Tomorrow by Chris Beckett

Author:Chris Beckett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

This was my old idea of forests, before my captivity: they were places where you could pass again and again from one small world to another. You could pass from here to there, and then be in a new here. And (in this romantic idea of mine) each here is new and engrossing because now you’re in a place that previously you only glimpsed – it was there but mysteriously it has become here – and yet what is best of all about being in this new place is always the new theres it opens up, for you now have glimpses of yet more places ahead of you which hitherto were completely out of sight, but have now come tantalisingly within your reach. And the places you were in before, when you look back at them, are either no longer visible at all or already becoming obscured by trees, and have now acquired almost the same mysterious glamour as the places you have yet to reach.

But I can see now that this notion didn’t come from real forests at all, but from city parks. Places like the Botanic Gardens and Temple Park are laid out with the deliberate intention of making a limited area seem large by teasing the eye with glimpses of a seemingly endless succession of spaces beyond the one you are in, while also ensuring that they are only glimpses, or you would just see right through the park to the far side.

But in this real forest, although the trees do create a screen that prevents me seeing clearly for more than a few metres ahead, and almost completely obscures what may be coming up even as close as ten metres away, there are no proper spaces, other than the spots where trees have fallen and the undergrowth runs rampant, which have no personality of their own. So there is no progression, just more of the same. I suppose in other circumstances, I might draw a good deal of pleasure from the stream, which is a feature of a sort, and which does from time to time widen into pools, or trickle over rocks, or even divide round a miniature island, and would certainly generate a lot of pretty pictures of ferns and so forth if you had a camera, such as you might see in a calendar or in one of my father’s programmes about the precious wilderness of our beautiful country of which so much, in spite of the depredations of loggers and mining companies and ranchers, is still almost untouched. But even there the range of permutations is limited, and soon used up.

I wade, I pull off leeches, or I try to avoid leeches by walking along the bank and scratching myself instead on long thorns that seem to carry some kind of toxin because the scratches without exception become infected. I feel sick. All I have left to eat is some of those red fruits that make my diarrhoea worse, plus a single sardine wrapped in foil, which I saved from the tin I devoured last night.

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