The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

‘Well, never mind,’ Clem said. ‘Leave him to his farthing-harvests. He’s a horrible little gnome. You need to get away from him. Tell you what, I’ll take you to Peru.’

‘You’ve gone green, are you seasick?’ ‘A bit. It’s, um . . . it seems only to be in the mornings, though.’ She didn’t look pleased, only worried.

‘No. Christ, Minna, it’s yours until it makes an appearance in the world. It’s yours in the same way your liver is; you wouldn’t catch me telling you what to do or not do about that. I’d suggest not drinking heavily or taking a lot of opium, but you know.’

Hasskarl was the worst gardener I’d met since one of my uncles had insisted ferns grew best in salt.

Find some Indians, lie, cheat, bribe, use your father’s name, sleep with the chief, I don’t care. This is smuggling, like everything else we ever did. There’s always a way.’

But all at once it came back. The place where my father had stood and my grandfather, a place that was in my bones and stories and home but had been as lost to me as Byzantium for years – here it was. I felt like I’d drawn a door on the wall at home in chalk and gone through into an imaginary place where the river was a dragon and somewhere in the forest was something stranger than elves.

she laughed a deep viola laugh

Raphael took him to the statue and I half-meant to wander, but Clem caught my sleeve and said firmly that it was Culture and that a man couldn’t subsist altogether on chlorophyll.

‘I’m selling them to the doctor,’ she called ‘Give them some corn.’ ‘I am not feeding them so the doctor can dismember them over an idiot with a chest cold.’

There was a clunk and a rush of cold air, then a firmer clunk. Inti winced. She was much taller than I’d expected her to be, nearly as tall as Raphael – everyone here was tall. ‘Did that sound to you like a man liberating two quite valuable guinea pigs onto my roof?’

‘Yes.’ He came back and narrowed his eyes at the goat when it bleated at him. ‘Christmas dinner,’ he said to it. ‘That’s what you are. No bloody turkeys round here.’ ‘He speaks English when he’s unhappy,’ Inti explained. ‘Apparently it’s a good language for swearing. What’s he saying?’ ‘He’s abusing the goat,’ I said. She snorted. ‘It’s good for a person to be terrorised by a goat. Hard to get too high and mighty when there’s something chasing you for vegetables.’

All my love, Harry

He took out the letter again and I thought he would burn it, but he only sat holding it open. Abruptly he held it wide of himself. I didn’t understand until he set it down and pressed his hand over his mouth so that he could cry without making any sound.

‘I have. I used to live there. I was an opium smuggler.’ ‘You were a what? I thought you were in the Navy?’ ‘I grew up in the Navy. But the family have always been gardeners and I was sharked quite young by the East India Company and their expeditionary arm. But India, yes. For about a year. I used to oversee a poppy plantation and then take the opium to China.

‘If you want to avoid me, don’t stay stuck there, just walk fast,’ I said. ‘I can only chase you for about eight feet.’

‘The past ahead. Time is like a river and you float with the current. Your ancestors set off before you did, so they’re far ahead. Your descendants will sail it after.’

‘If you’d tried to leave me in India I’d have settled down in the hold, thanks,’ he said flatly. ‘Stop talking to what I haven’t said. How do you do that, anyway?’ ‘You’ve got one of those faces.’ ‘That makes no sense.’ ‘On purpose,’ he said.

‘You don’t know what this means yet, but listen anyway. When Mr Markham crosses the salt at Bedlam, you must not. But it’s no good saying must not to anyone, so I’ve made it cannot. I’m so sorry, but if you were well, you would go with him and I want you alive at the end of it all. This was the only way I could think of to make sure of it.’

‘Because I knew your grandfather,’ he snapped, and then all the fight went from him as fast as it had come and he only looked hopeless. ‘And you look like him.’

Raphael looked away. He didn’t say anything and nor did I. He wouldn’t want to hear that I’d seen a drawing of it or that I knew there were freckles across his shoulders. He wouldn’t want to hear, either, that my father had gone over the border looking for him.

Despite the whitewood band, my leg started to feel sore after every mile or so and we paused often, never too close to a markayuq and always facing away from it, which felt itchy, but I was a lot better at this kind of thing than Orpheus and I never looked back.

It wasn’t until I shifted that I realised Raphael was asleep against my back, his arm across me so that it would have been almost impossible for someone, even standing right above us, to shoot me without catching him too. His rosary had imprinted a circle pattern in my arm, then a suggestion of a cross, just near the top of the anchor tattoo. I closed my fingers over the beads. It was the first time I’d been in bed beside anyone, having been tritely and pointlessly in love twice with other people’s wives until I was too old to start. I’d thought perhaps I wasn’t the sort of person who could have lived close to anyone else, but that was wrong, now I was here. It would have been good, always to wake up this way.

I rubbed at the rosary print on my arm, which still coiled across the anchor tattoo like rope. It didn’t go away, but then I didn’t want it to and stopped trying.

Raphael watched me and I misread him. His neutral expression was a half-frown and it seemed cold. I had time to worry he was angry before he hugged me. I put both arms round him and had to rest forward against him, shaking now, though I couldn’t tell from what. I didn’t feel upset, but I could feel that everything I was thinking now was only skimming the surface of things, everything else shut off. He lifted me off the body and put me on my feet again. He was much stronger than Martel or me. He turned his head to his left and the rainforest beyond the river, his temple just resting against my chin.

‘How many fingers?’ He slapped my hand. ‘Fuck off.’ ‘That doesn’t work on bears.’ ‘Damn. Stalked as I often am by bears hellbent on ophthalmographical studies.’

‘If. Now eat something,’ I said, and threw some grapes at him, because it’s much harder to be serious whilst trying to duck flying fruit.

My ribs ached with wanting to. Atom by atom he had managed to become more important than Clem or cinchona or anything else, but he was going to live for hundreds of years and I was nothing but another one in a long line of people he would never know well, who died like leaves.

He could have interrupted me, but he let me finish before he even shook his head. He only did it once, an inch to one side. ‘It was nice to be worried over.

got up and pushed the door open, his chest hurting because his heart wouldn’t move. The last time had been ten years. ‘Harry?’ ‘There you are. I’m cooking, not very well; I was hoping you’d come round in time to properly supervise. Or at least tell me how in God’s name you’re supposed to cook quinoa.’ Raphael pushed his hands together, because they were shaking. It had only been the afternoon. He folded the blanket over the back of a chair. ‘Not like that. What’s the point of you?’ ‘I’m ornamental.’

‘You don’t care,’ he laughed. ‘I don’t.’ ‘Happily that doesn’t bother me at all. Are you turning into a markayuq?’ ‘What?’

Harry looked pleased. ‘And all this stop-start exponential catalepsy is in fact a kind of stop-start metamorphosis, and each time you’re a little different and a little stronger and one day different altogether. What a lovely creature you are.’ Raphael felt himself redden. ‘Eat your bloody quinoa.’

‘No, no, no. You’ve got an incredible memory. Graven in stone, isn’t it? You’re made of different stuff and it works differently. You utter stinking cheating bastard.’ He kicked him under the table. ‘Oh, Harry’s so stupid, Harry can’t learn Quechua, look at my fancy English.’ ‘Ow.’ ‘I’m going to read this essay to you,’ he said vengefully. ‘Tell me if it sounds clunky.’ ‘Oh, I don’t want to hear—’ ‘Part One,’ Harry said over him. ‘On the idiosyncratic features of the lesser Peruvian mouse.’

Raphael sat still to listen. He had never known it till recently, but he liked being read to.

Raphael found their place and didn’t say there would be no need for it soon. Harry wouldn’t stay much longer and he wouldn’t come back. He had a wife at home, and a little girl. He wasn’t a natural expeditionary; he worried about them and wrote letters he couldn’t send. The quinine men watched the post. ‘Still with me?’ Harry asked after a little while. ‘Yes. Just finding the place.’ ‘It’s there.’ ‘I know that.’ ‘Read it then.’ ‘Shut up.’

Raphael, You’ve been gone for a month and I must go home. But I’ll come back. Write to me when you see this. Harry

Raphael caught my wrist and pulled me up the steep step.

Right, let’s go. Are you warm enough? You’re not useful if you keel over.’ ‘Yes . . . yes, shut up, you pointless fossil.’ He pushed me gently into the wall. I tried to push him back and couldn’t.

I didn’t try to say it wasn’t what I’d meant. Asking if he would forget me, because I’d arrived in this tiny wakeful space, could only sound like bleating. He wouldn’t give a damn if he forgot me; I suspected he might even be glad to. All I’d done was remind him of a dead man.

It’s a miracle, actually; sickly prematurely ageing worryingly inbred horsey idiots have managed to convince everyone else their way is best by no other means than firmness of manner and the tactical distribution of flags. I can’t believe no one’s called our bluff yet.’

That’s exactly the same thing, in the language that you actually speak rather than in Quechua but using Spanish words. Bloody Quespañol. Speak one or the other, or don’t complain when someone smacks you over the head with a Bible and calls you a moron.’

‘Am I . . . allowed to be here?’ ‘There are only one or two of us in a generation now. They left me in Bedlam for a hundred years and they’re feeling guilty,’ he said. ‘You can do whatever I want.’

To anyone watching from the ground it would have looked like I was being lowered by a considerate cloud,

Minna had had the baby a month early, which had nearly given me a heart attack but hadn’t seemed to worry her. It was, she pointed out, far too hot to be penned up somewhere airless, even when that somewhere was your own mother.