My New Novel: The Butcher The Butcher (Sample Chapter)

One
Entry

I look around me and all I seem to see is people going nowhere expecting sympathy – lyrics from ‘When I’m Gone’, SIMPLE PLAN

He is young and hungry. He has a vigorous if skeletal body, and piercing blue eyes that seem more innocent and less intelligent than they are. He is a ganglier version of Frodo Baggins, and today he is driving a long distance across the Highveld hinterland. It is a cold day in South Africa, sharp with the sun’s glare. His road is the N14, drawing him west towards the big city.

The Toyota is old, and with fuel prices so high he can barely afford the 500km trip. So he drives slowly and carefully, aware of the annoyance he is creating each time a vehicle overtakes him, but unwilling to go faster than he is going. He is faintly contemptuous of those overtaking him. Don’t they realize we can no longer afford to waste fuel by driving unnecessarily fast? What’s the rush? The light blue vehicle, once his mother’s, is packed to capacity with his things. Books mostly, heavy books, weigh the car’s belly close to the road. Everything else he owns – which isn’t much besides books - a few computer games (first person shooters), clothes, the odd pot and pan and government issue weapons.

He drives under hanging powerlines; through withered farmlands. Cathedral like grainaries rise up, looming beside a bridge as he moves slowly over it. He crosses the blades of shining railway track, glances at the listless windmills pressing their metal fans darkly against the bleached cold sky.

He thinks of his father on the farm. The Orange river and the heat, the dried fruit. He will miss the smell of the house, and mama’s food. Everything. Now, to be man, he must go on his own and do woman’s things; his own washing, cooking and cleaning. He is worried about food. He is a lazy chef, but a fussy eater. Perhaps he will find a girl who will love him and cook for him. This is if he will ever stay home long enough to eat. The inspector, Byleveld, expects a lot from him, he knows. He expects no mistakes, and Neethling knows, if he concentrates, if things are right, he can catch anyone. But he will have to work around the clock, harder than the criminals, burning every last drop of midnight oil to get the edge. He is ready to do this.

A few months on the job in Kuruman and Upington and he has brought in an impressive number of warrants and arrests. A big name in crime fighting in the centre of the crime war in South Africa had heard of Craig Neethling’s success. His boss, Captain Karshagen, described him as meticulous, and nicknamed him ‘Die Jood’ (‘The Jew’). To everyone the same crude explanation: ‘He is to the criminals like the Jews are wiff money. He let’ nothing go. He knows where every penny belongs.’

He nods now to himself, the wind tugging at his arm on the car door. The radio buzzing softly below the noise of the wind. I’m ready. Then, he rolls up the window (it is a very old Toyota, a 1986 model) and turns up the news. He has heard these stories before, but after today, it will be his job to track these people down. He listens to the woman’s voice calmly describing the murders in Johannesburg. They are losing the war in the big city. A tide, a mob, restlessly swills against the crime containing cup that is the South African Police Service. The cup is cracked and filled to the brim, while inside, the storm stirs up the poisonous tea into deadly maelstrom. The few details of a muder on the radio, and his mind races, computes. Already he begins to draw a portrait in his mind. Black, repeat offender. A civil servant. Probably from Alexandria…

The road sweeps by a hamlet known as Ventersdorp. On impulse, he turns in and stops at a run down garage. He fills up the tank out of habit even though the tank is half full. He talks to a petrol attendant. The man is friendly, with silver foil eyebrows and a hooded expression. The attendant helpfully tells the young man how far to Johannesburg from Ventersdorp, then adds in Afrikaans, tipping his cap: “You must try the biltong. Over there. Before you go.”
He follows the man’s finger across the road to a light green square; it’s sign above the door (BUTCHER) beckoning. “I think I will,” he murmurs, blinking as he turns back into the setting sun.
As he steps off the sidewalk, behind him a large red sign flickers to life, but only the last letter Y of the WIMPY sign is glowing bright red.

He crosses the street, cold fingers dip under his light yellow t-shirt, tickling the taught white skin wrapped around the skeleton. He steps into the Butchery, and immediately senses something different. It is dark and silver at the same time. It is immaculately clean. And bathed in a pool of soft light, apparently created by some trick, is the most beautiful creature he has ever seen.
“I hear the biltong here is the best I’ll ever eat.” It is his voice, but the voice seems to not come from him. He feels dislocated. A strange power in here.
Her eyes that seem to be on him, now steel into him for a moment. The razor edges of her lips curve deliciously, and the slight movement of speech makes her body and her hair swim in front of him.
“Do not believe everything you hear, or see.” She raises a finger to her lips, and sucks something off it, slowly. “Or what you taste.” Light finds flecks of green shining in the dark organic brown of her eyes.
“What’s your secret?” he croaks into the emptiness.
Her eyes turn slowly over him.
“To your legendary biltong…?” Her eyes remain on him.
“You know what they say about secrets,” she says looking away from him.
“What do they say?”
“If I told you I’d have to kill you.”
“Really?” He has regained his composure a little. “You say we should not trust our senses; why not?”
A twinkle in her eye, and a cheeky grin: “Because the body is vulnerable to its appetites. Not everyone can control them. Hey, stop asking me all these questions. What can I do for you?”
“Well let’s try this famous biltong of yours.”
“Would you like soft or dry, fatty or…”
“Dry. No fat. Chunks.”
“Okay.” She glides to a sliver bar and lifts it to the ceiling. A hook deftly lifts a stick of biltong from the cables that appear hung with large bats. She suddenly has a silver sharp knife in her hand as she steps into the pool of light. He watches her cutting the hardened decayed flesh. “This is not the way I like it.”
“Really?”
“When it’s dry it’s lost its life. It’s black and rotten. I like it soft and flesh…” That sharp smile again: “I mean fresh.”
He leans onto the counter, employing all the swagger he can muster. “How long has a girl like you been in a place like this?”

The steel in her dark eyes meet the cool in his blue. Her expression softens ever so slightly; she seems impressed by his guile.
She steps back. “Quite a personal question don’t you think?”
“Maybe. But er…maybe not.”
“No,it is.”
“Do you have…er…you know, something to hide?”
“Do you have another question Mr Detective? Be careful, I eat detectives for breakfast.”
He chuckles. “Is that so?”
“HA!Yes it is.”
“In that case I apologize.”
“Why? Are you a detective?”
“Almost. I’m on my way to becoming one.”
“Really? Reaaally,” she coos, suddenly slowing down, turning her focus seductively on him. “Well Mr. Tamborine Man, don’t let me stand in your way.” She looks down at the knife and continues working.
He watches her expertly carving a trunk of biltong into fingersized chunks. He notices the strength in her arms, her fingers.
Silence. The soft skkkRRRP of dead tissues being sliced into small blocks.
She hands him the packet, and enters something into a computerized cash machine.
“That will be -.”
“Dinner.” She cocks her head slightly at him.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you want to eat with me?”
“Can’t you be spontaneous?”
“Oh bite your tongue. There is some risk involved. You don’t even know me.”
“Strange way to put it. Don’t you mean, ‘You don’t even know me?’
“No, don’t put words into my mouth. Why should be spontaneous with you? Why are you so special?”
“Don’t you want to find out?...” She raises her chin a little, her eyes drifting over his head.
“I’m dying to watch you eat. You have a beautiful mouth.”
She offers a small smile, saying slowly: “Yours is small. But your eyes make up for it.”
“Is that a compliment?”
A darkness falls over her face. “All this silly talking is making me hungry.”
He smiles: “When do you get off work?”
“I own this place. I can go whenever I want.”
“Really. You’re not concerned you might lose a few customers.”
She looks down with a small self-indulgent smile. “No, I am not worried about that.”

Together they emerge at the door. She inserts a long silver key that sparkles in the sun. The lock clicks with loud and absolute precision behind the solid door.
“What do you want to eat?” He asks her. She looks at the ground, he thinks, out of shyness. The sky darkens over the street, with strokes of crimson.

Two
The First Meal

HOLIDAY rejected Yet Again

NVDL: BTW I am not considering the self publishing route for HOLIDAY. I’ve provided at least 6 individuals with copies of this manuscript. All feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive. An avid reader in her late 70’s said she read it twice. An acquaintance who works at SABC has recommended I send it to Hollywood as a script. It’s an important, compelling story, and – I feel – way overdue.

‘Holiday’ is a topical account of the human condition. It presents two characters, a middle-aged man and a young teenager – a girl – who find themselves propelled into an austere, warming world that has gone rapidly beyond the ‘tipping point’.

The story challenges the reader to establish what is real and urgent, and what must be done when the world and all information becomes essentially an ill-defined ‘gray area’. Without rules and regulations, without obvious patterns (in the weather and other areas), Hugh and Stella must decide what to make of themselves and the world.

In the end, everything is stripped away, the world is burnt black, and the only color, the only life that remains, is in these two surviving characters. ‘Holiday’ is a story filled with metaphor, and the metaphor is ironic: for we are not on holiday, there is plenty to do in a world that is increasingly hostile towards its human inhabitants.

Comment on 'HOLIDAY'

Read your book through the night recently but left the last couple of chapters for later as was subjected to symptoms of looming panic attack! Dreamt of doom & gloom & all sorts of associated nasties, so I guess the positive spin is that it's not lacking in impact! The Amazing Race without the glitz...

Dear Nick

Thanks for sending us the sample chapters of your novel. I can see why your readers react as they do – this is, indeed, the stuff of a drama, i.e an exploration of a situation (rather than a novel?) and of Hollywood.

We feel that it would be better promoted in the international market than in our relatively small local market, despite the South African component. This will, probably, require the services of an agent – there is a list in the Writers and Artists Handbook, available at bookshops.

Regretfully, I must decline HOLIDAY for publication by Umuzi. Another South African publisher may feel quite differently, however. So, don’t give up.

Best wishes
X

Tel.+27 (0)21 425 4071 Fax +27 (0)21 425 9470
http://www.umuzi-randomhouse.co.za/
Street address: 14th floor, 22 Riebeek Street, Cape Town 2001
Postal address: P O Box 6810, Roggebaai 8012
(Umuzi is the South African imprint of Random House (Pty) Ltd)

The Holiday (continued)

Fifteen
Nest

The inside of the boat was like a bubble bath. They were submerged hip deep and whenever the nose knifed through a broken swell, more water poured into the stiff wooden ribcage. Both Hugh and Stella were shivering. She was sitting on him, hair wet and sticking to her cheek, clinging to him like a monkey. The engine was taking strain, as it had to push a much heavier load through heaving, stormy sea. But at least the wind was whipping them from behind, hurling them forward.

They had been travelling all night, and after nearly seven hours the sky had lightened enough so that Hugh could move closer to the shore. If their boat was going to sink, he didn’t want to have to swim for miles.
“Where is El Nido?” he sputtered in her ear. “Any idea?”
“No, how should I know?”
“Haven’t you come this way before by boat?”
“Not at night!”
The frown about to burrow into his forehead was yanked at the last moment by her suddenly shouting in his ear: “Wait. I recognise that.” Blinking in the wet spray, he followed her gaze to a tall cliff plunging directly into the sea. It’s still a way, but around that and then through there,” she pointed, “the water should be calmer.”
“Through there, not around?”
Tall dark cliffs rose like ghost ships around them.
“Through, definitely through, and then you turn slightly to the right.”
He adjusted course, felt her hands loosen around his neck. She squatted in front of him and scooped water out of the boat. He kicked at it, used his free hand to scoop at the water. His fingers had turned white and wrinkly, and he shivered now not from cold, but from exposure, and sheer nerves.

They moved into the protected zone, with the cliffs closing behind them, shielding them against not just the powerful rip of winds, but allowing them to move over calmer water.
It was a mystical cauldron, the sheer rock that rose it seemed on all sides, filling with mist and a hollow sounding wind that swirled above them.
Once again they noticed yellow flames dotted all around them. They weren’t just fires in the forest, there were small merry flames sparking on rocks on shorelines near and far. It was most bizarre.
He pointed his eyes at these fires and she gave a dramatic how-should-I-know shrug, and pulled a face.
“Come here. Forget about the water.”
She sat with her wet body against his, sheltering from the slight wind blowing over his shoulder.
“That way?” he mumbled, warmly into her ear.
“Mmmmm,” she said sleepily. Then she nodded, as it seemed more and more familiar to her.

In the murk of mist and very early morning it was difficult to appreciate the spectacular surroundings. Islands rose sheer out of the sea, perched on black rock that had been carved at their bases by the weathering action of seawater.

“I suppose it’s not like travelling on land is it? No road signs. No distance markers.”
She glanced up at him without smiling.
“Can’t be much longer. Maybe half an hour.”
The engine knocked against something. He slowed down, and together they pulled it down, lifting the rotor slightly out of the water.
She leaned over the side, then went to the prow of the boat and stood there, hands on hips, balancing then pointing and turning: “Watch it! Shallow rocks. More this way.”
Twice rocks grinded against the wood under their feet and she pulled a face at him.

The hamlet in front of them sketched itself ever clearer. The cliffs behind the small village rose like a castle. But it was the fires on the beach, and black smoke billowing out of parts of the village that concerned them.
Stella hopped out of the boat and Hugh cut the engine. They walked 50 metres or so through the warm and shallow waters, and finally reached the narrow stretch of remaining beach. It was an odd sight, most of the beach underwater. Hugh imagined beaches all over the world looked like this. It was still a difficult thought to accept. One implicitly imagined a changing tide and water slipping back as it always did.

Then he noticed the bodies lying on the beach. He’d first mistaken them for boats or surfboards, even guessed they were odd tubers of driftwood. But lying on the beach were the bloated bodies of pigs, dogs and cows. Smaller, but more numerous were the dead birds lying everywhere. They made a final shove, the sand scouring the wooden hull, the anchor tossed into the wet sugary sand for good measure. He stood now with Stella, taking in the scene. Just a few derelict human forms wandering about. While they stood there a wind curled in off the ocean and started to really whip the water.
The flames from a nearby fire disconnected and took flight before disappearing.
“This is like a bad dream,” Stella said.
Hugh lifted a hand to his face, wiped his eyes. He felt so tired; he couldn’t imagine how she felt. Waves of shivering went through the both of them. It was the wet that made them shake, because both the drizzle and the wind were unusually warm.

They stepped onto a road and found a fire and saw the wings and feet of charred chickens. They noticed a few figures standing against a wall, their mouths covered in white masks.
Lightning cracked in the sky, throwing bright blue light against cashew nut trees and the gaudy deserted shops of El Nido’s main strip.

Hugh noticed on one side of the town the struts of some houses were underwater, and it sunk in when they drew nearer that what had once been the lawn, the garden, was now under a foot of seawater.
“C’mon,” he said softly to her.
The buildings were a series of units, holiday cottages, and very soon Hugh confirmed his suspicion: the rooms were unlocked, stripped, but abandoned. They found one with a mattress and closed the door. Stella slipped out and returned with two candles and some matches. Hugh did the same, managing to find two bog rolls and some curtains, which he simply tore of their rails.

And with the water swimming under their beds, and the sky breaking over their heads, they slept. They slept while the wind battered and shrieked, and the ankles of one of the houses cracked. The house slipped into the sea like a boat, floated away and then collapsed into itself. They slept as radio transmissions crackled back and forth, confirming outbreaks of H5N1 bird flu in Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, China, Russia and the surrounding Indonesian islands. It was spreading unchecked, with no resources available to exterminate contaminated birds. Wild ducks flew through radioactive clouds towards Europe, but the man and the girl slept, wrapped in curtains, a single candle burning on a nearby table while the warm wet wind blasted the sea outside.

The Holiday (continued)

Thirteen
Escape

The generators, all of them, were humming when Hugh approached the twilit house. He had an eerie sense that something was wrong. With each step,
he could hear the soft skrr of warm dry sand grains squeezing under his sea softened feet. But he was forced to move up an ancient embankment to avoid the rolling cream that covered almost the entire beach now. Even the strands leafy ground covers now spattered and choked through the outer tongues of brackish foam. All of it, all the soapy bubbles, reflected the violent orange cumulonimbus that still hung gigantically in what ought to have been a cool vault over the world. And so sometimes it seemed as though the whole world was on fire, or that he had stepped into a volcano. Rapidly the sunset colors deepened, from orange, to deep scarlet, and reaching the house, the color purple.

There was no one about, save the crackle and hiss and then the nasal tones of a voice, speaking urgently. Hugh went up the stairs and found them all there, silent in the shadows, listening. Now he was able to discern three voices. One a background of storm warmings from some derelict weather station, a message a few minutes long that looped, repeating itself. The other voices were Eric’s and someone elses, an old woman by the sound of her tired voice, coming over shortwave radio.
“El Nido this is Claire, yes I can confirm another category 5 superstorm to intersect the Palawan archipelago.”
“And this information is coming through now, over?”
“Yes, it’s updated, it’s confirmed, it’s being repeated around the clock.”
“Claire, what’s the ET, over.”
“ETA is unavailable. Satellite tracking is down. The reports come from on the ground, a boat in the Sulu Sea…”
“Jeffrey’s boat?”
“We assume so.”
“Oh my God Eric.”
“El Nido, we expect a similar pattern to the storm 3 weeks ago.”
Static. Then, “We need to get out of here.”
“Negative El Nido, remain calm. I repeat, Sylvia, take the necessary precautions – no non-essential transport – hunker down.”
Static.
Hugh managed to hear a murmur over the steaming radio: “He’s here.”
Through the dark he saw the camouflaged uniforms of two soldiers. Their powerful hands seized him by his neck and sunwarmed shoulders, turned him around and took him outside.
Some time after he had been bound in stringy hessian rope, and gagged with a filthy, greasy handkerchief, Eric pulled aside the tent flap and pointed fiery eyes at him.
“We’re missing at least three jerry cans of fuel. We have barely enough fuel to keep the generators going for another day, and with this storm coming, we are going to be in the dark without those drums.”
Hugh blinked.
“Now I know you took them. God help me, we ought to gut you like a pig right here. The only way we’re going to survive is together. It’s a loose cannon like you that’s going to get us all killed. Without these generators we can’t connect to the outside world, and without that connection, we’re blind. Do you have any idea what is happening out there?”
A hand slipped under the tent flap and on his shoulder.
Eric look surprised. The anger evaporated into shock, concern and fear.
He nodded, listened, nodded again.
“Okay,” he said, and turned to Hugh.
“The compass needles have turned. All over the world. Insects are going nuts. Fires are breaking out spontaneously throughout the Far East. My friend, there is nowhere to run.”
Hugh grunted against the handkerchief, and the silver haired man moved slowly forward and removed the gag.
“What’s your plan? To hide? To hunker down? This isn’t a one-off storm, at the very least it’s a carbon copy of what we saw three weeks ago.”
“This is our community here. The resources here are ours; they do not belong to you. We welcomed you as part of this community so that you could contribute, and in the few days you’ve been able to walk around my wife has died, food and water and fuel has disappeared, and worst of all, the community no longer trusts itself.”
“Eric, we have to get out of here. Your precious radio isn’t going to have any use when the mountain comes crashing down, taking your mast with it.”
“The cliffs protected us from the last storm, why would this one be any different.”
“Because in this world there are no more patterns. There’s just chaos.”
“No, that’s where you’re wrong. There is still day and night, rain and sunshine and all the rest. It’s people like you that spreading irrational fear.”
“Irrational?”
“Yes, irrational. What am I going to do with you?”
“I’m the least of your problems. The real question is, are you going to learn the lesson? Do you have any idea what is happening? Because it’s too late to make mistakes now.”
“You were a mistake. We saved your life, and this is the thanks we get.”
“We’re all sitting ducks if we stay here.”
“THEN WHERE WOULD YOU HAVE US GO!” he bellowed. “NO ONE IS GOING ANYWHERE!”
Softly, Hugh said: “The message has been very clear. In the new world, this area is going to see terribly destructive storms again and again. That’s not going to change. So by staying here, you…”
“We have no choice but to stay here.”
“No, you don’t have a choice.”
“Well now that we have you tied up, you don’t have a choice either.” Eric put the gag back in place. “I realise now I don’t have to kill you. I probably couldn’t kill you even if I wanted to. I see though that I don’t have to do anything to you. I’ll leave that to the march of time. What’s coming is coming for you too, my friend. There’s no getting away, not for you, not for anyone.”
He looked very old and very tired. Looking at the blanket in front of his knees, the old man said: “I’ll give you some time to think about that.” Looking directly at him now: “Do you want to die tied up, on your knees, begging? Or do you want to tell us where those fuel drums are?”
Hugh puffed against the handkerchief.
“Think about it,” Eric said, then pushed hands on knees, turned on his haunches and stepped out of the orange tent.
Hugh squirmed so that he lay on his side, with his bound hands behind his back. The walls moved around him like sails, like lungs.

He was awakened by Stella, who quickly cut the hessian fibres and pressed a finger against his lips.
“Hurry,” she whispered, taking him by the wrist. “We don’t have much time.”
As they walked under the moon, restless winds tugging at their cotton t-shirts, Hugh asked: “Where is everyone?”
“Listening to the radio. I fucking can’t sit here listening to that doomsday stuff all day.”
“Wait,” he grabbed her arm. “What are you foing? I said you can’t come with me.”
“After what I just did?”
He hesitated there with her.
“C’mon!” she hissed, pulling his arm.
“We need to get the fuel.”
“I moved it. And a few minutes ago we got it into the boat.”
A small fish of hope jumped in his stomach.
“That’s my girl,” he said softly. Then, “We?”
But she couldn’t hear him. She had grabbed his hand and now he ran after her, surprised at the speedy urgency of her movements.
They finally emerged at a section of beach obscured by a large jutting log, and leaning palm tree. She tossed aside brown palm leaves to reveal the boat, and the whites of children’s eyes.
“C’mon,” she said.

Like spiders they crouched and the four of them pushed at the boat, not far, since the entire beach was already submerged in water, in fact it had begun to pour and sway back between the stems of the outermost palm trees.

“Okay jump in,” Hugh said. The water was deeper. Once in, he pushed further over the calm water, and once the water hit his chest, he tried to clamber in. But he’d lost strength in his core thanks to the haemorrhage. There was a moment of panic as he lost touch of the banca, but Stella caught his shirt, hauled him closer, and then the others grabbed him and helped him up.

It was in that moment that they they heard voices behind them, saw dark figures kicking through the shallow sea towards them, only a few metres away.
Hugh, seized by adrenalin, moved forward over the slick wood, knocking over one of the girls. He seized an oar. Stella immediately did the same. And slowly they moved beyond the striving limbs of the old men in front.
They paddled briskly and chaotically, puffing and panicked, but getting the boat to move more and more decisively through the sweeping seawater. Once a hundred metres out, they were rebuffed again and again by a series of breakers. They remained stuck for two desperate minutes while the group on the beach were running around, shouting, waving, organising something. With a final co-ordinated pull, they managed to sword through a breaker and over the swell behind it. They let out a choked cheer, then breathlessly rowed some more.

Bright sparks suddenly erupted from the edge of the forest. Bullets zipped over their heads, imbedding themselves in the water around them.
Stella abandoned her oar, stepped over him. Ratatatatatatatat… Bullets and the sound following them seconds later. Shouts.
Time seemed to stand still.
Fuck, we’re sitting ducks…
A full minute passed. Hugh attempted to row with one oar. The boat had begun to turn and drift closer.
Another volley of bullets. A swell almost carried them with it, and now another was rising. Hugh clenched his teeth. He needed to straighten; he grabbed the other oar and missed…

Stella yanked at something, and the motor chugged. They moved forward with the swell and at the last moment, Stella swung the handle, and they switched back over the breaking wave, one of the arms diving deep into the water, then lifting again to stabilise them.
She gunned the engine, drowning out the hail of bullets.
Hugh pulled in the oars and found the twins behind them, their bodies warm, but portions of their faces ripped or torn away completely.
He swallowed and tasted metal in his mouth.
They raced over the restless sea under the stars, fingertips tingling, while behind them the soldiers exploded one last hail of bullets over the beach. This time it cut down their civilian friends, leaving a number of giant red ink stains that spread across the beach.

It was only much later that they stopped, and in the silence, the water lapping against the wooden hull, they offloaded the small bodies into the quiet blackness of the ocean. Stella wiped her eyes and nose quickly with the back of her hands. She didn’t want him to see her crying. Then, saying nothing, they started the pumpboat engine once more and went deeper out to sea, into the night.

The Holiday (continued)

Twelve
Underground

The sun rose and immediately began to burn through the forest. He had smelt the forest in Manila, here there was no steam, just a crusty smell. When you walked instead of the lushness of leaves brushing against each other, twigs snapped, and withered leaves begged for relief. Higher up, they sometimes wandered into lush sections. Here the frogs croaked, and birds flashed in dappled light. After two hours on the monkey trail, hiking through the St Paul Subterranean National Park, they arrived at the modest gray mouth of a mountain, and watched clear fluorescent blue water flowing out and sparkling in the sun. While the old man removed his shoes to rub tired feet, the girls tore off their shirts and dived into the water. They squealed, splashing the men, shouting, shrieking over and over: “It’s as warm as a bath.”
Hugh sat at a picnic table, reading the description of the various animals. These boards were usually constructed at pristine sites all over the world. He wondered if other places too were deserted and empty, even the animals it seemed, somewhere else if not dead.
Lingering in his mind was a strange dream that had left him also strangely aroused. He’d been unable to put his finger on it when Stella, with her brown eyes and brown hair, a girl of thirteen or fourteen, took his hand. “Come,” she said, wearing a simultaneously shy and cheeky smile. “Come and swim.”
He was surprised just how warm the water was. It was almost hot. It didn’t make sense. It was supposed to be flowing from within the mountain wasn’t it?
He mentioned this to the old man, who in six words broke the fragile film of structure Hugh had managed to blow out against the wind of the new world.
“Part of the mountain has collapsed.”
The bubbled popped.
“How can a mountain collapse?” Hugh asked, a girl climbing on his shoulder.
“Well it’s hollow on the inside, and we’ve had massive amounts of rain…God knows it must have been pounded inside and outside.”
“So the water is warm…why?”
“Perhaps somewhere upstream there’s a sort of cauldron where the water is temporarily held back and warmed.”
Hugh stood up suddenly and the girl jumped making a big splash. Hugh nodded quietly.
“Which is which,” he said, pointing to two girls with short, pixie black hair and pointy ears and noses.
“I can never tell. Aaargh. I’m going to sit down,” the old man said, wading stiffly up the embankment to the wooden benches.
Hugh lay on his back, noticing swarms of mosquitoes, watching swifts darting in and out of the mouth, in pursuit of insects. He wondered whether some clouds of insects, that sometimes grew so dark they blocked his view of background scenery. He wondered if that was normal. Lately he wasn’t sure whether anything was normal.

* * *

Inside the cave it was spooky. Stella shared his canoe and sat upfront with a paddle, while Hugh paddled and steered from the rear. The twins were behind them, struggling to row in a straight line. They couldn’t make out much as they had run out of torch batteries in the last week, and there had been no electricity at the house to charge cellphones or anything else.
“Where are the others,” Hugh said, softly.
“Right behind,” Stella murmured, her head right back against his chest, her eyes looking straight up at him.
“No, the other two.”
“Uh…probably smooching somewhere.”
“Huh?”
And just then, in the gloom, they floated quietly on the dark warm water, towards the glistening rock where the two nymphs lay, bikini tops at their feet, silky limbs and hair in the dimness.
DUNK!
The twins boat bumped into them from behind, and the cave echoed with shrieks. Hugh said in a warm, golden voice, “Shall we go girls?”
Paddling back Stella spoke while paddling, so he could not see her face. “Are you going to tell someone?”
“Who would I tell? What would I tell,” Hugh said.
Yet inside his heart was breaking. In a very short space of time he felt he had grown very fond of this small subunit of the Sabang group. He was leaving them to take care of number one, and more particularly, because he firmly believed remaining in Sabang was a terminal decision.

This feeling grew as they walked back. They pressed soft melons against their faces, the half rotten orange flesh soft and incredibly sweet. They passed around a sticky pip, biting the fibers that still clung to it, and trying to maneuver melon string stuck between teeth with their tongues.

Quite high up on the jungle trail they stopped. Stella pulled at Hugh’s hand and pointed. They could see Michael walking, limping painfully below them on the monkey trail. It was another irony, that the girls had rudely chosen to go with him on this harder route, a route he chose so that he could walk alone, and be alone with his thoughts.
“C’mon,” Stella said. Hugh sank onto his haunches, waving away a small mist of mosquitoes. “You guys go on ahead, I just want to be alone for a little bit. Go on.”
The twins and the other two solemnly walked on, taking small careful steps with their small legs.
Stella stayed with him.
“Take me with you, when you go.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Please take me with you.”
“What about the people here that love you?”
“Michael? He’s my step grandfather.”
“What on earth is that?”
“He’s not my real grandfather, he married my grandmother after my real grandfather died.”
“You’re here with him?”
“Just promise me you’ll take me with you?”
“I um…I can’t do that…Stella…I can’t.”
“Please….promise me…” A tear flowed over her cheek.
Hugh stood up.
“We are not having this conversation. You don’t even know me.”
And with that he turned and walked back along the path they had taken. She watched him for a long time, and then finally, turned and followed the others.

Hugh followed the jungle trail until the junction with the monkey trail, walked along it for a while, then left it altogether and walked onto a small protected cove. He saw rock rising up on both sides, the tired forest hanging, higher up it was lush and busy with life.
The beach was almost entirely underwater, something else that seemed unusual. What’s more there were strange creatures washed up, and many of them. He saw a dolphin, an octopus, and some very odd creatures that looked like they belonged in the deep, where the light of the sun never reached. They were monsters from a subterranean world, washed up, their lifeless fins gently touching his angles as the waves pushed at him.

It was this constant drama, this build up of frustration that made him tear off his clothes and walk into the water. It was crystal clear. He mistook a tussock of seaweed for another body from the deep, apparently also being washed ashore. He could feel the pressure in him manifesting in an erection. He wasn’t sure what it was…was it all this, the island, this life, the people around him…all fusing with the delirious dream…where sex and death are one and the same. Perhaps we die because we have sex, or because we have sex, we die. But he tugged at himself in the salty water, pinching eyes closed to concentrate, then taking a deep painful breath, and looking wildly at what was left of the forest. He aligned himself with his pleasure and his pain, and felt the ocean within him bulging. His bulging biceps gleamed in the stinging sun. His toes gripped the white sand, his left hand shielded the light from his eyes…the children were far away, and the ocean itself did not cease, when the man standing waist deep pumped his semen into the churning froth. Then he walked slowly up the beach, gathered up his clothes, and went along the shore to the faraway boats under the dying trees.

The Holiday (continued)

Eleven
Dummy

He was standing under the moon edging the banca (pumpboat) closer to the silver edge of foam. When he turned to fetch the fuel, he found himself facing the old man, his name was Eric, and behind him, his flock.
“What the hell are you doing? Who in hell do you think you are?”
The man’s face was worn and red, livid even in the pale light. He was quivering.
“It’s him Eric. He killed Claire, and now he’s trying to escape.”
He held up a hand that clenched into a fist. He turned, twisted by his own rage and turned eyes like burning coals on Hugh, who stood on the beach in just his shorts, his t-shirt wrapped around his neck.
“God help me, tell me what you are doing… And WHY!”
“I wanted to see this Underground River,” Hugh said evenly, measuring every word.
“There’s nothing to see at night,” a young Filipino girl wearing a yellow bandana said. A hand held her back, slapped the back of her head firmly with a ssh.
“Well day or night the Underground River is dark. And I have this.” He held up his hands, then moved to the boat and pulled out a long staff.
“It’s just a stick.”
“Well I was about to go back inside to get a cloth, you know, to fashion a torch.”
“He’s lying.”
“Hugh, my wife is dead, do you know that.”
Hugh folded his arms, with the long narrow staff poking out from either side of his upright body. “I know.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw her body before it was dumped into the reservoir.”
“And you didn’t tell us?”
Eric insisted: “WHY HUGH?”
Hugh slowly sank to his haunches, putting the staff down in the sand. He made a small nodding motion. Eric lowered himself to the sand, followed by some of the others. Those at the back remained standing, two young faces emerged between the arms and necks of the small group in front.
The sea sang a soft lullaby.
The breeze moved the dying Palm above them.
Hugh held up a finger. “In case you haven’t noticed, a small army is camping right behind us.”
“But one of them brought you to us.”
“Look, I’m new here, just like you. But ask yourself this: why would they help us? We are all fucked right here. And right now they’re thinking we can help them in some way. Perhaps the only way we can help them is through radio broadcasts we can interpret and they can’t. But pretty soon they’re going to get impatient, and they’re going to take over the house. It’s a matter of time. You know how people are. When they aren’t comfortable any more with their coconuts and dirty water…they’ll take what they want.”
“That’s bullshit. Eric has known these people for years. You haven’t.”
“Well I know people. I don’t have to know their names to know what they are capable of.”
“Eric we can’t take a chance. For all we know this shit was about to steal one of our boats. You know our rules.”
The group chorused: “No stealing of food. And second, no one person may take something for their own use. Everything is shared.”
Hugh felt the case against him was gathering momentum.
“Look, I am sorry. I can’t sleep and I wanted to visit this river. It was wrong of me to sneak off like this in the middle of the night.”
“Eric, don’t-“
“Wait!” he hissed, snatching words out of the air with his fist. Hugh looked at his face, grubby with tears and misery. “Hugh, you know we saved your life, don’t you.”
“Sure. I know that.”
“And you know we need you. Each of us here needs you.”
“I know. That’s why I need to understand this environment. We have to know how it works if we’re going to survive.”
The sea sounds and the wind again.
“That’s true, but that can be our third rule. Home is our time carved understanding of our immediate environment, and each day we must do one thing to understand it better.”
For some minutes the group memorized this stanza, and finally rehearsed the entire epithet, from rule one to three. Hugh joined in, but softly.
Eric, now satisfied that there was unanimity in the group, turned to Hugh: “You can go to the Underground River, but not tonight. You can go tomorrow, at dawn. You can take the girls, Stella and Michael.”
Michael was the oldest fossil of the lot; the one who trusted Hugh the least.
“Agreed,” Hugh said, offering his hand.
Eric shook it, a cool wet fish rather than a firm grip.
“C’mon, let’s pull this back up.”
Together the group moved the boat back to where it was. There were far more hands than necessary to move it, but they lingered, desperate to seem useful. Afterwards they stood breathing hard, looking up to Hugh.
“Thanks guys, you’re a great team.”
Smiles broke out in dark faces. People joined hands. A small girl patted the watermark under his ribs softly, saying, “It’s a miracle.” A white hand grabbed her and pulled her away.
When they had all left, Eric pushed his staff painfully into the watermark.
“I had better be right about you,” he hissed, then handed the staff to Hugh and walked slowly into the dimly lit house, a dark shadow under the twinkling stars, and enormous moon.
“What’s important,” Hugh whispered softly to the beach, “is whether the world has become what it is, or whether it is still becoming. I think it is far from over, and if that’s true, nowhere and no one is safe.”
He speared the staff into the soft sand. It flopped over, he grabbed it and speared it decisively this time. It stood solidly against the pale flat moonscape around it. Hugh walked to his tent, gritting his teeth.
He knew the soldiers could steal any one of them in the night, and kill them for their amusement. He also knew the body in the water was a message. It meant they meant to poison, or in some shape or form, contaminate or kill every last person that couldn’t defend themselves.
When he lay down on a mere blanket covering the bare black soil, he blinked in the darkness.

I must try to escape as soon as I can. Before the storm. Before the soldiers get themselves drunk on wickedness.
And in his dream he saw the world shape shifting, from a potato to a strange plant, whose leaves opened, grew thorns, and began to eat itself.
In his sleep he murmured: “…still becoming…”

And he saw the silvery silhouettes of the young children on the beach. He saw them wither, like leaves, and all that remained was a bone white staff on an empty beach, its warm sands flooded in moonlight.

The Holiday (continued)

Nine
House

He awakened to a cool metal blade snipping hair beside his ear. The bulge and shudder of bright orange tent flaps. The far-off sigh of the sea. The feeling of a beard, and then his eyes opened.

A young Filipino woman, no a girl, was bending over him, and cutting his hair. Her eyes stretched as she saw he’d woken; she dashed out of the tent. In the minute she was away he smelled the faint scent of death that still lingered in the tent. He lifted his shirt and saw the closed eyelashes of stitches under his ribs. The gray had been replaced by a faint watermark.
Several faces poked into the tent. “Well, welcome back,” one silvery haired man said with enthusiasm, his bright blue eyes wide and happy. “Give him this,” he said breathlessly to the girl.
The other faces blinked at him for a moment, then withdrew.
The girl gave him a sugary drink, perhaps coconut water or something. He sipped it delicately from a supine position.
“Where am I?”
“You’re at Claire’s Beach Cottages, in Sabang. You’ve been here for three weeks. We really thought we would loose you.”
“Who was…?”
“That’s Robert, my husband.”
“Your husband?”
“Yes.”

She cut locks from his hair for a few more minutes. The wind buffeted the tent impatiently.

She spoke softly: “He bought the cottages from my mother.”
High managed a small smile.
She pulled his shirt without inhibition, she’d obviously had to do it for some time. She moved her fingers over the smooth skin below his ribcage.
“We’ve been treating your wound with strong alcohol and…what do you call them… anti-septic herbs. There are no doctors here so we were very worried.”

She picked up the scissors and resumed cutting his hair. She told him that when he was brought here, they wanted to put him in one of the rooms in the house or adjoining cottages, but those already in them wouldn’t give them up. He lifted himself up on an elbow and saw many other tents in the garden besides his, and noticed some people lying in hammocks, talking in soft, serious, but inaudible tones. He could see over her shoulder that the sun was shining outside; it appeared to be a gorgeous day.

“Lie down now, rest; you’re in no condition to move around, much less walk.”
He looked at her clothes, her face, her hands. His hand took hers; her eyes swiveled uncomfortably to meet his: “Thank you,” he said “…for caring for me like this…” And then he slept some more.

It was very early the next morning that Hugh finally emerged, restored if not fully healed, from the near fatal impact on Rizal Avenue several weeks earlier. He stood in a small school of tents, the sea churning nearby, an empty hammock swinging like a spidery pendulum in the early wind.

Walking gingerly on the soft sand of the beach, he sensed his muscles had atrophied. The foam of the sea felt as cold as needles, and yet he knew it couldn’t be that cold. He was amazed at the lightness of his body. He guessed he must have shed 10kg or more. He tested and explored his new body with small jumps in the sand. He still felt a dull ache under his ribs, but for once the stitched eye did not shed a tear of blood.

“Are you alright?”
It was the old man, with a small boy behind him carrying a long fishing pole and an oversized plastic box, presumably containing fishing tackle and bait.
“Yes, I think so. Thank you.”
“Well don’t thank me. My wife looked after you. Get strong, we need every pair of hands around here now. There is a lot of work to do, and it’s obvious we’ll receive no help from the government.”
“Why? What’s happened?”
“An awful lot has happened while you were sleeping. When I get back I’ll give you an update.”
“No, tell me now,” Hugh said, stepping closer to the old man, glancing quickly down at the concerned looking little boy, and back into the old man’s expression-filled eyes.
“Well… I never know how to tell people the news any more. Sometimes I don’t know if I can.”
“I know, but I’d like to know. Please.”
“Alright. The world has lost a few cities…to put it mildly.”
“I know about that.”
“You heard about Shanghai, 20 million in that city alone, gone.”
“Yes I know. What about London and New York?”
“They’re still there. The fireworks seem to be over, but there have been rolling blackouts everywhere so far as we know. From South Korea – God help them – to South Africa, even New Zealand. I’m from England by the way, Kent. The United States started seizing oil tankers and directing them towards New York and New Orleans. As a result, a lot of ships have been sunk as a result of other countries fighting over the scraps America overlooked. And every major oil field is on fire, save a few small ones in Africa.”
“So America has emerged unscathed?”
“Not at all. Two trillion has been wiped off the stock exchange – that’s just Wall Street. There are riots and unemployment in the world’s strongest economy and the feedback mechanism has spread the contagion of hyperinflation and instability around the world. Look, we don’t have CNN, but we have the radio and we still don’t know precisely what happened. The world has changed. We have our hands tied now, simply because we no longer had the resources we once had. And the little we have seems to be running out as well.”
High looked down at his feet. “I understand.”
“We know it started with Jerusalem, and at about the same time we had some catastrophic weather here, and in the Gulf.”
“The Gulf of Mexico?”
“Well, as a matter of fact right now there are a series of super storms lining up in the Gulf of Mexico. It seems like this is not only a war without end, but where the weather is our worst enemy. You see we believe it started because a very big storm hit the Gulf of Aquaba and disrupted one of the busiest shipping lanes for about a week. That put incredible pressure on certain nodes, especially on America’s East Coast.”
The man put his hands at his sides, looked out over the sparkling diamonds in the sea.
“It was a shock. America’s inventories suddenly dried up, and so they seized tankers and used air craft carriers to chaperone them towards US ports. Because you see US cities had already come to an absolute standstill. By the way, they still are.”
Hugh kicked the warm sand softly.

“China didn’t like their ships being redirected. Understandably they kicked up a fuss, and made very direct threats against the US. But the US had little choice. They didn’t back down and the next thing North Korea seemed to be acting as an agent for the Chinese; they put the first missiles into the sky. The Japanese and US forces in the Republic of Korea forces shot them all down. Then something happened in Lahore, a massive terrorist attack…and then all hell broke loose. Jerusalem, Seoul and all the rest. You can imagine the backlash the Americans were faced with by the rest of the world. So now they’re withdrawing their troops – it’s a complete withdrawal, and all they can do now is diminish into the West.”
“What about what happened here?”
“Palawan has been destroyed. These people here, you; we are perhaps 100 survivors.”
“Everything on the entire island?”
“Well we were lucky. El Nido up north came through just as we did, but that’s all. This storm raked Palawan from bottom to top. There really were very few survivors. Didn’t you see Puerto Princesa?”
Hugh nodded.
“Puerto as you saw was completely destroyed. From what we know, there are two new superstorms building up as we speak, one in our neighborhood, a carbon copy of the last one, another over Europe. And, as I said, a whole series of them are billowing up off West Africa and spinning towards the Gulf of Mexico.”
Just the silence of the waves roaring in, one after another.
“Of course it’s unprecedented. Of course it is.”

Hugh held a hand over his eyes to block out the sun. “It seems like this is just the beginning,” he said.
“Yes, it will get worse, much worse before it improves. We already have to deal with no electricity and we’ve almost run out of diesel here. It’s becoming exceedingly difficult.”
Hugh looked at the old man, nodded, looked over his shoulder, nodding.
“The Earth,” the old man said, “seems to have passed some tipping point threshold because there’s been a massive increase in warming these last few days. You can feel it here too. I mean look: the forest is dying…”

Hugh turned slowly and saw gouges of desiccated yellow and brown in the forest that had been shielded from the storm by great cliff walls.
“Didn’t it rain here?” Hugh asked.
“Yes, heavily, but it’s dried up very quickly. You will see how hot it is in the next hour. Which reminds me, I have to hurry. Come on Peter.”

The old man and the boy moved quickly to a small bulging outcrop beside the sea. Hugh turned his back on them and walked along the shore. He noticed the water sometimes rushed up to the grassy verge of sand. He knew it wasn’t supposed to do that. And with each step his side ached.

Ten
Heat

Later that same day, when all were lethargic while the heat swelled over the beach like a quivering nuclear balloon, he emerged from the house. His back ached and the thought of sleep sickened him. The heat also did not touch him as much as it weakened them. He was as light as a reed, and eager to explore.

He walked barefoot over the gleaming wooden floor of the house. He walked by the radio room, where the old man was, as always, listening. The man, who had not caught a fish after all that day, gave him a small nod. The voices on the radio were strained; one man had a sore throat.
In the next room he found some of the girls. He moved between them to the bookshelf, and immediately found what he was looking for. He glanced down at them and saw that they were sleeping. He removed a Lonely Planet for the Philippines and turned to the last chapter. His finger traced the Underground River, not far from Sabang. He followed the Peninsula to El Nido. One of the figures stirred and so, silent as a shadow, he slipped out of the room with the valuable book.

He lay on the hammock reading it for a few moments, the hot wind breaking like shards of stinging glass through the withering fingers of the palm fronds.
Then, crossing his legs and sitting upright, hands on knees, he closed his eyes. For these moments he gathered strength and sought direction, while the forest sizzled around him.
The man had said to the group, over a lunch of fruit salad: “We can only survive if we work together.”
Was that a line he borrowed from a movie?

Hugh could not help but remember that another storm was bearing down on them. Without opening his eyes he knew that the aerial behind him, poking high above the roof of the house, was vulnerable, and if the winds blew differently this time, this house would also be destroyed. If 2 superstorms could follow each other within days, then one had to accept the island could no longer be inhabited. There were probably many places like that, and people would have to get used to that. The trick was to find those islands, even within continents that could be depended on for consistently benign weather. Sitting on the hammock, he believed the continent that would provide the best promise of resources had to be Africa. It was, after all, the only continent that spanned so much of both Hemispheres. And that meant somewhere between the tropics he might find viable pockets of life. And hadn’t he read that the Cape floral kingdom was the largest in the world because this sliver of land had been untouched by the last Ice Age? Surely that suggested long term viability?

In the quiet of the noonday heat, he made his plan. It was to return home, to Africa, by whatever road.
And while the old man and many here had already placed their faith in him as a potential leader, provider and protector, he knew he could do nothing to beat back the storm that had all but destroyed him, and would destroy them all if they remain here.

The man had spoken of soldiers in the jungle behind the cottages. Perhaps they could be persuaded to sell some of their fuel, and from there he could take a pump boat in the cool of the night to El Nido.

So he opened his eyes and walked with purpose to the forest. The soil was warm; the trees were wilting in the heat. Not far from the small circular water reservoir he saw the body. He moved cautiously closer and saw it was the girl who had tended him. She was naked, and it was obvious from her wounds that she had been raped, severely beaten and then shot. Her body was riddled with small black punctures made by bullets.

His hands lifted like wings. His ears pricked. His eyes shot left and right. Fearing they might be behind him, he darted quickly along the path in front of him, then dodged left and clung to the trunk of a tall tree. Perspiration poured down his forehead, his side ached, his forehead that had caught sunlight for a few moments, stung.

He heard low mumbling. He peeked around the tree and saw a small encampment. The soldiers were there, with two Jeepneys, and a few tents in the clearing. The men were consorting with one another, obviously drunk. They were all carrying weapons, and now convinced some key players to join them. They walked as a group past the big tree, towards the reservoir and the girl’s body. Carefully, and staying in the fringe of bush and undergrowth around the clearing, Hugh advanced. He ignored the weapons. He entered one of the Jeepneys from the rear and removed a big jerry can. He carried it 200 metres, put it down, and went back for a second one, and a third. Then he made repeat journeys to a position close to the three sidearmed Pumpboats that were moored close to the hammocks, in front of the hotel. He made sure the jerry cans were covered.

Then he climbed back into the hammock, panting and sweating profusely. He picked up his book and researched a possible route to El Nido.
No, the way to survive is on your own. Each man for himself. That was the game plan until further notice.
It took a long time for his blood to cool.

The Holiday (Chapter Eight)

Road

Shit.
The moment he noticed the first one he noticed the others. Three, six, eight…perhaps a dozen crocodiles. They were perfectly camouflaged in the forest debris and wet mud, and it was only the movement of one, that alerted Hugh. Now he saw their cold reptilian eyes glowing with yellow hunger.
He heard the mosquitoes, a cloud of them, whining right against his ears but he refused to move.
He was tired and sore and starving. He eaten a few cashews he picked up from the ground. He’d covered perhaps 10km over several hours, looking for shelter, and any other survivors. He did not see a single car, or a single person alive. But having seen more of the destruction in the surrounding area, it was obvious to him now that a storm surge from the sea had swept over the island, and what that had not destroyed, the wind had lashed or sliced to smithereens.

He stood absolutely still. It was the greatest predator the world had ever known against two handfuls of a creature that had stubbornly refused to become extinct. Did these crocodiles really think the tables had turned so soon? Did they really think they could pursue this creature that made handbags and shoes out of their skins, and ate them for dinner at restaurants around the world?

They answered this question in concert, for three of them suddenly moved rapidly and decisively forward, their long noses curving left, while their raised tails snapped in the opposite direction as they moved.
Hugh knew he smelled of blood, his new shirt had a bright red gleam under his ribs that had soaked down his side turning into a dark brown. He was afraid to run lest he tear the wound even further, and he wasn’t sure if he could. Waves of drunk weakness swarmed through him. His cool forehead had a lather of steam on it.

Instinctively, his eyes moved, surveying the area for a weapon. Nothing, just twigs and driftwood. He moved backward, and the response from the crocs was confirmation that this human being was scared after all.

“YAAAHH!” Hugh shouted, waving an arm, then wincing painfully and clutching his side. Fresh bright red blood seeped between his tightly bunched fingers. His eyes darted up. The loud noise seemed to have worked on the croc nearest to him, but others further away advanced, not wanting to loose out on the action. There were more than a dozen Hugh realized; in his peripheral vision the place was crawling with the big lizards, some of them perhaps three times longer than he was.

He was retreating, step by careful step backwards, and they were advancing, drawing alongside one another and opening their jaws wide to threaten their competitors.
He’s mine, they seemed to be saying.
The sole of his shoe squeaked on smooth metal. He looked down to see a smashed sign:
IRAWAN. He thought he remembered something about crocodile farms near Puerto Princesa.
He found a rock the size of his fist and hurled it. It missed the nostrils of the leading croc by a whisker. An odd growing noise. The croc surged; Hugh leaped into the air on pure reflex and jaws snapped shut on falling rain. He landed on the crocs foot, and was surrounded now by crocodiles. The crocs head turned and the side of his jaw bumped him against the calf.
Have I been bitten?
God I am so tired…

He heard a deafening sound, like an explosion. Man and croc froze in shock, then another explosion, and the back of a croc sliced open. In unison the crocs turned around and writhed away, like fifty slithering snakes.
Hugh stood like a statue, heart racing, the noise still roaring in his ears, and his side burning still from the effort of the leap. A hand shot out of nowhere and suddenly gripped his forearm. The shock of this sent a sick chill down his spine that made him want to pass out.
As though he’d suddenly become mentally retarded, he followed the brown hand along the arm to a khaki screen t-shirt. His neck was bulging. He was saying something to him. Shouting. On his head he wore a military style cap, and yes, his trousers and boots were military issue too. In his other hand he held a still smoking shotgun.
The man was saying something but Hugh could hear nothing. He thought of the money in his backpack, and then felt a salty snake coiling on the back of his tongue. He tried to fight the nausea. He tried to resist it. But the snake grew saltier, he tried to swallow but his tongue was dry…and then he slowly collapsed, with the vivid Jeepney grumbling behind the military man, and children’s bug eyed faces staring at him as he fell…under the barrel of the smoking shotgun..

Now there was the constant groan of the truck, and flashes.

The Jeepney rocking violently on a rough almost impassable stretch of muddy road.

A child dabbing a wet cloth at his lips.

The man with the military cap shouting at a kid wearing Prada sunglasses to leave the man’s bag alone.

The innocent blue sky.

The radio turned up very loud. A man’s urgent voice in a tongue he didn’t understand.

The frown dug deeper and deeper into the man’s face. His jaw dropped again and again.

The children sometimes laughing madly, other times they were strangely sedated.

The heat woke him. They had stopped inside a jungle. It was raining softly now. The Jeepney was empty. They were all outside, helping an old woman trapped under a tree trunk…they got her out and found her one leg had been crushed to a pulp, and when they turned her head her one eye was missing. She made soft noises and then slept…or perhaps died. They lifted her into the Jeepney, then after some moments, pulled her out of the truck and set her down on the long grass beside the road. They covered her with palm leaves and drove deeper into the jungle.

The incessant clanking of fuel drums.

Stopping to pick up fruit or some other abandoned item.

It was a nightmare that seemed to continue for ever. The road did not end however many times he lost or regained consciousness. It was just the road, and the pain, and the rain, on and on, without end.

The fever burned him in waves.

The pain in his belly became a dull ache and then numb.

He glanced under his shirt and saw a gray splodge.

I am going to die…

This is not a movie. This déjà vu Daffy Duck mother fucking shit is real, and it’s happening to me. It’s happening to everyone here…

A child’s hand with the kidney shaped pieces of an orange, bumping softly against his lips. His body was dry and yearned for the juice, but his jaw was too weak to chew.

He said one word softly: “Water.”

And water was poured over his cracked lips.

I am going to die aren’t I?

Moving. Trees flashing by the windows. The passengers bobbing on their seats as the rough road continued on and on.

They stopped moving. A hand pushed firmly under his back. His eyes popped open: “What’s happening?” He saw the military man leaning over him, and the children’s faces leaning over the front seat. The man reclaimed his arm.
“I think you are dead,” he said.
“You okay?”
“Okay.”
“We goto Sabang. There is safe place there. Big strong house. But not many survivors. Canyou understan this?” He was Filipino but there was a definite American edge to his accent.
He closed his eyelids slowly, opened them.
“Okay. You bleeding inside your body, my fren. You need doctor very bad.”
“How far?” Hugh croaked.
“Sabang no far, but this road very bad. Many underwater. So wait for water. Maybe long time.”
“News…” he whispered.
“Huh? I can hear.”
“You know news…of the world?”
Their eyes met and he saw the shadow in his eyes.
The man sat back and stared through the panicked wiper blades.
Hugh could hear the rain pounding the Jeepney’s roof. He heard the distant sssh of rain on mud, and the softer roar of a river in spate, tears a road into chunks of mud, melting it like chocolate.
The man’s words seemed disembodied…like echoes…coming out of the roar of the engine and the rain.

“Do you wan hear bad news or God awful fucking news?”
The man glanced at the children in the back of the truck and his body began to shake. Those dark, angry, anxious eyes pinched shut and his lips quivered. He let out a short wail, his bulging bicep pulling a hand over his face. When his hand dropped away his face worse a mask of composure. Even in his semi conscious condition, Hugh found this transition disturbing.
“Riya Sanhigh soul and pyon yang, these cities all gone in the nuclear bomb.”

Riyadh

Shanghai

Seoul

Pyongyang

He closed his eyes.
The world is going to hell…so…
… if I die now it’s okay.

The man’s face, his nose, was almost touching him.
Hugh’s eyelashes fluttered.
“London and…and New York?”
The man’s eyes seemed to be searching his for something.
For hope.
For answers.
The man’s head quivered. He was nodding.
“London and New York…these are okay.”
He sat back, sniffing. “And we’re okay, okay.”
He noticed the tip of a child’s hand being proffered from behind, soft voices saying “okay” and more thumbs poking over his seat.
The man nodded. “It’s okay its okay.”

Outside, just in front of them the soft roar of a river in spate grew loader, and the road was tearing into chunks of mud, right up to the wheels of the Jeepney. The man reversed 20 metres and watched the road in front of them still melting away like chocolate.


Click on the title of this post to link to a YouTube clip on crocodile movement.

The Holiday (Chapter Seven)

Fire

Sparks and stars. Pink flares and fireworks. Is this a dream? Lights moved between the stars, and then violent pink fireworks roared demonically overhead for what felt like hours. They sounded like the screams of big animals, behemoths – like elephants. And when he opened his eyes there was just the comforting crackle of burning wood, the hiss of wet wood on flame, and the warm blanket of smoke. His head ached, and his body burned, but he felt if he moved he might awaken himself into a more acute awareness, and he wanted to sink deeper into the soft passing away of existence. No, rather slumber than having to face the world and all its pain (including his own). So he courted sleep, and he was not far from it. He drifted on that periphery of consciousness, like a child skipping on the edge of a cliff.

There was no day or night, just oblivion, and inexplicable lights. Pain came in waves, the sleep drug grew stronger, deadening each successive wave.
Perhaps they were helicopters, or satellites, or missiles at various times of the day.

…perhaps they were drawings or some television program…

…perhaps it was something from a radio…

…or words of the passenger next to him…

…is that you, God…calling me…

…but I don’t believe in you…any more…

But the sky was alive with lights, and the curtains of smoke only made the illusions more mystifying. When at last his eyelids opened and dark pieces of chocolaty Earth fell from his lashes, onto his nose, he thought he was looking at an eclipse. Had God turned the day to night? His fingers twitched in the mud. Instead of an elaborate eclipse, it was thick smoke still pushing itself hard against the sun. It was also sweeping over him, urging him to cough and stinging his eyes. It was this squeeze on his lungs that drove him from the comfort of a sleep that would have undoubtedly become a permanent state if he had been able to remain there.

He knew himself to be incredibly weak. It took a great deal of strength to merely turn his body, to lift a hand to shield his mouth. His body screamed as blood that had not circulated for hours, now drove sharp pins and needles into incisions and scalded flesh. Around him was the ash of burnt bark. He climbed over fire hardened mud, emerging slowly out of his shallow grave. Hugh’s hands broke the soft ash that had once been powerful and muscular tree trunks.

From the top of the grave he saw the smoking landscape sweeping around him. Yellow flowers of flame were dancing with delight on a dry branch that had somehow been spared by the first firestorm. Lightning cracked, he hobbled in a pathetic attempt at a reaction. He realized that pregnant black cloud columns still remained, hovering behind the long gone typhoon like governors meant to maintain the status quo.

He coughed, and felt his ribs stab with pain. Blood began to ooze from the side of his head once more, and from a coin sized hole under his ribcage.
His throat felt dry. His nose was filled with snot.

He stumbled with the smoke; sometimes singeing the soles of his feet on a glowing coal. After two hours of moving slowly with the curtains he found the curtains opening to a yellow sea. It had a petroleum glow about it. The gray drapes allowed sick veils of golden sun to filter through. The beach smelled of rotten fish. Their silver bodies lay everywhere. The white beach sand was all black; covered now by what seemed like thick layers of waterlogged sawdust, wood pellets, bark and small branches. Here and there a solitary tree. Here and there a dead body. Sometimes an arm. Sometimes a chair. Here and there dead birds, a goat, a car tire.

He walked along the beach for a long time before he realized what he was doing. He just wanted to find another survivor. He noticed a few birds, seagulls, feasting on the dead fish. He saw an octopus scavenging in the shallow water; it bulged, swapped colors and skulked away when it sensed him.
He did not see any other person.

Silky blonde hair on one side of his head had turned into a burnt crust of hardened blood. It was banging painfully against his head while he walked, so he held a hand to hold it in place.
He realized the shirt had been torn and burnt off his back, that he’d lost his shoes and his watch. In his pocket he still had his iPod and a credit card, but that was all.

He stood for a long time in one place, and finally, registering the seagulls again, knelt unsteadily and fingered the water at his ankles for a fish. The waves heaved the silver bodies about. He glanced at the fish in his hand. It showed no signs of physical injury. He made small grimace, bit into its side, and was surprised at how rough it was, and filled with bones. He ate two small fingers of flesh, then picked up another fish. This one was rotten. He tossed it aside, and gasped. He was suffering an emotional attack, and shock. He struggled to breathe. Pinched his eyes shut. Opened them, rubbed them, opened them again, pinched them shut again.
Could this be real?

More than four hours later, he was standing exhausted from the walk, in Puerto Princesa, or what was left of it. He’d walked by the airport, one of the few buildings left standing, except that it had been destroyed by a terrible fire. A Boeing had been thrown across the runway and speared its wing into the building before exploding.

The rest of the town had been leveled, with barely an erect wall in sight. He thought he was near Mendoza Park (except place names didn’t seem to matter any more). He encountered a few small children here. These followed him for a while, until they saw the gaping wound under his ribs and realized he was far worse off than they were.
He spent some time scratching between building debris, and finally found what he was looking for. He pulled out a scissors, and sliced off the painful wad of black gluey hair. He tried to cut the rest as well, but lifting his arm hurt too much. He was about to toss the scissors away, then thought better of it and stuffed the scissor into his back pocket.

He found some shoes in the debris, and a pile of Nike shirts. The shoes were too big, but he couldn’t find anything else worth wearing. Then a shirt. He didn’t care about colors, he pulled the first one he could find out from under some bricks and metal poles.
‘Just do it’, it said in unusually small and modest letters on the back.
“Do what?” he murmured to himself. He was about to step away when his eye could the strap of a daypack. He pulled it, but it was broken. He searched for another one, but it was even more damaged.

He found a shattered ATM and fished into the broken metal canister under the faceplate. He stuffed some money into a plastic bag lying nearby. Dead bodies everywhere. Some of these people had survived, they must have, but there had been no one to rescue them. Why had the government not sent a team to rescue them? Did they have better things to do?

It was warm even as it rained. He opened his mouth and licked his lips and chin. He found tins and broken fruit from demolished roadside stalls. He opened a can of coke, and put two more in his bag. A few steps further he found bottles of water, picked one up and threw out the one coke can. For some reason he stayed close to the road. It felt as though it might take him somewhere, anywhere, as long as he could move beyond all this.

Under his eyes it was wet and cool. He pawed his cheeks a little while he walked. He didn’t understand. His fingertips were wet, and not with blood, with water. Through his fatigue he imagined that it was raining again, except for once it wasn’t. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. Not tears of sadness, tears of strain, but in his mind, he was walking in salty rain.

The Holiday, Chapter 6

Six
Breach

The sky broiled with the leading edge of a giant arc that was sweeping across the Sulu Sea. Although only a few drops of rain blew occasional bullets against his face, it was still very warm. He was not certain what to do. His guidebook specifically said that Palawan was not in harms way. The track beaten by typhoons every season, the guidebook assured, was a great distance to the south and east of Palawan.

Impulsively he waved at a motor scooter, and was comforted by the young man’s big white smile.
“Where you wan go?”
Hugh felt somewhat embarrassed. The locals must despise the tourists, must think for all their money, they are lazy and stupid and greedy for pleasure. He winced, and said softly: “The beach.”
“Oh, White Beach?”
“Huh? It’s called ‘Whites Beach’?”
The man laughed. “No, just White. It’s no far. Just one point five.”
Encouraged by the man’s can do attitude, he got in and they pulled away.
“You not stay long on White Beach okay,” the man said over the roar of the engine and the wind.
“Why?”
The man waved at the maddening forest around them. Hugh made eye contact, showed the thumbs up. He liked this guy. He had some grit.

But Hugh felt inwardly confused. Why? Why had he decided to this? He didn’t know what it was. He just didn’t feel clear about where he was, and he wanted the open space of a beach to see over the forest, to get his bearings. And perhaps seeing this storm, seeing the waves, he’d get a feel for what to do because he hadn’t planned on staying in Puerto that night. He’d wanted to go to Sabang on the South China Sea side of the long Palawan dagger, and now he wanted a headsup if that was feasible. But he wanted to see for himself. It was a rare mistake.

The 1.5km felt like 10km. The motor scooter was struggling through mud, and then thick dune sand. On both sides the jungle had been violently slashed and driven back by machete blades. The dense jungle sheltered them from the strong winds, more than both passengers had expected.

The forest cleared, revealing the cool blue of the South China Sea. It swelled like a cleavage subtly into view, and for a moment Hugh was stunned by the sheer color of the vast gently undulating expanse. The water seemed to glow like a tropical drink set on the counter of a backlit bar. There were some huge blackening cumulonimbus in the background, but he thought he’d seen worse storms in continental South Africa. What he didn’t expect was this sea. It was as calm as a swimming pool, sometimes flattenening into a shimmer of faint corrugations. The wind was behind them. The storm, he should have guessed, was approaching from the other side, towards the Turtle and Honda Bays on the Eastern shoreline, and of course, towards Puerto Princesa Bay.

“Do you think the storm will come here?”
“I think so. But there is time for a swim.”

Hugh hadn’t thought of that, but the idea suddenly appealed. He walked over the warm wet sand, dropping his clothes on a wooden bench under a beach shelter constructed from driftwood sticks.
The water was very warm. He sank into it, feeling conscious of his absurdly white skin and bulging stomach, but trying to enjoy it all the same. Startled fish skipped clear of the water. He felt something brush by his calf.
“Wow,” he murmured, “these waters are just full of life.”
He submerged again, swimming underwater, enjoying the soft salty water against his skin.

He came up, his warm body shining and soapy, and looked back at the beach. The motor scooter was throbbing. It was a surprisingly loud sound, but he guessed the flat beach and calm water amplified it a great deal more than normal. He waved back at the solitary figure on the beach. He glanced over his shoulder and saw a series of lightning bolts zap down at the sea. He was horrified to see that the electric spark had illuminated mighty pitch back silhouettes behind the closest storm. A warm gust pushed past him. As he walked knee deep across the broad white sandbank to the narrow platinum band of wet strand, the motor scooter bellowed to life. Suddenly he noticed the tops of the palm trees. It was not the palms, but the dark soup of airborne debris behind them, and the growing moan, that kicked his feet into an electrified run. Now the man was waving, and he’d turned on the headlight.

The man’s eyes were wild. He’d almost pulled away before Hugh reached him. The engine roared as they went back through the deep sand, and they nearly skidded over the mud into a series of bamboo spears poking out of the side of the cleared jungle. Once on the even dirt road, they found themselves entirely alone. They sped as fast as the motor would go over the lonely windswept road towards Puerta Princesa. The motor scooter was being buffeted violently by wind now, and dismembered leaves and branches were now flying across the road, the hands of trees gesticulating frantically. A large leaf slapped Hugh on the cheek. He pulled at it and the wind tore its soft leafy flesh to pieces. The large fan of a palm tree flew end over end, the fan brushed red cuts over their faces as it passed.

The dirt road seemed to be on fire, as milky white dust was torn off the surface. Then the rain whipped at them, and the world turned into a dark, roiling mass. It was in that moment that they suffered a terrific concussion: something very big, like an oversized pool cue, hit them from the side. Two men and their machine shot off the road and landed in the jungle. One man split like shattered watermelon, the machine lost its voice in a lung bursting bang that ripped it into a grenade of sharp greasy chunks of serrated metal. The other person landed deeper between the trees, a small fountain spraying out of the side of his head (above his ear). Although unconscious, he traveled smoothly down a muddy path created by forest animals, and skidded one third of the way into a sort of burrow.

While he slept through the eviscerating nightmare, the jungle that kept him was carved and slit into hammers and spears, and for several hours, it was as though the wind turned itself into Machete; slicing and hurling javelins and spending its fury on rock and man and plant alike. Even silver fish that jumped out of the churning waters were diced by ferocious clouds of black and swarming debris.

And in time the black blood oozing out of his skull, and the black mud in which he lay were indistinguishable.

Five

Holiday

The warm wind burned the pixie tips of already slightly sun burnt ears. He pressed the two white buds into his ears, and pressed PLAY on the shuffle. For the first time ever, he turned the volume up until it hurt. He knew what was coming. He knew it.
He looked up into the sky, as though perhaps the sky would change its mind at the last moment.
It was imminent now; he felt it approaching.
He walked down the steps wondering if he would ever fly again, wondering if the thought itself was absurd paranoia, but even so, he was somewhat amused that instead of appreciating this last flight, he had slept through almost all of it, even missed breakfast.

Another step, like the last tick of a clock. When the moment came, he recognized it immediately. It was as though the sparking atom had communicated itself across the Gulfs of the entire world, on a cellular basis, passing this consciousness on beyond the Sulu Sea, swarming through the islands of life in every other hemisphere.
It was dizzying for him, as usual, being more sensitive than the average human being to the subliminal. What could he say to this young woman in her red headscarf, walking beside him?

He still had the chemical residue in his brain of a dream on the plane, and he was still making sense of that, putting words to colors, while walking over the glowing cement. The train of passengers moved slowly towards the small airport terminal on the island. But even from a distance, it was obvious that tourists had been instantly transformed into refugees. And so very smoothly, with his mind’s eye turned inward, still piecing together the dream, his hand slipped into his unslung backpack, and around the hard body of his camera.
His slow motion walk carried him to the shade, and the growing circus of suddenly desperate human beings. His hands were assembling a lense and filter (for the sun, and dappled light).

He pressed the ‘on’ button.
It was so deathly silent among the gathering hordes that he was able to hear the soft electronic squeal of the battery loading up.

It was a moment repeated at airports all over the world. People frozen in their shoes, cellphone in hand, attempting to communicate with family, with friends, to gather more information, to make arrangements. But none of these people had a signal. And that confirmed the icy new reality. People stood helpless and silent and suddenly the moment manifested on all at the same time. Wasn’t it as if the atmosphere itself had sucked up all the errant signals and waves and in a blinding flash of furious anger, exploded a shearing white light back at us that melted our golden city, turning to dust a city of blood.

Hugh could feel their thoughts. You could cut it with a knife. He thought this unspoken conventional wisdom was a typical response to the inexplicable: to blame God for man’s mad deeds.

If it had been any other international airport the answers would have been more obvious, television screens would have been lit up with CNN. And shortly thereafter the status of every flight in the world would change from DELAYED to CANCELLED.
The peculiar silence here came from shock and awe.
He felt the skin on his arms prick as he lifted his camera.
Realities were fused, one by one, into the digital memory of the chip.
While clicking one electric memory after another, the dream unraveled itself softly. It went like this:

You arrive at an expensive restaurant you have always meant to visit, and somehow imagine the people around you that you have imagined, suddenly becoming real human beings, just as you yourself become real to them. Can Rome and Paris continue to exist without our being there? What about other places we pass through like zoos, prisons, schools, offices and airports? When we die is it any different? Do we live under the assumption that nothing can exist without our being conscious of it? Do we think our consciousness prevents us from being able to die? Does the world need one person’s consciousness to exist? And when we die, will the world need us to imagine it into existence, and will the world want to imagine life again for us on some other world like this one?

Just then the music from his iPod transitioned from Enya’s Orinoco Flow to Green Day’s Holiday.
He put the buds in his pocket, but could still hear a soft bleating coming from his pocket. He moved among them, watching their faces, and the bags, the burdens they would be carrying with them.

A solitary figure at the head of a dense queue put down the big plastic receiver of an old, creamy white telephone. He went to a board and pushed a mechanical handle that flapped metal plates into place on a modest overhead board. Metal pushing against metal, to produce a loud, demonic, jarring noise. It took Puerto Princesa airport little more than half an hour to do what every other airport in the world had done.

ALL FLIGHTS CANCELLED
UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE

Hugh led the mobs of people out of the building. He noticed military vehicles arriving, and 4x4 police vans, many of them, lights flashing, sirens blaring. Motor scooters were being fought over, so he decided to walk. Shouts, screams, shots, and he put the white buds back into his ears:

“…this is the dawning of the rest of our lives…”

He noticed cars rushing in the direction of the airport he was walking away from. He noticed the people in the cars had panicked eyes, and did not even notice him. Not long after that, the road was gridlocked with traffic, with some motor scooters moving between the paralyzed traffic.

It was a long walk, long enough for the weather to change. Gusts tore at his shirt. He wondered about the bags he had abandoned at the airport. Was there anything he would need? Perhaps his ACG shoes. The rest was just clothes, and he was prepared to do without those. The notebook? Perhaps now was a good time to begin to learn how to live without computers.
The warm wind pushed him. One more thing before I let go of that as well…

Further along the road he found a man with a bandanna around his head, wearing a Harley Davidson shirt, and sporting plenty of tattoos, stuffing his grinding jaw with what looked like a cheeseburger.
“Hey man,” he said in a lazy Texas drawl, “it’s just a hurricane.”
Hugh glanced up, nodded to him, turned around and took two steps backwards looking at the road behind him, and then with a last sidelong glance at the American, went on along Rizal Avenue.

As the hard rain began to fall he stepped into the internet café, and placed his Lonely Planet on the counter, brushing the rain wet cover with a leftover paper napkin.

“Is the internet working here?”
“Sure. It’s cable so it’s working just fine.”
“Can I have half an hour?”
“You can have all the time you want…”
“Can I have a coffee, and an extra napkin?”
“Anything you say buddy boy.”

He was the only person in the café for the first 10 minutes, but by the time the mob arrived, Hugh van Lewen was completely hypnotized by what he was reading.
A hydrogen bomb had been detonated over Jerusalem in the early afternoon; 14:43 local time. What was peculiar was that that was all CNN knew. For several hours now no one had updated the news at CNN. Through Google he tracked the information at source, finding bloggers and citizen journalists close or practically in situ. There was a grainy photograph taken from a redirected flight bound for Tel Aviv. There had been a lot of reaction.

Peculiarly the only streaming footage shown was of Lahore, also devastated. New York and London…still there. Every click of the mouse now took on a chilling significance. Another Google search, and a completely new set of results:

Google: blogs nuclear destroyed

Tehran joined a host of Middle Eastern cities.

The crowd outside were banging on the windows, an Irish female was conveying – shouting – the news as her boyfriend conveyed it to her. Her voice began to break.
The mayhem outside finally woke Hugh out of his reverie. He thought this next instruction tapped into the black keyboard would be the last time he’d ever use a computer, anywhere, ever.

He typed in the Google search box: Philippines typhoon tracker
He studied the information and then clicked on an image.
‘..unusual track…hard to predict…record intensity…gusts up to 340 km/h…’

When he stepped outside he stepped into another world.

The Holiday

One
Manila

Hugh closed the lid of light, and as he did the peppermint blue was extinguished. The passenger beside him opened an eye as the notebook clicked, then closed it to the airplane’s hollow sounding darkness.
A child could have drawn the deep gashes in Hugh’s forehead. His clenched hands pushed down on the computer’s ceiling. His eyes were closed, but not in an attitude of sleep, such as the Asian man beside him. They were pinched shut. Hugh’s thoughts, had focused his face into its present consternation. And his thoughts were the clanging symbols of futility. He had, you see, on a whim decided to open a document he’d been polishing for several years, and after a few final flourishes and finishing touches, he had fiddled and fussed, and somehow lost it all. Now, with the edge of the Philippine’s dark archipelago crawling under the airlerons of the Asiana Airlines Boeing, and his two weeks holiday about to start, his entire being ached with pain and futility. The consequence of confirming to overwrite the file had meant he had lost the original. And with that loss, all the sacrifices, backaches, arguments – the entire restrospective – now amounted to nothing.

Already he began to search for meaning in the loss. Already he attempted to find the silver lining. As he did so he realized the full extent of the loss. Daggers penetrated his chest. Images swam through his mind. The breath knocked out of him by the storm of emotional chaos that flushed through him now, in floods, torrents, and monsoons.
And all the while the aircraft continued to descend to the islands. The randomness, now, of his life, begin to scratch at him. An unpleasant emptiness swelled inside him, like a virus.
If your life fails to work out, it must be because you did something wrong? Trouble is your fault.
He opened his eyes. The crude digital aeroplane on the LCD moved a fraction over a map of the islands. It reminded him of the graphics on Atari games he played as a child.
He glared at the screen. He was now moving rapidly towards a place he no longer wished to visit. With all his work stolen from him, there was no work to celebrate. He would have to turn back and start again. Start over! Repeat what had already been done, repeat what had been accomplished! How could he convey it all as well once more? And to suffer those sacrifices twice? To venture through those troublesome memories, to spend the time negotiating the complex narratives again…
Heartbreak was in the eyes that now blinked in the direction of the notebook.
The aircraft landed, hangars and buildings flashed by the windows in rapid-fire. When Hugh stood up, his body felt twice as heavy. He contemplated leaving the notebook – a burden now – on the seat. He contemplated smashing it on the tarmac under the volcanic nose cone of the plane. He bumped against a passenger and, out of character, did not apologize. He was determined to be miserable. His wretchedness was encouraged by the fact that of the two queues, the one he chose moved half as fast.
He finally emerged in the terminal, utterly defeated, and unwilling to continue his journey.
He decided to sleep on a bench at the airport, and fly back to Seoul the following day. Perhaps he could get a few chapters done in the first week. If he worked quickly, it would save him time and effort, for he’d be able to draw on short term memory.
But he couldn’t sleep. The mosquitoes feasted on him. After two hours he was sitting in the dimness, other bodies snoring around him. Whilst searching for chewing gum (chewing loosened the sulking mouth) he’s fingers found a Lonely Planet. He tugged it out, the rough soles of his shoes causing the cover to tear in half.
He started with pictures, then jumped around, and finally his reading became more focussed, more interested. Fatigue had anaesthetized the memory of the lost file. Now sleep was the priority. And second to sleep, passing the night.
Inexplicably the almost motionless shadow, which every few minutes turned a page, and made almost no sound to disturb those Philippinos sleeping around him, stood up and almost without effort, walked quickly out of the building. A waiting taxi immediately drove him away from the airport, and into Manila.

Two
The Prostitute

Having been told where to go, and noticing his unusual Westerner’s accent, the driver began to ask questions. “Where are you from? What do you do?” and so forth.
Despite the lateness of the hour, government troops, their automatic weapons gleaming in the polished night, were gathered at intersections throughout the city.
“Is something going on?” Hugh asked, turning to look at a checkpoint in the rearview mirror.
“Bah,” the driver said dismissively. “Tonight is not special. Many nights like this.”
The driver saw that his passenger was still looking over his shoulder at the receding unit.
“So what job you do?”
Silence, then Hugh turned and sat back. He glanced up, then out the window: “I’m a writer.”
“A writer! Bah.”
He glanced back at the driver, made eye contact through the rearview mirror, then lowered his gaze through the windscreen wipers.
Manila, a dark city, with some tall building looming high like old bones, crept nearer. He didn’t want to go beyond this outer framework of the city.
The taxi driver seemed to have lost interest in talking.
“Is it nearby?”
“Yes, yes, very near,” the driver answered, irritably.
Almost interrupting himself, and in a more hopeful tone, the driver asked: “You will need a lift back to the airport?”
“Yes, first thing in the morning.”
“What time?”
“Early.”
“You call me okay.”
“Okay.” A moment passed. “So you are writer. Where does this word come from?”
“Which word?”
“Okay.”
“Where does the word ‘Okay’ come from? It comes from a war, a long time ago.”
The taxi turned a corner and pulled alongside the curb.
“It means ‘0 Killed’. O.K.”
The driver nodded.
Hugh handed over dollars. The driver looked pleased. He jabbed his index finger at the card he’d put in Hugh’s hand. “I will pick you up. Tell the lady, then I will find the hotel. Okay?”
Hugh managed a smile: “Okay.” And closed the door.
The air smelt salty.

Another door opened, and inside, wood and women gleamed in the low candlelight.
He sat down and eyes traveled to him, met him, and waited. A waiting game of hope, futility, shame, anticipation and desire – but this last one – a desire for what?
It was while of them, an older woman, pushed and plucked against him that a thought emerged out of a cocoon of memory.

Hugh’s mother had killed herself, he realized, not because of her life, but because of all the hope and promise it once had. She had been a head girl in high school. And a beauty queen at university. And then it all ended when she fell pregnant. It had started as another promising chapter, but all good things game to an end, and the flames that once were, were eclipsed, and then dusted by the too-early humdrum of marriage. Her suicide was merely the confirmation of a much earlier ending of her fairy tale. And her standards, like Virginia Woolf’s, could not permit a life so far below the par she had set herself.

The prostitute bumped against him once more. He asked her, dully: “Are you a mother?”
This caught her off guard.
She continued to babble and slur and make suggestive remarks, but he interjected once more: “Tell me about your children.”

The other prostitutes glanced at them, somewhat surprised that she had managed so many rounds already without being brushed off by this young, western buck.
But then he did brush her off. The brewery that was her mouth, the fumes that shot bullets of spit onto his cheeks, finally made him wince. With a small hand gesture and a small shake of his head, she tasted again the bitterness of defeat.
He glanced over his shoulder at a beautiful woman – no, not a woman – a girl, of perhaps 17 or 18. He patted the chair next to him. The chair was filled by this girl’s companion, almost as attractive. He asked her about procedures and processes, and then costs. Finally he asked for the girl’s name, who was still sitting behind them, watching her friend and him discreetly. He paid the amount written on the serviette, underlined the name, and handed cash and the paper towel to the girl serving drinks.

Hugh stood up, turned, and called out her name. She glanced to two faces, who nodded, one waved scrunched up papers, before feeding them into a till.

And as arranged, a taxi was waiting at the door. Doors opened and closed.

In the lateness, deep in the gloom, he discerned a soldier holding the muzzle of a machine gun to a beggar’s head. The taxi drifted by, like a ghost. Hugh said softly, with eyes closed: ‘If you murder you may come, as Pilate did, to murder the man who is God. Gerard Manley Hopkins.”
She heard the murmured name.
“Pleased to meet you,” she said, hesitating, then reaching, shaking his hand.
“No, my name is Hugh. Van Lewen.”
“Van Lewen,” she repeated.
Again she whispered, to the window: “Van Lewen.”
A fist of mist spread in front of her lips, then the silver slipped back into darkness.