Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [35]
Right now, before this fire, I sit and watch the Milky Way turn through heaven. And I’m not in pain, nor afraid of what the morning may bring.
Only by reading what I wrote last night have my spirits lifted. A mantra of two plus two equals three rattled my dreams. First I was back at school in maths. Each time the teacher asked two plus two, I answered four. Each time he cracked my knuckles with a wooden ruler. ‘Three!’ he barked. And so the scenes continued: Selling rubber life-saving rings on a market stall priced at £20 each. A man buys two and gives me £30. I say twenty plus twenty is forty and he laughs in my face. Next I was a racing-car driver, a world champion whizzing through chicanes. With the chequered flag in sight, the engine whines and dies. I’m stranded metres short of the finish line. The team manager runs on to the track, throws down his clipboard, and shouts, ‘What the fuck were you doing? What do you think powers an engine? You missed the fuel stop. I said four more laps.’ The rest of my team hold up lap-time boards, except the numbers have been rearranged into sums: 2 + 2 = 3.
In each scene, one face remained constant. The red-haired reverend was the maths teacher, the man at the market stall, and the race team manager.
I’m not superstitious. I played rugby and wore the number 13. I don’t believe in signs or omens. A broken mirror is an accident, a crow a bird. But logic tells me the reverend’s right. I can’t crawl 20, possibly 30 km to the track on 1.9 l of water. The sums don’t add up.
Fuck.
Fucking idiot. Fucking shoulder. Fucking leg. Fucking decision to take a short cut. This has been my life, slacking off and not doing things properly. I’ve fucked up. If I were a better mechanic I could’ve fixed my bike. If I were a better map-reader I’d never have taken the creek that took me so far from the track.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
Sorry. I’ve calmed down now. I needed the words to have an audience instead of vanishing into sky. Right then I just wanted to be heard, to feel human, to be more than this ragged mute crawling across a desert.
I have to face facts. I have to go back. Anything more than a light wind will dust over my tracks. A following rescue team could find the bike and not know which direction I’d gone. And there’s a chance if I dig into the creek bed I’ll find water.
A chance.
Please think of me as a fool and not a coward. I could crawl all the way back to France if I had the water.
Midday. Strung my sleeping bag between the same two bushes I did yesterday. I move each limb as though I’m crawling across the surface of a heavier planet, gravity an agony. Only when I transcend the pain and build our cottage can I rise from the despair of returning to the creek.
The first floor’s complete. A construction site now looks like a house. Next the beams for the upper floor, huge oak timbers the size of railway sleepers. They wait stacked on the grass by the kitchen doorway, my work for the afternoon crawl, after the last of my rice.
A success on this dark day of backtracking – though a foul detail of survival I wonder if I should even share? For lunch I had rice and instant chicken soup. Cooked the rice with minimal water and the lid firmly on, and then boiled up more water for the soup. The ‘water’ for the soup was from my emergency supply in the Gatorade bottle.
I think the culinary lingo is tart.
This time I’m still hungry. And thirsty. There’s no after dinner slouch, no sitting back with a slackened belt. I’m only resting because the sun’s still too fierce. If I crawled now the sweat would drip from me like tears.
Even though I’m returning to a wrecked bike and sorry