Divinity Road (2 page)

Who?

His eyes are still clamped shut, all the better to concentrate on the pictures in his head. One moment he’s outside the front of the house, peering up at the rust-coloured brickwork, flaking sash windows. The next he’s catching flashes of other rooms in the house – higgledy-piggledy bedrooms, jumbled lounge, mucky basement art studio – but it’s all still unfocused, simultaneously familiar yet distant.

He’s reached an impasse, so he backtracks, returns to the airplane. The terror of the descent is still vivid, but now he remembers other details. The dry, powdery roll and square of rubbery cheese in his meal tray; a picture of buffalo in the glossy in-flight magazine; the sleek, mixed-race stewardess refilling his coffee cup; the churning of his post-meal indigestion.

And beyond that, a crowded air terminal, a harassed stranger in tailored pinstripes scanning the flashing departure board while shouting into a mobile phone, a stoical woman with braided hair and African robes clutching her bawling infant to her waist. A long queue at passport control, the apathetic immigration guard, then the security officer, hare-lipped and uniformed. And before that, a snatched beer in the airport bar with...

Who?

With his friend: tall, rangy, black-skinned, smiling sadly. Embracing him as they say their goodbyes. A memory tinged with pain, a sorrow shared. With a final remark, they separate and he makes his way through security to the departure lounge.

What’s his name?

Retracing footsteps, fleeting images of the preceding days, sunny and colourful, music and beer and children and laughter. But melancholic, too. An image of a church. A funeral. Women crying, men looking sombre. A coffin. Child-sized.

Where? Who? What? Pull yourself together. Come on, Greg. Greg? And then, from frustration to enlightenment, it’s as if someone has recopied one of the lost files to his damaged hard drive. He opens his eyes wide, blinks, dazzled by the morning sun.

He’s Greg. She’s Nuala. They’re Sammy and Beth. The house is in Oxford, England.

The airport is Johannesburg. His friend is Farai. The funeral was for Farai’s son, Robbie.

Now the funeral is over. He’s on his way home.

An explosion. The plane falls out of the sky. He crashes.

Exhausted by mental labour, slapped by a wave of dizzy nausea, he closes his eyes, yields to his weakness, sinks into the relief of a blackout.

***

This time he’s stronger, though the pounding in his temple remains unabated. The tenderness in his abdomen seems, if anything, to have worsened. Some hours have passed. His intuition tells him that it’s mid morning. He wants to open his eyes but in his present position, lying flat on his back, the light’s too bright. I can’t put it off any longer, he thinks. It’s time to move. His right arm is bent into an ‘L’, the hand resting on his stomach. The left one lies straight by his side, the fingers brushing his thigh. Cautiously, warily, he flexes his fingers, rubs thumb and forefinger together, experiments with a fist.

Then, with great deliberation, he allows his right hand to glide up from his belly to his chest, past his chin and cheek.

He approaches his temple gingerly, his fingers probing gently, expecting the worst, is relieved to find nothing more serious than cuts, bruises and dried blood.

I need my eyes, he thinks. There’s no question of opening them while facing the sunlight. Even with his eyes closed there’s a burning orange behind his eyelids. I’ll roll over, he thinks. He braces himself, bends his knees slightly, brings his right arm across his torso and turns his body so that he is in a kind of rudimentary recovery position, resting on his side with his face sheltered in the crook of his arm. The ribs on his right side have taken a beating and he shifts to accommodate the pain. Finally he finds a less awkward position and allows himself a few minutes’ respite.

Despite the stabbing in his ribs and the all-over aching, he’s aware that his last manoeuvres would not have been possible had anything been broken, and for that he feels some sense of comfort.

For a split second his mind seeks to grasp the magnitude of what he has experienced – and survived – but the implications are too overwhelming, so he concentrates on getting his eyes, now sheltered by his arm, to adjust to the light. He forces his eyelids open, blinks, closes them again. Waits. Repeats the process, each time keeping them open for a few seconds longer. Little by little his vision returns until finally he can look steadily at the ground, focuses on the sandy grains of soil, the two off-white pebbles.

He becomes aware again of his bladder’s irate call. He still feels that the challenge of standing up is too great, so he shifts his body so that he’s on his side, facing downwards, the ground sloping away. He fumbles with his trousers, pulls out his penis and relieves himself from his horizontal position. He watches the liquid snake in rivulets through the dusty soil.

So far, so good. Piece of cake. Time for a look round.

He accepts this suggestion quite breezily, hasn’t made the connection between the atrocity that’s put him there and the scene he might expect to find when he surveys his surroundings.

So when he shifts his head so that he’s no longer looking straight down, but is now peering ahead, at ground level, he’s completely unprepared for the upper torso, severed at the waist, that’s lying six or seven feet away, blocking his line of vision. He blinks, freezes, appalled but unable to drag his eyes away.

He stares for some seconds at the butchered corpse, the spray of blonde hair, the cream silk blouse, the mush of shredded flesh and severed bone. The head’s turned away so he cannot see her features, the expression on her death mask.

New waves of shock roll in. As he levers himself up onto his knees and slowly gets to his feet, an observer could easily mistake his dazed, robotic manner for casual and leisurely. Then he sways, catches himself, and the illusion is broken. In his stained indigo shirt and baggy, bloodied trousers, he looks vulnerable, beaten.

He turns full circle, surveying his environment. The scene is so brutal, the carnage so overwhelming, that at first his eyes edit out the horror, take in only the physical layout of the location.

He seems to be standing at the foot of a steep hill dotted with rocks and bushes, a version of the kopjes he knows so well from his southern African past.

The kopje’s behind him, in front the landscape slopes gently down for several hundred yards to a broad, arid plain speckled with thorny trees, termite mounds, scrawny shrubs. Beyond that, in the faraway distance, a range of hills rises up through the blue-grey haze. He concentrates, peering, scans the flat terrain for evidence of human activity – a village, a cattle kraal, even a temporary dwelling – but sees nothing but untouched nature. He feels a chill of loneliness.

A chill of loneliness, but nothing more. Artist though he may be, today he cannot weigh up the sights that meet his eyes in terms of form and shape, tone and perspective, doesn’t wonder where the optimum vantage point would be to capture the panorama, the best time of day. Today he will not visualise his palette, the burnt sienna and yellow ochre, the cobalt blue and viridian green. For the moment all he sees is his own isolation.

And then, almost as if the filter has been removed from his vision, he becomes aware for the first time of the full extent of the devastation that surrounds him. For a few fleeting seconds he takes it all in – the pockmarked terrain, the strewn aircraft wreckage, the debris, the bodies – and he stands there, tall but broken, and tries to make sense of the mayhem. Simultaneously, like a tripped fusebox flipped back into action, his other senses come alive, and he’s aware at once of the stale sour taste in his mouth, the sticky grime of his fingers, the buzzing whine of blowflies, the reek of aviation fuel mingled with the sickly stench of death.

But it’s too much, a sensory overload. He rubs his eyes with his grubby hands, teeters, weighed down by the desolation around him, weakened by the battering he has received, by dehydration, by the rising temperature.

Unable to take in the totality of the destruction, he seeks escape in detail. Dropping his gaze, he registers three or four playing cards strewn at his feet – a queen of hearts, a two of diamonds, the others face down. He looks up, spots a stunted tree to his left and staggers towards it. He keeps his eyes to the ground, circles the twisted body of a young boy, a black leather handbag, a mangled camera, a tan lace-up shoe.

He’s sweating, his head’s pounding, and when he spots a floppy green hat, the kind worn by Afrikaaner farmers and safari guides, he picks it up, dusts it off on his trouser leg, then pulls it down over his head. When he reaches the tree he squats down in the shade, allows himself a few moments to gather his strength.

A painting looms up in his mind, skeletons attacking human beings, a scene of pillage and massacre, but he’s still dazed and it takes him some minutes to identify it, the ghoulish vision of Bruegel’s
Triumph of Death
. He seems to remember a poster on his wall as a child, hours spent gazing at the painting’s macabre detail. And he realises why he’s thought of it now, not because the scene around him today reminds him of the painting itself, more that his present environment brings to mind how he would imagine Bruegel’s scene would look the next day, when the murdering, marauding skeletons have departed. Yes, what he’s surrounded by, he realises, is
Triumph of Death: The Day After
.

The flies are bothering him, circling his head in endless aborted landing patterns. He swats away at them feebly. He’s aware of his tremendous thirst, an overpowering need to find water. He looks around. In a semi-circle sweep of twenty yards in front of him he can see three, four, five bodies, an empty blue canvas holdall, a pair of gleaming trainers, a meal tray, a pair of headphones, several cartons of cigarettes, a row of seating, a stuffed giraffe, two glossy magazines, an arm, severed at the shoulder. There’s a bumbag, three or four blankets, a jagged piece of fuselage, a walking stick and a gutted suitcase, its contents spewed out – a scattering of underwear, a bathbag, leaking toiletries, an alarm clock, toothpaste, paperbacks, the front casing of a busted radio.

Spotting a plastic water bottle, he staggers back up on his feet. He stumbles over to the bottle and picks it up. It’s almost empty but he sucks greedily at the inch or so of tepid liquid. He needs more and so, driven by dehydration, he looks around for a likely source. It’s the first time that survival instincts and rational thought have joined forces.

He looks around at the crash site again, awed by the scale of the devastation, the amount of debris, of carnage. He tries to recall what kind of aircraft it had been, its size, but his memory is hazy. He always experiences flying as a blur, like being sucked through a tube at speed. Had the plane been full? He remembers seeing a few empty seats, but the scene around him suggests that a vast army of travellers have descended from the skies, that the plane had been immense.

He takes in the three principal sections of the aircraft scattered down the slope at roughly ten, twelve and two o’clock, the first about twenty yards away, the other two slightly more distant. He decides to investigate these first, heads for the closest, zigzagging his way between body parts and baggage.

It’s part of the main section of the fuselage, a great tubed segment containing two rows of seats, overhead lockers, flooring. Four corpses are still strapped in, surrounded by a plague of whining flies. The first, a middle-aged black man with powder-snow hair, looks calm and serene, eyes closed, his head pressed back against the headrest as if catching forty winks. Next to him, two white schoolboys sit primly in blazers, shorts and long socks, their heads twisted forward grotesquely. Behind, the next two seats are empty, the third occupied by a silent, staring Asian man dressed in sober suit, white shirt and charcoal tie.

Greg approaches with caution, as if frightened of waking his fellow travellers. When he spies the water bottle tucked into the mesh netting pocket at the back of one of the schoolboys’ seats, he reaches down gingerly, extracts it, twists off the cap. It’s a half-litre bottle, almost full, and he drinks it off in one go. To escape the swarm of flies, he retreats, then heads towards the second section of fuselage.

On the way over, he passes a scuffed leather satchel, a woman’s padded jacket, pens, lipsticks, a CD of gospel music. He skirts several bodies, each time rousing swarms of darting flies. Everywhere, there is smashed glass, the shards catching in the sun, the ground a bed of diamond lights. He catches the sour smell of whisky, the pungent scent of perfume, smashed duty-free stock, he supposes. But more dominant, always, is the stench of blood, of flayed flesh, of human waste.

This time the wreckage seems to originate from that section of the plane where the flight attendants prepare meals and where the toilets are situated. As he approaches he sees with relief that there are no bodies, though the reek of excrement is powerful.

Next to the segment of the plane lies a twisted metal trolley, the kind used to bring around the drinks, and one of those sleek, stainless-steel compartmentalised containers used for storing the hot food. Among the array of shattered glass, broken plastic cutlery, empty juice cartons and smashed trays, he sees a couple of bottles of water, which he extricates, and some small sachets of roasted nuts.

He examines the third section hastily. Despite quenching his thirst, he’s still weak and giddy, nauseous from his physical and mental ordeal. On the way, weaving between luggage and unidentifiable wreckage, he has to circumnavigate more corpses, more body parts.