Thirst for Adventure

Chapter 9

And their bodies lay fatally shattered

On the rocks at the foot of the fall.

But the girl so true and so faithful,

She was not broken at all.

No, the girl so true and so faithful,

She was not broken at all.

Demy finished the song with a sad chord and sat looking into the fire, his head bowed. Since the mention of Random and the name Sunday Leo had been frozen with fear and horror. But Leo turned to him and said, ‘You’re from Random aren’t you? Does the story ring a bell with you?’ Then he saw from the tears on Leo’ face that it did indeed.

‘No-one knows,’ said Leo, his voice breaking with long-suppressed sobs, ‘no-one knows if that’s the way it really happened. But we think that’s probably right.’ He wiped his face and stood up. ‘How did you come to hear of her?’ he asked Demy.

‘I was in the valley at the time’ the man answered, embarrassed at the grief he had caused the boy. ‘Everyone was talking about it. The people were devastated. She seemed to be such a loved child. I wrote the song a few weeks later, after I’d moved on to other parts. I was a wandering balladeer at the time, travelling on my own.’

‘Everyone did love her,’ Leo sobbed, tears running down his face again. ‘When you’re a kid, you don’t think that you love your sister exactly, but you know that you care about her and you’d rather die yourself than have any harm come to her. But it’s not enough to want to save someone. Now I know I love her but I can’t tell her that, and I miss her. I miss her all the time.’ He stumbled away into the darkness, out into the empty expanse of the common, but Leo came after him and led him gently to a rock where they could both sit. ‘I’m sorry about crying back there,’ the boy said, ‘in front of everyone.’

‘Tears are part of the healing,’ Leo answered. ‘They’re one of the ways your soul heals itself after a wound. Just like when you’re hot your body sweats, to bring your temperature down.’

‘But I still don’t understand why people have to die,’ Leo said. ‘I guess that’s one of the things I’m meant to have worked out before I go home again, but some of the questions just seem too hard sometimes.’

‘Nothing dies,’ Leo answered him. ‘There is no death. Just change. Nature understands that. It’s only Man who doesn’t. Death is an invention of Man. Your sister’s body is metamorphosing back into the rich earth in which she is buried. Her atoms are rearranging into new and wonderful patterns. A flower gets eaten by an insect; it changes into part of the body of that insect. The insect is eaten by a trout; it becomes part of that trout. The trout gets old and stops breathing; its poor body disintegrates and gets washed away until it reintegrates with the soil and humus, along the fertile river flats. And from that soil grows a flower once more. That’s what happens to our physical bodies in the process called death.

Your sister was more than just a body. A head and a trunk and four limbs. Do you think that’s all you are? No. That’s not you. There’s much more to you. Inside that arrangement of flesh and bones there’s an abstract, indefinable something that is the real you and is a collage of your past and present, all the experiences and feelings and thoughts that you’ve ever had. And when the time comes for that essential you to leave its physical body, then away it goes, on fresh adventures, into a state of being that we can be sure will provide us with more new and wonderful experiences, even if we can be sure of nothing else about it.’

The man and the boy were silent, looking out into the mysterious darkness. ‘I can never understand why people get buried in those big solid coffins,’ Leo said at last. ‘It just interferes with the process of change. Makes it hard for the physical body to move on to its next stage.’ The two stood and walked slowly back to the bonfire, whose flames had now become coals and would soon be ashes.

‘I’m glad Demy wrote the song,’ Leo said. ‘It’s nice to know she’s remembered like that.’ Presently they retired to the caravan, for the healing process called sleep. Leo had not shared a bed with anyone since, as a little boy afraid of storms, he had snuggled in with his sister, but this night he climbed in under Leo’s eiderdown and, comforted by the gentle storyteller’s warmth, he spent the night at peace.

Chapter Seven

Two days later, knowing that the show was about to pack its tents and vans and move to a new town, Leo resolved to explore Ifeka while he still had a chance. For all the time he had spent there he had only seen the outer suburbs. He received permission from Jud to take a day off and go into the centre of town.

He went with a light heart and high expectations. It took him just forty minutes walking before he found himself, for the first time in his life, in busy market streets where he had to wend his way through masses of people and where it was hard to see more than a few yards ahead. Leo was excited by the pressing crowds, the smells, the constant noise, the frenetic hurry that seemed to infect the very paving stones of the roads. No-one seemed to notice anyone else; everyone was absorbed in his or her own affairs. There were a few exceptions though: a merry woman with laughing eyes helped Leo pick up some coins that he dropped as he fumbled for change; and an old woman suddenly remarked to the boy, as they stood waiting for a break in the traffic, ‘You know, I saw a daffodil growing through the cracks in the pavement here once’. Leo was too surprised to be able to think of an answer; before he could do anything more than smile politely the lady had seized her opportunity to join the throng, and was gone.

In a slightly quieter street on the edge of the main market area Leo settled himself into an aperture between two stone buildings, to watch the panorama of life in Ifeka. His main interest was the stall-holders, rather than the customers, as they, absorbed in their shopping, were a less colourful lot. The merchants seemed casually in control of the pavement. They chattered and laughed and visited each other, and enjoyed shared jokes.

As Leo watched, their personalities became more apparent. A huge man selling cheese dominated the street. Flushed and jovial, he was more involved in conversation than in business, and seemed almost to resent interruptions from customers wishing to buy. He was constantly laughing and rubbing his hands with pleasure, the gregarious centre of attention in the alley-way. Although Leo enjoyed his larger-than-life egotism, it occurred to him that the other stall-holders might dislike the man’s power, under which thin men chafed and muttered. Leo was reminded of Hammond, a young farmer from his own valley, who similarly dominated others by the sheer strength of his personality. He was popular, but resented.

The boy looked at the other traders, seeking proof of his theory about the cheese-seller. Occasionally they responded to the big man’s cannoning comments, but they turned away from him at the end of their terse responses, sometimes grinning in complicity at a neighbour. Leo was starting to feel satisfied that he was right when suddenly his theory was thrown off-balance, and he was forced to wonder if the man was not a genial buffoon instead.

A woman from an adjoining stall called out, ‘Come on Grobian, business is too slack. Get a few customers for us.’ Her good-humoured cry was echoed by others, and Grobian, after a little show of reluctance, took off his apron and came out into the middle of the lane, where he placed his hat on the ground and began a comic dance, strutting around the hat and singing:

I’m a big brown teddy bear,

Stuffed with cotton wool and air.

I’ve got eyes, left and right,

Peeping from my skin so tight.

My claws are big and sharp and strong,

They take me where I don’t belong.

If you want a new bear rug

I’ll give you a big BEAR HUG.

On the last two words Grobian rushed at a woman in the crowd. As she shrieked and laughed he picked her up in a huge embrace. Then, putting her down and taking a handful of eggs from his stall, he began juggling the eggs and singing a song about cheese. Leo could only wonder at t

he many dimensions of this man and, he supposed, of all men and women. He recalled the warning in his father’s old leather book that he had read, so long ago it seemed now: the warning that nothing was simple, that all things were complex, including people.

By the end of his show Grobian had gathered quite a crowd into the street. The big man was flushed with the success and exhilaration that can only come from public performance. He lingered in the middle of the alley, talking to a few onlookers who had not strayed away again to look at the merchandise. He even ignored two customers who were waiting to buy cheese.

Leo came out of his niche, wandered down the street and turned the corner into a broader thoroughfare. Here a vendor was selling ice cream. Leo watched as people bought the cones and walked away l*****g them with every evidence of pleasure. Though he had never tasted this food before, the boy purchased a cone and gingerly applied his tongue to the white mound. The coldness startled him and numbed his tongue. He jerked his head back and held the ice cream at a distance, studying it with amused perplexity; then, realising that some children were giggling at him, he turned away and continued down the street, taking experimental licks as he went. Once he had become accustomed to the shock of the coldness, he decided that he liked the taste very much indeed. But he chose, with typical conservatism, to make the pleasure last as long as possible. Having eaten half the ice cream, he put the rest in his pocket to enjoy later, and tried to ignore the coldness that seeped through his clothing to the skin of his leg.

As Leo came to the next corner, a woman, walking quickly, drew level with him; then, after a slight pause, she turned left and hurried down a narrow lane. A moment later a man also overtook him and followed the route that the woman had taken. Leo instinctively sensed tension in the speed of the two walkers and in the rapidly shrinking distance between them. He followed, as the woman came to the end of the lane and hesitated at the stream of traffic passing in front of her. At that moment the man caught up and placed his hand on her shoulder. The woman started like a half-wild horse at the contact, and said something to the man that Leo could not hear. He heard the man’s rejoinder though: ‘You’re coming back’, and he understood the tone of the message.