Sacred Country (39 page)

‘Heaven knows!’ said Fay May. ‘’Less it’s only from kind hearts.’

There was a chair and a microphone in the window of Fay May’s Lounge. Walter had noticed these. Bentwater picked up a guitar and sat down on the chair. He coughed a bit, tuning the guitar. The talking and laughing in the Lounge faded like sound turned down. The line of drinkers at the bar refilled their glasses and sat still. Walter noticed that on a little table near Bentwater’s chair was a sweet jar half-filled with dollar bills. A sign propped against the jar read:
SINGERS SING FOR TIPS. THANK YOU
.

Bentwater had one long pointed fingernail. He used it like a plectrum.

‘He picks good, whatever you say,’ said Fay May.

He had a high, nasal kind of voice. He started with a Louvin Brothers’ number, ‘If Only I Could Win Your Love’. Beyond him and beyond the window, the afternoon was fading to blue. Then he introduced a song he’d written himself. It was an old sad ditty about the poor of the fields and hills, the kind of song
that used to squeeze tears out of Pete Loomis’s meandering eyes. The Lounge fell quiet. Bentwater sang on:

Ask me where my hope and fortune lie;
They lie below me in the rushy river
And above me in the bright blue sky …

Walter went home to 767 and told Audrey and Bill C. that he’d met Bentwater Bliss. In the evenings, Audrey and Bill C. sat in front of a wood-burning stove playing Pinochle.

‘Oh my!’ said Audrey. ‘Tell ’im, Bill C.’

‘That one,’ said Bill C. ‘He’s been around a long time.’

The Pikes had been playing Pinochle together for so many years, they could play and carry on a conversation at the same time. Bill C. told Walter that Bentwater had come to Nashville in 1959 in a stolen meat truck. He resprayed the truck purple and parked it by the river and lived in it for a year. Then he had to sell the truck just to live and he slept in a pile of sand. They said: ‘He paid his dues all right – and how – and now they have him on the Opry ’bout three times a year. He had a good voice when he came here but just gently he drank it to almost nothing.’

‘Don’t hang around with Bentwater, Walter,’ said Audrey. ‘He’ll wind you up drinking.’

‘Well,’ said Walter. ‘He said he’d introduce me to some people.’

‘That’s true, Bill C., isn’t it?’ said Audrey. ‘He knows just about everyone on Music Row.’

‘He
knows
’em,’ said Bill C., ‘but that don’t help him none. They know he ain’t reliable. They know he’s reliable as the wind.’

Walter went to his room and sat down at his table in front of the window. It was pitch black. He couldn’t see the silhouette of the shade trees. It felt so quiet, he thought it might be starting to snow.

He remembered his afternoon. He and Bentwater had walked down Lower Broad past the bars and the clothes stores and the pawnshops to the river and watched a riverboat full of tourists dock below them.

Bentwater had said: ‘The founders of Nashville came in two parties. One came overland and the other came hundreds of miles up the Cumberland River, all the whole way pushing against the current. And that’s how it is in the music business, Walter. Every man starting out’s got the current against him and what that current is, is all the people who made it already who either want to keep ya out or else steal your songs or do you down somehow.’

‘I knew it wasn’t going to be easy,’ said Walter.

‘Not only is it not easy, pal,’ said Bentwater, ‘it’s also friggin’ hard. And there’s another thing.’

Walter could smell salt coming off the river, like the sea. He thought, everything here is different from how it is in other places. ‘What other thing?’ he asked.

Bentwater turned towards him and gave his arm a squeeze. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the thing is, Walter, in your case you’re an innocent, right? You don’t know First Avenue from the First Commandment, right? You’re a country boy, but from the wrong country. To summarise, you know d-e-d about it.’

Walter looked up at the sky, fading to mauve. ‘What’s d-e-d?’ he asked.

Bentwater laughed. His laugh turned quickly to a wheeze. ‘Doodle-ei-dip!’ he said. ‘Or in other words,
nothing
! See what I mean?’

Walter had felt foolish. He’d felt foolish for a good few minutes. Then he’d remembered an extraordinary thing and he’d told this to Bentwater while the riverboat tourists tramped past them and at their backs the neon signs of Lower Broadway came on.

He said: ‘Years ago, I went to a fair and had my hand read. By a woman named Cleo. She had plastic teeth. There were spangles on her spectacle frames. I got to know her quite well before she died.

‘And she told me something I never understood till now. Or rather, I misinterpreted it. She said: “I see a river.” She was positive about this. She said a river would definitely be part of my future. I always thought it was a river in England called the
Alde, but I was wrong. It’s this river. The Cumberland. And she said everything in my life would lead me here.’

Bentwater had listened attentively, then rubbed his eyes with his hands, like a man suddenly dog-tired. ‘Could be,’ he said. ‘Or could be not. I never believed I got my life written down on my hand. My life’s inside me, waiting. It ain’t noplace else.’

Walter liked this. He thought about it now in his room at 767, staring at the empty window. Bentwater Bliss was fifty-three but he could still feel his grand future in his heart, waiting its time.

I went back to see Sterns. He was in mourning for his axolotl which had died unexpectedly. The name of the axolotl had been Ken. Sterns said: ‘We shouldn’t give creatures names. It’s the name that breaks your heart.’

I told him about my guineafowl, Marguerite, taken away in a sack. He said: ‘You might have considered replacing her, or you might still consider it.’ He said: ‘Newts are good company.’

I was grateful for the dark and the sighing of the fish tanks. I sat there for a while, not speaking. I could feel my wounds aching and my head filling with a black sea.

‘Well,’ said Sterns, ‘you have something to tell me. What is it?’

I said: ‘I want to die.’

Sterns got up and walked around in the room with his face turned away. Then he sat down again. ‘Go on,’ he said.

I didn’t want to say anything more. I just wanted to sit there and not move.

Sterns waited. He is a person who can hold himself so completely still you can’t even see him breathing. He is like Ken in this respect.

I closed my eyes. I was remembering how my father’s faulty hearing used to be cured by the sound of my crying. I said aloud: ‘My whole life has been absurd.’

People say things like this to Sterns all the time. That’s what his job is – to listen to the absurdity of everything. He’s so used to it, he doesn’t even look startled. He just watches the fish, their colours and their graceful swimming, and nods his head.

He got me to speak by getting up and going out of the room, leaving me alone. The moment he’d gone, I felt lost and abandoned. I felt as if I were in a pot-hole, beyond reach of every human thing. I imagined Sterns letting himself out of the house and walking away down Ladbroke Grove. I wanted to call out to him but the feeling of being in a hole was so intense that I knew I wouldn’t be heard.

He hadn’t abandoned me. He’d just gone to the lavatory. When he returned, he sat down on the far side of the room and blew his nose on some apricot-coloured toilet paper. He said: ‘Why do you want to die?’

I told him about Pearl.

I described what happened. I said: ‘I knew she had a secret but I didn’t know what it was going to be.

‘The secret was Timmy. My brother. He took everything of mine when I was a girl. Everything. Except Pearl.’

So I told him everything I felt about Pearl, my precious thing. I told him how much I wanted to protect her from drowning. I told him that I’d always loved every single thing about her, including her snoring and her ambition to be a dental nurse. I said: ‘In the future that I’d imagined she was going to be there. As Martin I was going to love her properly and protect her from other men. And she would love me back. That’s what I’d always planned.’

‘And now?’ said Sterns.

‘There is no now,’ I said. ‘I’ll never see her again. Or her family, who were kind to me. Never. I can never see her or want to see her. Ever. Because she’s engaged to Timmy. This was her secret. Timmy’s going to go into the Church. He’ll be a
curate somewhere and Pearl will be his wife. She won’t even get to be a dental nurse. She’ll have a lost life.’

Once I’d started talking I didn’t want to stop. I kept remembering things: Montgolfier and the universe, the Flying Gumards of the coral reef, the definition of transillumination.

And I saw that these things were the highlights of my life, like my life was the room we were in and these times with Pearl were the fish tanks, illuminating the empty space. And so I said: ‘When I see it like this, it’s not surprising I did what I did.’

When I left Sterns, I found it terrible to walk in daylight. The air hurt me. I thought, I’ll go to where I can be killed by light alone.

It was a March day. You could smell breaths of spring. You’d turn a corner and suddenly get a waft of something beautiful and fierce.

I walked to the Serpentine. I found the boat attendant who had called me ‘lad’, the very same one. I said: ‘I’d like to take a boat out, please.’

The wind was buffeting everything. The trees looked startled. They would have liked to flee.

My boat wouldn’t stay still. Swans bumped by, regarding me. They seemed to have purpose and a destination in mind.

I lay down in the boat. I examined the sky. It was empty of everything but atoms of blue expanding out and up into meaningless space. Then I saw a white shape floating, miles high. I thought, it could be a seagull or it could be Livia turning and turning in her glider, looking for the one living or inert thing she hadn’t wearied of. Turning and turning and not finding it. Finding nothing.

I’ve never tired of Pearl. I would never have tired of her. Even her round writing I love and her white plimsolls. Every hair on her body. Her amazement at treefrogs. Her terror of water. Everything. And I know this – know it without knowing it: that for one person to love every last and least thing about another isn’t as rare as you might believe. What is rare is for all
that to bring the person happiness. What it brings is exhaustion.

I didn’t see this till the night of Pearl’s secret. I deluded myself that my life as Martin, holding Pearl in my arms, was going to come one day. I’d always believed it without once saying it. This was the name of my future,
Martin and Pearl, Estb. c. 1976
.

It wasn’t surprising then – not to me – that when she told me about Timmy I flung a lamp at her and then a book and the vase of cornflowers and all my invalid’s pillows. And then I flung another much more terrible thing: I flung myself.

The lamp knocked Pearl over and she fell onto the floor. Then the vase landed by her head and broke into fragments and the water spilled into her hair.

She tried to get up. She kept saying: ‘Don’t, Martin! Don’t!’ but I told her to shut up. I said I didn’t want to hear any words from her mouth ever again unless they were words of love for me.

I knelt over her. Using all my strength, I took her thin wrists in my hands and pinned them down behind her head, among the pieces of broken glass.

I could feel my two triangles of wounds tearing and starting to bleed into my bandages, but I thought, mouths are wounds worse than these, the pain of what mouths say is worse.

I opened my mouth and put it on Pearl’s. She tried to twist her head away from me but where her head moved, mine followed. My head is as heavy as stone. It’s so full of longed-for things.

I kissed her. I put my tongue into her mouth and sucked all her sweetness. I drank her. My head grew light with the sweetness of my precious thing. And I laid my pain on her breasts. My blood came through the gauze and stained her.

She was weeping. Her face was hot with sorrow. And gradually I felt it transferred to me, her burning misery. One moment I was giddy with the sweetness of Pearl and the next I was heavy and inert and on fire with shame.

I stopped kissing her. I knelt between her legs. She was sobbing. She put her hands over her face, blocking me from her view.

‘Pearl,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m
sorry
. Forgive me. You’re my precious thing …’

She got to her feet. She began putting all her belongings into her suitcase. It was night. I tried to warn her not to go anywhere but she paid no attention. All she kept saying was: ‘I am not a
thing
. I am not a
thing
. I am not a
thing
!’

Thing. Person. Beloved. What matters is that she was precious to me. It’s not only the naming of something that makes us love. It’s everything entire.

Now, she’s gone. I lie in my boat and ask the universe to fall on me and crush me in its freezing glitter. But there’s no sign of the universe. It has moved on.

My life is lived from hour to hour: an hour with Sterns, an hour out here on the water. My boat’s number is one. When my hour ends, the attendant hails me through a megaphone: ‘You in Number One, Sir, come in.’

I didn’t want summer to arrive. Or autumn. I tried to slow down time. In summer or in autumn – I didn’t know which – my brother was going to marry Pearl. I wanted to be dead by then.

I sat in the
Liberty
office doing drawings of rice fields and grazing oxen with napalm bombs about to fall on them. I put myself anonymously into every picture.

Tony was gone. Rob was in love with a girl called Electra. I told him: ‘I feel as if we’re all in a Greek tragedy.’ He said: ‘Mart, keep a hold on what you still have, hey?’

Zorba’s closed. I don’t know where everyone went, Nico and Ari and so on. I just arrived there one evening and the restaurant was gone and the front was covered with fliers for demos and rock concerts. I stood and stared at it for about ten minutes and then I went home and ate a marmalade sandwich and remembered Irene. I said to Rob the next day: ‘There’s not a lot to keep a hold on, you know.’