Jim Crace - All That Follows

He pays his entry toll to a cheerily officious Natfo volunteer at the warden lodge and, following instructions, drives through disinfectant troughs and over wildlife grids into the woods and the cliff-shrouded clearings of the historic mine workings, where vehicles can park. Here the soil is still too impacted and toxic for any vegetable growth other than nettles, brambles, and knotweed. But beyond the barefaced cliffs, the light is high and bright, a fine day, at last, for walking. He will hike up into the birch hursts, where at this time of the year, with the trees half stripped of leaves, it should be easy to spot parties of deer and maybe even catch sight of this district’s almost-native bustards or the families of escaped wallabies that the Natfo man has said are “a must” for any visitor.

Leonard reaches for his binoculars. As his hand frees them from the van’s stowage box, he lets his knuckles brush against and nudge the radio alive. He can’t resist. Before he sets off on the walk, he might as well discover (if the news blackout has lifted) that Maxie is all right. Or that Maxie is in custody. Or that Maxie has agreed to talk. For Lucy’s sake, he doesn’t quite want Maxie dead, but he would certainly be relieved to hear that her hopes of visiting her father behind bars are likely to be realized, and soon. He’ll appreciate the hiking and the trees all the more, knowing that his caution and dishonesty this morning on the phone have been vindicated. No point pretending otherwise. But there is static on the set. The radio will only cough and clear its throat. He chooses another level of preselects, but these are no less bronchial. A couple more. With no success. And Retune fails to find any traction in the traffic of signals. The scanner shuffles through every single station and all the frequencies, chasing any signal strong enough to hold good. The numbers pelt across the screen; the stations briefly name themselves with their IDs, too fast to read, but nothing takes purchase. Then the names and numbers roll round again with little to delay them, not a note of music, not a human sound, not a word of news, just the woof and tweet of distant frequencies that sound like animals in undergrowth.

Neither the van’s speakerphone nor Leonard’s cell does any better. They offer only No network provision. Try again later . This clearing is not only toxic and impacted, it is information-dead as well, too buried in the countryside, too screened by cliffs and woods, too underused to merit contact. Whatever’s happened in the hostage house, whatever shape the greater world is in, cannot insinuate itself into Pepper’s Holt. Leonard is out of reach. He shrugs. He even says “So be it” to himself. Perhaps it’s just as well, preferable even, to be beyond the bulletins. Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to have radios. He drops his cell phone into the space vacated by the binoculars and checks his watch. It’s almost disappointing to see the second hand circling so firmly. Time should have failed as well. It’s early afternoon. He has more than three hours in which to explore the forests and still get home in time for doormat hugs with Francine. He puts his binoculars and his coat into a backpack, tucks his trousers into his socks, pulls his beach cap on — QUEUE HERE — and starts to climb toward the freshened sky and the silver stands of birch.

It often happens when Leonard’s walking on his own. There is something about the countryside — woods, hills, the coast, the riverbanks, no matter what — that makes him feel both reckless and slightly anxious, like an escaped animal, one of those must-see wallabies, perhaps, or a family pet that has broken loose and is equally excited and unnerved by freedom. How could it not? Forests like these were where he and his boyhood friends played hidey-hunt and fought their concocted battles, carried out their ambushes, were Robin Hood and his Merry Men, were Spartacus, were fugitives. As a child, he spent countless Saturdays hiding from marauders in the branches of an oak when there were oaks, or creeping on all fours toward a suspect shed, or following the outer hedges of a field rather than cutting across on the footpath where his foes might spot him. Such unrealities, so sustained and engrossing for a child, should have been driven out of him with puberty. That’s growing up. When you finally become part of the world, there should no longer be any need to act it out. Can it be possible that from all those rough-and-tumble friends of forty years ago, only he — little nervous Lennie, now almost fifty years of age — is still enthralled by these compulsions, still favors hedgerows over the open field?

He has gone well beyond the car park and is climbing up less trodden paths with no reassuring signs of humankind except the occasional nesting box and the vapor trails of jets. The forest makes its comment every time he takes a step. Leaf litter cracks and rustles at his feet, mimicking the static on the radio. Saplings, bullied by the wind, yelp and squeak like animals. A patch of restless, waving light suggests at first that someone’s following — and then it stops, it hides itself. Leonard cannot help but pick up and carry the first strong branch he sees, holding it more like a cudgel than a walking stick. And then he holds it like a gun. He will defend himself. He’s acting as if he’s twelve years old again, a fearful and excited boy, lost in the tucks and folds of the forest, and imagining — his favored fantasy — that he’s fighting Fascism in 1930s Spain. What if he falls and breaks a leg, perhaps? What if a pack of wolves sweeps out of the trees? What if Franco’s men are closing in on him? How will he call for help, without a phone, without a working radio, but just the woof and tweet of distant frequencies? How can he safely reach Orwell, Perkiss, Hemingway, and his other comrades in the International Brigade? Alone in Pepper’s Holt this afternoon, when he could have been on active service in a real adventure with an actual “kidnapped” girl, Leonard Lessing cannot stop himself from imagining and forging filmy memories from things that have never occurred, at least to him. He’s stepping lightly through the undergrowth, in Catalonia.

He has reached the plug of weathered rock that offers views across the carbon-eating canopies into the wooded valleys of the reserve and the newly planted blocks of light-efficient, black-leaved trees, Turning Sunshine into Fuel. He is careful to be silent, watching where he steps, avoiding loose rocks and brittle timber, staying out of sight. When he’s found a high nook in the rocks where he can safely wedge himself, he takes out his binoculars and trains them on the countryside, checking every angle for signs of Franco’s men. No pasarán . His aching shoulder is a shrapnel wound. The birches are olive trees. The smudge of gray on the horizon is the fug of Barcelona, smarting from the bombs.

LEONARD’S BUSY IN THE TRAPEZIUM. His clothes are hardly damp from the afternoon of walking and combating Fascism in the woods, but he takes off his socks and trousers and pulls on a pair of sweatpants, still warm from the dryer. He continues to resist the news and tunes the DAB receiver to a New York jazz station and a Eurofusion band he does not recognize and does not like (“Oh, loosen up,” he thinks) while hunting in the cupboard for a vase. On the drive back home, he stopped at his local shops, booked a corner table for the evening at Wilbury’s, where the chef is used to naught percent diners, and bought an autumn mix, mostly garden perennials — Michaelmas daisies, chrysanthemums, rudbeckia. Already they are past their best. He has to pick up petals from the floor. He’ll spruce the bunch up a bit, he thinks, with foliage from the patio, some fern sprays or sprigs of variegated bay. Francine appreciates it, praises him, when he arranges and displays the flowers he has bought or picked for her, rather than just handing them to her in a wrapped bunch with the implication “women’s work.” He prepares a short strong coffee in their silver macinato and rewards himself with barely half a spoon of sugar. He puts away the crockery. Wipes surfaces and handles. Pours planet-friendly disinfectant down the sink. So this is what it’s like to be retired, a life of undemanding walks, role-play, light shopping, housework, nothing much to do that counts.