Books Of Blood 6

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existed.'
Locke swallowed the rest of his drink, silently saluting
the fatal wisdom of these people. They knew when to
die, which was more than could be said for some he'd
met. The thought of their death-wish absolved him of
any last vestiges of guilt. What was the gun in his hand,
except an instrument of evolution?
On the fourth day after their arrival at the post, Stumpf s
fever abated, much to Dancy's disappointment. The
worst of it's over,' he announced. 'Give him two more
days' rest and you can get back to your labours.'
'What are your plans?' Tetelrnan wanted to know.
Locke was watching the rain from the verandah.
Sheets of water pouring from clouds so low they
brushed the tree-tops. Then, just as suddenly as it
had arrived, the downpour was gone, as though a tap
had been turned off. Sun broke through; the jungle,
new-washed, was steaming and sprouting and thriving
again.
'I don't know what we'll do,' said Locke. 'Maybe get
ourselves some help and go back in there.'
'There are ways,' Tetelman said.
Cherrick, sitting beside the door to get the benefit
of what little breeze was available, picked up the glass
that had scarcely been out of his hand in recent days,
and filled it up again. 'No more guns,' he said. He
hadn't touched his rifle since they'd arrived at the
post; in fact he kept from contact with anything but
a bottle and his bed. His skin seemed to crawl and
creep perpetually.
'No need for guns,' Tetelman murmured. The
statement hung on the air like an unfulfilled promise.
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'Get rid of them without guns?' said Locke. 'If you
mean waiting for them to die out naturally, I'm not that
patient.'
'No,' said Tetelman, 'we can be swifter than that.'
'How?'
Tetelman gave the man a lazy look. 'They're my
livelihood,' he said, 'or part of it. You're asking me to
help you make myself bankrupt.'
He not only looks like an old whore, Locke thought,
he thinks like one. 'What's it worth? Your wisdom?' he
asked.
'A cut of whatever you find on your land,' Tetelman
replied.
Locke nodded. 'What have we got to lose? Cherrick?
You agree to cut him in?' Cherrick's consent was a
shrug. 'All right,' Locke said, 'talk.'
'They need medicines,' Tetelman explained, 'because
they're so susceptible to our diseases. A decent plague
can wipe them out practically overnight.'
Locke thought about this, not looking at Tetelman.
'One fell swoop,' Tetelman continued. 'They've got
practically no defences against certain bacteria. Never
had to build up any resistance. The clap. Smallpox.
Even measles.'
'How?' said Locke.
Another silence. Down the steps of the verandah,
where civilization finished, the jungle was swelling to
meet the sun. In the liquid heat plants blossomed and
rotted and blossomed again.
'I asked how,' Locke said.
'Blankets,' Tetelman replied, 'dead men's blankets.'
A little before the dawn of the night after Stumpf s
recovery, Cherrick woke suddenly, startled from his
rest by bad dreams. Outside it was pitch-dark; neither
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moon nor stars relieved the depth of the night. But his
body-clock, which his life as a mercenary had trained to
impressive accuracy, told him that first light was not far
off, and he had no wish to lay his head down again and
sleep. Not with the old man waiting to be dreamt. It
wasn't just the raised palms, the blood glistening, that
so distressed Cherrick. It was the words he'd dreamt
coming from the old man's toothless mouth which had
brought on the cold sweat that now encased his body.
What were the words? He couldn't recall them
now, but wanted to; wanted the sentiments dragged
into wakefulness, where they could be dissected and
dismissed as ridiculous. They wouldn't come though.
He lay on his wretched cot, the dark wrapping him up
too tightly for him to move, and suddenly the bloody
hands were there, in front of him, suspended in the
pitch. There was no face, no sky, no tribe. Just the
hands.
'Dreaming,' Cherrick told himself, but he knew
better.
And now, the voice. He was getting his wish; here
were the words he had dreamt spoken. Few of them
made sense. Cherrick lay like a newborn baby, listening
to its parents talk but unable to make any significance
of their exchanges. He was ignorant, wasn't he? He
tasted the sourness of his stupidity for the first
time since childhood. The voice made him fearful of
ambiguities he had ridden roughshod over, of whispers
his shouting life had rendered inaudible. He fumbled
for comprehension, and was not entirely frustrated. The
man was speaking of the world, and of exile from the
world; of being broken always by what one seeks to
possess. Cherrick struggled, wishing he could stop the
voice and ask for explanation. But it was already fading,
ushered away by the wild address of parrots in the trees,
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raucous and gaudy voices erupting suddenly on every
side. Through the mesh of Cherrick's mosquito net he
could see the sky flaring through the branches.
He sat up. Hands and voice had gone; and with
them all but an irritating murmur of what he had
almost understood. He had thrown off in sleep his single
sheet; now he looked down at his body with distaste. His
back and buttocks, and the underside of his thighs, felt
sore. Too much sweating on coarse sheets, he thought.
Not for the first time in recent days he remembered a
small house in Bristol which he had once known as home.
The noise of birds was filling his head. He hauled
himself to the edge of the bed and pulled back the
mosquito net. The crude weave of the net seemed
to scour the palm of his hand as he gripped it. He
disengaged his hold, and cursed to himself. There
was again today an itch of tenderness in his skin
that he'd suffered since coming to the post. Even
the soles of his feet, pressed on to the floor by the
weight of his body, seemed to suffer each knot and
splinter. He wanted to be away from this place, and
badly.
\ warm trickle across his wrist caught his attention,
and he was startled to see a rivulet of blood moving
down his arm from his hand. There was a cut in the
cushion of his thumb, where the mosquito net had
apparently nicked his flesh. It was bleeding, though
not copiously. He sucked at the cut, feeling again that
peculiar sensitivity to touch that only drink, and that
in abundance, dulled. Spitting out blood, he began to
dress.
The clothes he put on were a scourge to his back.
His sweat-stiffened shirt rubbed against his shoulders
and neck; he seemed to feel every thread chafing his
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nerve-endings. The shirt might have been sackcloth,
the way it abraded him.
Next door, he heard Locke moving around. Gingerly
finishing his dressing, Cherrick went through to join
him. Locke was sitting at the table by the window. He
was poring over a map of Tetelman's, and drinking a
cup of the bitter coffee Dancy was so fond of brewing,
which he drank with a dollop of condensed milk. The
two men had little to say to each other. Since the incident
in the village all pretence to respect or friendship had
disappeared. Locke now showed undisguised contempt
for his sometime companion. The only fact that kept
them together was the contract they and Stumpf had
signed. Rather than breakfast on whisky, which he knew
Locke would take as a further sign of his decay, Cherrick
poured himself a slug of Dancy's emetic and went out to
look at the morning.
He felt strange. There was something about this
dawning day which made him profoundly uneasy. He
knew the dangers of courting unfounded fears, and he
tried to forbid them, but they were incontestable.
Was it simply exhaustion that made him so painfully
conscious of his many discomforts this morning? Why
else did he feel the pressure of his stinking clothes so
acutely? The rasp of his boot collar against the jutting
bone of his ankle, the rhythmical chafing of his trousers
against his inside leg as he walked, even the grazing air
that eddied around his exposed face and arms. The world
was pressing on him - at least that was the sensation - [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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