Read Part I here
*****
Jacq rose slowly from his squat. Rose to his feet unsteadily, turned there and stepped, unsteadily, to where the body lay, face down in the heather. And the stillness into which he had, on his bike, gone forth, been drawn heedlessly towards, out from home and through the village, down to the river, across its piddle, across the concrete bridge and up, out onto the wide and silent moorland, its flat scrub, its pale sky, all of it redoubled now upon him, descending, concentrated in the form of the man who was lying face down, his arms by his sides. Jacq, his phone in hand, did not look around. The landscape was all there, no less quiet, no less still. On then up the slope of his boots’ upturned soles, their worn heels, worn to slant betraying gait, betraying knock-kneedness, betraying age; the legs in faded jeans, and, further up, his flat buttocks and narrow hips, cracked black band where a belt was cinched, pitched on the round of what, when standing straight, would have protruded gut; small of the back, skin bared where his shirt had ridden up, either in the fall or during the, supposed, drive, a scree of greying hair at the base of his spine; and on up again up his green-gileted back, wide, its quilting flat, stitching stretched, unzipped and splayed, as though unfurling as he fell, a span of malformed wings. His shoulders were square, and Jacq’s eyes now drifted back along his arms, the sleeves, their plaid, and to his hands. There was something to his hands, drawing in Jacq a further step, as though they held something that might explain him, that would wring from his presence something other than his death. The man’s white hair curled over his collar, what remained of his pattern tonsure having grown long, having grown out, appearing, Jacq might have thought, unkempt, in lock with the state of his clothes, the state of the man, perhaps, himself. It was a look that would not have been unfamiliar, that Jacq might have even said to be characteristic, of a piece with the land and with the landscape and with all those that peopled it.
Dropping his phone, Jacq approached the body. He knelt at its side. There can have been little doubt that the man was dead. Since Jacq had arrived, in all that time, that time whose duration has now been lost to the interim between the concrete and enacted and that extending beyond what has been recorded, what seen and maybe read, he had not moved and had not made a sound. Had he not, Jacq, in the contingent postures of his niggling want, positioned himself just so, set about just so, been thinking of how the so might justly be shared with those absent and those, he would have hoped, invested, so unremarkable and unobtrusive, so declined to the matter of the flat and scrubby moors, had been the man in his death that his body would have gone unnoticed.
Discovered, however, now, Jacq put out his arm and his hand on the man’s shoulder. He pushed, flat-palmed, against the body; the body shifted back. He pushed again in double, almost a rousing, almost a chivvy. Unresponsive to all the body was. Jacq’s breath cut short, grew audible, brought a breeze back on its intake across the moors. About them the heather was in flower.
Jacq hooked a hand underneath the far arm and, with some concerted effort, turned the body over. He looked into the face of the man and did not recognise it, and would no longer have recognised himself, nothing in his face, nothing there. The man’s eyes were closed. There was no sign of a bump, a graze or contusion. There was no stain of blood on his forehead or running from a broken nose. Jacq looked at him, the eyes shut, the lips sealed, at its pallor which held the whole light of the sky, rosacea the blushed array of flowering heather, and took to himself the absence there; no mien of tranquillity conveyed a state of rest, there was only obliterating nothingness, that absence which had divested both the man and Jacq of feature, of what in the face of the other one was, and whom, and had fixed them there instead, stones awaiting decades’ growth of lichen, just up and off the passing place of the moorland road.
Back along it then, from there, in the direction he had come, Jacq walked, his phone returned to hand. Some distance he had gone, phone intermittently held to his eyes, held over his head, in a bid for signal, for voices, word. He had not yet reached the cattle-gridded gate, nor could yet make out the dilapidated buildings which marked the borders of what was farmland. The odd sheep, however, there now was, crow too, the lands around no longer so unyielding of their lives. His breath still short, Jacq had started to sweat, pressed though not urgent in his pace, but aware of how the road dipped and wound in ways of which, as he had ridden on his bike, he had been ignorant. Now in a slow and steady ascent, he saw no distance, not the sink of the valley and its river, not the village beyond, not the town or any of what further there was still there, awaiting. Or perhaps it was invisible as Jacq thought nothing of it, the horizon the cold lip of the road, and that far only, climbing the rise, communication hoped to be established, his mind being bent.
His phone vibrated in his hand. A message from his father: Starting without you. No messages from anybody else. Jacq called the emergency services and, down a choppy line, cutting in and out, explained to the best of his ability what had happened and where he was, which direction to take once they came to the village, where to turn and for how long to drive until they found him, which they would, surely, once they got onto the moorland and followed the road the only way that it went. It was impossible they wouldn’t see him. He was told to go back to the body and wait.
Hanging up, it might have occurred to Jacq that he should have taken his bike. He had stood from the body and turned and begun, and had not stopped walking until his father’s message came. Now a long walk back beckoned, and the sky was shading dark. He must have felt a chill, suddenly, too, the adrenaline wearing off, what duty he owed to the corpse, at least as far as he was able for the moment, fulfilled, and him wearing only a t-shirt too, having set out with the notion of cycling only. He would have expected to be long home by now, resting well with all his energy spent, having exhausted of himself, and cosy in his childhood home, one sleep more in his childhood bed, before the train the next morning would take him back.
A second message from his father had come through while he had been talking to the dispatch. Your mother’s asking where you are. Jacq began typing a response then stopped. How even to begin to describe it? And how, unpossessing of any answers, would he respond to the inevitable questions that came next? What could he say about what he had found? He should have called, perhaps, but what, again, to say? Already, Jacq, unconsciously, had started walking back. The window for any word at all was brief. Fine here, he typed. Will explain all later. It would be enough to allay the fears his mother might have had. He re-opened the message that read Good morning x. Staring down at his phone, Jacq walked, mind bent now towards no horizon at all, curled lip, chewed lip, inarticulate. He wept quietly as he went.
Jacq stood over the body. He had told the dispatch he had moved it, turned it over, into his lap; they had reassured him. Coming back now, however, to where it lay, face up in the heather, Jacq noticed how inelegant his positioning had been, the man’s left arm trapped beneath him, the buttons of his shirt pulled taut exposing his belly through the gaps, shirt untucked also, his head now lolling back. He walked a circle around him; to put him back as he had found him, face down, must have seemed a desecration. Jacq, instead, freed his arm and tugged about his shirt, not re-tucking it but making sure his gut was covered. He joined the man’s hands at his sternum, noticing the plain wedding band his finger bore, and rubbed it gently with his thumb as he laid the right hand over the left. When asked, he had described the man as old: an old man in jeans and a plaid shirt, he had said. He had not thought to check for identification, but had mentioned there was nothing in the van. He had poked about in there, he had said. “And the van was crashed into a tree?” “Yes, that’s how it looked. But he doesn’t look injured. The body, there’s no blood.” “And about what time did you arrive there?”
Jacq checked his watch. Nothing but waiting, as he had been instructed. He sighed, perhaps regretting that he had not at least tried to call his father, who, had he answered, might have driven out, brought something to eat and, perhaps, a hot drink, who would have been, at least, some kind of company as they waited for whomever. And who would come, the police? An ambulance? Jacq had little idea how such things might work. There was no emergency, certainly not, but the scene was perhaps unusual enough to merit a degree of haste. He must have hoped as much. He looked at his phone again as though, miraculously, some signal might have been established, and there by the body, by the hawthorn, by the van, he might be able to connect, to be reached or, if in need, reach out. He walked back towards where he had leant his bike and took a sup of water from his bottle. For the first time in several hours, he sat.
When Jacq woke the sky had taken colour, darkened, a tumult of powered blue and deeper, the clouds in cast and definition that in the light of day they had not shown. Everything a shadow of the evening, a shade toward night, there was not a sign of human life for many kilometres around. Jacq shook the sleep from him and stood. There was no confusion in the way he moved, he appeared to know exactly where he was, his only jitter fear, perhaps, a nervousness that he had been caught dozing at his post. He looked towards where the body had lain. For a moment he could not make it out, slight panic then apparent in his step; had they been and gone? Had they come and taken the body away, leaving him asleep? Had he slept through their lights and the sounds of their vehicles, the opening and closing of doors, their voices, the unloading of the gurney? Surely they would have woken him. He had not been hidden. And even, as he stepped further into the heather, unsteadily again now on his feet, the possibility that there had never been a body must have occurred to anxious Jacq, that he had been mistaken, weary, and imagined it, that he had sat down to rest while taking his ride and dreamt the entire situation. Jacq’s breath cut short and, audible, the night responded with a breath its own. There was the body, there still, there a stillness amid the quivering heather, the ring on his finger a crescent glint.
Jacq reached into his pocket, alarm incipient still as the automatism of his movement met exception: his phone was not there. He jogged back towards the van, to where he had sat, to where slept, to where his phone had fallen from his hand. Relief and disappointment: no signal (still), and now its battery was getting low, but the hour, at least, was not as late as he had thought. He had become accustomed to the city’s jaundice, nights where darkness must be sought or exists as choice, and had forgotten what the landscapes of his childhood had taught him, how here the night will rise around you, bleeding from the ground not descending from above; how one can look to the west where a light still glimmers and look down to discover you are being swallowed up.
Tramping the mire of the night, Jacq paced between the tree and the edge of the road. He walked along it a little way, hoping perhaps that to do so would provoke emerging headlights. He walked to van, its back door still open and sat down again on the lip of its bay. He opened the message which read Good morning x, and, hesitantly, started typing a response. Jacq looked towards where the body was lying, supine now, and out of sight, hands, as Jacq had himself arranged them, laid one upon the other on the hollow of his chest. There was someone waiting to be told. Message unfinished, he put away his phone.
The hours were growing cold, and a stiffening set about the world as less of it appeared to view. There was the near edge of the road and there was the far edge; there was the plain of tarmac that extended in both directions a couple of dozen metres, though with such little perspective, just how many who could say? The moorland all around was dark. The sky was black. Jacq sat in the back of the van, knees drawn up, his phone beside him. The boxes of text books and manuals, which he had looked through when he first arrived, he had unloaded to make room for himself. This had also given him access to the boxes further back in the van’s cargo bay. They contained every kind of writing he could have imagined, fiction, histories, philosophy and more, but no matter how he tried, he found he couldn’t read. He grew frustrated with himself. Forced to wait, duty bound to stay, bored and hungry, getting colder, he had untold stories within reach to entertain him, endless education at his fingertips, and yet every time he opened a page, no matter how foreign the vocabulary or syntax, he was confronted with a voice that was his own. He kept losing his place, rereading lines, beginning sentences, paragraphs, and pages again, and all the while he could only hear himself, a voice of condemnation demanding to know by just whose standards he was living.
He turned from one book to another, one a friend had recommended, one an ex had loved, one he had seen on a shelf in his boss’ office, one which had won awards; ones of which he had never heard but whose covers, whose titles, momentarily appealed, but there were none that would grant him the distraction he sought, the release from the natterings of his brain, from his confusion, from his sadness, from his anger at the world; from his going through the motions, and his strained relationships; from his ignorance, and from the knowledge, dawning, that within who he was, there was no recourse, no escape, no depths into which prolonged and searing mediation, attempts at improvement or redress, might offer him salvation. The frustration he felt quickly turned to despisement. He had started throwing books out in the darkness but soon that too got tiresome.
The chill now biting, Jacq descended from the van. He kicked around the books that he had thrown to the ground, gathering them into a pile, a plan having formed. He walked around to the cabin, opened the passenger door and climbed inside. As he did, the whole vehicle dipped on its suspension and dropped further still, the hawthorn pitching forward as the vehicle sank back, a stubby jut of branch revealing itself in the upper corner of the windshield as the cause of the fragments on the seat in which he sat. Metal clunked and plastic snapped, a rattling of glass, the windshield free now of the hawthorn, fell into his lap. Jacq jerked at the handbrake as he felt the van roll. He stepped out of its still open door. Turning on the torch on his phone, Jacq crouched and shone the light under the vehicle. How the tree had survived the collision was revealed: when the van had hit, the whole network of its roots had been wrenched from the thin, spongy moorland soil, the tree in its entirety, from the depths of its anchor to the earth, shunted back, lifting up without break or splinter. His weight then, Jacq’s, had been a counterbalance; the hawthorn, released, settled back into its place.
With his foot, Jacq cleared the passenger seat of glass, and climbed back in. He had remembered correctly: there was, though faint, a smell of stale cigarettes. He started looking for a lighter. He reopened the glove compartment and scoured every pocket, he leant into the depths of the footwells, his phone illuminating dirt. There was no lighter in the cabin. Jacq sat and thought.
Having climbed out of the van, his phone, torch lit, still in his hand, Jacq made his way towards the body. Its face now, under the blue LED, had the grey of the stone they had briefly become. It looked more drawn, the wrinkles of its mouth more profound, its age and the translucence of its skin more pronounced; the drinkers blush on the nose and cheeks, blood turned now black, showed the scribble of the vessels. Jacq squatted down beside the body. The wedding band shone silver under his light. He reached across first for the far pocket, then, in the near one, found the man’s cigarettes, his lighter tucked inside the packet.
Back at the van, he tore some pages out of a chemistry book, twisting them and knotting them up, as he had often watched his father with old newspaper do when he would set fires in the parlour grate. He tore strips off pages too, to act as finer kindling, setting a nest in the fold of a pressed open book, the shreds surrounded by the burls he had wrung, covered with further shreds, and circled with textbooks in which he had scrunched up the pages but not pulled them out. With everything in place, he leaned in to set the pile alight. The flame would not take. Jacq thumbed and clicked the lighter’s mechanism, snapping out sparks and flares of light. He cupped the lighter to protect its flame, but none would last. He stood and shook the lighter, held it close, close to his chest, close in the crook of his palm and coaxed a flame there. It took. As he sank, however, to a crouch, the flame again went out. He tried, again now squatting, the metal casing of the mechanism getting hot. He burnt his thumb as he held the flame to the fire, and did again as he fed it, flickering, scraps. Giving up on the shreds, he then tried to light full and freshly torn out pages; nothing of them but their edges though would catch, and only quickly then at that, fading to a shoreline of ember, dousing glow, as their ashy tides disappeared into the night. He threw the lighter into the heather, and kicked at the pile of books at his feet.
Taking his phone from his pocket, Jacq saw that he had not turned out his torch in the whole time since he had been trying to light the fire; his battery was nearly spent. He turned the light off and stood still in the dark. The sign, Servez-vous, still hanging on the van, chuckled in the breeze against the metal. Jacq turned and walked towards the body.
Despite the darkness, he knew now the way and stepped as though as he navigated by constellations unseen: he knew what bearing in which to head and how many steps would lead to the man. When he got there he continued without looking, at least not looking at his face, there still, a mottled patch of grey. Head down, eyes shut, Jacq removed his gilet. He pulled it on before he stood, and whispered as he walked away.
Sat in the van, in the dead man’s vest, Jacq understood that no one was coming. Soon surely the sky would be turning bright; he had long given up checking the hour on his phone. He had smoked a cigarette and choked, felt sick; his face had paled, and he had had to wash his mouth out. He had spat the last of his water out onto the moors. He had tried to fall asleep and failed.
Releasing his arm from within the gilet, where it was tucked for warmth, he reached up to the folded palm frond cross protruding from the pocket of the passenger side visor. He would have remembered receiving crosses like that, being taken to Palm Sunday mass, waving them about, holding them upside down like a knife, the head of the cross becoming a hilt, its bottom blade; of unpicking the knot by which the crosses were formed, opening them out and, despite their simplicity, never being able to correctly fold them back. He would have remembered, also, how the ashes with which he would be blessed on Ash Wednesday were those of the previous year’s palms burnt. He traced out the sign of the cross on his forehead. Pinching then the long, pale, dry frond, he ran his thumb and forefinger along its length, then, just as he had done as a child, he undid its tight square knot. He opened the palm out and laid it in his lap, then closed his eyes and set about re-making the cross.
Jacq stood over the body with his palm cross. Calmly, and without hesitation, steady on his feet, assured and conscious of his actions, he knelt beside the man and slipped the cross into his hands. He then removed his wedding ring, which he slipped into his pocket with his phone. Jacq’s lips moved, speaking as he stood.
Its cargo bay now empty, Jacq removed the sign which hung on the van’s open door, and set it visible, angled towards the road in the direction he had come, amongst the boxes he had piled there, his bike beside them. He released the door from its elastic binds, which were thrown in amongst what he was leaving, and slammed them shut with a bang like the splitting of stone, or the placing of a marble lid on a tomb. Out somewhere beyond where Jacq could see it, unthought of, the dawn was breaking.
Jacq got back into the cabin of the van, and climbed over into the driver’s seat. He released the handbrake, and the van rolled back. The buckled metal and plastic of the bumper cracked but nothing seemed to fall away. Jacq didn’t try the engine yet, rather letting himself be carried off. The van came to a natural stop. Jacq turned the key in the ignition. The engine guttered and cut out, started, stalled and cut again. On a third attempt it started up. There was a smell of petrol and burning rubber, but Jacq, for the moment, seemed unperturbed. He put the van into reverse, the gears working, and slowly, gently, cautiously backed it up the lonely road. Once confident the engine would not give out, the smell of burn and singeing fading as the motor had warmed up, Jacq shifted gears and prepared to leave. He took out his phone, opened its voice recording app, and lay it down on the passenger seat. Not checking the time, nor seeming to care that the battery would soon to run out, he pressed record and began to speak.
With one working light lighting up the moorland road, off drove Jacq in the direction that he had yet to go.