The bridge, p.22
The Bridge, page 22
They left me here eventually, after the mountains and the hills and tundra and another, lower, colder plain.
Here is the Republic, a cold, concentric place once known, they say, as The Eye of God. It is reached, from the barren plain, by a long causeway which divides the waters of a huge grey inland sea. The sea is almost perfectly circular, and the large island at its centre is also very close to that same geometric shape.
The first I saw of it was the wall; the grey sea wall skirted by low surf and topped by low towers. It seemed to stretch curving away for ever, vanishing in a haze of distant rain squalls. The train clattered through a long tunnel, over a deep moat of water and then another wall. Beyond lay the island and the Republic, a place of wheatfields and wind, low hills and grey buildings; it seemed at once rundown and full of energy, and those grey buildings gave way, every now and again, to immaculate palaces and temples of an obviously earlier age, perfectly restored but seemingly unused. And there was a graveyard, a cemetery miles to each side, packed with millions of identical white pillars spread geometrically across a green sea of grass.
I live in a dormitory with a hundred other men. I sweep leaves from the broad paths of a park. Tall grey buildings rise on all sides, bulking square shapes against the grainy, dusty-blue sky. There are spires and thin towers on top of the buildings; banners I cannot read fly from them.
I sweep the leaves even when there are no leaves to sweep; it is the law. I formed the impression when I first came here that this was a prison, but this is not the case, at least not in the obvious sense. It seemed then that everybody I met was either a prisoner or a guard, and even when I was weighed and measured and inspected and given my uniform and taken by bus to this large, anonymous town that nothing had really changed. I could talk to relatively few people - this came as no surprise, of course - but the ones I did talk to seemed delighted that I could speak to them in my strange, alien tongue, but also rather guarded when talking about their own circumstances. I asked them if they had heard about the bridge; some had, but when I said I came from there they seemed to think I was joking, or even that I was mad.
Then my dreams changed, were taken over, invaded.
I woke up one night in the dormitory; the air was sick with the smell of death, and choked with the sounds of people moaning and crying out. I looked through a broken window and saw the flashes of distant explosions, the steady glow of large fires, and could hear the crump of falling shells and bombs. I was alone in the dormitory, the sounds and smells came from outside.
I felt weak and desperately hungry, more hungry than I had felt on the train which had taken me away from the bridge. I discovered I had lost almost half my weight during the night. I pinched myself and bit the inside of my cheek, but I did not wake up. I looked round the deserted dormitory; the windows had been covered in tape; black and white tape made X’s all over the rectangular panes. Outside, the town was burning.
I found some ill-fitting shoes and an old suit where my standard-issue uniform should have been. I went out into the town. The park which I was supposed to sweep was there, but covered in tents and surrounded by ruined buildings.
Planes droned overhead, or came hurtling down out of the cloudy night sky, screaming. Explosions shook the ground and air; flames leapt into the sky. Everywhere was rubble and the smell of death. I saw a dead, skinny horse, fallen in its traces, the cart behind it half-covered by the ruins of a fallen building. The horse was being carefully butchered by a group of thin, wide-eyed men and women.
The clouds were orange islands against the ink-black sky; fires reflected there on the hung vapour, and sent huge columns of their own darkness into the air to meet them. The planes wheeled, like birds of carrion over the burning town. Sometimes a searchlight would pick one out, and a few black puffs of smoke would darken the sky around the plane still further, but it seemed that otherwise the town was defenceless. Occasionally shells shrieked overhead; twice explosions nearby made me duck for cover as debris - dusty bricks, shards of stone - fell pattering and thumping around me.
I wandered for hours. Towards dawn, as I was returning to the dormitory through this unending nightmare, I found myself behind two old people, a man and a woman. They were walking along the street, each supporting the other, when the man suddenly crumpled and fell, taking the old lady down with him. I tried to help them up, but the man was already dead. There had been no bombs or shells for several minutes, and though I thought I could hear distant crackling small-arms fire, none of it was near us. The woman, almost as thin and grey looking as the old dead man, cried hopelessly, sobbing and moaning into the worn collar of the old man’s coat, slowly shaking her head and repeating over and over some words I could not understand.
I did not think the shrivelled old could contain so many tears.
The dormitory was full of dead soldiers in grey uniforms when I returned. One bed was unoccupied. I lay down on it and woke up.
It was the same peaceful, intact town, with the same trees and paths and tall grey buildings. I was still here. The buildings I had seen in flames or in ruins were those that overlooked the park where I worked.
When I looked carefully though, in some places I found stones which had not been restored, and which were part of the original buildings. Some of those blocks were chipped and scarred with the distinctive, but weathered, marks of bullets and shrapnel.
I had similar dreams for weeks; always much the same, never exactly similar. Somehow I was not surprised when I discovered that everybody had these dreams. They were surprised; surprised that I had never had such dreams before. I cannot understand, I tell them, why they seem frightened of their dreams.
That was the past, I say, this is the present; the future will be better, it won’t be the past.
They think there is a threat. I tell them there isn’t. Some people have started to avoid me. I tell the people who will listen that they are in prison, but the prison is in their own heads.
I sat up drinking far too much spirit with my workmates last night. I told them all about the bridge and that I had seen nothing threatening to them on my long journey here. Most of them just said I was crazy and went to bed. I stayed up too late, drank too much.
I have a hangover now, at the start of the week. I pick up my brush from the depot and head into the chilly spaces of the park, where the leaves lie, damp or frozen on the ground according to where the sunlight falls. They are waiting for me in the park; four men and a big black car.
In the car two of them hit me while the other two talk about the women they screwed that weekend. The beating is painful but not enthusiastic; the two men administering it seem almost bored. One of them cuts a knuckle on my teeth and looks annoyed for a moment; he takes out a knuckleduster, but one of the other men says something to him; he puts it away again and sits sucking at his finger. The car screams through the wide streets.
The thin, grey-haired man behind the desk is apologetic; I wasn’t supposed to be beaten up, but it’s standard procedure. He tells me I am a very lucky man. I dab at my bloody nose and puffy eyes with my monogrammed hanky - still, miraculously, not stolen - and try to agree with him. If you were one of ours, he says, then shakes his head. He taps a key on the surface of his grey metal desk.
I am somewhere in a large underground building. They blindfolded me in the car, on the road between the town and whatever city this is. I know it is a city because I heard its noises, and we drove through it for an hour before the car dipped into some echoing underground space, spiralling down and down into the earth. When it stopped I was led out of the car and along innumerable curving corridors to this room, where the thin, grey-haired man was waiting, tapping his grey desk with a key and drinking tea.
I ask him what they are going to do with me. He tells me instead about the combined prison and police headquarters I am now in. It is mostly underground, as I had guessed. He explains, with genuine enthusiasm, the principles upon which it has been designed and built, warming to his subject as he goes on. The prison/HQ is in the form of several tall, buried cylinders; inverted circular skyscrapers interred together beneath the surface of the city. He is deliberately vague about the exact number, but I form the impression there are between three and six of these close-packed cylinders. Each of these huge sunken drums contains many hundreds of rooms: cells, offices, toilets, canteens, dormitories, and so on, and each cylinder can be individually rotated, like some immense battleship magazine, so that the orientation of the corridors and doors leading into and out of each drum can be changed almost continually. A door which one day leads to a lift or an underground car park or a railway station or a certain place in one of the other cylinders might on the following day lead to a completely different cylinder, or to solid rock. From day to day, even - in conditions of high security alert - from hour to hour, this massive gearbox of revolving drums can be moved either at random or according to a complex, coded pattern, thus totally confounding the planning and execution of any attempted escape. The information necessary to decode these erratic transformations is distributed to the police and staff strictly on a need-to-know basis, so that nobody ever knows in exactly what new configuration the composite subterranean complex has been arranged; only the very highest and most trusted officials have access to the machines which set up and oversee these rotations, and the machinery and electronics which are its muscles and nerves are so designed that no engineer or electrician working on any conceivable fault or failure could possibly gain a working overview of the whole system.
The fellow’s eyes are bright and wide as he describes all this to me. My head hurts, my vision is blurred and I need to relieve myself, but I agree, quite honestly, that it is a considerable work of engineering. But don’t you see? he says, don’t you see what it is, what it is an image of? No, I don’t, I confess, ears ringing.
A lock! he says triumphantly, eyes flashing. It is a poem; a song in metal and rock. A perfect, real image of its purpose; a lock, a safe, a set of tumblers; a safe place to store evil.
I see what the man means. My head throbs and I black out.
When I wake up it is on another train and I’ve peed my pants.
Metamorphosis: Miocene
‘Versions of the truth disseminated, To the flock like plastic shrapnel, Getting under the skin of most, And on the nerves of some. - Another chip off the old blastema, Another symptom of the system; The bloom and sump of your diabetical materialism.
‘Come give us your excuses, Explain why you did what you had to do; Tell us of your hurting to be kind.
You talk of: Bloody Sundays. Black Septembers, And all the time you’re wasting.
‘We’ll smile, dissemble, Case the joint for barricades, Count the weapons, Cost the operation, And mutter back meantime “I believe that’s just the way it happened. I’m sure it’s exactly as you say.”‘
‘... Oh well, very radical. Lot of street cred there.’ Stewart nodded. ‘I’ve always said a good poem’s worth a dozen Kalash-nikovs.’ He nodded again and drank from his glass.
‘Look, asshole, just tell me if you mind the bit about “Diabetical Materialism”.’
Stewart shrugged, reached for another bottle of Pils. ‘Doesnae bother me, pal. You just go ahead. That a new poem?’
‘No, ancient. But I’m thinking I might try to get some printed. Just thought you might be offended.’
Stewart laughed. ‘God, you’re a daft bugger sometimes, you know that?’
‘I know that.’
They were in Stewart and Shona’s house in Dunfermline. Shona had taken the kids to Inverness for the weekend; he’d come over to leave their Christmas presents and talk to Stewart. He needed somebody to talk to. He opened another can of export and added the ring-pull to the growing pile in the ashtray.
Stewart poured the Pils into his glass and took the drink over to the hi-fi. The last record had ended a few minutes earlier. ‘How about a blast from the past?’
‘Yeah, let’s wallow in nostalgia. Why not.’ He settled back in the seat, watching Stewart thumb through the collection of records and wishing he’d been able to think of something more imaginative than record tokens to give the kids. Well, it was what they’d both asked for. Ten and twelve; he remembered he’d bought his first single on his sixteenth birthday. These youngsters already had their own album collections. Oh well.
‘Good heavens,’ Stewart said, taking out a blue and grey cover and looking slightly shocked. ‘Did I really buy Deep Purple In Rock?’
‘You must have been stoned,’ he told him. Stewart turned round and winked at him as he took the record out. ‘Oh, eh? Was that a little flash of wit there?’
‘Merely a scintilla; put the goddamn record on.’
‘Well it hasn’t been played for a while, just let me clean it here ...’ Stewart cleaned the record, put it on: Can’t Stand The Rezillos. My God, he thought, that was from 1978; a blast from the past already, indeed.
Stewart nodded in time to the music, then sat down in his armchair. ‘I like these gentle melodic songs,’ he shouted. The track he’d put the stylus down on was Somebody’s Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonight.
He raised his can to Stewart. ‘God almighty, seven years!’ Stewart leaned forward, a hand cupped at one ear. He pointed at the turntable, shouted, ‘I said seven years ...’ He nodded towards the hi-fi. ‘That: seventy-eight.’ Stewart sat back, shaking his head emphatically.
‘Aw naw; thirty-three and a third,’ he shouted.
I am reduced to telling stories for my living. I raid my dreams for tasty morsels to feed my jealous Field Marshal and his motley band of vapidly murderous ancillaries. We hunker down round a fire of fallen flags and precious books, flames glinting on their bandoliers and bayonets; we eat long pig and drink rough whisky; the Field Marshal boasts of famous battles he has won, all the women he has fucked, and then, when he can think of no more lies, he demands a story from me. I tell him the one about the small boy whose dad had a pigeon loft and who later as a man never felt happier than when his proposal of marriage was turned down, at the top of a pigeon-loft folly of monumental proportions.
The Field Marshal looks unimpressed, so I go back to the beginning.
By the time I recovered from my melodramatic swoon in the office of the grey-haired man with the tapping key and the grey desk, the train I’d been put on had crossed the rest of the Republic, steamed across the causeway to the far shore of the nearly circular sea, and travelled some way across a cold waste of tundra.
I had another new set of clothes; a uniform for the train. I was in a small bunk and I’d wet my pants. I felt terrible; my head was pounding, I ached in various places, and the old circular pain in my chest had returned. The train rattled around me.
I was to be a waiter; one who waited. The train contained various elderly officials from the Republic who were on a peace mission - I never did discover exactly who they were or what sort of peace they envisaged - and I, along with an experienced chief steward, was supposed to wait on them in the dining-car, serving them drinks, taking their orders, bringing their food. Luckily they were drunk for most of the time, these ageing bureaucrats, and my initial gaffes went mostly unnoticed as the steward trained me.
Sometimes I had to make beds too, or sweep and dust and polish in the sleeping compartments and public carriages.
If this was a punishment, I thought, then it is very mild. I found out later all that had saved me from a much worse fate was the fact that I was - to these people - illiterate, dumb and deaf. Because I could not understand any conversations I heard, or read any papers left lying about in the cars, I could be trusted and used. Of course I did learn something of the language, but my vocabulary was mostly limited to table matters and the decoding of signs saying Do Not Disturb and the like. I did my job. The train rolled through the windswept tundra, passing flat towns and camps and army posts.
The composition of the train gradually changed. As we went further from the Republic the attitude of the officials on the train gradually moved from drunken relaxation to drunken tension; slow columns of smoke climbed blackly on the horizon and occasionally a flight of war planes would swoop, sudden and screaming, across the train. The officials at their tables ducked instinctively when the planes flashed over us, then laughed, loosened collars and nodded appreciatively at the fast-receding dots of the flight. They caught my eye and snapped their fingers commandingly for more drinks.
First we had a couple of flat cars with two four-barrel antiaircraft guns on them, one just ahead of the engine, one at the back of the guard’s van, then later a carriage to accommodate the gun crews and an armoured wagon full of extra ammunition. The military tended to keep to their own carriages, and I was not called on to serve them.
Later, a couple of the public cars were taken off at a small town where sirens and klaxons blared in the distance and a large fire burned near the station. The cars were replaced with armoured carriages containing troops. Their officers took over some of the sleeping cars. Still the people on the train were mostly bureaucrats. The officers were polite.
The air changed; snow fell. We passed by the side of gravel roads where burned-out trucks lay at angles in ditches, and the trackside and road were pitted with craters. Lines of troops and poor-looking civilians pushing prams loaded with household goods started to appear; the soldiers going in either direction, the civilians only in one; the opposite to ours. Several times the train stopped for no apparent reason, and often, in a siding, I would see a train pass us, carrying sections of track, and cranes, and wagons full of small stones. Often the bridges over the snow-covered tundra were built on the ruins of older bridges, and manned by sappers. The train crossed these bridges at a crawl; I got down and walked alongside to stretch my legs, shivering in my thin waiter’s jacket.
