Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

‘You’ve just been on a trip,’ she said, ‘haven’t you?’

Wilson did not deny it.

‘Find anything?’

‘Not really.’

She stepped forwards. ‘No gold?’

‘No.’

The taller of the two men came and stood next to her. His only weapons were his height and the bunched fists that swung like lead weights on the end of his arms. He was looking at Wilson, but he spoke to La Huesuda.

‘You believe him?’

Her mouth turned upside-down.

‘Who are these men?’ Wilson asked her.

‘My brothers.’

Wilson looked at each of them in turn. ‘Are they descended from Amazons as well?’

He saw the tall man’s fist loop towards him. The room burned yellow for a moment. Then he found that he was sitting on the floor, the tall man standing over him.

‘Actually, they’re half-brothers,’ La Huesuda said.

The short man began to rummage in the knapsack that hung on the wall. His hand emerged with a wedge of onyx.

His face twisted in a triumphant sneer. ‘Thought you said you didn’t find anything.’

Wilson climbed to his feet. The inside of his head shimmered and hissed. ‘I was looking for gold,’ he said, ‘not onyx.’

‘Onyx?’ the tall man said. ‘I never heard of that.’ He was studying the knuckles of his right hand.

‘Still, it must be worth something,’ the short man said.

‘Is there anything else?’ La Huesuda stepped over to the wall. She had wrapped her small head in a scarlet shawl. Her nose protruded from her face like a knife stuck in a door.

Snatching the knapsack off the wall, she turned it over on the bed. A collection of lesser minerals, the fruit of his two weeks in the desert, spilled across the mattress. There was jasper and chalcedony, some crystals of cumengeite, and the onyx. They looked prettier and more valuable than they might otherwise have done. He had been working long hours on the stones, drawing the colours and markings out through polishing. It had been one of his methods for trying to remove Suzanne from his memory. It had not worked. He had ended up meditating on their beauty and then, by association, on hers.

‘This is robbery,’ he said.

La Huesuda turned to him, the black shapes of her two half-brothers lurching in the room behind her. ‘Yeah, well,’ she said, ‘I had some personal misfortune recently.’

‘What happened?’

‘Someone destroyed my balcony.’ She smiled to herself, teeth touching the wet curve of her bottom lip. ‘It was a foreigner, I think. An American, if I remember right.’

Wilson said nothing.

‘I’m asking for contributions,’ she went on, cackling now. ‘Just so happens I thought I’d start with you.’

‘But I told you. They’re not worth anything.’

‘So what are you worried about?’ She snapped her fingers in the air beneath his nose. He could smell raw onions, bacon fat, the genitals of sailors.

He sighed. ‘I collected them. It was a lot of work.’

‘As I said. A contribution.’

But he did not want to lose the crystals. Lifting the idea from his dream, he had decided to make a present of the best ones to Suzanne when they were finished. They would be souvenirs for her to take back to France with her. His only way of remaining in her memory. Touchstones. In his frustration, he had stepped forwards.

The taller of the two men stood in front of him again, his bottom teeth overlapping like a hand of cards, his bunched fists dangling against his thighs. There was a foot of stale breath between them.

The corner of the room exploded as the short man broke a bottle.

Wilson appealed to La Huesuda. ‘I told you that I’d mend your balcony,’ he said. ‘Don’t you trust me?’

‘Trust you?’ La Huesuda said.

The room was filled with mocking laughter.

Wilson looked from one face to another. All the mouths the same shape, all the laughter identical. Here was the family resemblance that he had been unable to see earlier on.

Suzanne could see the house, high on the cemetery ridge. She saw the long white wall ribboning across the land, and soldiers lying among the rocks, asleep or dead. Beyond the house, below it, lay the sea, an aching shade of violet. It was dusk.

A crowd moved up the hill towards her. There must have been at least five hundred people. The dirt-track could not hold so many. They spilled out across the slope, scrambling over rough terrain. An urgency, as if they were late for something.

She thought of hiding, but there was nowhere. Only stones the size of heads or fists, and the house in the distance, standing out against the sky, the graves like bruises on the ground. Only the dead, it seemed, could hide.

But they did not see her.

She stood on a bank above the track while they moved past. Women took the lead, their heads wrapped in black scarves, all softness gone. Silent the women were, with tight mouths, and the silence was more frightening than sound. Some had pickaxes in their hands. Others had spades. Sticks. Chains. Kitchen things.

The men followed, in workshirts streaked with clay and stiff wool trousers. She could smell them as they passed. Their clothes were company-issue, worn for weeks on end. Sweat, oil, urine, garlic, sperm. At dances you could smell it too. When you sat on a hard wooden chair against the wall and the couples went whirling past your face. It was always the men that you could smell. She stepped backwards, covering her mouth and nose. Still they did not see her. Their eyes all pointed different ways. Their fists beat at the air, as if the air were a door and they were trying to get in.

Then she was standing in the house.

She knew this part. No lamps lit in the hallway, only moonlight falling through a high window. A shine on anything that was smooth: the tiled floor, the curve of a banister –

The stairs.

They brought him down feet first. Hoisted on their hands, he seemed to undulate, a cloth stretched over poles, a snake on stony ground. She could not look into his face.

He was wearing the scarlet jacket with the silver epaulettes — his own pride, other people’s mockery. His feet were naked, though. His boots were now the property of two different men. They wore one each. Later they would fight to make it a pair. Down the stairs they carried him. Along the hall. Out into the night.

It would happen in the cemetery.

She watched the crowd swarm along the ridge. Something else was being carried. The long oak table from the dining-room. She asked what it was for. One Indian shrugged. Another chuckled, but would not say.

Clothes were lifting into the air, short flights against a sky that ached. Tunic, breeches, undershirt. They were stripping him bare. She saw a silver epaulette spin through the darkness, vanish into someone’s outstretched hand. Sometimes, through the crowd, she caught glimpses of the body he had wanted to show her. Pale as a peeled fruit. She had to look away. But, whichever way she turned, it was still there, in front of her.

There were knives now. Sticks too. Kitchen things.

All along the ridge the miners had lit bonfires so she could see the colour of his agony.

Up the table came, propped against a cairn of stones. And he was pinned to the dark wood, with nails through his wrists and ankles. The crowd had learned their Christianity too well. His belly had been opened lengthways, ribs to groin, and his guts tumbled downwards, over his genitals, in one bright coiled pulp. Served up on his own table like a feast.

And they had painted him. One half of his body red, smeared with his own blood. The other black, daubed with ashes from the fire. Flies were beginning to settle on his wounds. Her eyes jumped all round the sky. Would vultures soon be circling? She was not even sure that he was dead.