White Time Read online

  The guy lies in a faint, then, pretty much. I fetch him some water in a glass with a straw. He has a little difficulty working out what the straw is for, but he drinks the lot.

  ‘Eight-thirty. I’ll go and buy us some food.’ I sign it to him. ‘And a covering for that,’ I add, pointing to the folded clean dry cloth lying on top of the wound.

  He doesn’t move or grunt, just looks dazed, so I leave. I change into clean jeans in Bunny Cottage, grab my wallet, head north up the beach to town. I buy some fat bandages and antiseptic powder, plus the ingredients for a good, solid, stewy soup involving pasta and vegetables and thick-cut bacon, and proper crusty bread for alongside. It feels very odd to be out here in the clean, modern world after having been up to my elbows in blood and sweat all morning. I guess getting up before dawn doesn’t help a person’s sense of what’s normal.

  I’ve just turned home along Anzac Street when I think I see a knight in armour crossing the road up ahead. I blink and he disappears, into the park. A minute later a car pulls up at the same spot, and two damsels get out, in shiny gowns, one’s pale blue, the other’s crimson. I speed up – I get this weird feeling they’ll stop existing if I let them slip out of sight.

  But I get to the park and there are dozens of them, damsels and knights and people in cloaks. There’s a marquee set up at the edge of the park. There are horses with fancy cloths covering their heads. I stop at the gate and stare at them all.

  One of the ladies setting up booths calls out to a friend, ‘Were we lucky with the weather, or what?’

  ‘Weren’t we? Going to be a lovely spring day!’

  Over by the pond there’s a little crowd of people, medieval and modern, around two knights having a slow-motion battle with huge swords. The blades clang and the shields clash, but it all looks pretty light-hearted and harmless – the guys are laughing at each other’s jokes as they swing away.

  I walk towards them uncertainly. My guy at home – this might be the costume party he belongs to. I should tell someone here about him. Relief washes through me; I can hand him over to someone else? But when I get to the fight I walk slowly around the outside of the circle. Those medieval-dressed people, they look so clean … and those veils flying from the ladies’ pointed hats would have to be synthetic … I try to spot someone who might be in charge, some bustling innkeeper, some queen or baron. Maybe one of the fighters is the person I should inform? I fold my arms and stand there undecided.

  Then the sword-fighters clinch, the two blades pointing straight up between them. And beyond the blades, swinging in at the park gate and striding straight towards us, is the guy from the beach.

  There’s no mistaking him, even though he’s wearing a helmet now, and a monster sword slung across his back – it’s his size that tells me, his rock-chunky build, the sick feeling in my stomach.

  Stillness falls around him as he crosses the park, as if he’s scything the life out of everyone he passes. When he gets to us, the crowd falls still too, and then the knights notice, and stop fighting. People’s jaws drop; they glance at each other, and then back, expectantly, at this … this …

  You know how people say, ‘She brought a breath of fresh air into the room’? Well, this warrior, he brings with him not a breath but a gust, not fresh but strange air. I don’t know how to describe it, but very suddenly I know a few things about him: that he’s come for me, for a start. He’s not one of these dress-up-and-play knights; this is not his party – he’s not from anything as frivolous as a party (what was I thinking?). He’s from somewhere else in a serious way, from somewhere beyond anywhere I know, from some complete other-where.

  I mean, he is foreign. He’s some different species of human from what I’m used to. The armour – I’ve handled it, I’ve seen it up close – it’s got a different history, it’s made with a whole different technology from the armour these knights are wearing. The guy’s muscles have built up out of different movements than we make in daily life. The eyes, hidden now behind a chain-mail veil across the front of the helmet, they come from seeing some place, some life – some reality – so utterly different from Sunny Bay, or from the city—

  This is all coming to me in a single gasp of thought. Then the guy calls out to me across the circle, something calm and matter-of-fact, like, We had an arrangement, remember. We’ll go home now. Oh, you can hear the strangeness, the words almost all consonants, not squishing and buzzing like Russian or clicking like those little Kalahari guys, but doing absolutely its own thing, making its own kind of sense.

  I pick up my shopping and push forward through the crowd. ‘’Scuse me. I know this guy,’ I say into the silence, and suddenly everyone’s slack-jawed attention is on me, too. ‘Thanks. Excuse me.’

  He escorts me from the park.

  ‘Hey, where’d he get those trousers made?’ one of the knights calls out as we go.

  ‘Shut up, Trev,’ says the other.

  We get off the main street, away from the Saturday morning traffic. Beside me the chain-mail trousers make a soft sloosh with every step. I’m trying to see how his wound is, but the strap of the sword-sheath covers that part of his side, so that I can’t see either the wound or a bandage of any kind. No fresh blood on his trousers, no inflammation on the visible skin. And the injury isn’t bothering him at all. I can hardly believe this is the same guy who nearly collapsed on me a few hours ago.

  ‘Your side,’ I say. ‘How is it?’ He keeps walking. I touch his arm and point to my side, then his. He hooks the strap away from his body so I can see the dark welt where the bullet hole was.

  ‘Wha-at? But how’d you do that?’ There’s no blood, no scab, no torn flesh, just a layer of pearly new skin sealing over the wound.

  He’s wearing a gap-toothed grin, his eyes no more than gleams behind the helmet mail. Hmm, a fully operational foreign warrior, that’s quite a different thing from an incapacitated one. Why’s he looking at me like that? What’s he planning?

  When we get home I really worry. The screen door, which I locked on the way out, is kicked off its hinges and bent almost in half, still attached by the lock on the other side. ‘Oh, what?’ I moan. ‘Did you do that?’

  But he’s gone on past the house, stepping over the back gate and heading off into the dunes. ‘Oh. Well, thanks a lot. For all your help, Mr Self-Healing, Self-Bloody-Contained—’

  I bang my way inside, glad he’s out of the way.

  I get started on the soup. Sizzled onion and bacon smells start warming the house. When everything’s chopped and thrown into the stock, I’m ready to tackle Marnie’s room. I zip off the mattress cover and put it in the washing machine with all the other bloody cloth. I spend a long clumsy time on the porch pouring water into the foam mattress and stamping it out again until it runs clear. I wash down all the bloodied surfaces and sweep up the sand, hang out the washing. I rinse all the armour plate and the arrow-bullet and put them on the ugly little Formica coffee table in the living room.

  At that point the warrior bursts in. The front doorhandle crashes into the wall; a fresh load of sand drops in chunks from his boots. He seizes the bread that’s on the kitchen counter, tears off half of it and goes out again, without so much as grunting at me.

  I stand there looking at the sandy floor, at the mangled bread. The soup lid glunks gently on the pot. It’s quiet except for the birds, and the distant breathing of the sea, and my own breathing. I’m really tired, I realize – and not just from getting up before dawn. I’m deeply, long-term tired, emptied out, sick of cleaning up other people’s messes, sick of being James’s resident mess, sick of try-try-trying and always failing, always having someone – if not James, then Conan the Barbarian here or someone – barge in and trample all over what I’ve done. I won’t tidy any more, I decide; I’ll just wait and see what happens, and tidy up at the end – maybe. If I feel like it.

  I fetch a couple of blankets from Marnie’s room and lie down on the couch where I can see the door. No sirens, no traffic s
ounds, no possibility of a phone ringing – only birds, breeze, soup pot, sea and me.

  ***

  The finned bullet is the first thing I see when I wake up. I reach out of my blanket-cocoon and pick it up. It’s heavy. It all but fills my hand. And it’s sharp; it gives me a low, sick feeling to think of it choonking into a person, sitting second-knuckle-deep inside a live body, fizzing out its poison. But it did choonk, it did sit. It’s all really happening.

  I get up and ladle myself out some soup. It’s dim in here, at five o’clock. I turn on the lights and close the curtains against the darkening bush-scape. Sit down, eat. Everything’s so quiet. Maybe he won’t come back, I think hopefully.

  I’m halfway through my soup when I hear a sloosh outside, a thump of boots on the patio. Rattle-rattle of the doorhandle. Crash against the wall. I cringe low, my face practically in my bowl.

  ‘Aaah!’ He grins at me – Christ, what a wreck of a face! Then he goes to the soup pot and fills his mouth direct from the ladle.

  I jump up. ‘Hey, don’t be a pig! Here, sit down, at least.’ I grab the ladle from him and push him towards the table. Suddenly everything in the house seems small and dinky, the Sixties chairs, the bowls. The spoons look like fairy spoons!

  In the end I put the pot in front of him and give him a big old battered silver serving spoon. He eats soup until there’s no more soup, bread until there’s no more bread. He eats like a person who doesn’t know about tables and cutlery, crouched over the bowl slurping. I watch him as I finish my own soup, worrying, How long is he planning to stay? I don’t know if I can keep the fuel up to this person. Not to mention, what does a guy like this do after dinner?

  He gets up, wiping his mouth on his hand. He goes to the coffee table and picks up his washed shirt, eyeing it from all sides before putting it on. Immediately he looks a bit more domesticated. Then the mail-shirt, then the leather shirt. He ties on all the plate armour he can, but brings the tail-pieces across to me, turns his back and waves a hand where they should go. ‘O-K. This I can do.’ So long as clothes keep going on rather than coming off …

  When his back’s re-plated, he goes to the door. He jerks his head at me, Come on, and goes out. I pull on my boots, grab my jumper and the torch and follow him, shutting and locking the door behind me, just in case this takes a while.

  He’s standing at the back gate. When he sees me coming he disappears into the dunes. I follow him down to the beach and shine the torch around.

  ‘Hey, you’ve been busy here.’ He’s dragged together a huge pile of driftwood, propping it against the giant dead tree trunk that several summers’ worth of our family bonfires haven’t managed to burn away.

  He takes the torch from me and holds it to a nest of dry seaweed and paper litter in the side of the pile. He’s surprised when it doesn’t catch alight; he touches the torch-end tentatively and then in scorn and amazement, and tosses it towards me. He gets a flint and steel from a pouch tucked in at the top of his trousers, and lights the fire that way, using fine frazzled seaweed to catch the sparks. Very delicate work for such big hands.

  He builds it up bigger than any bonfire I’ve ever seen, a huge orange flag flapping against the stars. The heat pushes me gradually back up the beach to the edge of the dunes. The warrior strides about wielding a big long branch to stir up the flames; all the while he’s singing, some tuneless, growling, energetic song, but only snatches of it reach me through the fire-roar.

  And then other people start turning up, stepping into the firelight and bellowing greetings, rough people, others of his kind. They’re a cross between a biker gang and a bunch of bag-people, all leather and dirt. The women are strong and snaggle-toothed, and several go bare-breasted. Some are pregnant, their bellies armoured like silvery armadillo-backs. The men are all built like brick outhouses, with shaved heads or messy, long hair like my guy’s. Men, women and children, they’re all scarred somehow, all tattooed somewhere, and all wear some kind of armour, sometimes just the plate, sometimes just the mail, sometimes the whole kit right down to the finger-guards.

  They bring stuff. They bring this dark-red drink, with a head on it like beer, and big metal cups to drink it from. They bring bread that’s almost black, with what look like small yellow chunks of stone all through it. And they bring – I don’t know how, I can’t think from where – a gigantic black-bristled dead pig, with tusks, hanging from a pole, and they dig a pit with their bare hands, and they line it with hot coals and hot stones, and bury the pig to cook it. I guess we’re in for a long night.

  A girl with good teeth approaches me – the first, it seems, to notice me – and with lots of bowing and hand signs gives me a mug of the red drink. She sits down next to me, drinking her own drink and talking non-stop between gulps. I’m not a big drinker, so I just sip at first. It tastes kind of fine and foul at the same time – a touch of sweetness and a lot of sourness and a chilli-heat that blanks out all the taste after the first few sips.

  As for what it does to my brain … After half a mug I feel as if someone’s gone over the inside of my skull with a pot scourer, and is rinsing it out with hot water. I put the mug down firmly in the sand beside me. I feel intensely physically well co-ordinated all of a sudden, and as if – ah! at last! – I’m starting to see life clearly. It’s really very simple, when you think about it properly. If only this girl would stop gabbing at me, I’d be able to concentrate and sort out every single thing that’s bothering me. I’d get it straight in my own brain, in my own way of saying things; I’d go back to James, and I’d say, so confidently—

  But she keeps on. And then – it’s not quite as good as those dreams where you pick up a flute and start blowing beautiful music out of it, but I find I can tell her sentences apart, and in each sentence there’s a key word that sense comes out of, sometimes combined with a gesture – throwing the spear, cutting the beast’s throat, driving a stake into the ground. And I forget about James-and-what-I-should-say-to-convince-him, and focus instead on grasping the meaning in her talk. It’s not easy, but it’s fascinating. I can feel myself becoming a different person as I listen; a whole world is opening up inside my head, this girl’s world, the warrior’s world, that other-where world.

  And then the bandits were on us, she says. Only a little group, but they had good weapons, must have traded them all down the country from Rivermouth. Kun-asta went down and Lie-Bold, our best, and then – I guess our fear was great enough to thin the world-skin.

  ‘Huh?’ I don’t quite trust my ears on that last bit.

  She laughs, the drink red on her teeth. Oh, I know, your call did the main work. But a saint’s need must meet an equal need, to breach the skins of worlds.

  My ‘call’? A ‘saint’? They’re hard words to get my mouth around in her language. You mean me?

  This is a saint-realm; you must be the saint, she says matter-of-factly, and takes another swig. Oh, good, they’re making a fight-circle. Come down and watch.

  Down on the harder sand, we help dig out a hand-deep gutter around an area the size of a sumo-wrestling ring. Then the duels start. There’s wrestling and there’s fighting with sticks and swords. The toddlers go first, these little feral kids stumbling after each other in the sand; everybody loves that. Then it’s older girls and boys, carefully matched, and the rules are clearer: you start and finish with an embrace; you pull your punches when your opponent’s really at a disadvantage – you show that you could hammer someone, you don’t actually do it—

  Whenever I drain my mug, someone comes around with a big brown skin flask and refills it. There’s boisterous singing going on behind me, fast and complicated with outbreaks of laughter – if I could take my eyes off the fighting I’d love to turn around and concentrate on that for a while. But as the pairs and groups of fighters get older and better, I start to feel uneasy: surely they won’t expect me … ?

  Teeth-girl gets up, slapping my shoulder. She calls out for a shirt for me. Oh my God, here we go, into major e
mbarrassment. I take a big swig of the drink and stand up.

  I get a mail-shirt – it’s heavy – and a sword that I do have some hope of hefting. I follow the girl onto the fighting-ground. Huge, bright-eyed, filthy people are all around, all of them, down to the toddlers, better fighters than me.

  But I’m learning – I’m quickly hugged and then I’m learning. At first she’s doing all the moving, using the tip of her sword to show me how I should respond. As soon as I start to make my own plays, shouts go up all around, and she grins, and makes an obvious, foolish error that leaves her bare side exposed. I’m in there, my blade poking at her ribs, straight away – she laughs, and spreads her arms, presenting me to the others – some of the little kids look a bit pitying, but all the older people laugh and call out approval.

  We go a couple more rounds, one in which she pins me, the last she lets me win. Then she sheaths her sword and hugs me. Plenty to learn, but plenty learned, is the gist of what she says into my ear.

  We walk out of the circle. My bruises are throbbing; my hands can still feel the handle, my arms the weight, of the sword; I’m tingling all over with the heat of my own movement, sweating in the fire’s glow, sand in my hair from being knocked to the ground.

  Now I’m ready to get into the singing. But something makes me look up – a firelit figure on the dunes, tall, slender as a greyhound, staring down at all this in utter disbelief. James.

  Run up there. Tell him. Explain, say my instincts. Feelings – relief, joy, love – swoop through me, a familiar flypast. But instead of flying with them up the dune, I stand, weighed down by the mail-shirt and the sword. I see the shadowy banners those shiny little aeroplanes drag after them, the other feelings: my fear of James’s opinion, the pain of holding myself in this unnatural shape he professes to love, the anger at all the crap I take, all the ground I give, because I think that’s love, I think that’s a marriage – or thought it until, now, there’s nothing left of me, and James is married to a shadow-James, with all the life and interest and self squashed out of her.