He did not tell her he had been suspicious of their neighbours too. What was the point in letting her lose all hope in the place? But the cheapness of life in this paradise was more than he could stand any more. At eleven o’clock they were allowed to board the plane. Night had fallen unnoticed while they sat in the airport, and outside the sea moved darkly, for there was no moon tonight. Ten minutes to twelve, thought Giulia. Ten more minutes left, thought Rohan, and still I feel nothing. Theo had been dead for nearly eighteen months.
In the darkness, as the plane began to taxi, in a house that appeared occupied, in a leafy suburb in Colombo, a fire started. It was uncertain what might have caused it. Arson was commonplace enough. The fire rushed through the empty rooms, taking everything in its path. Burning canvas, melting tubes of oil paint, cracking mirrors, incinerating the furniture. It tore through the corridors in a fury of heat; it destroyed pictures and documents, and the paraphernalia of the recently departed. When it had burned itself out, when all that was left was blackened rubble, the fire brigade arrived. And the neighbours came to gaze in awe at all that remained of the house where the painter and his Italian wife once had lived.
H
E SAW IT ALL IN COLOUR,
dark green with a touch of blue. The images fragmented, like rushes from an uncut film, full of light and sharpness. But every time, before his mind could investigate them further, he drifted back into sleep. Whenever he regained consciousness he drank the water that arrived, by mysterious means, in his hand. It was cool and fresh and he drank it without thought or question, without pleasure. He drank it simply because it presented itself. And then he slept again. Something had happened to the seal on his eyelids because all the time the light seeped through to his eyes, so that while he slept he dreamt of sun, dazzling on the sea. He could not have been further from the ocean.
Other things happened while he slept. Voices flitted across his brain, like fruit bats. Words circled him like gulls; words like, ‘in the beginning’, and ‘flailing’, biblical words, words that had no end. In the background was the sound of artillery moving in and out of focus.
At night, the single light bulb, unshaded and comfortless, cast an aching, dull glow. It reflected the slow tortuous routes of the
geckos and the cockroaches that crawled past him. He watched them through a curtain of pain and sweat, these routes that crossed and criss-crossed along the wall, passing through imaginary enemy lines. Although they came from the hole in the broken window they never went back that way. They would always disappear from his sight line somewhere to the left of his bed. He never turned his head to find out where they went. He never turned his head for anything. He was simply not interested. Like the beetles, he seemed to have arrived here through a broken skylight, crashing in from some other life, never knowing that this place, this spot, would be where he would land. Here in this bed, with this small pile of sodden cloth, his only possession.
Some time later, he woke once more, to walls that were bare of beetles. The sun was raking long fingers through the blinds and the voices were back.
‘How long has he been this way?’ Gerard asked.
The man in the doorway shrugged. Ten days, two weeks? ‘There’s nothing much the matter with him now. His wounds are healing well. He could walk out of here if he wanted to.’
‘No,’ Gerard said hastily, ‘that’s not what we want. He needs to stay here for a while.’
‘He can’t stay here. The Chief doesn’t want him. You’ll have to move him.’
‘Yes, all right,’ said Gerard. ‘But you’ll have to give me time. I can’t work miracles.’
‘Look, he’s waking again. Now he’ll have a drink of water and stare at the ceiling. Then he’ll go back to sleep. We can’t spare the bed much longer.’
‘OK, OK. I’ll move him.’
They watched curiously as Theo finished drinking. He was unaware of their presence. Secretly, though, Gerard was shocked. The writer had taken a severe beating, far worse than he had
expected. The fingernails on both his hands were ripped and blackened and he looked smaller than Gerard remembered. He lay motionless, like a broken fishing boat.
‘Can he hear us, d’you think?’
They moved closer, watching him in silence.
‘Who knows? It was a mistake.’
‘Yes, yes, I know, men.’
‘These things happen. All the time. He’s lucky someone found out before it was too late. He’s lucky they didn’t finish him off.’
Luck, thought Gerard, laughing inwardly. No, you fool, it wasn’t luck. It was my doing. While you rush around in circles with your machine guns, shooting at shadows, I pick up the pieces. Louts in charge won’t make a government. But he said nothing. He wondered if Theo would be useful in the way he had hoped. Would his mind be too damaged to write again? Well, the first thing would be to move him down the valley, into a remote part of the hills and give him some peace. Then we’ll see, thought Gerard. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Let them slaughter each other for a bit longer.
‘OK,’ he said, making up his mind, ‘we’ll move him in the morning.’ And he went out.
The next time Theo looked at the sky it seemed more intensely blue. And the green of the leaves were dark and succulent. As always, the smell of food made him want to vomit. A man came into view.
‘Hello, Theo,’ said Gerard. ‘I’m here to make sure you’re looked after until you get better. You’re in a safe house, now, OK? You’ve nothing to worry about. All you have to do is get better. Do you understand? You’re safe now. We’ve got you away from that place.’
There was a pause. Outside a bird cried harshly and repeatedly.
‘I’m not sure how much he understands,’ said Gerard. Perhaps they went too far, he thought. Perhaps I’m wasting my time. He’s become a cripple, with a cripple’s mind. Broken and rubbish-can empty.
‘I want to sleep,’ said Theo, faintly.
‘That’s OK, men,’ said Gerard heartily. ‘You have a sleep. But you must eat something when you wake up. I shall be gone for a few days, but everyone here will take care of you. And I’ll see you soon. OK?’
There was no reply. Theo had shut his eyes again. He had become a curvature of bones across the bed, bereft of words. Violence had washed away his hope, robbed him of speech.
‘Make sure he eats,’ was all Gerard said. And he left.
Days sifted by. Nights passed without notice. Theo moved uneasily between consciousness and sleep. At night the darkness cocooned him and he hardly stirred, moving from one dream to another. He dreamt as once he had read, sifting through images as once he had turned pages. He was neither happy nor unhappy. Mostly these dreams were nebulous things filled with people he did not know. One in particular repeated itself night after night. He saw himself sitting at a desk beside a long, high window, working. He was writing furiously. In his dream the rain fell heavily from a leaden sky and leaves drifted, like flocks of birds, towards the ground. But he had no idea what he was writing. And the dream never went any further. Then one night, without warning, he saw a face that was vaguely familiar. He was sitting with a woman on the balcony of a funny little flat. The balcony was filled with pots of bright red geraniums. Somehow he knew the flat was in London. He remembered the place being called Shepherd Market. But that was all.
‘Write it down,’ the woman urged him. ‘Write it down, Theo. That way you won’t forget.’
In the dream, the woman peeled a fruit. He could see the yellow insides of the fruit as she ate. The juice ran down her arm and on to her white dress. He thought he had seen that image somewhere else. The woman frowned and licked her arm, then, seeing him looking at her, she laughed.
‘Why d’you never listen to me?’ Her eyes were sharply focused and very blue. ‘You’re a writer, Theo. You should be writing all of this down.’
He woke feeling agitated and found the sunlight sleeping on him, heavy as a dormant cat. A little later, how much later he couldn’t say, he had the same dream again. And on that same day he remembered the name of the fruit the servant brought him. It was a mango. He must have moved about a little after that, because he began to notice there were other rooms leading on from his. His whole body ached and the wound across his back bled as he walked. The servant woman came and went, nodding at him, occasionally speaking to him. The man he knew was called Gerard visited almost daily. One afternoon he handed Theo an exercise book and a pen.
‘Yes,’ he said, as though he was continuing some previous conversation with Theo, ‘it’s a good idea to try to start writing again.’
A bit later Gerard returned, bringing a doctor with him. Why are you here? Theo wanted to say. But he could not bear to hear the sound of his own voice, so he said nothing. The doctor looked him over. He felt his arms and examined the wound on his back. Theo flinched when he came near him. But the doctor was smiling. Don’t smile, thought Theo. I’d rather you didn’t smile. But again he remained silent. The doctor told him he was fine, his ribs and pelvis were mending, as were his collarbone and arms.
‘With time, the scars will all fade,’ the doctor said. He sounded pleased.
‘Good,’ Gerard said, heartily. ‘Good. You see, Theo, you’ll soon be fit and ready to start your new book.’
Theo looked at him blankly.
‘You don’t remember, do you?’ Gerard said, laughing. ‘Well, I think you should reread one of them, in that case. Your most famous one, perhaps!’
And he handed Theo a book.
Tiger Lily
, it was called. So, he
had
been a writer. Inside the book, he read,
For Anna
. He stared at the name blankly. There was a photograph on the back cover that he supposed was of him. He squinted at it.
‘Of course!’ Gerard said. ‘You wore glasses, of course. How stupid of me! Wait, men, let me see if we can replace them.’
Maybe it was because of the new glasses that had been found for him, not quite perfect but usable, that he began to move around more. The house, he saw, was large and shabby, though not uncomfortable. There were two other people in it, the Tamil woman who cooked for him, and outside, discreetly out of sight, was an armed soldier, a boy of about fourteen.
On the second day that Theo was up and walking, the servant woman came into his room and lifted the blind. Soft light poured in. The woman gave him a mango. She spoke to him in a low voice. Theo did not speak Tamil. He asked her for the time in English.
‘Up, get up,’ she said, pointing at the sun. ‘Morning.’
Later on that same day, she brought him a clock. He had been sleeping for hours, he realised. Maybe days. Fully conscious now, he thought he heard voices. But the gaps in his memory distressed him more than his aching body. He could not leave them alone, probing and fretting over them. Something gnawed away at him, constantly. Or was it
someone
? He had a feeling there was a missing person somewhere in all this. He decided
to read
Tiger Lily
. Perhaps the answer was in the book. And the name Anna.
During the long, solitary day, he had discovered an urge to write. But what about, or who to, he couldn’t say. In any case he was easily tired, easily frightened. And his fingers ached constantly. Something marked time in his head like a metronome. It moved almost on the threshold of his thoughts so that he felt himself edging towards an abyss. The sight of his face in the mirror, the man called Gerard, all these things both terrified him and left him curious. Maybe I should read the book, he thought at last, reluctantly opening it.
‘No one should be an exile,’
he read.
‘For it is an indignity curiously difficult to overcome.’
Theo shuddered. A sliver of memory uncoiled itself silently. He read on.
‘What can I tell you about the boy? He was a Tamil, brought over from the Indian subcontinent, olive-skinned and handsome. It was meant to be the perfect solution. Except it didn’t work out that way.’
He felt the stirrings of suspicion. And interest too. The sunlight on the wall beside him fell in a slanted disc. Outside the window the branches of the mango tree drooped heavy with fruit. Something has happened, thought Theo. Again his skin grew taut with fear. He began to smell colours. Crimson lake, he thought. Cobalt blue. The greens and yellows, the browns of the yard outside the window filled him with nausea and intense panic. They were army-camouflage colours, he thought, unaccountably depressed. Suddenly he had the urge to write all this down.
‘
There is no such thing as freedom,’
he wrote.
‘Nor do I want to have an ideology. I see no sense…To have an ideology means having laws; it means killing those who have different laws’.
He looked at what he had written. He had no idea why he had written this. Something was scratching away inside his head, struggling to get out.
‘Man kills as no other animal kills,’
he wrote.
‘He kills himself, as if under a compulsion, not out of hunger, not because he is threatened, but often out of indifference. We live in a jungle…
’
Again he paused. A thought crawled along the rim of his brain and then slipped maddeningly away. Perhaps, he thought, perhaps it’s to do with the woman I keep seeing. Outside a bird pecked at the air as if it were puncturing it.
‘Oh good,’ said Gerard, walking in. ‘You’re up! And writing too!’ His friendliness was terrifying.
‘I’ve been trying to remember,’ said Theo slowly. ‘Perhaps you’re right, perhaps I was a writer.’
Speech, the smallest utterance, was distressing. Every word quivered on the edge of a scream. But Gerard seemed perfectly friendly and one night, after his visit, Theo determined to finish reading
Tiger Lily.
‘
At last he knew the meaning of what had occurred. That the things he had been through were too terrible to utter out aloud. That one part of him had gone ahead while the rest of his mind remained frozen. And he knew too that he had been tipped into an inexplicable no-man’s-land, not of his making.
’
Theo stared at the words, knowing with sudden, sharp shock how the novel resolved itself. Fragments from the past detached themselves and floated towards him. He stopped reading and saw again, with perfect ease, the high-ceilinged room, with its vases of peonies and his desk, littered with papers. There was a cup of coffee beside him; hot, rich, strong coffee. A hand lingered on his arm. And then he saw what must have been his own hand touch the silky cloth, and then the arm, and finally the face of the woman it belonged to. And in the clearest of
moments of certainty, he understood that the woman’s name was Anna. Memory flooded over him.
The house had been shut up for the night. The guard sat near the gate, his footsteps occasionally crunching on the gravel.
‘Why am I a prisoner here?’ he said out loud. ‘What else have I forgotten?’
Panic rose out of nowhere, with a new urgency. He turned out his light and lay rigid in the darkness listening to his own heartbeats and to the faint sound of a waterfall in the distance, thinking of the woman in the silky dressing gown, certain now that Anna had been his wife.
Towards dawn he slept a little. When he woke it was morning. He saw again that something had been working silently within him. Like a spool of tape threaded through a machine, it replayed itself in slow motion. Anna, he thought. She had died. He had marked the place where she had fallen like a leaf to the ground. He had marked it with flowers. Bunch after bunch, wrapped in foil to stop them withering. Week after week he had gone to the spot, marking it so it no longer remained an unmarked grave. Month after month, long after they said he should have stopped going, long after they said was healthy. He had wondered what was unhealthy about loving. Should his love for her have ceased when her life did? He had gone home after they’d told him she had died. It had been an early-spring day, sharp and cold and with splashes of crocus colour. A day full of birdsong and fresh air. He had registered all that with the curiously detached other part of his brain. Then he had seen her small delicate bra, suspended like some strange beautiful flower, pegged out on the washing line. Hanging out to dry. And without thinking he had taken it down out of habit, and even though it had been washed, even though the sun had dried it, still he could smell the secret parts of her. All this he
remembered now. Seeing it like a photograph, still and deceptive, and potent. Opening his notebook he began to write of Anna. Lest he forget.