Voyage XIX – Non-violence

I spent the next I-don’t-know-how-long in my bunk, breathing the smell of her body out of my pillow. All I could think was how I could have done things differently – going over and over everything that had happened. Sometimes I thought maybe I’d been too pushy. Then other times I thought I should have been more pushy, less hesitant, more manly. What had she said about a woman above all wanting a man who felt good about himself? I certainly wasn’t that. I went over all the conversations we’d had about sex and women, and I remembered how she’d looked at me sometimes (but didn’t she look at other men that way too?), and offered to come to my cabin and strip off for me (but wasn’t that all in the name of art?) and how later I’d gone to try to find out what was wrong and she’d dismissed me (but hadn’t I just been a silly little boy, again?).
And why would someone like her (a goddess, frankly) want someone like me anyhow, so weedy and awkward and pathetic and how could I have been so stupid to have, even for a moment...? The memory is just too pitiful, not least because I'm filled to a hard, purple bursting point with the image of her extraordinary naked body on my bed. My balls ache with the memory of it.
The pictures are there still. I can’t destroy them. I thought of throwing them in the sea, but I can’t. Instead I fix them (my craftsman brain, still there, in spite of everything, thinking practically) and roll them up and put them away.
I sleep as much as possible, and wake up to a second or two of peace before the memory collapses in on me anew and forces me to go over it all again. Not having to eat or drink or go to the loo means I have no distractions. I don’t seem to have been missed either. I suppose everyone knows by now too. I can’t face them.
But I can’t just stay in here forever. I wait until it’s dark and everyone has settled down for the night and I go up on deck to feel the fresh air on my face. Even then I can’t help fantasising that Lucy will be up there, unhappy, and I will go and talk to her. She’ll tell me that in fact, for all her bravado, she was shy and needed more time, that she wasn’t ready, and can I be patient?
Of course I can.
But there is no one up there.

The next morning Joe comes and knocks on the door and asks if I am ok. I say come in and he stands awkwardly in the door. ‘You heard what happened I suppose’ I say, turning away. I feel ashamed of myself now.
‘Everybody did’ he says, smiling. ‘I wouldn’t take it too seriously if I were you.’ But I do, I think. This was it, I think, my one chance. I really can’t imagine ever meeting a woman like her ever again, in any life or after life. She was it.
‘From what I gather you handled it rather well. I thought you’d be cock-a-hoop.’
I’m confused – what has she said? Maybe she’s playing a game with me? I did ok? Is there hope?
‘Harry is, if anything, even surlier than before,’ he continues, ‘and Jason says Liz is in tears most of the time... well, that’s confidential. So...’
Why’s he talking about Harry? Oh. I get it. I’d forgotten about all that. The memory makes me smile a little. It gives me a moment to come up for air. ‘Has Lucy said anything?’
‘Lucy?’ He looks blankly at me for a moment ‘Oh that tall, dark, well-endowed lass. No, why?’
I flinch at the description.
‘Never mind. Doesn’t matter.’ I turn away again.
‘You fancy her?’ he says with a sly grin. ‘Well who wouldn’t? I’m only about twenty percent straight and I can see it. Have you spoken to her?’
‘A bit’ I say, evasively.
‘Anyway, are you coming along later?’
I think about it and realise I really need to. ‘Yes’ I say. ‘I’ll see you later.’

Time is an odd thing here. There are no clocks. Hours and days just wander about casually. Back in life everybody knew – if you were having a shit time it went on interminably – a good day was over before you knew it. Here I suspect it’s a bit the other way, which is nice, but it’s hard to tell, looking back, how long you’ve been doing anything. You can count elephants to sixty, a hundred-and-twenty, three hundred, but sooner or later you get muddled and don’t know where you’ve got to. I’ve even tried keeping track on paper but I still get lost. Time is absolutely relative here. “Sooner or later” is about as close as you’ll get to describing it. And yet, somehow, I always know when it’s early afternoon or after midnight, or time to go see Joe for example.
He doesn’t know about me and Lucy. That probably means no one knows. He’d know if anyone knew surely? Maybe not. The guides keep themselves quite separate from the rest of us. I’m sure she must have told Damian and Matt. They probably think it’s hysterical. What was I thinking? I look at myself in the mirror on the back of the door. I’m just a stupid child. She’s a woman. It occurs to me that she doesn’t look very old – twenty-two maybe? I don’t know how old she is really. This revives my optimistic ‘I’m actually a virgin and need you to be gentle with me’ fantasy, although it’s not very convincing. She doesn’t seem like a virgin. That’s what I liked about her.

I feel hungry. There’s a small serving hatch near the library so I won’t have to go through the bar. I put on a dressing gown and open the door and Harry is there, just on his way past.
‘I wondered when you’d show your face again’ he says coming too close too quickly. He jams his hand across the door, blocking my way. I look beyond. Several other travellers have stopped to see what will happen. They look concerned, not entertained.
In retrospect I guess a part of me was scared – I felt faint afterwards, but mainly I just felt pissed off. I really couldn’t be bothered with this, and I guess it showed in my face. Even so, I couldn’t ignore the simple fact of his sheer physical size. I knew you couldn’t die here, but I didn’t want to get hurt. I didn’t want to shout for help either, so I just stood there. He grinned at me, too close, too heavy, too nasty. ‘And what are you going to do now, eh?’ he said in my face. I could feel his hot breath on my neck, his eyelids on my cheek. It was revolting. I was horribly aware that I had nothing on under the robe, and that it was falling open. I pushed a little with my body, turning my head away, not really expecting any result. He moved more firmly to block me and push me back but in the process began to lose his balance. He moved his arm a little to steady himself, and I stepped through, over his leg as he heaved himself toward me in an effort to pin me against the doorframe with his body. It didn’t work but as I slipped past he took a swing at me with his free hand.
It was very odd. I felt his hand connect but it was as if my jaw had become marble and his fist was a rubber ball. The force threw him across the passageway onto his back. I was standing there unscathed and he was lying there winded. We all stood around for a while wondering what had just happened. Harry was getting up, swearing under his breath, rearranging his tie. He went to hit me again.
‘You can’t do that here’ said a voice behind me. It was Angie again.
‘Who’s going to fucking stop me?’ he said, furious, spluttering his words, his face red, fit to pop.
‘Nobody’s going to stop you. It’s just not physically possible on the boat. No violence.’
‘Who fucking says?’ he cried as if this is the greatest infringement of his civil liberties imaginable.
She shrugged. ‘Just how it is’ she said blandly. ‘Are you ok Gabriel?’
‘Yes’ I said. ‘I’m fine.’ I didn’t want to gloat but we were all looking much jollier. I went back inside and put some clothes on.

Well it was a welcome diversion anyway, and I had a good half hour of chuckling to myself before my thoughts about Lucy came back to bother me. By then it was time to go and see Joe again.
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Journey X – The Temptation

Miranda tells me firmly that we must find me a place with other people that’s safe and comfortable and where they’ll take good care of me. Then I’ll be able to maybe find a new guide and move on. She gets up, looking considerably closer today, purposefully striding about, in the rain too, gathering up our stuff, talking to herself. Meanwhile I’m sitting on a stump half asleep, sipping my coffee. It’s all a little too busy for me. It’s barely light yet and we had a visitation in the night – silent thankfully. They just hung around watching me swearing at them. I got the impression I’d hurt their feelings more than anything. Well, if they will hang around looking spooky all night what do they expect? Miranda said I shouldn’t take the piss. Things are bad enough for them already but I think (I didn’t say this out loud) if they want to get lost they should just go and get on with it, not keep bothering us non-lost types. They’re really beginning to get on my wick, keeping me up all night...

We pass on through more of the same forested, mountains-and-valleys landscape as before. Miranda says it reminds her of the place she grew up, with lots of heather and bracken and little streams. It’s not that I don’t like it. I’m really just beginning to want to get somewhere. I told this to her and she gave me an odd little smile.
Meetings with the lost spirits are getting further and further apart. Miranda tells me they tend to gather in some areas more than others and she seems decidedly livelier here, away from them (‘although there’s always a few loners about’ she says). The countryside’s still pretty wild out here and we have the place to ourselves. Once again my thoughts turn to the proximity of her scantily clad little form. All in all, maybe I prefer it that she’s too small (or far away) to actually have sex with. I like the way we get on and chat and flirt and look after each other and I think maybe sex would spoil it, or anyway, I’d probably mess it up somehow – make a twat of myself. It’s better this way.

Our final encounter with the lost spirits happens on a night of heavy rain – another night of total darkness and we’re camped in a bog. Miranda is convinced this is the right path but is very frank with me – there will be lost spirits again, and they might not be so easily dissuaded. I don’t ask how she knows.
For a few nights now she’s been running off at night like before and I am once again unhappy about it but not so easily fobbed off with her reticence on the subject. I pester her and tell her I’m not going to ‘leave it’. So she gives in and tells me she’s been protecting me, going out and keeping them away. I ask if that was how she got hurt that time before. She goes very quiet.
‘With some of them you have to be prepared to give them something in return’ she says vaguely, not looking at me. ‘There has to be some sort of offering. That’s the way it is.’
I look at her. I don’t know what she means. I don’t think I want to know.
Then suddenly she looks up at me and says brightly ‘We’ll soon be there. It’ll soon be over.’
She turns to go and I catch her arm and hold her back. She looks at my hand, at first wearily, then irritably. I let her go.
‘It’s ok’ she says, and is gone into the darkness.
I never did find out what it was they got up to out there. The thought made me feel sick, especially in the light of what we saw later. I didn’t sleep. I sat and waited for her to come back and we slept together in the morning.

So we come to a place where the valley becomes extremely narrow and steep sided, with ranks of stunted oaks growing out of the sheer sides. The valley floor is narrow and sodden and thick with rushes and reeds. It sees the sun only briefly but floods regularly and we struggle to find a patch of dry ground to pitch the tent on, hoping not to get washed away if there’s a flash flood. Evening comes. We watch the mists come down and wait for frightening things to start happening. There’s nothing more, she tells me, that she can do to hold them off. We sit and wait to see what happens.
‘Will they hurt us?’ I ask quietly, the rain dripping off my hood into my lap. She’s hidden there, in my cape, peering out. She looks so tiny – barely visible.
‘Not necessarily’ she says, like there might be something worse they could do.
‘What then?’ I say. ‘Will they capture us?’
‘Something like that’ she says.
‘Something worse?’
She says nothing. We wait.
‘I could try swearing at them again’ I suggest.
‘Probably worth a try’ she says without much enthusiasm, ‘if it makes you feel better.’
More silence.
‘If I hadn’t lead you astray you’d have been somewhere safe a long time ago’ she says quietly.
‘But you tried. You took me to that hill town place.’
She shakes her head. ‘I was being selfish. I needed somewhere to rest, recover. I wasn’t thinking about you.’
I look down at her. She looks so sad, yet strangely defiant.
‘I really don’t mind you know’ I say, and I want to tell her it was worth it because I love her. It seems a stupid thing to say, while we sit there, peering into the darkness, watching for spirits.
‘I just didn’t want to lose you’ she says ‘and I wasn’t ready to go, maybe. I thought I was.’
‘Do you have to go? Can’t you change your mind?’
She begins to reply but instead says shush and holds her finger up. I stand and listen. There’s a low roaring sound coming from away up the valley. As it gets louder I can feel it in the ground. It’s different from last time, more like a sobbing or a pulsing, like a machine or a heart beating deep in the soil. We stand there together, listening to it growing in volume. It sounds like a flood. It occurs to me it might be a flood. I look about for an escape route but Miranda is not moving. She knows that it’s pointless to run. The sound gradually expands to fill the landscape, coming from all sides, surrounding us and then we see them, figures of all shapes and sizes emerging from the shadows, changing all the time, growing and shrinking, materialising and melting into the darkness all around us. There are so many of them. It is overwhelming. They cluster around us and press their faces into ours – repulsive, terrifying, seductive. A tiny spikey one with a slug for a tongue insists that I am no better than she is, deep down. A bloated giant bawls at me over and over again to listen to him. A wraith wrings her hands and grizzles that there was nothing she could have done. There is so much bitterness and recrimination. It bludgeons, seeps and injects itself into my innards like gas gangrene – the things they’ve been through, what they’ve suffered, and what suffering they’ve inflicted on others. For that is the difference here. The spirits that have collected here have done terrible things. They are not merely victims. These really are the monsters. I look about me, try to tell them what I think of them but the wind takes my words away. A groaning throbbing lament drowns out everything that I might have wanted to say. This heaving mass of the unforgivable before us is past all understanding.

It seems like hours we stand there as they heave and jostle around us. The noise and the stink are terrible. It is the sound of all the agony and the degradation and the abuse they’ve endured and caused and I can feel it entering me, probing, trying to find something in me to latch onto. They want to know if perhaps I could have done those things too, or if I’d have them done to me perhaps? Or would I like to watch? because that can be arranged. It’s intolerable and meaningless. All their stories are long lost. What they did has no explanation any more. They try to explain their actions away nonetheless.
I curl up and keep my eyes shut – try to keep it all out.  
Everybody has it in them they say. Every man has his price. What would I be prepared to do, hmm? If I was desperate enough? Hmm?
Who is to judge them? Who can blame them? After all, it had to be done. Everybody else was doing it. It was legitimate trade. They were just doing their jobs. They did what they did for the purity of the race, to the glory of God, for King and country, for vengeance, for the family’s honour, for the greater good.
And didn’t they deserve it after all, those scum, because they stood in the way of progress, because they were different, because they were weak, because they didn’t matter, because they happened to be there and they were alone and nobody to protect them.
It was the final solution. They were asking for it. They probably enjoyed it.
Wogs, Queers, Bitches, Pakkies, Kikes, Commies...
And on and on and on...
Gradually their jeers and harangues begin to wash over me, to have less and less effect. There’s no connection. It’s just noise.
I look down at Miranda, her hopeless eyes fixed on them and I sit down with her.
We sit and observe them, these horrors, impassively and I pull her toward me. She looks at me and doesn’t understand but realises that she is safe with me. We sit and look at them and they begin to seem small and ridiculous. The wind and the noise die down and just a frustrated grumbling and whining follows. I can sense them milling about, knowing there’s nothing they can do and yet unwilling to give up. Finally, as morning comes the last of them discretely disappear and Miranda and I pack up and move on as quickly as we can. She looks up at me with a new kind of expression, almost like she admires me or something. ‘We need to get you home’ she says.
The path takes us up to the top of the valley by late afternoon and there before us lies a broad rolling landscape of meadows and woodlands and lakes. It looks like heaven. 
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