The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2. Adam Thirlwell

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СКАЧАТЬ thistles and wire moss, seemed a huge man-made artefact which militated against the super-real naturalism of the delta. However, the terrace city, like the delta, was moving backwards in time, the baroque tracery of the serpent deities along the friezes dissolving and being replaced by the intertwined tendrils of the moss-plants, the pseudo-organic forms made by man in the image of nature reverting to their original. Kept at a distance behind him, as a huge backdrop, the ancient Toltec ruin seemed to brood in the dust like a decaying mastodon, a dying mountain whose dark dream of the earth enveloped Gifford with its luminous presence.

      ‘Do you feel well enough to move on?’ Louise asked Gifford when they had received no word of Mechippe’s messenger after a further week. She gazed down at him critically as he lay in the shade under the awning, his thin body almost invisible among the folds of the blankets and the monstrous tent over his leg, only the arrogant face with its stiffening beard reminding her of his identity. ‘Perhaps if we met the search party halfway …’

      Gifford shook his head, his eyes moving off across the bleached plain to the almost drained channels of the delta. ‘Which search party? There isn’t a boat with a shallow enough draught between here and Taxcol.’

      ‘Perhaps they’ll send a helicopter. They could see us from the air.’

      ‘Helicopter? You’ve got a bee in your bonnet, Louise. We’ll stay here for another week or so.’

      ‘But your leg,’ his wife insisted. ‘A doctor should –’

      ‘How can I move? Jerked about on a stretcher, I’d be dead within five minutes.’ He looked up wearily at his wife’s pale sunburnt face, waiting for her to go away.

      She hovered over him uncertainly. Fifty yards away, Richard Lowry sat in the open air outside his tent, watching her quietly. Involuntarily, before she could prevent herself, her hand moved to straighten her hair.

      ‘Is Lowry there?’ Gifford asked.

      ‘Richard? Yes.’ Louise hesitated. ‘We’ll be back for lunch. I’ll change your dressing then.’

      As she stepped from his field of vision Gifford lifted his chin slightly to examine the beaches obscured by the morning haze. The baked mud slopes glistened like hot concrete, and only a thin trickle of black fluid leaked slowly along the troughs. Here and there small islands fifty yards in diameter, shaped like perfect hemispheres, rose off the floors of the channels, imparting a curious geometric formality to the landscape. The whole area remained completely motionless, but Gifford lay patiently in his stretcher-chair, waiting for the snakes to come out on to the beaches.

      When he noticed Mechippe serving lunch to him he realized that Lowry and Louise had not returned from the site.

      ‘Take it away.’ He pushed aside the bowl of condensed soup. ‘Bring me whisky soda. Double.’ He glanced sharply at the Indian. ‘Where’s Mrs Gifford?’

      Mechippe steered the soup bowl back on to his tray. ‘Miss’ Gifford coming soon, sir. Sun very hot, she wait till afternoon.’

      Gifford lay back for a moment, thinking of Louise and Richard Lowry, the image of them together touching the barest residue of emotion. Then he tried to wave away the haze with his hand.

      ‘What’s that –?’

      ‘Sir?’

      ‘Damn it, I thought I saw one.’ He shook his head slowly as the white form he had fleetingly glimpsed vanished among the opalescent slopes. ‘Too early, though. Where’s that whisky?’

      ‘Coming, sir.’

      Panting slightly after the exertion of sitting up, Gifford looked around restlessly at the clutter of tents. Diagonally behind him, emerging from the lengthening focus of his eyes, loomed the long ridges of the Toltec city. Somewhere among its spiral galleries and corridors were Louise and Richard Lowry. Looking down from one of the high terraces across the alluvial bench, the distant camp would seem like a few bleached husks, guarded by a dead man propped up in a chair.

      ‘Darling, I’m awfully sorry. We tried to get back but I twisted my heel –’ Louise Gifford laughed lightly at this ‘– rather as you did, now that I come to think of it. Perhaps I’ll be joining you here in a day or two. I’m so glad Mechippe looked after you and changed the dressing. How do you feel? You look a lot better.’

      Gifford nodded drowsily. The afternoon fever had subsided but he felt drained and exhausted, his awareness of his wife’s chattering presence only stimulated by the whisky he had been drinking slowly all day. ‘It’s been a day at the zoo,’ he said, adding, with tired humour: ‘At the reptile enclosure.’

      ‘You and your snakes. Charles, you are a scream.’ Louise paced around the stretcher-chair, downwind of the cradle, then withdrew to the lee-side. She waved to Richard Lowry, who was carrying some specimen trays into his tent. ‘Dick, I suggest we shower and then join Charles for drinks.’

      ‘Great idea,’ Lowry called back. ‘How is he?’

      ‘Much better.’ To Gifford she said: ‘You don’t mind, Charles? It will do you good to talk a little.’

      Gifford gestured vaguely with his head. When his wife had gone to her tent he focused his eyes carefully on the beaches. There, in the evening light, the snakes festered and writhed, their long forms gliding in and out of each other, the whole darkening horizon locked together by their serpentine embrace. There were now literally tens of thousands of them, reaching beyond the margins of the beach across the open ground towards the camp. During the afternoon, at the height of his fever, he had tried to call to them, but his voice had been too weak.

      Later, over their cocktails, Richard Lowry asked: ‘How do you feel, sir?’ When Gifford made no reply he said: ‘I’m glad to hear the leg is better.’

      ‘You know, Dick, I think it’s psychological,’ Louise remarked. ‘As soon as you and I are out of the way Charles improves.’ Her eyes caught Richard Lowry’s and held them.

      Lowry played with his glass, a faintly self-assured smile on his bland face. ‘What about the messenger? Is there any news?’

      ‘Have you heard anything, Charles? Perhaps someone will fly over in a couple of days.’

      During this exchange of pleasantries, and those which followed on the subsequent days, Charles Gifford remained silent and withdrawn, sinking more deeply into the interior landscape emerging from the beaches of the delta. His wife and Richard Lowry sat with him in the evenings when they returned from the terrace city, but he was barely aware of their presence. By now they seemed to move in a peripheral world, players in a marginal melodrama. Now and then he would think about them, but the effort seemed to lack point. His wife’s involvement with Lowry left him unperturbed; if anything, he felt grateful to Lowry for freeing him from Louise.

      Once, two or three days later, when Lowry came to sit by him in the evening, Gifford roused himself and said dryly: ‘I hear you found treasure in the terrace city.’ But before Lowry could produce a reply he relapsed again into his vigil.

      One night shortly afterwards, when he was woken in the early hours of the morning by a sudden spasm of pain in his foot, he saw his wife and Lowry walking through the powdery blue darkness by the latter’s tent. For a fleeting moment their embracing figures were like the snakes coiled together on the beaches.

      ‘Mechippe!’

      ‘Doctor?’

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