Out of Time (17 page)

The girl skipping in the night, the image of perilous innocence, a child hidden from the townspeople. Joe now understood the significance of what he had seen in his headlong flight and his heart went out in pity. He prayed fervently that she was still alive.

The pieces of the puzzle were coming together. Joe with his youthful looks had been a maverick, a threat appearing out of nowhere.

‘Why do they want to kill you? Out here in the wilderness you pose no challenge.’

‘But we do. They are attached to us as surely as if we were calling them. I hear their longing.’

‘Longing to kill you?’

‘People often kill the thing they love.’

Joe had heard this said before, back in his world, but now it seemed to him obscene. He could not imagine a situation in which he was even remotely involved with harming Kathryn, never mind being in any way responsible for her death.

‘It’s a universal truth. They love us because we are their youth, we hold ideals they once had, a purpose in life they have lost. They hate us savagely because they can never quite erase the memory of what they once held sacred.’

‘Which is?’

‘A belief in the dignity of man, his right to bring up his own children, live in a decent society, the right if you like of happiness, as it used to be, before we lost our innocence.’

‘Innocence?’

‘We did not know that so much evil was stalking us; that people who had lived in perfect harmony could kill one another. Murderous instinct, lust for power, ruthlessness, all these must have always been part of our society, but hidden. It needed the right circumstances for man’s inhumanity to emerge.’

‘You wouldn’t think it surprising if you lived in my world,’ Joe thought. Evil was an accepted fact, evident in every aspect of his civilisation. Wars, unrest and murder were everyday occurrences. The greed for money and for power was relentless. Indeed, it was considered normal, even desirable. People died as a result, thousands, millions. Against such numbers, the demise of these young people and indeed of himself was insignificant, a mere statistic in the vast panorama of the dead.

‘That’s how the world has always been,’ he said.

‘Not for us.’

‘Cast out of Paradise,’ Joe murmured

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a myth we have about a man and a woman who had the chance to live without evil, who sacrificed their innocence for knowledge.’

He explained briefly.

‘Yes,’ Otto said. ‘We’ve eaten the apple and it tastes bitter.’

As he said this Otto’s face was transformed. Was this an illusion, a trick of the eye? The old, ancient Otto was looking at him again, his face wrinkled and grey, his eyes heavy with a world of experience.

‘You’ve all taken the drug, haven’t you?’ Joe said, but he was looking straight at Kathryn. ‘You’re not really young people at all.’

‘We’re as young as the day we took it,’ she said, and there was defiance in her voice. ‘That’s the magic of it. We don’t change.’

‘But Otto..’

‘Otto’s different,’ Randolph cut in, ‘Otto is the grandson of a sage.’

But Joe was not interested in Otto. He was thinking only of Kathryn, trying to absorb knowledge he had probably known in the innermost recesses of his mind but had rejected. And rejected still. It was impossible to think of Kathryn as old as Otto now looked, his beautiful, graceful love. But incredulity was swiftly replaced by bitterness. This was the great secret they had concealed, which Kathryn had entreated him to ignore, this was the essence of their existence, the reason for their enigmatic silences which had haunted and puzzled him. No wonder that an unfathomable abyss had lain, no matter how intimate or passionate their love, between them. She was not who he had thought she was. She had deceived him.

He felt as though the earth had opened and he was slipping into its dark core.

‘I have to go away for a while,’ he said.

No one tried to prevent him and he left the room. They looked after him, resigned and sad.

Kathryn did not come to him that night and the next day he left.

*

The dungeon door is thrown open and a new girl flung down the steps. Her name is Margaret. She has only just been caught, a girl of twelve with fair hair and dark brown eyes. Very pretty but the other children know this will not last. She will soon look like all the rest, ghosts that once were children.

Margaret’s parents have been accused of plotting to overthrow the chief, Helmuth, and she is certain they have been killed. But, she says, there are others who want to topple the regime. She knows some of them. But the state is vigilant. People live in terror. Neighbours inform on neighbours, there are spies everywhere.

Susie and Ian tell Margaret that they are devising ways of escape though so far no opportunity has presented itself. And Susie, who has been imprisoned longer than her friends, is growing weak. She urgently needs help.

For once luck is with them.

One of Margaret’s relatives is occasionally on guard duty. She is too frightened to be an outright rebel but is prepared to smuggle extra food and clothing for the children when she can. This she whispers to Margaret as she is brought in. Her hope is that she is given the duty of fetching the children for work in the mornings or when they return at night. That way, she can leave food behind with less danger of discovery.

The children plan and plot their escape. Perhaps through Margaret’s relative they may be able to make contact with the undrugged children who are still at liberty.

*

Under Otto’s watchful eye Joe took essential supplies and stuffed them into a rucksack, enough to last him the long walk to the cave.

‘Are you intending to come back?’ Otto asked.

‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier?’ Joe countered.

‘There’s a right time and place for everything.’

Otto’s usual gnomic reply. Joe slammed out.

Dawn was breaking as he trekked through the woods, oblivious to the rising mist, to the sun tipped leaves, to the sky embracing the growing light. He made for the river and walked along its bank, spent one night in the open, another in his old bivouac, sadly reduced by time and weather. By midday he was standing approximately opposite the cliff that contained his cave. All markers to it had vanished and he despaired of finding it. One or two climbs up the rock face brought nothing but weariness and frustration, adding to the warring emotions threatening to explode inside his head. He desperately needed, for reasons he could not explain, to be back in that dark womb in which he had learned to survive, through will power, through the insistent demands of life - he knew not what - independent and free. Perhaps the cave’s healing powers would work their magic again; or so he hoped.

It was almost dark when, torn and bleeding, he found himself astonishingly on his platform. The tree had grown, the thrush still happily making it its home. The water, after the heavy snows, ran more fiercely from the rock face but inside the cave nothing had changed. He crawled into it with a sense of release and collapsed on his old bracken bedding, dried out and pricking against his skin, but his own, familiar nesting place. He lit the lamp he had brought and in its small encircling light crept apprehensively to the back to find, to his immeasurable relief, his possessions still intact, his watch, a talisman from a life left behind, still going, impassively informing him that almost a year had passed since he had been expelled from home. He thought ruefully of the hapless and innocent boy he had then been, a schoolboy, callow, uncaring, with scant regard for life outside immediate preoccupations. He marvelled now at what these had been, school, friends, television, video games, music, alcohol, drugs. They were more than a lifetime away, they belonged to another world both metaphorical and actual. He wanted no more to do with them.

He sat throughout the night, as he had so often done, watching the play of ghostly light on the land, listening to the night noises of birds and small prey, their cries of distress echoing his own intense confusion.

Kathryn’s betrayal tasted like gall. She had lied to him by default, failed to tell him the truth. They had all failed to tell him the truth, content to let him go about his daily business in a cloud of delusion. All were guilty but none more so than Kathryn to whom he had given his great and only gift, his trust, his passion and his love.

It had never occurred to him to question her age. With hindsight this appeared naive. He had read the history and had learned that the drug conferred long life. He had found it difficult, despite the community’s assurances to the contrary, to accept this as anything other than a myth, reshaped in the telling. She had traded on that, had done nothing to disillusion him. He was not her first love, probably the successor to countless older loves going back he did not know how many years. He tried to banish images of other men who must have touched her, kissed her, loved her. He had not been exploring new territory but ploughing old furrows and he remembered now with pain how more experienced in the game of love she was, guiding him early on through the strange and intricate country of their passion. He relived every detail, every nuance, their vows of love, the joy of their consummation. He had, he thought bitterly, found the ultimate elixir, the reason for being alive; but it was all illusion, a wayward, taunting ghost. The world was dross, a tableau of mirages evaporating as you approached. Who had her lovers been? Older men, young boys like himself, ancient men who remained forever young? How great was her love for them? Did she caress them, did she use the same endearments on them as she had when she caressed him? She must have offered for their delectation her ineffably beautiful body, her soft lips, her warm, translucent skin. He pictured her nestling in someone else’s embrace, in that same house, perhaps in the same bed. It drove him to the point of madness, rage and jealousy.

He looked for the nearest object on which to wreak his vengeance. He seized the ash growing out of the sparse soil and shook it until its roots groaned. The thrush, disturbed in its nest, flew with surprised cries into the night. Joe collapsed on the ground and wept.

The confines of the small platform and the cave could no longer contain him. He hurriedly stuffed his meagre possessions into the rucksack and in the lightening dark climbed down the cliff, determined on escape, across the river, to face dangers unknown. His survival was of scant importance.

He travelled through the night, using the stars to guide him, and by early afternoon of the next day was standing on the river’s bank. He had wrapped his coins, all those months ago when they seemed to matter, in the Andrew WK page of ‘The Face’ and now he spread it out. The text, ‘The most passionate emotions are happiness, love, hate and just fucking killing,’ struck him as obscene and he tore it into small pieces and let them float away, wondering how he could have even read about so savage a philosophy. He pulled his watch out of his pocket and studied the second hand moving in its tight circle, pitilessly advancing time. The smooth, cool metal against his skin brought back painful memories he preferred to forget, his deliberately offhand acceptance of a gift valued only as a status symbol with which to impress his friends, his mother’s rebuffed withdrawal. He had rejected her love and now he was rejecting another. But Kathryn deserves it, he told himself fiercely, and with pent-up rage hurled the watch into the fast flowing current. It sank out of sight to be carried away to the distant ocean. Joe felt his past life go with it.

He stripped and, holding his possessions aloft, prepared to swim across the turbulent water.

SUSIE’S mother and father are growing weaker. One day the guards order them out of their cells and herd them into a yard crowded with other prisoners. Susie’s parents are happy to see each other even though they are scarcely recognisable, so devastating have been the privations to which they have been subjected. But they succeed in smiling and in touching before they are shackled and tied to a cart and with other prisoners driven like donkeys out of the town. Susie’s parents succeed in staying close to one another and that gives them strength but others are beaten as they falter. Dogs harass them. Two die on the way, their bodies thrown unceremoniously into bushes for animals to devour. The prisoners are dragged along all that day, and the next and the next until they come to a hillside that, in other circumstances, they would have regarded as beautiful. Now all they can see is a dark door leading into a tunnel into which they are forced, pick axes pushed into their hands.

They are in the salt mines, the grave of countless others.

*

The black greedy mouth of the mine stands open, a scar in the side of a green valley whose smooth grass is an invitation to roll down as we did as children, how long ago, tumbling round and round until the world was spinning and you couldn’t stand for dizziness; or cart-wheeling until you dropped, oh so many years back when the world and I were still innocent and young.

We set out five days ago, Randolph and I, to the salt mine, a hard and hazardous journey on a track long out of use, blocked by storm-felled trees, rocks, stones and heady new growth. We’re remaking the track as we go along, ready for the return journey and its heavy load; the return journey? I can’t think an hour ahead, not a day, not a night, I lie on the cart, helpless, impotent. Randolph is labouring alone, says he doesn’t mind, but I mind, I can’t move, my mind is numb, my body frozen, seized up like a dead thing. I’m unable to lift the smallest stone, there is too heavy a load in my heart. Joe has gone, his going sudden, our life torn apart in as long as it takes to say ten words, in a moment of time faster than a darting lizard’s tongue. One minute he was there, my love, my life, and the next he was gone.