reach the weir via the unmetalled track that descends from the hard shoulder of the ring road. Black leggings, denim skirt, big tartan shirt, long straight blonde hair. Twenty, maybe twenty-five. She seems unsure of her footing and is supporting herself by holding on to the metal uprights and the rusted valves. It is not a good place to be unsteady on your feet.

  Again Fran blocks the path in front of him, tail up, head down, panting, tennis ball between her paws.

  “Not now.”

  She whimpers. Please please. He picks it up, wallops it away and starts walking upriver towards the lock. Beneath the woman’s feet the whole river is being forced through a single open gate, a fat silver spout curving into the churn of surf. The roar could be a house on fire. She comes to a halt in the very centre of the weir. She is clearly in some kind of trouble. Sudden dizziness, maybe, or that phobia people get on bridges. He can imagine standing there and looking down and being spooked by that torrent. She needs help. He wants to call out to her, reassure her that he will be with her in a few minutes, but there is no way she will be able to hear him at this distance and over that noise. He starts to run. If he remembers correctly there is only a chain to stop pedestrians crossing the lock. Presumably there is some kind of path through the trees. It will take him, what, two or three minutes?

  Then he turns and sees her let go of the supports. She stands facing downriver and he realises that she is planning to jump. Understands, too, why she was staggering, because why else would you wear a rucksack if you were planning to do something like that? He feels sick at the thought. “No!” He waves his arms, but she does not turn her head.