Wall of Days

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I don’t know what to do with him now.

I reach out to his face and try to close the eyelid. It does not move. I don’t want to be too rough with him. I place my hand on his forehead. I take his hand in mine. It is cold to the touch and the limbs don’t move. I reach into his mouth and run my fingers along his teeth.

I feel something in there, something that is not his tongue. Thinking it is a piece of wood I prise it loose. I hold it to the light. It is the tip of a finger. I examine his hands. It is not one of his own. I imagine him in a struggle. A man’s hand reaches around his neck but is not careful enough. The body, in rage, in fear, grabs a finger in its teeth and bites.

The man reaches for his knife and draws the line across the victim’s throat, releasing his finger but not before part of it has been lost. The killer clutches his hand to his breast.

So I am not the first.

I pick up the body. I am surprised by how light it is. It is lighter than the same amount of peat would be. I wade further into the bog and let him go. He sinks slowly into the water. Legs and arms first, then his chest. Finally his head with one staring eyeball disappears.

There are bubbles for a few seconds. Then the water becomes still once more. Something touches my leg – the body settling perhaps – and I jump out of the water as quickly as I can. There is no reason to fear a body that has lain dead for thousands of years, I tell myself. Out here though, in the silence, there is reason enough.

I pick up the peat I have cut and my spade. It is not as much as I wanted but I am in no mood to continue the work. I begin the walk back to the cave. After a minute I glance back at the bog. It is still. A gull has landed near where I was working and pecks at the ground.

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I find myself looking over my shoulder frequently on the walk back.

I don’t know what it is I expect to see.

Walking up the hill to the cave I look back again. It is far away now.

I shield my eyes against the rain. It is getting dark. I cannot make out the pool but I know where it is.

In the cave I stoke up the fire and sit shivering. I cough every now and then from the smoke. I lie on my bed, half awake, half asleep.

Whether awake or dreaming my mind is flooded with images of the body and of the killing. There is now a group of men, a group of ten leading the victim by a rope tied round his neck down a path towards the peat bog. There is a village on the island. They lead him down the path, make him kneel. They say words, they chant, there is a struggle.

It ends the same way.

He is led out, though in truth he leads himself out. His head held high, he is dressed in robes, proud of his fate. His subjects follow willingly, in awe at the bravery of the man, of the man-god. To them he is not being murdered but being sacrificed so as to rise again, to protect them from afar, to become one of the ancestral spirits who seep out of the marshes every night and hang a protective cloud over the town.

Some say they hear them whisper to each other. A last minute panic when being held under water, when feeling the knife on his throat. His bravery soiled at the very last. The people silent, wondering what it means. They’ve never had this before: one of their chosen refusing to go quietly, refusing to do his godly duty.

A killer. A cannibal. Dragged out of the woods where he had been hiding. Beaten. Spat upon. His face contorted in rage, in fear. His were unspeakable crimes, even for that age. A last second revenge before succumbing to the waters. Was he staked to the ground to 222

prevent him rising again? How similar the fate of killers and gods.

His face parades before me. It grins, out of fear or mirth. One eye is closed, the other open.

Now he lies beneath the water of the island, breathing silt, his wounds sutured by the mud and by time.

I am not alone. He is the true man of the island. I am just one in a line.

There have been others. There will be more. It does not end with me.

In the morning I lie on my reed bed, wide awake but unmoving. I think of the settlement. I think of Elba, of Amhara, my daughter. I think of the promise of a life. Is it that bad to have to publicly ignore your past, to live as another? To be reborn another: alien, empty. It could have its merits.

I catch a glimpse of a shadow beneath the door and move my head sharply. It does not re-appear and outside it is utterly silent. A gull I think, or a greyer cloud than normal. But it is my signal. I climb out of the bed shivering.

I walk aimlessly out of the cave and down the hill. I only know I do not want to go back to the peat beds, back to the man in the marsh.

A couple of hours later I find myself at the top of the cliffs looking out onto the red sea below. The tide is out and the beach stretches a long way. The cliffs have eroded badly since I was here all those weeks ago. I have lost more of my island to the sea than I should have. The rate of erosion has increased it would seem and my island is disappearing fast. I find I am not unduly bothered by the thought.

Out on the sand, on the black sand, I see the rock, large and white, lying there, unmoving. I sit down on the grass. Or, rather, I kneel down.

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Kneel first then slump to one side to sit. I watch the thing. I watch, I do not think. It is too much now. I see the white mass on the black sand and I sit on the grass watching it. Then I roll onto my back. It is still there when I sit up again. I close my eyes.

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14

A shadow swims through the mud beneath me, shapeless. It forms a head, a pale eye, arms. It reaches out to me, mouth open. I jump up, brushing myself off.

The white rock is still there. I realise I must go to it.

The rock is wet and smells of the sea. Seaweed clings to the base.

Around it are smaller stones partly submerged in sand. Perhaps parts of the whole. If you half close your eyes, make it darker, they look like fingers. The rock is a body in the sand. I think of the myth of the man encased in rock. This rock, if you look closely enough, if you will yourself to see it, has a face etched in it, a face that cannot speak, frozen forever.

In the end it is not Andalus. The fragile imagining of him is gone.

I sit on the sand, my back against the rock. I take hold of some of the stones, let them drop through my fingers. I am surrounded by black rocks spewed out by the crumbling cliffs. And this white one, alien, out of place. A hallucination.

I think back to the dead. The nine hundred and seventeen. Washed away like the cliffs in the rain.

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I walk back to the cave, back through the rain, the wet grass, the grey light. A seagull follows me overhead. The whole way I look behind me, not at the horizon but directly behind me at the ground, the mud. I see my own prints leave a slight mark on the sedge. They fill with water.

In mud my feet slip in and as I pull them out there is a sucking noise and the mud closes over them. I stand for a moment in the mud. I feel my feet sink in, mud sliding through my toes. I imagine something cold beneath them: a stone, an urn, a face. I imagine a hand reaching through the earth to try to touch me. I pull my feet out and walk on.

After a few paces the marks have gone completely. I stop again. Sink again. I run this time. I run through the mud till I reach grass and am not sinking. I bend over to catch my breath. I should not be shivering like this.

In the cave I build up the fire and sit in front of it, not caring about the smoke. I sit in front of it till the steam rises from my clothes. To a stranger it might seem as if I am melting. But there is no getting dry here. Not completely. If my front is dry, my back is wet. If I turn around the wet air gets to work again. There is no keeping the water out. I curl up on the bed of reeds and close my eyes.

I wake in the middle of the night to a banging on the door, a loud relentless knocking. I get up, still hazy from sleep and go to the door. I am frightened and expecting I know not what – a stranger? A friend? – but I do it anyway. There is no need to be afraid though. The wind has got up and the door is banging against the stone. There is no one outside. Still, I find myself saying hello to the dark. It sounds strange to talk.

The wind is new. It does not often get like this. Only once or twice in the years I have been here.

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The next day it continues. I lie still on the mattress burning wood, peat, whatever I have. I cough from the smoke. I do not eat for the second day in a row.

I stand in front of the wall of days for hours. I have a stone in my hand. I do not add to the wall. I drop the stone.

That night it happens again. I hear the door banging in the wind. It sounds like someone knocking. I go to the door, open it and say hello.

When I do this the wind seems to slacken.

In the morning I take my fishing rod and walk to the shore. I position myself so I face the cliff as much as possible. Even so I have to look at the line in the water every now and then and I cannot shake the feeling I am being watched, watched by someone crouching down, barely peeking over the cliff edge, his mouth close to the grass, whispering to it perhaps, whispering to me, saying what, I don’t know. It is not a language I understand.

I catch a small fish, go back to the cave and bake it in the embers of the fire.

After two days of tending the fire almost continuously I have exhausted my supply of wood and peat. I know that I need to do something about it. I raise myself and set out, axe in hand. I leave the spade behind. I am not ready to return to the peat bogs. Not yet. But return I will. I know I will return. But for now the man must wait.

On the way there the going is difficult and I find myself running out of breath. Lack of food, I tell myself. I cannot remember it being this difficult. My feet are sucked in, even when I walk on grass it seems. I look down at them. When I press down the water rises to the surface. Bits of grass, mud, swim over the tops of my feet. Again 227

I find myself looking behind me, waiting for the earth to rise up as if disturbed by some mole-like creature the size of a man. Each time there is nothing.

I reach the forest. The ground here is slightly higher than the plains around it.

It is no longer a forest. A ring of one hundred and twenty-five spind-ly trees. Around them a brown carpet of needles. The trees are barely twelve feet tall. If it’s done right they can be felled with just twenty swings of an axe each.

It is a place of darkness. The trees make it so.

When I stand in the middle of the circle of trees in every direction in which I face there is a potential hiding place behind me. If I look ahead, north, towards the cliffs, I sense something moving behind me.

If I look south towards the peat bogs, the figure shifts to the north.

The shapes behind my eyelids will always be with me.

I look down to my feet again. If this sense of another is not imagined, then movement must take place underground. There would be a network of tunnels criss-crossing the forest, with concealed entrances. Or perhaps they cross the entire island. A legacy from the time of the smoke. Would I have only to dig to find a tunnel, a network, a whole warren of pathways, a settlement, even a city? Is there a world beneath me? One in which creatures scuttle about fol owing the land animal they sense above them.

They wait for the right moment to reach through the silt, moss, earth and drag it below. Perhaps the tunnels are fil ed with water. Perhaps I walk on a porous island, an island whose shell is all that is solid.

I take my axe, lift it high above my head and bring it down with all my force into the earth below. I feel it cut through leaves, earth, and then something more solid. I scrabble frantically with my hands but 228

it is only a root. I have severed a root, clean through. Sap leaks out of the wound.

I know what I have to do, what I want to do. I pick up my axe and get to work on the first tree. I begin quickly but my grip slips on the handle and the axe flies off as I swing my arm. I stand up and see something out of the corner of my eye. A glimpse of white shifting behind the trees. I call out but hear only the echo of my voice. I have stood up quickly and am breathing heavily. Dots begin to swim before my eyes and I have to sit down amidst the pine trees. I look at the spot where I imagined the figure but nothing.

I resume. This time I am slow, methodical. I glance around me now and then. When the tree falls, I do not begin to trim the leaves and branches. Instead I begin on the next tree. And once that is gone, the next and the next. I chop through the night. I don’t know how I last. By mid-afternoon the next day, every single tree is lying on the ground. I strip the branches from one and from that take as much as I can carry.

I run through the grass with my burden. I only notice my heaving chest when I am back in the cave.

I wake in the night chilled to the bone. I throw more wood on the fire and lie back on the damp grass. I draw my coat closer. I close my eyes and think of Tora. The kind words, the smiles. I think of Amhara too, running, laughing, disappearing round corners in an abandoned settlement. I fall asleep remembering Tora’s warm body against mine, her head on my shoulder, her breath on my neck. This is what I see, what I feel, when I fall asleep.

It is pouring today. I strip off my clothes and run out into the rain.

I run down the hill, my arms stretched out to the side to keep my 229

balance. I trip and tumble and am up again, running again. I am a child again. After a few minutes I am no longer cold. I run out onto the flats and there it becomes more difficult. My feet begin to sink and I feel like I am in slow motion and then I am flying through the air. I land face down in the mud and I can’t stop myself, my arms are useless. I am lying in the mud and I feel it breathed into my throat. I turn and retch and lie on my back. I struggle to contain my breathing. I am spread-eagled. And then I feel it happening: I am sinking.

And with the sinking I feel the hands. They prod my flesh, feeling for something to clutch. They take hold of my fingers, my hands, drag these down below the mud and they try to grab my hair but I shake my head. They grow more frantic but their hands slip off my wet limbs and I roll over again and again.

I am covered in mud now, although each time I turn the rain washes some of it away. I must look a true spectacle, white on top, brown underneath. A dissolving man.

I sit up and look around me. The grasses stretch on forever. I look over to where I have just been lying. The mud moves, as if alive. It is settling back into place. This much I know. Still, I get to my feet hastily and begin to walk away.

I walk over to the peat bogs. A short distance away I stop, crouch down. Nothing moves. I see only grass, mud, water.

I feel faint. Black dots swim before my eyes. I close them and the world spins. Lack of food. The cold.

When I open them he stands before me: shoulder wrenched from its socket, toothless jaw hanging open, wisps of red hair waving in the breeze.

And then he is gone and again I see only mud, water and the grim skies above.

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I shout. I put my face close to the ground and yell with all the strength I can muster. It is not a word I yell. It is a sound, a deep guttural yell.

The noise of a beast in its cave, taunted by men.