We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (21 page)

‘That day I went and got the tear tattooed. A tattoo on your cheek is hard to hide. It sets you apart. I didn’t trust myself to avoid law school or advertising or journalism – sorry, Mr Kellas—’

‘It’s OK,’ said Kellas.

‘I didn’t trust myself. And I didn’t want to ask somebody to kill me, like Edwin. So the tear was my safeguard. Not to destroy me, only to fence parts of the world off, put it out of bounds. No country club for me. No golf club for me. No brokerage house for me.’ He laughed a single, short laugh. ‘Not in the Sixties, anyway. So that’s what the tear is, it’s to ward against possible weakness.’

‘It could also be—’

‘An excuse for failure, I know. But I’m not one. That same day I had the tear done, I threw Edwin out of the house and dug up the marijuana. A few weeks later I was in New York, looking for teaching work, writing short stories, trying to earn a wage. I owe the tattoo a lot. It put me back in the world by setting a limit on how worldly I could become.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Kellas.

‘And now. Now…’ Bastian lightly rocked Naomi’s cot. After a second of silence he glanced at Kellas. ‘Now I think it’s better that those who have weaknesses are constrained, or constrain themselves, by means of quiet but tangible barriers like this.’ He touched the tear. ‘Like deliberately moving to a place where their weaknesses are outlawed. Or by…’ he sighed, a deep inhalation followed by an equally full breathing out ‘…submitting to the rule of a warden. The flaw in barriers like that is, of course, that they’re so easily breached. A pair of sunglasses and the tattoo’s hidden. A causeway and a car—’

Naomi woke up and began to cry. They had reached the water
and the causeway. Bastian pulled over to the side of the road, lifted her out of the cot and held her against his shoulder. He murmured soothing words to her and jigged her softly up and down and the bawling eased. It was light outside. The sky was clearing, although the sun wasn’t yet up.

‘Are you Astrid’s father?’ asked Kellas.

‘No. Did you think I was?’

‘To begin with, yes. She said that they lived together.’

‘Jack Walsh died in summer. He was a good friend of mine. Listen, I have to get Naomi home. I can drop you at T’s Corner, pick you up later and drive you to Baltimore or DC, or you can come home with us. I have to ask you to decide. Keeping in mind that I recommend very strongly that you do not come to the island.’

‘I’ll be welcome if I come, but you think I’d be better to leave?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I don’t understand. Why shouldn’t I come?’

‘That concerns a third party who is not here to speak for herself.’

‘But she invited me. She sent me an email.’

Bastian looked carefully at Kellas. His head was tilted slightly to one side. He was stroking Naomi’s back.

‘Did it say “I want to see you now. I want you to come to me…” Yes? I can see from your face now that you get it. It’s too bad. You might have known better. Those emails are flying around all the time. Did you really think it was genuine? When did it come in? Because she sent out messages to everyone yesterday apologising.’

‘Are you sure?’ said Kellas.

‘As far as I know, the virus sent that email out to everyone in her address book.’

Kellas rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. The news was bad, grievously bad. Yet in some last-ditch redoubt of nothing-to-lose synapses he thought: she had my email address in her list.

‘So you’re saying I’ve travelled here from London on the strength
of a few words fabricated by a piece of malicious software?’ he said. ‘Astrid didn’t contact me at all.’

‘It looks that way. I’m sorry.’

Kellas nodded while he thought. ‘I always liked that word of yours, “dumb”,’ he said. ‘It means “stupid” and “ignorant” at the same time.’

‘Don’t be hard on yourself. You haven’t done a bad thing, yet.’

‘You don’t think I should come to the island.’

‘That’s right.’

‘You can’t tell me why.’

‘I’m not going to do that. But now you know you weren’t invited.’

‘Has Astrid ever said to you, “I don’t want to see Adam Kellas again?”’

Bastian blinked. ‘There are four people involved here,’ he said. ‘One of them being you.’

‘Has she ever said it, or anything like it, about me?’

‘No.’

‘I’d like to see Astrid,’ said Kellas. He blinked. He was lightheaded and his wrist ached. ‘I’ve travelled a long way. Whatever the situation between the three of you, I’d like to see her, and if there’s room for me, to stay tonight.’

‘There is room,’ said Bastian. He handed Naomi to Kellas, who took her warm, soft weight under her arms. He cupped his right hand under her bottom and put his left hand on her back and let her lie back against his left shoulder, feeling her springy arms hook onto it. Kellas moved her up and down but it didn’t stop her crying, only made intervals of silence.

Bastian drove onto the causeway, which ran for several miles through an expanse of khaki reed beds and creeks. The island lay on the eastern horizon and the sun was coming up behind it, making the coarse short reeds glow bronze. The view to the north was partly obstructed by a succession of painted, cabin-sized signs, advertising food and lodging for tourists on Chincoteague.

While they drove, Bastian told him that Astrid had become pregnant before she left for Afghanistan, in September, before, in fact,
the Twin Towers came down. It came from a one-night affair; the father was an Australian scientist on a short visit to the Nasa facility opposite Chincoteague who’d since gone back to Melbourne. Yeah, Melbourne. They weren’t in touch. The house had belonged to Bastian since the Seventies, when he’d bought it with the proceeds of a book deal he’d done with the government. It was too big for one. It was a family-sized house. Jack and Astrid and the other Walshes would visit all the time and after Jack retired he and Astrid moved in.

‘After Jack’s wife killed herself, and his son went away to the north-west, Jack and Astrid looked out for each other, and I looked out for them. The suicide made Jack very hard. He made a cult of hardness. Reticence and obstinacy was all there was. He wasn’t cranky, he wasn’t even grouchy, but he hated a conversation. Anything that he could answer “Yes” to was a waste of time as far as he was concerned. He liked to stop you talking by saying “No”. If you got a “Maybe” out of him, you were doing well. Astrid could get him to talk, I think, but then she was away a lot of the time. So now Jack’s gone, and I’m looking after Astrid, and helping take care of the kid. You all right there? We’ll be home in ten minutes.’

‘Does Astrid need looking after?’

Bastian didn’t answer at once. He kept looking straight ahead while they crossed a humped swing bridge over the last deep channel before the island itself. ‘I don’t speak for Astrid,’ he said.

They turned left off the bridge and drove for about a mile along a street of shops, hotels and restaurants. It was narrow for America, a small shoreline town main street with a cinema and a petrol station and a sculpture of a horse. The buildings were two-storey affairs of brick or clapboard. A dozen old trees, winter-bare, opened out above the roof line. Green Christmas garlands, wreaths and scarlet bows were strung between wooden telegraph poles. Some of the houses had verandas enclosed by wooden latticework arches but nothing looked as old as a town on Virginia’s east coast must be. Kellas asked about storms.

‘Storms, fire, floods, we’ve had them all. The snow’ll be gone by
noon, though,’ said Bastian. ‘There now, honey, soon be home now.’ He stroked the screaming Naomi’s cheek with the second joint of his index finger. ‘She’s hungry. You must be, too.’

They took a right onto a wider street. Maddox Boulevard, the street sign read. They passed an old whitewashed garage with a larger-than-life carving of a fisherman in yellow oilskins at the door. A sign on the wall read ‘Island Decoy’s’, with two Canada geese in flight fixed alongside. They were heading east again, towards the Atlantic, and the sun ahead of them looked as if it might tip out of the sky and come bowling down the street. Here the houses were smaller and lower, the souvenir shops and motels bigger and louder. There were cycle rentals, a Chinese restaurant, drive-through banks and a shack called His & Her Seafood And Bait Shop. Bastian had been right about the weather. Although the grass verges were still dotted with clumps of snow, the roads and gardens and parking lots were already melted clear. The neck of a fibreglass giraffe in a pocket amusement park, and the ears of an African elephant, glistened where the sun caught the wetness. The park’s palm trees were shrinkwrapped for the close season. After another mile the road crossed a further stretch of reeds and creeks. They reached a roundabout. Bastian took a left off it by a Family Dollar store and turned right at a church like a factory unit, with gothic arch windows cut in the vinyl siding in the gable ends and a thin white fibreglass spire fixed on top. Here the houses were larger and lay in groves of tall pine trees. Bastian turned off onto a potholed road covered in a layer of redbrown pine needles. The trees cast strips of shadow across the road. On the right, through the trees and beyond the houses, Kellas could see more reeds, water, and the green line of a second island.

‘That’s Assateague Island,’ said Bastian. ‘On the far side of that’s the ocean. And this is where we live. I’m sorry Astrid couldn’t welcome you herself.’

The house was closely encircled by a stand of forty-foot pines, with slender trunks and high crowns of bright green. It was a two-storey building, counting the rooms under the roof as an upper
storey, with walls faced in lengths of unpainted, treated wood and a screened-in veranda projecting from the front. A stone extension had been added, with a chimney. A pile of logs lay under sacking at one end. The house sat on raised foundations and a short flight of wooden steps led up to the front door. The roof was streaked with snow, melting in the sun. An old bicycle with rusting chopper handlebars and white walled tyres stood leaned up against the wall by the door.

Bastian took Naomi from Kellas – she had stopped crying – and they walked over the patches of snow and the thick covering of fallen needles to the door. It was not locked. Water pattered from the trees around them and trickled in the drainpipes. In the porch Kellas recognised Astrid’s pointed boots, carelessly left, one upright, the other on its side. He followed Bastian, took his own boots off when Bastian removed his in the porch, and found himself sitting at the table in the kitchen, which smelled of toast and coffee from an earlier breakfast.

‘I have to change and feed Naomi,’ said Bastian. ‘I won’t be going to pick Astrid up for a few hours yet. You don’t have any luggage, right? I guess we can fix you up with a change of clothes. You’ll be sleeping upstairs. Take a shower, if you like, or you can fix yourself some breakfast – coffee’s there, fridge is full.’

‘You’re very kind,’ said Kellas. ‘I’ll rest and wash later.’

It was warm in the house. He hung his jacket on the back of a chair, rolled up his sleeves, and set the coffeemaker going. He melted some butter in a frying pan and broke a couple of eggs in, with a few rashers of bacon. He offered to fry for Bastian but Bastian said he had already eaten. The two men worked without speaking, Kellas frying and Bastian changing Naomi’s nappy and using gadgets to sterilise her bottles and heat her milk. Inside the fridge Kellas had checked, while he got the food, for items distinctively Astrid, but how could he tell? A packet of raisin bagels? Spring onions? Chipotle sauce? The kitchen was neat and clean. Along a tiled ledge under the uncurtained window, which looked out of the back towards a wooden
shed and a pear tree, were bleached gleanings from the foreshore, shells, the bobbled, spherical integument of a sea urchin, a green crabshell and the long delicate skull of a bird. There was information on the fridge door: a scrap of paper with ‘Call doctor’ written on, fixed with a leaping salmon fridge magnet, a table of hunting areas and dates, and a grainy black-and-white photograph of a stone tablet with letters carved on it in two different alphabets; the upper alphabet looked like Greek.

Kellas set down his plate and coffee and began to eat. Bastian was feeding Naomi from a bottle and Kellas watched her, trying to find Astrid in her chubby head and new eyes. The sounds in the kitchen were Naomi’s gurgles, Bastian murmuring words of endearment, Kellas’s cutlery on the plate and the hum of the extractor fan he’d switched on over the hob. He felt more cheated of immediate reunion with Astrid, more indignant that there were not more signs of her life in the house for him to read, than he felt anxious about Naomi or Bastian, even though he hadn’t expected to find either of them here. There was a docility in Bastian’s manliness. If it came to it, Kellas couldn’t imagine him fighting for Astrid. Naomi was more complicated. Of the two interpretations of Astrid going to Afghanistan while pregnant, the reckless and the defiant, Kellas liked both. He was moved by the thought of having slept with Astrid while Naomi was growing inside her. He didn’t want her to be careworn and cradlebound, but the child gave Kellas more time, must slow Astrid down enough for Kellas to walk alongside her for longer. The implicit offer of stepfatherhood lay in his chase and he could surely coo as sweetly as the big old man on the far side of the kitchen table, who was poking his nose into Naomi’s giggling face and getting it repeatedly clapped between the pink stars of her hands.

There was, still, the question of money.

‘What’s the inscription in the photo on the fridge?’ asked Kellas.

‘It’s a tablet from the second century before Christ. An edict of King Ashoka, carved in Greek and Aramaic. It was found in Kandahar
and put in the archaeological museum in Kabul until the civil war in Afghanistan in the Nineties. It disappeared.’

‘Did Astrid put the picture up?’

‘I put it up. Before she went out there, I asked her to see if she could find out anything about where it had gotten to. I leave it up there, hoping she’ll write something, because although she never got to the bottom of it, she did the interviews. You know how it is. People who aren’t reporters always think they have some idea that’ll make a great article. Do you read Greek?’