Beneath the World a Sea Read online

  The porter laid down Ben’s bags and left. The room was warm and a little stuffy, with the strange bitter-sweet smell of the forest somewhere in the background behind the furniture polish and pot-pourri. Desperation and loneliness oozed from Mrs Martin. (‘Nicky! Do call me Nicky!’ she cried.) Ben had a sudden strong sense that, if he’d made the smallest move in that direction, she would have very willingly laid down with him right then on her hotel bed. In fact, it seemed to him that, short of saying it out loud, she was actually telling him just that. Here in the Submundo, he was to discover, even in the centre of Amizad, unspoken signals were louder than they were in the world outside. At times this was exhilarating, at others claustrophobic: everything and everyone felt a little too close, as if they had come right to the threshold of his inner self.

  Mrs Martin wanted to chatter, but she finally left him, and he opened up his cases and began to unpack. As he stacked shirts in a drawer, the photo of Valente caught his eye, and he went to have a closer look at it. The Baron’s gaze was direct, confident and sure of his own rightness. All the other faces looked wary and confused, and almost all of them were blurred, as if they hadn’t understood that an image was being made of them or that they needed to keep still. The picture next to it showed the clock tower in the square in the process of construction, seen more or less from the same perspective as he would have now if he looked out of his window. Or at least, so Ben thought, until he read the inscription beneath it. ‘Nus town square, 1933’, it read and he felt a sudden chill. This wasn’t the Amizad clock tower, then, but an identical one inside the Zona de Olvido, which he must surely also have seen and stood in front of, as alive and conscious as he was now.

  Beneath his shirts he found his three notebooks – blue, purple and red – where he’d shoved them to the bottom of his case. He weighed them in his hand for a moment, his notes from oblivion. All he remembered of their contents was the first part of the first notebook, and the final four words of the last: ‘Because the truth is’. He had a momentary impulse to toss all three of them into the wastepaper basket so the maid would remove them in the morning and that would be the end of them. But he knew he wouldn’t be able to leave them lying there so instead he put them in the left-hand drawer of the fancy Louis XIV-style desk, laid a few small things on top of them – a paperback, a pack of cards, a waterproof torch – and pushed the drawer closed.

  II. THE ANTHROPOLOGIST

  (4)

  Back in the seventies, when Hyacinth was a teenager in North London, there was a little wood behind her parents’ house. She thought of it as a wood, at any rate, and ‘the wood’ was what she and her friends always called it, but in reality it was an old bombsite from the war, which for some reason – a legal dispute of some kind – had never been redeveloped. And so, in the thirty years or so since a German flying bomb had exploded there, trees had grown up, not to full-size, but certainly well past the sapling stage: sycamore, yew, rowan, ash, holly. The sloping strip of uneven ground had once been a terraced street called Diski Row, which had climbed towards the larger, busier road that still ran along the top of the hill. Every house in the row had been wrecked by the bomb, and the passing of time had finished the job. Now there was a mesh panel fence round it with rusting Keep Out signs, and barbed wire along the top.

  But in various places holes had been wrenched in the fencing and, alone or with friends, Hyacinth would slip inside almost every day and head to a favourite spot among the trees which couldn’t be seen from anywhere outside. Usually she and her friends had the whole wood to themselves, but they weren’t the only ones who knew about it. Other people came there to have sex, smoke dope or drink cheap booze, and it was also used for small-scale fly-tipping, solvent sniffing, and masturbating over pornographic magazines. Each of these activities left behind its own distinctive archaeology so that, along with rusty fridges, broken TVs and spilling sacks of rubbish, there were broken cider bottles, glue-smeared polythene bags, used condoms (whose contents, she learnt, shrank and turned yellow as it dried), empty cigarette packets with neat little rectangles of cardboard torn out of them, and little autumnal drifts of flesh-coloured torn-up porn. (Hyacinth was puzzled about these drifts. Why not just leave them in the wood if you didn’t want to take them home? It was only when she’d learnt a little more about male lust and the way it switched off like a light when it had performed its function, that she realized how the wood’s little tribe of wankers, having reached their climaxes, would suddenly make the humiliating discovery that the focus of their excitement was nothing more than ink on paper.)

  Already in a way an anthropologist, Hyacinth was curious about all these different human tribes who shared her hiding place and, in her mind, they were as much parts of the life of the wood as were the trees that had taken root there, or the foxes and cats that she and her friends sometimes came across when they crawled in through the fence to lose themselves in clouds of oily, aromatic smoke. They saw rats occasionally too, and squirrels, and even a couple of times a small deer, while in early spring the stagnant pools that formed in the footprints of the demolished houses would fill up, first with groaning masses of copulating frog flesh, and then with tadpoles you could scoop from the slime in soft writhing handfuls. The wood was a coalition. It didn’t belong to any one of these human and non-human organisms but was a sanctuary for them all, even the sad pervert with the glass eye, who once offered Hyacinth and one of her friends a whole pound note if they’d let him see their knickers.

  She felt comfortable there. Back at home she could never tell when her mother’s fragile veneer of normality would fall away and she’d lash out suddenly in bitter, tearful rage, while her father hid in the tiny attic room he called his study, knocking back sherry by the tumbler-full and doing supposedly important things with books and paper that no one else would ever give a damn about. Their only child, wherever she went inside the house, she was surrounded by the poisonous force fields that thrummed and crackled between the two adults through the hollow, drab brown rooms. But in her wood, with the foxes, the birds, the tadpoles, and perhaps with a friend or two from equally inhospitable homes, she could do what she pleased and feel sane.

  One warm summer day Hyacinth and her friend Tiff found a red ants’ nest under a curved fragment of rusty metal which the creatures had used to provide themselves with a solar-heated roof. Tiff turned the metal in her hands. ‘What is this anyway? It’s quite…. Ow!’

  An ant had bitten her and she flung the metal to the ground, but Hyacinth picked it up and shook off the remaining ants. ‘Wow! I know what this is, Tiff! It’s a piece of the bomb that made this place!’

  The two of them had smoked a fair amount of grass. Squatting down with their find, they developed the idea of the bomb as a kind of blind creator god, of which this scrap of metal was a precious relic, and ended up spending the rest of the afternoon constructing a little shrine around it with stones and twigs and chunks of rubble. But as they were emerging from the wood towards evening, they met some young workmen who were bringing up new fencing to replace the damaged panels. The workmen were only a year or two older than Hyacinth and Tiff. They were friendly and weren’t particularly bothered by their trespassing. But perhaps they were a little resentful that these posh-voiced girls could spend the afternoon taking drugs and daydreaming while they lugged mesh fencing around North London in a stuffy van, because there was a certain grim satisfaction in their voices as they told Hyacinth and Tiff that their company was about to clear away the remnants of Diski Row to build a block of flats.

  So the wood was going to be cut down, bulldozed, covered in concrete, and reconnected to the ordinary London streets that surrounded it. Hyacinth grieved, but not that much. She knew she was beginning to outgrow the place, and she was old enough to understand there wasn’t the slightest chance of saving it. This wasn’t some piece of ancient woodland, after all, or the last refuge of some endangered species. It was just a lacuna in the fabric of the city, opportunistically ta
ken advantage of by herself, her friends and sundry other life forms. She took some comfort in the thought that, when her wood had gone, all the elements of the coalition that had made it what it was would still exist, ready to take the next opportunity whenever it came.

  And that included her. She would find a new refuge, she told herself, perhaps in America, where she was already planning to continue her studies after school, far away from her mother and father. She had no inkling, of course, that one day she would find the Delta, but her wood had given her faith that something would turn up.

  It always was a something for her, a something or a somewhere, never really a someone.

  •

  This was her seventh time in the Submundo Delta but she still loved the river voyage, even though on some previous trips this enjoyment had been marred by having to share the deck and the dining room with other returnees who affected to be irritated by the length of the journey, or the fact that they couldn’t charge their laptops, or the time it was keeping them from their important work. She always found this maddening. Could those people not see? Could they not feel? Were they so blinkered by the dreary goals trained into them by a society obsessed with its need for control and mastery, that they couldn’t appreciate the loosening, the opening out, the rising to the surface, that came with that moment when you realized you’d forgotten the last few days and you were there in the midst of the Delta? You could loathe the place, she could see that, you could fear it, you could be repulsed by it, you could long to be somewhere else, but she couldn’t understand how anyone could get bored of it for to her this was the one place on Earth where her emotional responses didn’t diminish over time. In fact, sustained intensity when you were in it was one of the Delta’s many strange psychic properties, the counterpoint to the effect that occurred when you passed through the Zona the other way and emerged in the world outside. You could still remember that you’d been there – the Submundo wasn’t like the Zona – but it was hard to hold on to the feeling of the place, and even harder to convey it to other people, who always seemed oddly indifferent to the fact of the Delta’s existence.

  But to her relief, no one this time was complaining about the length of the journey, or the lack of electric sockets, or the wasted time. Jael dallied on the cargo hatch with the increasingly lobotomized-looking Rico, the two of them clearly returning from one of the regular trips to Nus which they claimed to find energizing. The unhappy Dutch woman, Mrs de Groot, languished in perpetual pain like a tragic Fisher Queen maimed by some forbidden spear, tended by her loyal but impotent knight. And the other passenger, the British policeman Ben Ronson, was very obviously, and rather endearingly, entranced. He was actually quite nice-looking too, with his thick black hair cut in a boyish, old-fashioned, Second-World-War sort of style, and his startlingly naked blue eyes whose apparent defencelessness he himself of course couldn’t see. She found him pleasant to talk to. He had nice manners. He even listened to what was said to him.

  After she’d learnt what he did for a living, Hyacinth had dimly remembered reading about some work he’d done in London on forced marriages or some such culturally sanctioned crime. She supposed that, from the perspective of the world outside, where the Delta shrank to a small grey dot on a map which an obscure, not very interested committee in Geneva was supposed to administer, duende killings fitted rather neatly into that same category – crimes committed by a community that didn’t consider them to be crimes at all – making Ben an obvious choice to look into them. But of course he had no idea what he was letting himself in for, or what kind of place the Submundo was, and she could see that, rather touchingly, he hadn’t even noticed the effect the Delta was already having on him – that opening up, that rising from the depths, that shaking off of old and calloused skin – though it was utterly obvious in his face and his posture. He was still at the stage where he was putting it all down to the novelty of the experience and nothing more.

  There was a lot of time to spare and the forest did open you up. Once, while she was drawing, Hyacinth told him about her wood in London, how it had been a refuge to her, and how, absurd as the comparison might seem, what the wood had meant to her back then was something akin to what the Delta meant to her now. He seemed puzzled, but listened and asked questions. It turned out that, when they were growing up, he and Hyacinth had only lived a mile or two apart, and they soon established that he knew all the streets that surrounded Hyacinth’s wood, though he couldn’t place the wood itself.

  ‘I used to go to Scouts over there,’ Ben told her when she mentioned one of these streets, and she almost laughed out loud at the news that he’d been a Scout in his teens – it seemed so fitting somehow – but she saw him flinch in anticipation as he saw the signs of laughter in her face, and she managed to contain it.

  ‘But you must have seen the wood then!’ she told him. ‘The Scout hut was pretty much opposite the top of it!’

  ‘I vaguely remember a metal fence with bits of crumbling brick wall behind it.’

  ‘That was it! That was the top end of my wood.’

  ‘Oh, I see. I suppose I didn’t really think of it as a wood.’

  She could tell he was completely bemused by the idea that anyone could feel this sort of attachment to a patch of waste ground.

  ‘Didn’t you have somewhere like that?’ she asked. ‘Some special place that was just your own, where the grown-ups didn’t go?’

  But he laughed uneasily and said he didn’t, he’d always been too busy with ‘school, and football and generally getting into trouble’.

  In Hyacinth’s experience people who talked in that way about ‘getting into trouble’ were never the type you could imagine getting into any kind of trouble at all, much in the same way as people who said, ‘Don’t mind me, I’m just crazy,’ were always exceptionally conventional and sane. And what kind of trouble could Ben have possibly got into, she wondered, when something as mild as her illicit use of a bombsite as a hiding place from the adult world seemed to strike him as inexplicably weird? When she pressed him a little more about his childhood, he talked about the cinemas he used to go to, the schools he attended, and the football team he supported, but seemed to find it difficult to come up with anything more than these shells and containers.

  ‘To be honest, I can barely remember it,’ he said, ‘which is probably because it was so boring and average. Nothing at all like yours, by the sound of it.’

  III. THE POLICEMAN

  (5)

  It was his first night for a month in a decent bed and Ben had promised himself a long sleep, but he actually woke very early and decided to go outside for a walk. Mrs Martin – he hadn’t yet brought himself to call her Nicky – was already up and eager to know what he’d have for breakfast, but he told her on this occasion he’d take coffee in the town.

  ‘Well, if you’re sure.’ She looked dismayed. ‘We have fresh croissants and coffee all ready.’

  ‘Much appreciated, but I need the air this morning, I think, before the day gets too warm.’

  One of these days, he found himself thinking as he emerged into the warm moist air outside, if he wasn’t very careful, when he was tired and discouraged, or had been made to feel that he didn’t know what he was doing, he would take from Mrs Martin what she was so obviously offering him. He would let her kiss him, and tell him how wonderful he was. And she’d offer him more and more, dote on him, mother him, tend to him, and at the same time, if that’s what he seemed to want, submit to him as if she was a helpless child. And it would feel great for about half an hour and then he’d feel sick.

  He walked down to the waterfront, through streets that were still very quiet: a little grocery shop here, a small café there with a single customer sitting at the bar. In the harbour, the boat that had brought him was still docked, along with the submarine and a couple of other vessels. To the east, beyond the harbour wall, the smooth water of the Lethe, here almost half a mile wide, flowed on round the northern end of the rocky isla
nd on which Amizad was built. Looking in that direction, the forest was in the distance, the far shore, another place entirely. But just to the south of the town, Ben knew from the little town map that was provided in his room, it came right up to the rock itself, and you could simply walk straight out into it.

  On a bench in the middle of the quay, he spotted Hyacinth, sketching in charcoal in a large pad.

  ‘Good morning. Drawing already?’

  ‘Hello there, Mr Policeman. Yes, it’s a nice way to start the day.’

  He sat on the bench beside her. ‘I’m not really a policeman, you know.’

  He wondered immediately why he’d said it, for he’d always despised people in authority who tried to wriggle out of the role they themselves had chosen to play. And Hyacinth seemed to feel the same because she frowned and said nothing at all, still scratching away at a detail of the water at the southern edge of the harbour.

  ‘Well, I am a policeman, of course I am,’ he corrected himself, ‘and very happy to be one. What I meant was that it wasn’t my life’s ambition. I have other interests. I considered other careers. Like many people, I studied for a degree and then looked around for something I could do, and this just happened to come up.’

  She laughed. ‘Well, you seem like a policeman to me. I saw you that way even before you told me what you did.’ She glanced down at the drawing she’d been working on. ‘I’ll tell you what. If you’ve got ten minutes, I’ll draw you.’