Sarah Hall - How to Paint a Dead Man

And so it continues.

In his letter, Antonio insists I install a telephone at Serra Partucci so that he might speak with me more readily. He has insisted this before many times. You are welcome to speak personally with the municipal engineers, I have told him, and ask if their scaffolds will extend up to the house. And while they are there, they might as well fill the pockets of their overalls with stones from the surface of the moon.

Thinking about it, I would like to smoke very much. It has been my habit for fifty years to smoke outside after dinner and look at the landscape. I am attempting to keep my hand busy by writing, but I desire tobacco. The pocket watch is ticking on the wall and it is making everything worse. I find myself in the end writing nothing of importance. But I must try to keep my word. When she comes tomorrow, Theresa will notice the discarded cigarettes and report them to Florio. I am too old to begin to hide things in poke holes like a schoolboy!

At night the mountainside belongs to others. I feel like an honoured guest. The trees are full of noise and movement, insects shuffling, the slow transit of sap in the bark. Benicio would always try to broker our status at this hour, patrolling the hill in the twilight and scratching at the bottom of trunks and digging between roots. Dogs have a simpler claim to the land than we do. Occasionally his barking woke me in the reading chair, but with no great alarm, and I would sleep again and dream of cats in the alleys and upon the walls of our ruined monuments. Benicio was a nocturnal emissary of unimportant messages. Other times he lay at my feet and the unrest of the night was settled. I had to be careful when I stretched not to knock his back legs, which he always guarded carefully. Theresa does not come after dusk. Her bicycle has no handlebar lantern.

They will have had their supper by now. They will be sitting by the fire talking about what he could be doing, speculating on his unreliability. Susan, tutting—‘He’ll just be in the pub.’ Danny—‘Maybe aliens have abducted him. De-de-de-de.’ Lydia — quiet and smiling. Or they will be in bed, warm, snug, and he will simply be a vacancy, a hole in the cottage fabric. Meanwhile here he is, wringing wet, unfed, unhappy as hell. His stomach gurgles, and a sour belch makes its way up his pipes. Hungry. They will have had their supper. What was on tonight’s menu? Did Lydia mention it this morning? Fish pie. Oh yeah, fish pie. With buttery carrots and peas. He could murder a great enormous dollop of that. With crispy brown potato topping, dill sauce, and salmon and mackerel filling. He’d even eat it off that rock he pissed on a few hours ago, bent over the mound, grunting and snorking like an animal in its byre.

Though the rain must have washed the surface clean by now.

It has stopped falling, more or less. The floor of the ravine is splashing and trickling, like the bed of a river, far below him. He can hear nature getting along just fine, going about its business, regardless of his pitiful arrest. He is hungry and thirsty-the rain he sucked from his palms was only enough to dampen his throat, and the slugs that he can feel sliming up the sides of the rock are not appealing enough to consider eating. Not yet anyway. His clothes are sticking to him: when he pulls his shirt it slurps off his skin. He’s wrapped himself up as best he can, arms tucked inside against his sides, but heat is still escaping into the vast draw of night. He can feel the chill making its way into the meat of him. And the foot. Well, that’s the most disturbing thing. He can’t really feel it any more-not even when he concentrates on that spot, trying to locate the injury. There’s nothing. Not a stinging lesion or a swollen outline. Not even a final protesting nerve. There is no pain.

This is not a good sign. Surely it indicates some hideous and irreversible medical condition, which can’t be fixed by vascular surgery, grafts, or wires and pins. Fantastic blood loss, necrosis, gangrene. Bye-bye useful, well-loved appendage-and off to the glue factory with you. What if rats have smelled the wound and crept along the gulleys to the ripe offering? They could be starting in on his toes with their rotten yellow teeth, infecting him with disease, and he wouldn’t even know. Here’s the ridiculous thing: after all the begging, the litigating with God (no longer is he agnostic, no longer atheist), and the mortgaging of years from his old age in exchange for the stopping of the pain, now that it’s gone he wants it back, absurdly. Fuck morphine. Fuck blissful analgesics. Fuck compassionate relief. He wants the registry of suffering again. He wants a good old belt of it, a reiteration of his vital signs, even if it means biting off his own tongue and roaring again at the horizon. At least he could call that an affirmation. At least then he could say: I am this war.

Because, what if this is it? What if everything unravels now? What if it is all about to be taken away from him?

It’s a terrible thought, the thought of erasure, of hopelessness, the thought of losing himself, his family, his tomorrow. He feels like he is falling though the massive blackness above, spinning and spinning away, even while he is caught in this precise spot, pinned like a fragile butterfly, staked like a stupid scarecrow among the potatoes. It feels like there will be no end to the cold, the wet, the weightless rushing air, this stone crucifixion. Fate it’s called. He begins to breathe shallowly and urgently. Ah, the dark epiphany has arrived. He absolutely does not want to be here, here in this rigid, unfair place, in this awful, invalid body, in this bastard providence. He does not want to be this man trapped in the wilderness. He does not want to be Peter. Peter. The name is awful. The name is prison. He doesn’t want to be here. ‘I don’t want to be here!’

He puts his head in his hands. This is it. This is despair. This is the bitter, unalterable heart of the situation. There’s nothing he can do. There’s no way out. He is choiceless. He is condemned.

The ravine continues to trickle. There is scuttling, like the scuttling of rats. He yells down at the ground. ‘Get away!’ He peers hard, but there is nothing to see in the blackness. His eyes can’t pull out the shapes of the boulders or the top of the cliff. They can’t detect any little movements through the tunnels of rock, as if scavengers are gathering. He can’t discern his own hands or his body or his damned limb. Perhaps he is no longer there. Peter. Where are you, Peter?

Home. In another dimension, if he had never come here today, if he had not decided to climb down into the bottom of the deep Gelt gorge, or he had taken a different route back across the boulders, he would be home now. He would be where he should be. With them.

There’s comfort in thinking about that. The cottage, with its hewn walls full of mice and straw, its warm fireplaces. His brood, his clan. What will they have been up to in his absence? The usual antics. Danny will have arrived home covered in grass stains and mud, saying he rolled all the way from town and can he have another bath. He’s home because she’s home. Susan will have thrown buckets of water over him outside while Lydia cheered, and he’ll have loved the attention. What a plonker. That pie will have been a beauty, as always. There’ll be a portion of it saved, tucked into a compartment in the kitchen range, just in case. They’ll have sat at the table after dinner and spoken to each other, in a lower tone than when he’s there, naturally. Mr Volume; Mr Have-Another-Glass-of-Homebrew. They’ve always managed conversation, his family. They’ve never been stuck over a stuffy platter of English beef, while the mantle clock ticked and the fire crackled. It is not a house of excruciation and repression, where the scrape of cutlery on plates and the dreadful chomping of jaws are the only sounds during meals. There’s always something interesting to talk about, a book, a meeting, the news. And they can always fall back on their common currency. ‘F’art’, the kids call it, doing their buck-toothed posh impression.