Marcel Theroux: Far North

That plane I rode in was the last I ever saw.

These years that I’ve written of were the fall of my life. I’m pushing on into my own winter now. This hasn’t changed: old age is as cold as it ever was.

I’m growing old and thin. I’ve had to cinch my gun belt tighter each year to hold what’s left of my hips. I’m frailer too. But I still ride at dawn each day, round the fading circle of what was once this city. And I’m still greedy for whatever’s left to me. I can’t open my eyes soon enough each day to see you, my darling.

*

The road’s been quiet for a long time. The only thing moving on it is dust devils in the summer months. Sometimes I look at it and wonder: what became of all that life ?

I expect the base is gone by now. I wonder if the grapple I made still twinkles in a broken-down corner of the grain store.

Those prisoners were bound to rise up sooner or later. You can’t keep your foot on a man’s throat so long without facing the consequence of it. And when they did? What then?

They’d kill the guards, fall out over the women, scatter in the bush, and their offspring — if they managed to have any — would end up like the tabby that I’d seen, miaowing round a cold hearth, flinching at the sight of a stranger.

*

The cranes lurch south each fall. Each year the wilderness reclaims a little more. Each year the taiga riots on another tract of the city. Each month that goes brings closer the time of your departure.

And once you’ve left, I see it going like this: five or ten years after, or maybe sooner if I’m lucky, the horse will throw me on a cold morning, or the stove’ll catch while I’m sleeping, or I’ll just keel over among the cabbages — I won’t have the puff I used to and it’s heavy work chopping those stalks out. Down I’ll go, nose in the dirt, and breathe my last.

There’s not one iota of fear in me about it. I wouldn’t have you stay for anything. But I can’t think too hard about the world I’ve bequeathed to you, or the gulf between your childhood and mine, or I start to feel guilty for it.

Once I thought I would make this for you to read. I planned to give it to you, copied out in a fair hand, with all the spellings checked up against pa’s dictionary. But now I see that the best thing I can leave you is your own blank page. This can stay with the other books I’ve saved, in the way of a memory stone, or one of those Tungus ribbons on a branch at the start of the journey, or the end of one, chalking up a little prayer against annihilation.

When you’re ready to light out of here, take the Winchester and the fastest pair of horses and go. Let it be on a bright day in winter for better travelling. And until the wind fills them, I’ll be able to look down from the tower on the fire-house at the tracks you leave across the snowfields north, and say to myself: Ping’s on her way home.

Marcel Theroux is the author of three previous novels, A Blow to the Heart, A Stranger in the Earth , and The Paperchase , winner of the 2002 Somerset Mgham Award. He lives in London.