Emma Donoghue Two-Book Bundle (13 page)

I thought Jean-Luc might not have heard me or taken it in; he still stared ahead fixedly, as if anticipating a cave bear or mammoth around every corner. His eyes were enormous; the occasional beam of light showed their whites. But as we ducked under an overhang, I heard it like a mantra, under his breath: ‘
Faut pas avoir peur. Mademoiselle dit, “Faut pas avoir peur”
.’

I grinned, briefly, in the dark. He was doing all right. Mademoiselle had told him not to be afraid. We’d get out of here in one piece.

When we came to a set of deep steps spiralling down in to the rock, I went first, so that at least if he slipped I could break his fall. But Jean-Luc held on to my hand like a limpet, and I didn’t want to scare him by tugging it away, so I held on with the tips of my fingers, our arms knotted awkwardly in the air, as if we were dancing a gavotte. His arm was weaving and shaking; it was like wrestling a snake. My silk hem got under my feet, then, and the pair of us nearly crashed down on one of those stubby little stalagmites. Now that would be funny, if we snapped off ten thousand years’ worth of growth and got sued by the French state.

The steps began to twist the other way, and I found my arm bent up behind my back as if I was being led to my death. This was ludicrous; I was going to dislocate something. I stopped for a second and switched hands as fast as I could. Jean-Luc stared at me, but held on to the new hand. ‘
Pas de problème
,’ I said foolishly. No problem. Could you say that in French or did it sound American?

We found our rhythm again, and I could hear Jean-Luc behind me, repeating, ‘
Pas de problème, pas de problème
,’ in a ghost’s whisper. Our joined hands were the only spot of heat in this whole desolate mountain.

At last the path levelled out and we found ourselves in a huge cavern where the rest of the group stood watching the guide point out painted animals with her torch. A few faces looked over at us. I relaxed my grip, but Jean-Luc held on tight. For a moment I felt irritated. He wasn’t afraid of falling any more; he was just taking advantage. And then I almost laughed at the thought of this peculiar gentleman taking advantage of me. I stood with his warm cushioned hand in mine, the pair of us gazing forward like a bashful couple at the altar. I was cold right through, now, and my nipples were standing up against the silk of my dress; I angled myself a little away from Jean-Luc so he wouldn’t see.

I tried to pay attention to the guide. I peered up at the rock walls: orange, greenish grey, and a startling pink. There were scrawl marks that looked as if they’d been done with fingers on a thousand long nights. The paintings were of horses and lions and bears, or so the guide said, and the Specials were laughing and pointing as if they could make them out, but to be honest the rusty overlapping squiggles on the rock all looked alike to me. Whatever the cave dwellers’ powers of endurance, it occurred to me, they hadn’t been able to draw for shite.

The guide said something I didn’t catch, and then let out a surprisingly young laugh and flicked off the light switch. Blackness came down on us like a falling tent. Some of the Specials shrieked with excitement, but Jean-Luc cleaved to my hand as if it were a life belt. I tried to squeeze back, even though he was hurting my fingers. My eyes strained to find any speck of light in the darkness. It suddenly struck me that this was entirely normal behaviour for a trogloditic cavern. When the cold and the dark and the weight of a mountain pressed down on you, what made more sense than to grab the nearest living hand and hold on as tight as you could?

When the lights came back on, I blinked, relieved. A fat boy with a baseball cap on sideways edged back to us, and tried to take hold of Jean-Luc’s other hand, but Jean-Luc shook him off, almost viciously. I looked away and bit down on my smile.

What did we think they ate, the cave dwellers? the guide was asking. Most of the Specials grinned back at her as if it were a joke rather than a question. Did they go to a supermarket, she suggested, and buy veal? One or two nodded doubtfully. No, she told us, there were no supermarkets! This claim caused quite a stir among the Specials. Now the guide was shining her torch on a painted animal; I couldn’t tell what it was. She announced with grim enthusiasm that the cave dwellers hunted animals with sticks and cooked them in the fire.

‘
Non!
’

‘
Non!
’

‘
Tuer les animaux?
’

A shock wave ran through the group as she nodded to say that yes, they killed the animals. A tiny woman with a squeezed-up face sucked in air. ‘
Manger les animaux?
’ Yes, indeed, they ate the animals. The Specials’ reactions were so huge and incredulous that I began to suspect them of irony. Had no one ever told them what sausages were made of?

That’s what the cave dwellers did, the guide insisted. And they caught fish, too, she told us, in nets made out of their own hair. And they turned animal skin into leather by soaking it in their own urine, then chewing it till it was soft. At least, I feared that was what she said; the cave was a confusion of voices, now, and all I could think about was how cold I was. I was starting to shake as if I had a palsy. People must always have been cold in those days, it occurred to me. Maybe they knew no different, so they didn’t notice it. Or, more likely, maybe they couldn’t think about anything else. The minute you woke up, you’d have to start working as if your life depended on it, because it did: build up the fire, eat, keep moving, pile on more clothes, keep eating, never let the fire go out, even in your sleep. They’d all have slept in one big heap, the guide was saying now, putting her head on the shoulder of the girl in the helmet and miming a state of blissful unconscious; if you slept alone, she said, you’d wake up dead. Jean-Luc, by my side, must have heard this, because he let out a single jolt of laughter. I turned my head to smile at him, but he was looking down at his shoes again.

I thought the tour had to be nearly over by now – all I could think of was getting back up into the sunlight – but the guide led us through a little passage so tight we had to go in single file. Jean-Luc and I stayed knotted together like a chain gang. At last the group emerged into a chamber, the smallest so far. The guide mentioned that the man who had discovered these caverns called this one the Sanctuary of Hands.

Then she lifted her torch, and all at once I could see them; they sprang out to meet the light. Handprints in red and black, dozens – no, hundreds of them – daubed on top of each other like graffiti, pressed onto the rock as high as someone on tiptoes could reach. This was how you signed your name, about twenty-seven thousand years ago, said the guide with a casual swing of her torch. The prints glowed in the wide beam as if they were still wet. They were mostly left hands, I saw now, and smallish; perhaps the prints of women or even children. I stepped up to one for a closer look and Jean-Luc crept along behind me.

The handprint nearest us only had three and a half fingers. I recoiled, and the guide must have noticed, because she swung her torch round to where we were standing. I backed out of the blinding light. Yes, she said, many of these hands appeared to be missing a piece or two. This was a great mystery still. Some archaeologists said the cave dwellers must have lost fingers in accidents or because of the cold, but others thought the people must have cut them off themselves. For a gift, she said, almost gaily, did we understand? To give something back to the gods. To say
merci,
thank you.

Jean-Luc stared at the print on the wall a few inches from his head. He let go of my hand, then, and laid his own against the rock, delicately fitting his short pale fingers to the blood-red marks. He turned his head and looked at me then, for the first time, and his mouth formed a half smile as if he were about to tell me a great secret. But ‘
Touche pas!
’ called the guide sternly. ‘
Faut pas toucher,
Jean-Luc!’ Touching was forbidden; I should have told him that. His hand contracted like a snail, and I took it into mine again. It was chilled by the rock.

We followed the group up a long widening tunnel that seemed to have been dug out in modern times, and soon I could smell fresh air. After some very steep steps, we were all panting audibly, even the backpackers, and Jean-Luc’s hand was hot in my grip again. He and I were the last to emerge, wincing in the sunlight like aged prisoners set free. The hills were a jumble of rocks on every side, and the half-reaped valley slid away below us. The sun warmed my face, and the air tasted sweet as straw.

Every year for a week or two there would be a sort of summer, the guide was explaining; the snow might shrink away just enough to let the cave dwellers come out and sit on the ground.

And what became of them in the end? someone asked her. Well, she said with a little shrug, one year they must have come out and found the snow gone and the sun shining. Then they walked down into the valley and never came back.

On the way down to the car park, I began to wonder when Jean-Luc was going to let go of my hand. I didn’t want to have to wriggle it out of his grasp, but I could see the group leader waiting for them by the little bus. I hoped Jean-Luc didn’t think I was coming home with the Specials. All of a sudden I felt appallingly sad. I wished I knew what to say to him, in any language.

But at the edge of the car park he disengaged his sticky fingers from mine and turned to face me, very formally. ‘
Au revoir, mademoiselle
,’ he said, which I supposed could be translated as ‘Until we meet again,’ and I smiled and nodded and took up his hand again for a second to shake goodbye. He was puzzled by this, I could tell, but he let me shake it, as if it were a rattle.

‘
Au revoir
, Jean-Luc,’ I repeated, more often than I needed to, and waved until he’d disappeared into the bus. I did look for his profile in the window, but the glass was white in the glare of the sun.

Appalled by his credit-card debts, the writer succumbed to a one-year writer-in-residence job at a small college in the mountains. Until he sold the Great Novel for a hefty enough sum to pay the rent on his apartment for a few years, pragmatism seemed to be called for. In the distant past, the writer had tried every joe-job he could think of: he’d picked grapefruit and filed insurance applications, fried pancakes and sold fitness equipment door-to-door. Since then, he’d supplemented his royalties by other means that he was even less proud of: he’d written inane articles for in-flight magazines and lived two years too long with a doctor because it was just so damn handy not to have to worry about the rent. This year, at least, he would be making his living in a job which was, if not literature itself, then at least not unconnected with it.

As jobs went, the writer thought this would probably turn out to be a rather pleasant one. Interesting, even, at the human level as well as the intellectual one. Packing his possessions into the locker room at the self-storage facility, the day before his departure, he tried to visualize the office that awaited him at the college, perhaps with a view of the bluish mountains. He imagined himself mentoring a few bright young poets and diffident, late-blooming novelists whose brief visits to his office – Mondays and Fridays only – would leave him ample time to work on the Great Novel.

Dear Mr Writer-in-Residence (I’m afraid I don’t know your Name),

I would greatly like to Introduce Myself. My name is Herb Leland and I call myself a WritOr that is not just someone who Happens to write but who am a Storyteller from the very Depths of my Be-ing. The Truth is that I must WRITE OR DIE so to me the word WritOr which came to me during one long Sleepless Night eighteen months ago expresses this fully. I am sure you Understand being a Multi-Talented Wordsmith Yourself.

I take great Pleasure in enclosure of the following two Book manuscripts The Long and Lonely Road that is a Memoir that follows Me from Ages one to fifty-three (my present age) and Serendipity a Novel about my character Lee Herbert’s Journey from Naivete through Confusion to a (eventually) sense of Atuneness with Everything around him. I have been working on them for Ten Years and they are now done.

I look forward to our Appointment on Friday next 6 September at 9:15 am when You will be able to give a full Critique of my Works’ strengths and any Possible shortcomings. There are so few Kindred Spirits in this town so I am Most excited at the prospect of being able to Share with you.

Herb Leland’s epistle – written in looped, purple letters – made the writer laugh out loud. He was tempted to pin it to the corkboard in his office, but he supposed that wouldn’t be nice. Perhaps his year’s sojourn among small-town eccentrics would bring out a new humour and warmth in his writing, a sort of Sarah Orne Jewett quality.

His office was narrower than he had expected; the high walls were stubbled with the ubiquitous cream paint. The framed prints he’d shipped from home looked minute. One wall was occupied by a vast set of dark bookshelves; he filled a few inches of one with his complete works – three slimmish volumes – then reconsidered and turned them face out, so they took up half a shelf. Proof that he was a professional, a ‘published writer’ as Marsha the secretary of English kept calling him.

‘I’m curious,’ he asked the self-professed WritOr at their first meeting, ‘about why you use so many capital letters. Are you trying for a Germanic effect?’

Herb Leland’s white, swollen face looked back at him in puzzlement. ‘The capitals are for added meaning,’ he confided, ‘and emphasis.’

‘Ah,’ said the writer. ‘You know, Herb, in my view, it’s best to let the emphasis … grow out of the choice of words. When you capitalize something, it doesn’t really add to its meaning. As such.’

The middle-aged man’s face split into a broad smile.

The writer grinned back at him nervously.

‘That’s exactly what the last three writers-in-residence said,’ marvelled Herb.

The writer shrugged, as if to say that life was full of coincidence.

At the end of that first Monday, tired but still amused, he strolled home to the cheapest ground-floor apartment he had been able to find. (He was intending to live simply this year, saving most of his stipend to reduce his debts.) The rooms smelled of something cooked, something he couldn’t identify even when he sniffed the air and free-associated, as he’d learned to do many years ago in a workshop on overcoming writer’s block.

He sent a flippant e-mail to all his friends.
Currently ensconced in college community in small-town America. Pray for me!

What should he call them, he wondered, the unknowns lined up in his day planner? ‘My writers’ seemed a little optimistic. ‘My visitors’ sounded like a hospital. ‘My students’, maybe, except that Marsha had given him to understand that very few of the locals who had made appointments to see him would turn out to be enrolled at the college. ‘The student body here are into football,’ she told him regretfully. On his cork-board someone – probably Marsha – had pinned an article from the
Campus Calendar
in which the provost was quoted as saying, ‘The Writer-in-Residence is our college’s ambassador to the wider community – a way for us to reach out the window of our so-called Ivory Tower and truly touch the lives of those we live and work alongside.’

By the second week the writer was seeing ten of them a day.

He worked late into the night on the manuscripts they left in his pigeonhole; he made extensive notes for his own reference. He read Christian magazine columns and chapters of legal thrillers, bits of action screenplays and one twenty-page piece entitled ‘Absurdist Collage Poem’. Instead of scribbling anything in the margins – that would be too schoolteacherish, he thought – the writer typed out long lists of tentative suggestions under the headings Micro (spelling, grammar) and Macro (genre, plot, theme).

‘Jonas,’ he asked, one morning, ‘could you read me this sentence here?’

The boy looked at where the writer was pointing. He cleared his throat raspingly.
‘It was then immeasurably time for it to be enacted, the action that required to be carried out as aforesaid.’

The writer let the words hang on the air for a few seconds.

‘Do you see what I mean about how your vocabulary in this story tends slightly to the abstract, rather than the concrete? How it could possibly be hard for some readers to tell what’s actually going on?’

Jonas scratched a spot on his chin. ‘No.’

An hour later the writer was struggling with Mrs Pokowski. ‘When you say on page one that “The savages recognized the White Man as lord of their dark and mysterious jungle,”’ he quoted neutrally, ‘don’t you think perhaps some readers might be bothered by that?’

She furrowed her brow. ‘You mean the word
savages
?’

‘Ah, yes, for one thing …’

‘Well, I didn’t want to put
niggers
,’ she said virtuously.

After lunch (a tuna sandwich at his desk) came Pedro Verdi with his genetic-engineering near-future fantasy. ‘OK,’ said the writer, taking a peek at his notes to refresh his memory, ‘so the opening scene takes place in a hospital?’

A shrug from the bank teller. ‘Well, you think it’s hospital.’

‘Yes,’ said the writer, not wanting to seem stupid. But after a minute, he couldn’t help asking, ‘Isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, yeah, it’s hospital,’ Pedro conceded, ‘but I no want my readers to be too sure, you know?’

‘Don’t worry, they won’t be,’ said the writer heavily. ‘Now’ – trying to read his own handwriting – ‘there’s some ambiguity about the newborn daughter.’

‘Aha. Yes. There has been mix-up,’ articulated Pedro, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. ‘Only it’s no really mix-up, but you don’t find it out till after.’

‘Mr Verdi.’ The writer meant to sound stern, rather than petulant. ‘By my count there are three newborn babies in this book.’

‘Pedro, please.’ The bank teller loosened his Bart Simpson tie.

‘Fine. Pedro. Now, which baby is the genetically modified telepath?’

‘Me, I prefer to leave that open. Tell you the truth, I no decided yet,’ said Pedro, lying back and gazing out the window.

Three hours later the tiny office was feeling full. Maybelline Norris had brought her mother, a weighty woman introduced only as ‘my mom, she’s my best friend’, who sat with her chair several feet behind Maybelline’s.

‘Who’s your favourite poet?’ the writer asked, to put off discussion of Maybelline’s own work.

‘Dunno. Jewel, I guess,’ the girl said. ‘If I like stuff, I don’t pay much attention to who actually wrote it, you know?’

The writer couldn’t think of any other general questions. His eyes flickered between the two Norris women.

‘So hey, do you like my poems?’ Maybelline asked brightly.

‘They’re very interesting,’ he lied. ‘I like some … more than others.’

The girl’s mother squinted at him disapprovingly.

His eyes fell to the manuscript on his lap, and he silently reread a verse at random.

Hurts hurts

like     crazy

My emotionality

crushingly hemmed in

like      cactus flowers

Utterly     longing for the monsoon

‘Have you ever tried … redrafting any of your poems?’ he suggested.

‘Oh no,’ Maybelline reassured him. ‘I wouldn’t want to mess with the magic. I don’t know where they come from; I just shut my eyes and it flows. I call up my mom and I say, “Mom, I’ve just written another poem,” and she says, “Wow, that’s so wonderful! You’re so talented!”’

The writer’s eyes veered to the mother, just for politeness, but she only nodded.

‘I showed a bunch of them to my teacher back in eleventh grade and she said, “Wow, you can write. You can really write!”’

It astonished the writer, how tiring it was, this listening business.

‘I’ve got about maybe a thousand of them at home! But these ones are like the crème de la crème,’ said Maybelline, her eyes resting fondly on the manuscript. ‘I showed them to my swim coach and she said, “Wow, this stuff deserves to be published.”’

The writer allowed his eyebrows to soar up, as if in encouragement rather than disbelief.

The girl’s mother leaned forward then. ‘But then there’s copyright, ain’t there?’ she said darkly.

This took him aback.

‘Yeah,’ said Maybelline regretfully. ‘My mom thinks, what if I send my poems to like a magazine or something, and they get stolen?’

‘Stolen?’ the writer repeated.

‘Yeah, you know, published under another name. Like the editor’s, maybe.’

His throat was dry; he suddenly longed for a martini. ‘No one would ever do that,’ he said faintly.

‘Really?’ said Maybelline, smiling.

‘Trust me. It’s never going to happen.’

Even on the days when he didn’t have office hours, he found it hard to get much of his own work done; this job was so distracting, somehow. But when he did manage a page, at least he approved of what he wrote. It might not be Faulkner, but it was a damn sight better than Herb Leland.

His office collected sounds, he found. Chain saws outside where the dead trees were coming down; gurgles in the ducts as the heating revved up at the start of October; high-pitched giggling in the corridors. Sometimes he imagined that students were pausing to read the résumé pasted to his office door, and laughing at it. He wished he’d left out the line about the
New York Times Book Review
calling his work ‘profoundly promising’; it would mean something only if he were still twenty-four.

He stared at his shelf, the few inches his slim hardbacks took up. His name in three different typefaces, repeated, as if it were a phrase that meant something. So sweet to his eyes; so insubstantial.

He rather wished he hadn’t pinned a head shot on his door, either. Now people recognized him in the corridors and took him by the elbow to ask one of the four FAQs of the trade:

‘Did you always want to be a writer?’

‘Where do you get your ideas?’

‘How many hours a day do you write?’

‘How can I get published?’

But when the writer did a lunchtime reading from his poetry collection, only eleven people showed up. To think that on the plane, flying down here, he had worried about his privacy, how to keep people from prying into every detail of his life! As if they gave a damn. Nobody was remotely curious about him as a person except for Herb Leland, who seemed to have formed an unconscious crush. And Herb’s questions were hardly probing, either; they were more along the lines of ‘Do you realize how Honoured we feel to have You Living here among us?’

Most nights the writer read detective novels and ate microwaved macaroni.

‘I guess I’m a would-be writer,’ one housewife introduced herself coyly.

After that, in his head he called them all ‘my would-be’s’, meaning that they perhaps would have been writers if they’d been born with a tittle of talent. It never occurred to them to supplement their high school education by consulting a dictionary. They seemed to feel – like Humpty Dumpty but without his powers – that words should mean what they wanted them to mean: that
un-usual
was a brand-new coinage, that it was possible to
riposte
someone, that drunks fell down
unconscientious
in the street.

By mid-October the writer realized that he shouldn’t waste his energy trying to teach the would-be’s about literature or anything else. His job was to listen. And it was not just casual nodding along that was required, either, but an intense, full-frontal, eyes-locked kind of attention.

The would-be’s claimed they longed for honest criticism. ‘Be brutally honest with me, man,’ said BJ, a trainee electrician and spare-time rapper who was writing a novel about his recent adolescence and owned seventeen how-to-get-published books. ‘Hit me with it!’ But BJ didn’t really mean it; none of them did, the writer discovered.

‘Should I chuck the thing in the stove?’ one grandmother asked, her eyes watery and fearful, but it was obviously a rhetorical question.