A Clue to the Exit Page 12

  As I finally broke free of the bay, I was confronted by a cream-coloured yacht. Ostentatiously old-fashioned, the inside of its funnels painted red, and several forests felled and varnished for its masts and saloons, it bore down on me with easy indifference.

  Other people, I thought, other people were always ruining everything. Then again, what did it matter? I could just swim on. I would be out of sight by the time they could give me any unhelpful help. The yacht continued to bear down on me.

  ‘Oy!’ I shouted. ‘Watch where you’re going.’

  It made no correction to its course. Its sharp bow was set to split the hemispheres of my convoluted brain. With a burst of speed I swam to the right. I had no intention of being exhibited at a consciousness conference as an unplanned example of one of Gazzaniga’s split-brain patients. I needn’t have bothered to move. The engines roared into reverse, and after the slithering indented clatter of the anchor chain the boat came to a halt, cut its engines and undulated serenely a few yards away.

  The sudden expenditure of energy left my stately and thoughtful suicide in jeopardy. I also had to deal with the uncomfortable fact that I’d tried to save my life. Was I the mere plaything of animal instincts, the ‘fuck, food, fight and flight’ of evolutionary psychology? Or was I only prepared to kill myself on my own terms? Far from submitting to fate I was trying to exercise stylistic control over it; I was still playing a role.

  ‘Coo-eeh!’ someone called from the boat. I looked up, galvanized by an involuntary social habit. ‘Excusez-moi, j’espère que vous nous, I mean, nous vous … Charlie? Is that you? It’s Pamela, Pamela Goodchild. What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘Drowning – until you came along.’

  ‘Well, hop on board quickly! I’m sure Jean-Marc’ll be delighted. It’s his boat; isn’t it lovely? Jean-Marc!’ she called, looking over her shoulder. ‘Guess who’s off the starboard bow, if it is the starboard bow – I never know which is which.’

  Jean-Marc appeared at the guard rail. ‘Charlie! Your timing couldn’t be more perfect. Marie-Louise was just complaining that we needed an extra man for lunch. Really, she has a genius for arranging these things.’

  ‘John dropped out at the last moment,’ said Pamela. ‘I was furious. Whenever we have something really lovely planned, he wants to stay at home and doze off over some absolutely dire political memoirs.’

  Silent with horror, I mounted the ladder as if it were a scaffold. The usual suspects littered the deck.

  ‘What a small world,’ said Pamela. ‘It really is, isn’t it?’

  ‘In Spanish,’ said Xavier, laughing like a hyena, ‘we say “the world is a small handkerchief”. Maravilloso! A small handkerchief.’

  While these fools wittered on around me and a crew member rushed forward with a cream-coloured bathrobe, my eyes were drawn across the vast scrubbed deck to an unknown figure in a charcoal suit who stood with his back to us massaging a pair of shoulders in the chair below him. I knew with nauseating certainty that they belonged to Angelique.

  ‘So, what were you doing on this charming island?’ asked Jean-Marc.

  ‘Taking the long swim,’ I said.

  He looked at me discerningly. ‘Not, I hope, the “long swim” which Richard Burton threatens to take in Night of the Iguana?’

  ‘Colder,’ I said.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ he said, ‘you must take a hot shower straight away.’

  Angelique and her masseur remained perfectly self-absorbed in their corner of the deck. I followed Jean-Marc through the saloon and down some stairs into a rainforest mausoleum of mahogany and rosewood panels.

  ‘I’ll send one of the crew to fetch your clothes on shore,’ he said, leading me through the double doors of the master cabin. ‘Or, if you prefer, you’re welcome to borrow something…’

  Stacks of cashmere sweaters, as tightly packed and finely graded as a box of crayons, filled the teak cupboards of Jean-Marc’s virile wardrobe. Hanging opposite were rows of identical off-white cotton trousers, pressed as crisply as folded paper, and, above them, rows of identical softly corrugated corduroy trousers. On brass rails at the foot of the cupboard was a tilted display of tasselled loafers and blue canvas shoes.

  ‘Great selection,’ I said, wondering if I could slip through a porthole and back into the freezing water. I thought of my three-day-old clothes heaped on the beach, the balls of dirty socks stuffed into the rotting shoes, and the huge coffee stain next to the hole in my blue sweater, gone at the elbows. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d love to…’

  ‘Anything you like,’ said Jean-Marc, sliding open a few drawers on his way out. ‘We’ll have lunch when you’re ready, but there’s no hurry. It’s really just a picnic.’

  I washed the goose pimples from my skin under a steaming shower and, feeling like the boy in The Go-Between who is bought a green velvet suit by the rich family he spends the summer with, returned to the deck wearing some of Jean-Marc’s maddeningly soft clothes. His South Sea Island cotton might as well have been drenched in Nessus’ blood.

  The table was loaded with lobsters and glistening bowls of mayonnaise and yellow-necked bottles of white wine, punctuated by silver bread baskets and silver pepper mills. Everyone was in the mood for a picnic.

  ‘Ah, enfin,’ said Marie-Louise. ‘So, we can eat.’ She angled her cheeks expertly for the quickest kiss. ‘I’m sure you remember Angelique,’ she said confidently, ‘but I don’t think you’ve met Dmitri.’

  I nodded to the pointlessly good-looking man in the charcoal suit, and then said hello to Angelique, hoping to make her share the alarming nostalgia which was flooding my body like an injection. She answered me with cheerful shallowness. I could tell that she was not just protecting herself, but already protected enough by genuine unconcern.

  I sank into my chair and listened to the cracking of lobster shells, like distant gunfire. I felt closer to the lobsters than the people who were eating them. Even the eggs which had gone into the mayonnaise seemed to have been unfairly sacrificed. Why, if it came to that, had the bright olive and the swelling grape been crushed, if it was only to prolong the lives of these vile mannequins?

  ‘Aren’t you having one?’ said Pamela, dragging a lobster tail through a half-demolished hillock of mayonnaise. ‘You’re making a terrible mistake.’

  ‘Have you noticed,’ said Alessandro, ‘that Jean-Marc’s lobsters always taste better than anyone else’s?’

  ‘Hmm-mm,’ everyone agreed, their mouths too full to form a whole word.

  ‘We must know your secret!’ Alessandro demanded, his swashbuckling finger dispatching all opposition.

  ‘I think that Charlie needs a bowl of hot soup after his ordeal,’ said Jean-Marc.

  ‘The ordeal has only just begun,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, non,’ said Jean-Marc, ‘you’re not going to swim back. Nobody swims at this time of year; the water is an atrocious temperature. Jean-Pierre, amenez Monsieur une petite soupe bien chaude,’ he instructed the swarthy butler who stood behind his chair. ‘Your timing couldn’t be more perfect,’ he went on. ‘Lola Richardson, who I know is an old friend of yours, is joining us after lunch, and we’re having a screening of Flat. I have a very, very small projection room on board, but as long as it’s you there’s room for one more.’

  I suppose what I did next must have seemed odd to the others, but the thought of seeing the Maestro’s swan song in the company of my self-appointed literary conscience was more than I could bear. I couldn’t plausibly claim to have urgent business, and so I simply got up and walked back to the steps which led down to the water. I peeled off Jean-Marc’s luxurious clothes like a man on fire.

  ‘He seems to be the most fanatical swimmer,’ said Pamela.

  ‘He certainly has an extraordinary idea of good manners,’ said Marie-Louise.

  ‘It’s typi-cally English,’ said Alessandro, delighted as usual. ‘So eccentric! Perhaps he is going to fetch more lobsters for us.’

  ‘More lobs
ters!’ said Xavier, wheezing from the effort of laughing so much.

  I had left my swimming trunks to dry in the bathroom, and so I was naked by the time the butler arrived with a bowl of soup.

  I explained that my appetite had deserted me.

  Just before I jumped into the shatteringly cold water, Angelique came up to the guard rail and whispered, ‘You bastard, why didn’t you call me?’

  Back home I was dismembered by exhaustion and hunger. I made the bowl of soup I had refused on board Les Enfants du Paradis. The heat pulsed through my body in widening rings like the broadcast of an important victory. The scattered jigsaw puzzle of my attention reassembled into a single image. The sea and the sky didn’t seem so far apart after all; ‘the incense of the sea’ drifts up and falls again in a gentle rain. I felt myself tumbling into sleep, but I knew already that it was time to leave. The beauty of the South of France has been embalmed on this little island. It can be visited like an inspiring tomb, helping people to imagine a time when the whole coast was wild, before land became property, and property became lots, and the lots became little. In the absence of nature and of land, there is natureland, a theme park of biodiversity, crammed with educational material and environmental projects, financed by a partnership between a regional council, a national park and an oil company. Infuriated by its lack of development, the air force roars overhead all day long, and the envious mainland disgorges boatloads of tourists hourly onto its fragile shores. Silence and darkness, which people used to be able to get by stepping outside their houses, are finished in Europe. There is always the hum of a road, the whine of a jet, the screech of a train, the glow of lights over the hill, and, in really remote areas, army exercises. I thought I might find some silence and darkness in Porquerolles, and although the lighthouse beam cornered me in the creek, there was a little silence, until the dawn patrol ripped open the sky.

  It is time to go into a deeper solitude and find somewhere really empty for the final phase of my life.

  23

  The blue smoke of paraffin. The din of scooters. Narrow shops with stepladders to reach their high-rise stock, coarse sacks outside filled with grains and beans. The spattered colonnade, greasy smoke from the charcoal grills, little food stalls with vividly dirty shutters. The smell of the ground drenched in motor oil outside a mechanic’s shop, wheels and fan belts dangling from the ceiling. Everywhere men hanging out. Some are slumped all day at a cafe table, sipping a bottle of Coca-Cola, stories of violence and passion blaring from the television. Some stare into space, their eyes emptied of all curiosity. They look perfectly prepared for death. I envy their sense of stylistic continuity. Staring blankly while their hearts beat, staring blankly when they stop beating. How agitated and self-concerned I seem by comparison. I must emulate their obedience. I am heading south until the will to live is baked out of me.

  24

  On the road, a mud wall enclosing a scrappy garden. Pointless gateways separating one expanse of broken stone from another. The increasingly beautiful absence of people. Big cloud shadows drifting across the brown plain, and then over a pinkish hill shot with a seam of darker rose. The eye meets no obstruction and the mind relaxes into infinity.

  And then the dunes. We bounced and slithered over the sand. When we stopped, the flies moved in, feeding from the edge of my eyelids, cleaning their legs on my tear ducts, exploring my nostrils, tickling my lips, crawling deep into my ears as if they had something special to tell me. I came here for silence and I have put my head in a helmet of flies. There are no cars, no trains, no jets, none of those mechanical noises I was so anxious to escape, just the natural sound of a few hundred flies sampling my body and my food. Is it really such an improvement? Wouldn’t I prefer to have a high-speed train shooting through the end of my garden? Ibrahim wrapped a blue scarf around my face, leaving only my eyes exposed. I squeezed the arms of my dark glasses through the tight folds of the thin fabric, and still the flies crawled around the edge of the lenses, and searched every stitch of the scarf for a point of entry.

  I set off among the small blonde dunes, tufted with grass, towards the darker orange of the bare dunes in the distance. The big dunes are voluptuous and dead: sharp tendons and hollow scoops and round mounds and sprawling limbs of pure sand. Closer, the few green blades among the pale dry grasses take on a brilliant intensity. Sand, tracks, dung, grass, flies, sky. There’s a small pack to play with here in the desert. There aren’t even palms and goat herds and oases and bashi bazouks and camel caravans and Bedouin encampments. Just sand, tracks, dung, grass, flies and sky. That’s where I am and that’s what there is here. And out of this poverty comes a necessary inwardness. All the distractions I have been running away from aren’t here. I am falling without their resistance to lean on.

  The far dune is far further than I thought. I run down the slopes, jog across the flat and labour up the far side of the sea of smaller dunes. The day is coming to a close by the time I reach the lower slopes of the big dune. I look back and after a search spot the white tents which Ibrahim and Mohammed have set up. I can’t go back yet. I am fixated on the summit. The sun is going down and I’m worried about time. Worried about time – it’s a miniature of my life. I make a contract with fate: if I can get to the top of the dune before the sun sets, I’ll be healed. I don’t stop to think what I mean by fate, or how it would reward me, or the countless superstitious deals which I’ve watched myself half-heartedly strike over the years. This is different: my whole being is unreflectingly locked into the contract.

  To begin with, the route is hard and humped, but it soon narrows to a soft crease and from there a blade of sand curves up to the peak. With each step I have to excavate my foot and race to keep ahead of the sand which breaks away like snow in sheets and rivulets. It is as if I was running up the fugitive slopes of an hourglass. I have to stop and plant myself firmly while the sand rushes away around me, my heart beating violently. The wind grows stronger as I climb. The flies are fewer and then gone. They are hiding from the cold and the darkness that are rushing into the desert. I am heading away from any refuge, unsure of my footing, unsure of what will happen if I fall. The ridge is high and narrow. Will I bring tons of sand down on my unwilling somersaults? I imagine choking, my throat and lungs filling with sand. Now my lungs are the lower half of the hourglass. I untie the scarf around my neck. It seems to be strangling me.

  There’s no colour in the air except the white glare of the sun and the darkening blue of the sky. No clouds, no smoke, no dirt to catch and redden the light. This merciless clarity unmasks the sky and fills the atmosphere with the feeling of planetary solitude. It is beyond human emotions, in a colder, slower zone of mineral melancholy.

  I make it up the last few yards to the peak and look out at the lower dunes. The rippling gold sinks into shadow. I wait for my reward. I’m in the Sahara, still gambling, still making deals. The sun slides down fast, leaving a white nimbus around the edges of the large dune opposite. There is no time to reflect. I have to hurry back to camp. In the desert, still keeping busy.

  25

  Moonless night, stars down to the ground. Clouds of breath streaming past my cheek. My feet swishing through the cold heavy sand. Walking to calm down. Stopping to calm down. Starting again to calm down. Everything is work, everything has to be earned. My watering eyes bring down a rain of needles from the feeble stars, stitching me into the night. How can I sleep in this silence, the blood hissing in my ears like a hostile crowd? I patrol twenty yards of frigid sand, working to exhaust myself.

  I try the tent. Huggermugger in plastic dereliction. The floor covered in used handkerchiefs, empty bottles, dirty clothes, ripped packaging, a torch with a flickering yellow bulb. Outside, no limits; inside, no room. Then no limits inside, then none inside me. Agoraphobia on the bone, agoraphobia in the marrow. I struggle into my sleeping bag and, after half an hour of writhing, my arms pinned to my side and a cold zip in my mouth, imagine I’d be better off outside. And so I burst
out of the tent like a swimmer coming up for air, and find myself back under the covered dish of stars, under the dazzling rain of diamond and sapphire needles, a prisoner of too much space.

  26

  Today a veil of sand is swaying unreliably over the ground. From the edge of this dune it pours into the air like an inverted waterfall. Sparkling and smoky, it snakes through the hollows, hissing against my boots. Most things change by falling apart, but the restlessness of the desert is a renovation. The landscape is priming its canvas again and again, like an amnesiac living on the shining cusp of oblivion. I can see the footsteps I made yesterday being blunted, buried and obliterated, and I feel the exhilaration of still being here to witness the brevity of the traces I’ve left behind.

  A man in my position might easily head for the mountains and try to find consolation in their perseverance – never mind the rock slides, the sinking plateaux and erupting islands – or, at the opposite extreme, he might extort some pleasure from knowing that he will outlast the flies spinning on the windowsill, but neither of these strategies can match the sinister joy of watching the dunes replacing themselves with each other, as if the world could be destroyed and renewed by the same gesture, as if my sense of death could melt into a universe of change, like ice slipping from a tilted glass into a summer lake.