CALLOW and CRAVING
© David Nerlich 1995
Rachel crouches with her back pressed against a
rock high up on the end of the cape with her hair
thrashing in the full thrust of the furious wind. She
is as close as she dares to the the edge, overlooking
the crags and sickening waves. Far across the
waters the dark knuckles of the Hebrides rise.
Beyond to the north of them the sea and clouds meld
together into a vast grey wall of nothing. The sky
rumbles. She closes her eyes lost in all the fearful
symphony of noise. She takes deep breaths, taking
in, drinking up as much of the violent elemental
atmosphere as she can. When she opens them again
Thomas is there, standing about ten feet away with
his raincoat flailing and billowing out behind him
like a parachute. He stumbles then rolls awkwardly
toward her, half smiling, half gritting his teeth,
then sits up with his back to the rock beside her.
She stares at him, saying nothing. It is as if she's
just realised he exists, that this is a real person
next to her, and at that moment it seems much too
close to her.
Thomas remarked to himself how strange had been
the nature of Rachel's foreboding, as if there had
been some inexplicable knowing of what to expect, a
knowing that there was more than simply a
measurable degree of intoxication to be dealt with,
that rather there was an element of stepping into
space, of crossing into uncertain frontiers,
something akin to the smell of a ghost. The body too
seemed to sense something impending, host to
jitters and shifting into an uneasy supersensitivity,
like it was waiting for something, something that
might let all the monsters out, hiding things that
dwelt only in the corner of the eye suddenly striding
into plain view, marching across mind's eye in all
their hideous finery, or so he thought, or thought he
thought. And then he thought again . . .
Her eyes are closed but she can hear the
movement among the branches, the motion around
her benign and enveloping, not of beast or bird but of
an mollecular stream flowing out of herself and into
the branches. Without eyes she can see the living
colour in it, flowers are rising and blooming,
opening moist lips, each flower plants a kiss that
draws the blood from her skin, or through the skin
from the flesh, or through the flesh from something
deeper, something it craves almost sexually. She
imagines herself swept on a wave of petal colours,
wonderfully bright and ever changing, rippling with
the ebb and flow borne from a distant pulse. She
sees no reason why heaven need be more than this.
Nor why she doesnt spend more time alone having
daydreams like this? But then she's never had a
daydream exactly like this.
Open your eyes . . .
She does, and what she sees is at once dazzling
and impossibly drab, everything draped about her in
a spectrum of filthy greys. Thomas is sitting with
his back to her. The rusty thatch of the back of his
head looks like a furball coughed up by a cat. He
glances round at her as she stirs and there's
something wild about his eyes, something
fantastically wide open about them. She can't bear
the sight any longer. She looks away, rubs her
forehead, trying to clear her mind and stop all the
strangeness, but the palm of her hand she finds
shining at her, a fabulous mesh of blue veins.
They walk silently. For the first time the path
breaks from the cover of the forest, and so is
revealled the heights to which they have already
climbed, a wide sweep of the forest roof now below
them - a storm of vegetation, boughs crossed and
twisted and in their lichened paleness like lightning.
The cloud cover too is breaking, breached by spears
of sun, bright motes crossing the lowlands far and
hazy beyond. Thomas stands on the edge of the path
overlooking it all and looking as if he'd made it
himself so it seems to Rachel, and unlike that
moment when she first opened her eyes all is now
surging with colour, living pulsing sentient greens,
infinite hues, flames of it licking about her shoes.
''My shoes are on fire...'' she says sitting on a
rock with her chin in her hand, looking down at them.
The words fall limply, the sound of her own voice
seems a stupid thing - but its alright, he knows
what she means. He turns to face her, poised against
the distance with his firebangs flying on the wind.
It's the first time he has sought her eyes since
entering this strange universe of theirs. He watches
her but she doesn't know what to say. He's so much
better at being like this than she is.
They climb higher.Everything is wrought in elaborate
neon and full of faces and ciphers and eruptions of
nameless things. If she closes her eyes they don't go
away - thats the most disconcerting thing - it won't
go away, any of it - but while its scary its sort of
interesting. The way spirals up and up, giddying.
Someone had warned her of the likes of this once.
That it would be like a merry-go-round you can't get
off. She's on it now and its spinning faster.
''Look at that.'' said Thomas, pointing up.
''What?''
''That sun coming through the leaves, glittering
like that. Does that do anything to you?''
It looked to Thomas like part of the tree was
laced with diamonds, sparkling at him but mocking
like a cheshire cat's grin. What are you? Too
beautiful, too much like holiness, too empty in truth
though. Like a satiric reference to the face of God.
Were it really God in the tree it wouldn't be laughing
like that, mocking his eyes, being so obviously void
of message, good for nothing but looking at. Spinning
wheels, flashing lights, God in his tree - he seemed
to have outgrown it all now, maybe for seeing that
it would all soon be gone, whatever.
'' Does it do something to you?'' Rachel asked
him.
''It did. But it doesn't now.''
Rachel lead him by the hand to the crown of
a high rock. She lay down in the rock with her coat
spread out under her like two black wings.
''I always wanted to try this.'' he said.
''Try what?''
The soft hyperbolae of their flesh blurred with
the curves of the stones all around, Thomas unsure
if it was into Rachel or into the living rock that he
sank, the boulders blurred with the clouds, and earth
and sky were flesh. As her arms folded about him,
all of it did - and the all of it sought his mouth,
and he tasted its soft breath, a deep wet undulating
enclave opening to him in a a kiss, opening and
opening endlessly.... Rachel closes her eyes. Spine
and shoulders pressed hard against the altar rock,
there is a sense of ritual in this joining, of a
terrible magic being worked - eyes open again - the
flying sky and a fringe of hideous fire sprouting
from Thomas' brow, and Thomas glimpsing the
clouds boiling reflected in her eyes for a moment
then gone again, her lids shuttered and trembling ,
her lips blue with cold, her face closed to him like a
beautiful death mask. He drew closer to the edge of
the spell, wanting to pause at the brink but a force
beyond himself in control and it began, the heat and
voltage exiting him in its sweet helpless
detonations - firing, firing, then falling, falling and
over - but for a kiss of denouement on the pale
mouth.
From the battlements they watched the sun
depart, like a red fireball doused in the sea. There
was a stab of sadness felt by both of them as they
sensed it all slowly seeping away and leaving them.
Clouds crossed the sky like an armada of burning
ships, and the land too glowed hotly in the angled
light.
''I never understood before,'' says Rachel ''why
people want to paint landscapes, and skies. Now it's
so obvious...''
She grabs onto him, hard, like she doesn't want
to float away.
''Everything seems just perfect. Like it would
never need to change...''
''Mmm...''
''But I've never thought that before, Thommy... In
fact I've just realised that nothing's ever been
perfect. My whole life has been an imperfection.
Incomplete...misshapen...a deformity... some kind of
dreadful deformity...''
Thomas bound her in a firm embrace, saddened
that his will to protect could forge no bastion
against these ghosts that came from inside her.
He had thought perhaps this day might change
her, or something in her, somehow... For himself he
was content. In the day's ending he felt strangely old
- though old in the way of having reached a fine age
in this idyllic glowing peace. He imagined the end of
a life might feel like this, still and complete after
an age of fury. He hoped so anyway.
Now Rachel watches the stars. They seem harmless
enough this night, but she is nevertheless appalled
by the vastness of everything. Her head swims as
she is no longer gazing upward but rather down into
an impossible emptiness into which she might fall.
He's looking at the sky like it's an old friend, so
unafraid. All she can see is an infinite scrapheap
senselessly orbiting about itself. What does he see?
Something alive? thinking? Knowing what they're
thinking? She wrestles with the idea but it's more
disturbing than the emptiness. All or nothingÉ
"What are you thinking about now?"
Thomas had been drifting and feeling an energy
from afar sucking him away - where? To Morocco, to
Portugal - anywhere - to some pokey hotel room
with a bed with Rachel in it and a crowd of
mountains outside the window.
"Nothing." he said.
Together on the grass beneath the glittering
night his eye is against her ear as if pressed to a
window, to look within and behold the twilit oceans
of her unconcious, a spirit formed of clouds of
nebulous spray, stirred by whirlpools of absent
thought.
"Nothing..." she said, and Thomas thought perhaps
he glimpsed some profound sadness living inside
Rachel then. He was almost afraid to speak, careful
of what he should say to her. In the end he didn't say
anything.