Hemispheres (24 page)

I waited.

War is war, he said. People get shot. That doesn’t really interest me.

He stopped, exhaling pensively.

What does interest me is people. Human connection. It’s what knits us together into the fabric of a society. It’s what stops
us blowing away in the wind, just like fen peat. The army’s like that – like a big family. You’re connected to these people
whether you like them or not. You rely on them and they rely on you.

Fraser didn’t look at me, carried on gazing out of the windscreen at the distant fen. Ghosts of polarized light swam across
the toughened glass.

That’s what your dad didn’t get, he said. In the final analysis, he was just a fucking waster.

He turned to look at me.

You look shocked, he said. But you need to know the truth. When you’re a little kid your parents seem as permanent as the
landscape. Solid, like hills. But then you’re a man, and you find out that they’re only people. And sometimes you find out
that they’re worthless. Those hills are light as a feather. One breath of wind and they’re gone.

He gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles, smudged with faint freckles.

Yan always had something faulty inside him, like a broken spring. Don’t get me wrong, he was great company – most people thought
he was the life and soul, men and women alike. But I know the type. People got close to him but they didn’t touch him inside,
and when he got bored he’d cut them loose and ship out.

He sniffed, and pinched his nostrils closed.

The type of man who’d sit at your table and drink your beer and laugh at your jokes, and then help himself to a little of
whatever it was he wanted, without a care.

Your wife, I said. Helena –

He swivelled quickly and his thumb was pressed against my carotid and his eyes were cold and dark like collapsed stars. I
shivered, felt my blood beating against his hand.

You don’t talk about her, he said. If you talk about her again I’ll cut your fucking throat.

Okay. I won’t.

Good lad.

He relaxed his grip and gazed determinedly out of the windscreen. I looked at the side of his face, framed in delicate sunlight.

You asked about Longdon, he said. I don’t know any more than Barlow, not for sure. He disappeared, two others with him. Never
seen again. But if I had to guess I’d say that he got bored, and he cut the threads, and he pissed off.

He smiled, ruefully.

People like Yan, he said. They don’t see it. The ties that bind you to other people, that sometimes feel like shackles and
halters and trusses constricting the life out of you. Those ties are also your veins and arteries, your life blood. If you
cut them, what are you?

There was a long silence. I pushed my hands under the backs of my thighs, warming my fingers between car seat and denim. Looked
up into the blue of space, felt the planet buck and lurch beneath me like a scarce broken horse plunging wildly through the
universe.

But what happened to them? I said. I still don’t know.

He turned to me. That rueful smile again, and his watery blue eyes. He rapped his fingertips against the steering wheel.

Go home Danny, he said. Go home, wherever that is. You seem like a nice enough lad. Too nice to be wasting your energy on
Yan Thomas. He’s damaged goods, take it from me. Even if he’s alive, he’s in no hurry to find you, is he? Your position’s
simple. Go home and get on with your life. Let him go.

I looked out of the windscreen across the fen and felt tired and dirty and a long ways from home. Weightless tears rose to
the corners of my eyes and I tried to blink them back. I could hear metallic taps and crunches as Paul pottered his way back
towards us among the dying cars. And then the heron rose from the fen like a huge soft smut from a fire, great rounded wings
billowing up above the reedbeds and into a painless blue sky. And with it a huge weight was lifted from the world. The bird
flapped lazily and drifted away on the wind, in search of another island of water among the arable prairies.

Becalmed here with no wind and pitiless sun and the frozen surface of the sea. All the tiny ripples and dreams which are the
ocean’s constant conversation with itself – all them little tics and furrows and wrinkles – have solidified and come to a
stop like a kettle furring itself dry.

Islands and mountains float above the horizon in dizzy blueness. Reality and mirage are the same thing. There is South Georgia
out to the east with Bird Island at its tip, but when the sun licks the black chain of mountains I remember that South Georgia
is a lifetime away. The mountains sizzle and melt into the low blue cones of a drifting volcano.

Eyes and mouth crusting up with salt, more than a day now since we had fresh water and my tongue a wrinkled lump inside my
own head. Lips like blistered wood, eyeballs pickled by the constant flare of light. They wept liquid for days but now they’re
dry, as if the outer layers have shed. Keep them downcast beneath the wide-brimmed hat but the glare reflects up and slides
a flat-bladed knife inside my skull.

If I were a sailor I’d whistle for a wind, says Joe Fish. But I’m too dry. Can’t make a sound.

He blows a few dry notes and grimaces.

Is that an island on the horizon?

I squint into the sun and the blade slides further, the tip of it between my frontal lobes. Pull the hat down and cower in
its shade. But there is an island, and it’s getting closer as we trudge across the solidified surface
of the sea. Why the hell did we need the boat before when we’re making such good headway on foot?

Fabián, how far is it to La Paz? asks Horse Boy gruffly, with the tone of an impatient child.

Once we are on the other side of this, says Fabián, it is still some way. But at least there are roads. We can try to find
a lift.

La Paz. Landlocked capital of a landlocked country. I shake my head and remember straight. This is no sea but a vast salt
pan. There was a lake here once, but sun and time have congealed the water into a vast flow of sparkling white mineral, shimmering
to the horizon where the blue peaks of the Andes hover. Rippling geometric patterns etched into the surface of the salt, running
away into painful distance.

When I look back I can no longer see Barriga’s van. For a long time her carcass was still visible back there where she boiled
dry and died, a still black point in waves of salt, the origin of our slow hoofprints. I think about the boneshaking months
coming out of Chile and into the south of Bolivia, and I’m almost glad to see the back of her.

You tell each other stories, about quenched thirst, about swimming in highland rivers. There’s me and Kate in York on a chilly
spring morning, walking on the old city wall behind the Minster and stopping every few paces to tongue each other silly. And
there’s this garden down below, running from the back of an elegant Georgian house. A grace and favour pad for some cathedral
bigwig, I’d hazard a guess. An expanse of clipped lawn, turquoise like a submerged forest of seaweed, the surfaces shimmering
with dew, with a billion tiny globes of moisture. You could dive into that lawn and submerge beneath the wet grass. You could
drink those lucid worlds of dew.

Now I can’t forgive myself. I saw the jewelled lawn but I didn’t dive in. We continue plodding towards the cone of the island.

Okay, says Horse Boy. When I was seventeen or eighteen.

His Wiltshire burr is growing stronger. He pauses to gather enough moisture in his mouth.

We drove up to the Ridgeway. One of them late summer evenings when you think it’s never going to get dark. A harvest moon,
massive and orange and hanging like a pregnant belly and the sky blue like smoke. You could see the White Horse on Uffington
Hill. Looks like its leaping, that horse, from one hill to the next. Made out of chalk, dry as a bone and thousands of years
old.

He licks his lips and the sun bludgeons us about heads and shoulders. I look at Dave, huge patches of sweat burgeoning on
his back and under his arms, dried to a white crust around the edges. Dry as a bone.

We went down to Wayland’s Smithy. It’s a prehistoric tomb, right, just off the path in a grove of trees. This long low mound
of grass and at one end there’s a facade of big flat standing stones like a row of teeth. We looked out across the fields,
acres of wheat moving in the wind. And I thought, this is how it’s been, for five thousand years. The quiet tomb and the trees
whispering and the wheatfield stirring. And then I thought, maybe five thousand years ent really that long at all. Just the
blink of an eye.

We march on across the salt pan, the dead sound of our feet mopped up by the soft mineral. Tramp tramp. Horse Boy looks like
he’s lost the plot. Tilts his head from side to side, as if considering.

We got off our tits down there, brew and cans and blow. Me and Emma ended up doing it. I’d been wanting to for so long that
it was over in a few minutes.

Shot his bolt, roars Joe. You should wait for the starting pistol son. Next time you give her my number.

Horse Boy winces, but continues.

And then we passed out too. I woke up in the middle of the night and I’ve never been so thirsty. That’s what made me think
of it just now.

Tramp tramp tramp. I stumble and almost drop but Joe grabs me under the armpits and sets me upright. The island isn’t far
now, shimmering in unbearable light.

In the end I got to sleep again, says Horse Boy. And I heard this drumming sound. Like the hardest rain bouncing from the
pavements.
Apples, hard and bitter, raining from the trees and buffeting the ground. Hooves, coming across the downland. The white horse,
careering across the sky, just cresting the hills. I could see froth brimming up out of its mouth, and running down its neck
and sides. The front hooves were over me like crescent moons and the spit was dripping from them, down into my mouth while
I was asleep. It was like opium, like sherbet. White and sweet and bitter and tender. And I weren’t thirsty any more. He was
in the field with me and I was standing up, holding out my hand. He nuzzled it and it became a green apple, huge, like a cooking
apple. I held it out and he bit into it with these clean white teeth.

You forgot to tell us about the magic mushrooms, Joe guffaws. Or was it an acid trip son? Can you conjure up a white horse
out here?

I don’t think so, says Horse Boy.

We reach the island and the day’s long-drawn-out scream of heat is dwindling into a cold Altiplano night. It’s a shallow conical
hill of rock, rising only a few metres above the salt pan and studded with bulbous cacti clinging to crevices in the rock.
Fabián takes out a machete and butchers one and a milky fluid begins to drip out.

It’ll be salty, says Horse Boy, don’t get excited. Can’t be no fresh water round here.

Perhaps the cacti drink rainwater, says Fabián. There’s only one way to find out.

He raises a slice of cactus flesh and squeezes it so that the milk dribbles into his open mouth. Stands like this for some
time before closing his mouth and gasping.

It may not have dripped from the hooves of a white horse, he says, but it is fresh.

So we take turns to guzzle milk from the cactus flesh, ignoring the spines which puncture our skin. It’s bitter but refreshing,
like a thin coconut milk. And when we’re sated we sit, shivering as the temperature plunges. There’s a thin crust of salt
across our skins, stinging the sore
corners of mouths and eyes, and our boots and trousers are white. The stars come out like clumsy fists and beneath them the
salt pans glitter.

Joe wets his lips and whistles a few bars and I lift my voice and join in with the words.
We’re a bunch of fucking animals, we’re the airborne infantry.

When I dropped off that roof, says Horse Boy. If I’d fallen a few inches to one side, I’d have caved my skull in. I’d never
have come back.

Bollocks, says Joe. And I’ll tell you for why.

Go on then.

Because it’s all predetermined boy. From the day the universe set rolling. There is no such thing as
what if
. You were always going to come back.

I reckon, I say. There’s a parallel universe where Joe is a right looker and he has the gift of the blarney and has the ladies
eating out of his pants.

Horse Boy laughs. Now you’re stretching credibility Yan.

When I started walking, that day at Mount Longdon, I say, I thought I’d walk down the hill, into the belly of the ocean. Look
where I’ve ended up.

So why did you start? says Horse Boy.

Dunno. Why did you come after me?

Dunno.

Horse Boy laughs and shakes his head, hunkers back down on his rock. Night thickens.

Tongues of rock begin to appear among the salt flats, and we realize we’re nearing the far side. The sun swamps the entire
sky in flood-waters of sulphurous heat, and dark bare hills begin to loom. We scramble up and over a low ridge encrusted with
garish minerals, and look down on a lake of blood, many miles across and encircled by pure snow. Bare rounded hills float
behind it, hazy in the heat. We scramble down closer to the shoreline and find, not virgin snow, but a white crystalline precipitate.
Fabián crumbles some of the mineral and dabs it with his tongue.

Borax, he says. And the lake is blooming not with blood but with red algae. This is Lago Colorado.

There are thousands of flamingos feeding across the lake. Chilean flamingos, a vivid salmon pink, legs crooked at improbable
angles as they wade, their dark bills inverted, sweeping through the water to strain out algae.

The algae give them the colour, says Fabián. Otherwise they turn white.

More birds stream in from the sky, legs trailing, and the blood-red lake is alive with movement and chatter. We watch the
garish pink birds skimming the algae out of the water, squabbling and flirting, sleeping with one foot tucked up and bill
smuggled among the back feathers. They are at home here, on a lake of rusty blood, lying in a bed of congealed minerals and
salts, high above sea level in the Altiplano of Bolivia.