The View from Mount Dog Read online

  ‘No,’ said Carney. ‘I’ve often puzzled over why it should have happened just at this moment. I’m slightly less puzzled about how it happened at all.’

  ‘Might you elaborate?’

  ‘I’ll try. I suppose over the years – and quite unconsciously, I might add – I’ve been formulating the idea that human beings are capable of very much more than they themselves think and infinitely more than they are told. Everybody knows that small children can easily be brought up bi-, tri- or even quadrilingual. There seems no end to what their brains can assimilate. Now look at the educational system of a country like this one – or of any other, come to that. It’s lamentable. Children can actually and legally leave school at the age of sixteen functionally illiterate in their own mother tongue. Clearly no one is being educated to even a fraction of their innate abilities and, indeed, the more you stand back and look at the whole social set-up with a properly jaundiced eye the more it seems that it’s in nobody’s interest that they should be. The whole aim of advanced civilisation, now that the immediate horrors of nature have been more or less held at bay, is to keep people quiet at all costs from cradle to grave. Just that. Nothing else.’

  ‘Yes!’ Desmond Lermit was sitting forward in his chair, the rare image on television of unfeigned attentiveness. ‘That’s it exactly. That is the Social Contract. In exchange for its total and mindless passivity the public agrees to be entertained for life. More ghastly TV channels, more dreadful sit corns, more awful video-cassettes, more organised sports, more hideous golf-courses, theme parks, computer games….’

  ‘You take my point,’ Carney interrupted gently, perhaps lest his host get properly launched into some private Jeremiad. ‘Now, it came to me that just as people’s brains are not being educated to appreciate much other than organised entertainment nor are their bodies being trained except down to the standards of organised sports. I found myself doubting whether the current levels of physical achievement as measured by world records represented more than a fraction of human bodily potential. It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘But how did you liberate your own potential?’ asked Desmond. ‘That’s what I want to know.’

  ‘I’m not too sure,’ confessed Carney, ‘although I can tell you it happened quite suddenly one evening as I was running for a bus. But before that I’d been thinking the traditional shibboleth about endless concentration and single-mindedness being the way to achieve anything was probably completely wrong. Indifference and contempt would be a better start….’

  ‘… and a fine maxim for dealing with life,’ interrupted his host. Off-camera the Studio Manager buried his face in his hands.

  ‘… but what was needed was a way of liberating the mind completely from all thoughts of the effort it takes to do something. I can tell you that, in so far as I think about anything when I’m breaking records, I imagine myself trying to catch an elusive number 5 bus. Five seems to be a significant number for me,’ he added, but did not elaborate.

  ‘I think it’s brilliant,’ said Desmond admiringly. ‘I’ve never heard anything quite like it. But presumably your physical potential could have been expressed in any activity?’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course.’

  ‘Would I be right in thinking that your choosing sport was precisely because you despised it?’

  ‘Perfectly. Actually, I don’t despise sport as such; it’s merely something people can do if they like. I particularly loathe organised sport, the mass international sporting machine, that whole world so beautifully typified by bogus tennis-tantrums. So sports seemed like a sacred cow that it might be quite fun to have a tilt at. The British are so enslaved by their whole social organisation that they’ve long since forgotten how to say boo to geese, much less moo to sacred cows.’

  This made Desmond laugh enough to waste nearly thirty seconds of peak viewing time. ‘I think that’s a scriptwriter speaking,’ he said when he recovered. But then his face fell surprisingly as if an inner sobriety had surfaced unbidden. ‘I’m awfully envious, you know,’ he said. ‘Not of your records, of course; they’re rather silly, aren’t they?’

  ‘Footling.’

  ‘But I wonder what I could do?’ mused Desmond Lermit wistfully. ‘I’m almost fifty.’

  ‘Oh, anything you like. Motor racing?’

  ‘Much too noisy. And the company….’

  ‘Of course. Mountaineering? That’s quiet.’

  ‘Not the way I’d do it; I’m terrified of heights. I rather like depths, though, oddly enough. How about deep-sea diving?’

  ‘Perfect. Go to it.’

  And so the viewing public was treated to the extraordinary spectacle of a television host planning his own future by using his guest as job consultant. The Studio Manager stood like Lot’s wife in headphones.

  Desmond Lermit showed a few more clips of Carney Palafox’s sporting achievements, then said: ‘You surely won’t go on with this sports thing now?’

  ‘No. I think I’ve got as much amusement out of it as there is to get. It’s becoming tedious. I’d like to get back to my wife and my cat. No, I’ll leave it to the professionals to catch up, although maybe I’ll have just one last fling. Do you suppose there’s a marathon in the offing? I’ll have to ask around and see if anybody knows. I started with one and, although they take an awful time to do, there’d be a certain symmetry to end with one, wouldn’t there?’

  ‘He’s completely insufferable,’ said Bob Struthers, who was watching. The wastepaper-basket beside him was full of savagely crushed root-beer cans. ‘They both are, him and that Lermit queen. As far as I’m concerned, it’s goddamned open season on huskies. I wonder what the sod’ll turn up to ruin now?’

  The answer was a marathon run ten days later in Italy as part of the Rome Games. Carney Palafox was not an official entrant; but a figure dressed as a chef was seen to attach itself to the back of the pack and rapidly work its way to the front. This time he was evidently going for maximum humiliation since within the first kilometre he took the lead and had soon disappeared. Helicopters, gaggles of motorcycles and convoys of press cars with cameras mounted on their roofs kept him on Italian television screens, though, and everybody was prepared to see the fastest-ever marathon. Within sight of the stadium and a clear sixteen minutes ahead the fleeing chef had nearly caught his number 5 bus when a man burst through the cheering crowds lining the road. In front of a dozen cameras Carney Palafox was shot dead on the spot by a disgruntled Turkish miler who then made a dash for it. He was soon outpaced and torn to pieces by devout Carney fans.

  And thus ended the more public and the shorter of Carney Palafox’s two careers. That summer unquestionably marked an indelible trauma in the collective memory of international sports, and Carney himself would have been the last to be surprised at the conspiratorial way in which the public machine closed ranks and dealt with it. The sporting journals and the Guinness Book of Records went on printing their annual lists of new achievements year in, year out, just as they always did. Only in the columns assigned to that particularly memorable year there appeared ten entries right across the range of sporting activities, each marked with one asterisk or two. At the foot of the page the rubric read: ‘*CP official world record’ and ‘**CP unofficial world record’. It was one way of glossing an annus mirabilis. But Carney Palafox’s records stood for an awful long time, nine of them outliving his cat and five of them his wife.

  Compressor

  I

  It is a strange moment when, whistling in a bare room, you chance to hit the precise note at which it resonates. For the duration of that note the room becomes live, it rings in sympathy; the very plaster declares its heart. A quarter-tone’s deviation up or down and it at once falls silent, you become again a whistler in an empty room. Similarly there can come a moment, maybe only when you are past being quite young, when something happens which makes your lived past vibrate with a kind of accuracy likely to make you say, ‘Yes, that’s me; that is how I have always been,’ but
which also might make you much prefer to fall inwardly silent with that shame which is not guilt but years and years of wishing you were not so. Such a moment came, such a note was struck and such a recurrent fault was set trembling into inward audibility when you visited Tagud.

  Thanks to Badoy, whose home village it was, Tagud had become a legendary place, a minor Mecca which, once you had heard its name, you were fatally destined to visit. For at Anilao you shared an exile: he from his birthplace, you from yours. And what brought you together in that dull coastal strip with its half-hearted fishing and its weary copra-making? What else but the sea, which, although it scarcely runs in your blood, does run beneath your character like an undertow, tugging and churning and – whenever you are close to it – unsettling the contours of your restless bed.

  You did not become conscious of Badoy until several weeks of enforced exile had passed in Anilao. The government project – a feasibility study of the prospects of a dendro-thermal installation to generate electricity for the province with quick-growing timber – had stalled in the way in which such things do in that part of the world. Insinuations had come that the funds set aside for your salary had already bought the cement needed to build a house for the newly wed daughter of the manager of the electricity co-operative. Pending reassurances you stopped work. Many days passed, and in Anilao the days pass slowly. The mornings are blue and tropical; the afternoons are black and tropical, and the rains tramp in from the sea; the sunsets are resplendent until promptly the nights descend like swags of stifling black cloth shot with vast discharges of electricity. Not long, therefore, before your feet took you into the sea as others’ take them into the room where the television is. And there you met Badoy.

  You are hardly alone in your admiration for people with an elegant physical skill. It is pointless to deny there is always an erotic component, however well disguised, in such admiration since it is impossible to watch any body so closely without seeing your own. One day you were down among the corals in a mask, at least knowing enough so that the corals you sometimes held on to were not those which sting and leave the hands blazed with brown weals. In point of fact you were watching – for as long as each lungful of air lasted – the local species of bird wrasse with its long snout whose exact purpose seems not precisely known. It is a reasonable assumption that it picks its food out of deep crevices which other fish cannot reach; but this, as they say in scientific circles, remains unconfirmed. You had some idea that, as a casual amateur with time on his hands, it would be nice to confirm it one way or the other. They are not easy fish to observe, because unlike other species of small coralline fish they seem to be continually on the move, weaving rapidly from place to place rather than forever circling the same patch (for many species of fish recognise a territorial imperative).

  On that particular occasion you had just gone down a fathom or two with freshly held breath when from behind a rock and not more than ten feet away there swam a fat parrot-fish, green and blue and scrunching away at the coral with its powerful beak-teeth. There was a sudden rushing sound, a pok! and the fish began flailing wildly. A shadow passed overhead and the parrot-fish rose, still struggling, hauled upwards with a long steel rod spitting it. You rose with it to the sunlight and there was Badoy sparkling and grinning in tiny home-made wooden goggles set with little olives of glass. He passed the struggling fish down along the spear and on to the length of green nylon cord which trailed in the water behind him.

  ‘Did I surprise? But I thought, that’s a delicious fish and you are down there without a spear-gun so why waste it?’ He refitted the spear into the gun he was holding, a simple wooden stock shaped like a child’s toy rifle with powerful heavy-gauge elastic tied to its short bamboo barrel: essentially an underwater catapult. You bobbed your head back beneath the surface. In front of you hung Badoy’s legs, one foot wearing a flipper cut from marine plywood and held on by a piece of inner tubing tacked across it, and trailing downwards in the blue water like a thin tail from his spear-gun was the length of nylon which ended with perhaps two kilos of threaded fish, joined now by the still-flapping parrot-fish.

  ‘How long did that take you?’

  ‘Two hours, maybe more. It’s not a good day. The water’s too clear. Very easy for us to see the fish but very easy for the fish to see you. Also it is daytime. And anyway this is Anilao. Not like Tagud.’

  ‘Tagud?’

  ‘Where I come from. Maybe forty kilometres down the coast.’ And Badoy pointed with the tip of his spear (which you now noticed was barbed with a nail bent and hinged ingeniously through a hole) to where the green of the palms disappeared in a succession of hazy headlands into the distance. ‘They are real fishermen there. Not like here in Anilao.’ He looked sardonically at the beach a few hundred yards away on which a handful of boats was drawn up but which was bare of activity except for the rootings of domestic animals.

  ‘Is that thing very difficult to use?’

  ‘No, not difficult to use. Difficult to catch things, yes. Ha, perhaps that is why not many people in Anilao go spear-fishing. They just use nets sometimes or look for small octopus in the rocks at low tide. They are very lazy here. Just drinking.’

  Of course you wondered why he was here if he seemed so contemptuous of Anilao and its inhabitants, and of course you were drawn to the only other person in the sea for what seemed like miles in any direction. Above all, you were filled with a great urge to imitate, to try spear-fishing perhaps for food (as you would have explained it sensibly to yourself) but more to become accomplished in a new skill, to have some of that nonchalant marine confidence and enter a new world with new companions and rise just as dazzlingly to the surface, teeth glittering with pleasure. But more still – although you did not at the time recognise it – because it promised fear and fresh confrontations with an old bugbear; for your submerged self sniffs out fear like truffles which your daily self shrinks from as poison.

  Badoy’s elegance underwater was complemented by his ingenious craftsmanship on land. He set about making a second spear-gun using the few tools he could lay hand on, hacking the stock out of a plank of coconut wood with a large knife. The spear was a metre of quarter-inch steel rod in which he gouged holes and slots and raised a jagged tooth at one end to catch wire loops attached to the stretched rubber thongs. And all the time you wondered why he was so eager. Was it because he had nothing to do? Or maybe because he wanted a companion in the water, even a tyro? Or because he was a natural didact anxious to pass on what he knew? A week or two had passed, the speargun long since finished and in daily use before you discovered that the much older woman who brooded discreetly in his house was Badoy’s wife, evidently formidable enough in some undisclosed manner to insist on their living in her home village rather than in his. Her uncle, recently dead, had left enough money by local standards so that Badoy was not compelled to take regular paid work. What would he do but mooch and fish and, according to gossip, occasionally disappear for annihilating binges in the distant provincial capital?

  Frightening as it all was eventually to become, you do remember those early days when you were learning the craft as ones of extreme happiness. Taking the spear-gun and spending three hours in the sea, often twice as long, sometimes with Badoy but more often alone, shooting and missing, stalking and missing, learning the habits of the different species. Exhausting at first: the continual swimming down to fifteen, twenty-five, forty feet in pursuit or merely on reconnaissance, then clawing back up for air, the process repeated for hours until a strange disorientation set in and you became in some sense unsure at any given moment which medium you were in. Learning to manage the long nylon line attached to the rear end of the spear was a slow essay in exasperation. The currents tangled it; the corals snarled it; your legs attracted it and snared themselves in it. One day you said ‘Enough’ and cut the line off. It happened to be the day you got your first shot at a really decent-sized fish. The spear struck home satisfyingly and the fish made off with it at spee
d to vanish, heading downwards into the ocean deep.

  Badoy merely grinned and unhesitatingly set about making a new one; but it took hours and he cut himself in the process and you felt contrite and sullied by incompetence. Thereafter you learned to use the line, holding the stop-knot on the end lodged between two knuckles until there was enough catch to weight it out of the way in the water.

  Soon you began to return trailing small coral fish like paper cutouts on the tail of a kite. Most were familiar aquarium fish: angels, butterflies, Moorish Idols and the like, enough of which fried or toasted constituted a meal. Some days there were none; later there were a few but larger. And all the while Badoy hung around his dark house among the trees, whittling this and filing that or maybe sitting on the step morosely watching the eddies of hens around the pump where the maid did the washing and the sun never pierced the canopies of leaves. Behind him his wife moved sombrely about the house. Your arrival – probably anybody’s – would awaken both from their melancholy so that she smiled and Badoy sparkled. But when you left you could feel whatever strange and mutual reproach settle once more and no doubt remain until you next saw them: something which emasculated or unfeminised them into the gloomiest creatures.

  Away from his house, though, Badoy was full of energy. Even when alone in the water you felt his presence over your shoulder explaining a diver’s worst enemies or making you work the corals harder or pointing out that he always did most of his own impromptu repairs right there in the sea since he had nobody on shore to whom he could bring unravelled rubber bindings or broken wire loops. You were being urged along; steadily, certainly, you were being groomed but you still did not know exactly for what.

  ‘You must come to my village,’ Badoy said one day. ‘Perhaps at the end of this month or next month we will visit Tagud. You would like to come? The spear-fishing there is very good. But first we must practise night diving.’