Hiding In A Cave

At the spring, Albert splashes his face with water, while Kate relaxes on the sand. Above the leering rocks the sky is callously brooding. The flavour of the atmosphere has calcified into something resembling an after dinner staleness, although the appetite remains, and Kate salivates compulsively. Albert’s paleness seems to lose itself in omnipresent rock.

The overwhelming sky a dome.

And now she sees the ram, eliciting a murmur of surprised hope, a starting gun which urges Albert into motion. His scurrying feet produce a drum-roll of expectancy, his frantic hands unfurl. The air expended hard, then pulled in against the tightness of emaciated throat, retreating, while his fervent breath rejoices at the sight of sanguine, spurting blood.

An unfamiliar wave of brightness rises as, colliding resolutely with the rock, a merciless pre-eminence of brain becomes exposed. The dying embers float, as weeping might have fallen tears of ecstasy. Kate clasps at Albert’s weary hands, aghast yet gratified.

A nascent unity of purpose arises from their mutual devotion over roasted leg of mutton. Albert’s unctuous lips are close to Kate’s. The damaged succulence inspires their stinted stomachs to a fertile roundness, and they laugh, or wheeze, as though released.

The darkened sky extends a heinous veil, implying admonition, articulated in a clamorous wail of wind. Albert mutters indecipherably, while Kate’s gleaming face is unabashed, her hostile teeth despising. She eats with irredeemable haste, gulping, gnawing, tearing. Voracious fingers strip the undefended bones. She soothes herself with violence, a heavy indignation stirring in her abdomen, stern tugs of passion pulling at her throat.

The sky a purple enmity.

“We’ll have to find some shelter,” Albert says, against the now forbidding backdrop.

Kate is hopeful. “I think I saw some caves,” she says.

So that running through the sympathetic gorge their legs become supreme, inviolable. The exhilarated fervour of a rising coolness in the atmosphere infects them with abandonment as their gushing faces luxuriate in wind. It is good to stand beneath the unexpected sanctuary of caves, to laugh at one another’s suddenly brightened faces as the sky ignites and belches forth a warning. Then clambering madly up the rock face, seeking refuge.

At the same time as Albert’s eyes are suddenly invaded by remembrance, his outward presence settles back. A warm, alluring curl of sensuality enfolds his spine.

“Where are they, sarge?” The hoarse, constricted tones of apprehension.

“For Pete’s sake, McKinley, down it, man! These trees have ears.”

The turbulence of water overwhelms their vision. Albert assuages the sergeant’s anger with a reconciling gesture, but the private is nonetheless awash with remorse.

Motioning briefly with his hand, Albert leads the others on. They confound the ceaseless rain with streamlined expertise, proceeding through the weighted undergrowth on liberated limbs, and finally emerging, sodden, at their hoped for refuge in the forest’s sensuous heart. Their calibrated panting on arrival soothes their saturation.

“How’s the time, Bates?”

“Near enough, sir. Could be any moment now.”

“Get ready, men.”

They wait, perhaps not quite believing. Other than the delirious howling of a bloated mountain stream, no sounds are audible except the crashing of the lunatic, incessant rain on leaves and bark. The sweat which swathes and cools the men’s flesh evokes a spurious consolation, which their gaping mouths, absurd with sweat, appear to contravene.

All at once the frenzied interior of Albert’s mind is rendered manifest in raging, desperate movement, and a brilliant flash of unexpected light reveals in sudden, startling clarity the tangible existence of a foe. While his comrades’ frantic bodies squirm, Albert finds himself consigned to a fit of unrequited torment on the bastard earth.

“ – is time to go. Perhaps we’ll never make it, but we surely have to try.”

His perfect eye investigates. There are occasions when alternatives reinforce.

A sudden, piercing sense of loneliness invades him like a stab wound, compelling him to flinch. His strained, contorted face erupts.

“Are we, then, or aren’t we?”

The woman’s unenlightened cheeks are dour, and Albert, seeing that internal complication may be unavoidable, is induced to vomit on the jungle floor. He edges closer to the brink. “I’m ready if you are.”

For, despite being fixed in place by vicious nails, his outstretched arms have comprehended freedom.

“We’ll go tomorrow, then,” says Kate.

The thunderous cacophony of rain resounding in endorsement.

“I wish you’d told me of this place before,” says Albert, smiling feebly in an effort to disguise his petulance.

“It didn’t seem important earlier.” She dares him to demur.

But Albert merely grunts, a response which Kate is content to interpret as acceptance. “The gorge is filling up,” she remarks. “It’s virtually a river.”

“We might well have to stay here longer then,” says Albert, presuming to hope, but Kate, who has returned to the cave-way entrance, fails to hear.

So that Josephine is breathing in his furtive eyes. The sudden warmth is overwhelming. “I want you, Albert - take me further.”

Amidst the stifling smell of after dinner staleness. Too confusing. Causing him to suck his knuckles.

“Are you all right, my darling?”

“It’s nothing.”

As his rib-cage writhes in unexpected pain. I can not breathe, he thinks. I must escape.

But Josephine is quite inexorable. “I need you, Albert.” Affording him a sudden glimpse of purgatory, as he waits to be engulfed by surging hills of flame. There is hoped for screaming in his cramped, inoperative mouth.

“What keeps happening?” asks Kate, her moist hand firm against his palpitating brow. Albert gasps, though whether from relief or pain even he is not quite able to decide. “We need each other, Kate,” he hears himself declare. The words are like a loose page re-inserted in a book; the glue may take some time to set, but ultimately the book will be restored, if not as good as new, at least sufficiently securely for it to be read from again.

Recalling Burmese brightnesses in steaming jungle depths. The endlessness of two and three times tables, suddenly, and inexplicably, grown comprehensible. I get you now, he irreverently proclaims – to Sister Mary Paul’s amazed disgruntlement.

Enlightenment, though, is blotting paper to the ink of pain; his anguished tears are actually alive with hope, so that Kate becomes dismayed. This new, unwanted complication is disquieting.

“Stop it, Albert, please! We must be serious.” Her face grown quite immense with fear.

I can not bear this, Albert thinks, acutely aware of the sweat-saturated sand upon his back and buttocks, as the rain relentlessly persists.

“Albert, get a grip on yourself!”

And her words are like a dancing swarm of bees, to which Albert’s flesh feels starkly vulnerable. He tries to reassure himself with careful hands, but in the face of such overwhelming odds the gesture is futile. “I can’t stand it!” he sobs, conscious only of an omnipresent buzzing.

But then returns. “I’m – sorry,” he concedes, releasing himself. Kate’s eyes relax, if only a trifle. She winces, though, and says, “There’s no reason to feel sorry, Albert, it’s entirely understandable. This whole situation’s so…….unreal.”

The final, stabbing word inflicts a gash in the spurious veneer of self-assurance that Albert has so meticulously concocted. He hugs his knees to his chest, as though to interpose a barrier between himself and some truth he has found to be distasteful. “What is reality?” he resents himself for asking.

Kate replies: “It’s what we find ourselves confronted by.” And the still air endorses. “It’s what the universe proclaims or asserts.”

Persuading Albert to his feet. “I can’t accept that, Kate,” he says. “Reality is sometimes surreptitious as a worm.”

But “You don’t have to be consciously aware of something to be confronted by it,” Kate insists. “Reality is tantamount to personhood. No matter what, you have to make some manner of response – it forces you.”

As Albert stares across the desert, desperate for conviction.

“Reality,” she postulates, in careful, measured syllables, “is not to be avoided.”

But Albert’s suddenly animated limbs are argumentative. He plunges ostentatiously to the floor, unleashing clouds of whiteness all around, and inducing Kate to splutter, wanly: “I hope you understand me, Albert.”

The conversation wavers. They have either flirted with a breakthrough, or are more enmeshed than ever in disharmony.

As Billy Sutton frantically screams, “Gerroff! Gerroff me! Nasty brutes!” – apparently believing himself assailed by ants, which might as well be Albert’s prying fingers.

I can not stop, thinks Albert, as the beauty of his partner’s suffering flesh excites aroused anticipation in his own.

“Alby, Alby, help!”

His loins ablaze with mirth, as he realises that the frenzied waving of his victim-lover’s ant-infested arms is his own path to freedom. Perhaps, in spite of everything he believes himself to have learned, escape is actually conceivable. There, inside the cave, a nebulous trickle of light glimmers palely on the inner wall, as Albert whispers softly to himself. Could it be that their most enlightened course of action would entail an abnegation of the obvious? He laughs at what is really quite a serious joke. But Kate, whose posture has grown ungainly, retains a prima donna’s right to silence. Whatever is involved in such considerations finally cedes them rest.