Alice Can Wait

It was tea-time. Saleem, because he was not born English, but had to learn to be it, took his tea strong and brewed in the pot. Bryce, on the other hand, was free to take his tea any way he liked it. His idea of a good cup of tea was hot water into which he dipped a teabag (any kind, he wasn't fussy) for about 2 seconds and then immediately took it out again, leaving about half the water a brownish colour.
These habits had been observed in the lounge of the five-star hotel where Saleem and Bryce, together with a dozen other prominent authors, were staying. Observed, that is, by other authors, not by outsiders – for the comings and goings of some of the world's most prolific writers assembled under the auspices of "The Adelaide Writers Festival" passed relatively unnoticed by the local population. The year was 1984 and the presence of Saleem and Bryce was the highlight of the festival. Their books Noon Children and In Santa Cruz were invariably forced to share the display table, the news, the camera. What happened next can thus best be explained through the process of osmosis. After a week of forced association and constant comparison, the creators of these two novels decided, like their characters had before them, to embark on a journey. At the end of the week the two men rented a 4-wheel drive land rover, bought supplies, and set out into the desert north-west of Adelaide.

Bryce was fidgety. He had been planning this trip to the Simpson Desert ever since he first began his study on nomads several years earlier in Africa. Not that he objected to Saleem as a person, but he was averse towards company in general. He liked to travel alone, finding it easier to bond with those he met (other travellers, locals, eccentrics) when he didn't have to worry about someone else. Worrying was what you did when you had company and he didn't like the way it slowed him down. Of course, Saleem was a first-class migrant, a professional wanderer. Bryce only hoped that they wouldn't have to talk books the way writers tend to do when they are together; especially not Saleem's book since he would then have to admit that he hadn't actually read Noon Children. He felt awfully embarrassed about it and could provide no excuse except the usual – too little time, etc.
He needn't have worried: Saleem wasn't going to talk books if he could help it. He was fed up with books and the whole circus he had come to associate with it. Not that the book-world didn't have certain advantages. Being a famous author brought about lots of things that would otherwise never come his way, or at any rate not in such abundance. Money was one such thing, women was another. But these two accessories had made it quite difficult for Saleem to find the time to write and think. One day he was a migrant from India, and the next he was a trophy of the empire. The West had seduced him – made him into nothing short of a rock-god. To ensure his unfailing commitment to the East, he had sworn to do something different next time. Something a little less cutesy: Islam. His agent was against the idea. She said religion never sold, particularly not that kind. Saleem won her over, got his advance and all he needed now was a place of peace and quiet.

After a whole day on the road they stopped at a small crossroads to rest. Bryce, showing no signs of fatigue, wrote in a black notebook made out of moleskin. Meanwhile, Saleem prepared the fire. They wanted to get to Alice by nightfall the following day so after having shared a meal consisting of tinned beans and grilled meat, they laid under the stars, and fell asleep.
When Saleem woke up the following morning, Bryce was already consulting his notebooks.
-Are you working on your new book? he wanted to know, feeling the familiar pang of agony and envy that came with seeing another author at work.
-Well, several really. I'm nearly finished researching Aboriginal cartography. I was hoping to talk to a couple of fellows in Alice, but it's going to be difficult. They don't like strangers.
-You mean they don't like white men?
He had to ask. And then he felt another pang in his stomach. Could it be that Bryce was bringing him along to soften up the "black fellas"?
-White men, black men, yellow men. They don't like any strangers whatever colour.
Bryce went to clean up their plates from last night. He used leaves from the ground as a brush. Saleem followed Bryce's movements. Watch out for the snakes, he wanted to shout, but thought better of it at the last moment. Bryce was like a local: competent, practical, unafraid. For the first time that he could recall, Saleem wished he wasn't so English. It made him feel like a fraud now that he was in the company of an Englishman who was more like a bushman at heart. Bryce turned to tell Saleem to smother the fire they had made to boil water for their tea. Within ten minutes they were back in the land rover leaving behind them a cloud of dust, some burnt gum tree, and a pile of chewed bones.

After a couple of hours Saleem was beginning to feel relaxed for the first time in months. Nothing bothered him. He felt more at home in the dust, the distance, the heat, the silence than he had in any city of Europe. He let his imagination take him to other distant and dry lands; to the East of his memory. He imagined the roar of an aeroplane and saw two men falling, falling through space, yes, and they would talk on their way through the sky; a nice Muslim, a young man brought up the English way and an angel who sees the world through the Prophet's eyes, yes.

He was woken up from his reverie by the extraordinary stillness. They were parked in the shade of some rocks. Bryce was watching him, amused.
-How long have I been asleep? asked Saleem. He abhorred the thought of being watched like an insect when he wasn't aware of it, though he himself had done it often enough to lovers on sleepless nights.
-Not long. You nodded off sometime after we turned left off the track.
-What about Alice?
-I'm following the directions an old Aboriginal man gave me in Adelaide. I bought him a few drinks and he told me certain things.
Saleem followed Bryce's movements as he began to collect branches and stones to build the fire. He was wearing shorts and hiking boots.

Later that night, after hours of driving, Bryce was telling Saleem the names of the star constellations above them. Bryce didn't think of himself as a selfish man. He liked the sound of his own voice, but he was also convinced that as long as he had things to impart to other men, it was his duty to do so. Knowledge had to be accumulated and released. Knowledge was compressed energy that had to flow. A mind at rest was a diseased mind, just like a body that didn't move was an unhealthy body. Even Bryce's imagination travelled extensively. It took him to borderless, esoteric landscapes of simmering craters. At times, he longed to suspend time so that he could exchange air and water for these globules of anti-matter. Globetrotting was simply not enough. He longed for the day when it would be possible to traverse time, space, and most of all: the body. Meanwhile, writing novels was as close as he ever got to transcendence. In his youth, he had tried to summon the spirits of dead people; his father's notably, but also his great-uncle's and even the one of his old friend from school who had died in a car crash when he was only nine. None of these sermons had, alas, yielded any success. Thinking back at these embarrassing fiascos, Bryce had the sudden urge to tell Saleem about his desire to travel through life and death. He was sure Saleem would sympathise with his endeavours. With his exotic Eastern background he was bound to see the beauty of such a journey.
-Imagine, he was now in the process of telling Saleem, what impact it would have on our personal lives, and literature too! If infinite transgression determined our approach to everything around us what, if anything, would keep us in the moment?
-Surely there are other needs, other than spiritual I mean, which come into question: hunger, cold...
-Granted, but if the soul and the mind operate under the laws of boundless mobility, they will see that the body is satisfied. The body is the motor of the soul. Nomads wander to feed their stomachs, but above all, the journey satisfies the spiritual needs of these people.
-But don't you find that we don't live enough in the moment and until we do...
-Frankly, no. The present is overrated.
It then crossed Saleem's mind that perhaps the distinguished British author had rather wanted to be alone or at any rate somewhere else or with someone else than the present moment provided. Because that thought permeated him to his very bones, it rendered all further conversation impossible. He pondered how to terminate the discussion without seeming rude. At last he settled for an ill disguised yawn, which had the desired effect of Bryce informing him how tired he was.

When Bryce stretched himself out on the warm ground, he thought he could hear voices. His study of aboriginal customs had made him increasingly aware of the sacredness of the land. How could he be sure that he wasn't violating some unwritten law by camping right here? It was the middle of nowhere, but he had been told that the spirits could be everywhere. That thought made it impossible for Bryce to go to sleep. Unnerved by his own thinking, he was now sure now that the air vibrated with something invisible to the human eye. His instincts told him that tonight would bring them something out of the ordinary. He wanted to share his premonitions with Saleem, but when he looked over to his side he couldn't be sure he wasn't sleeping because his back was turned to him.

Saleem watched the fire turn to coal until there was nothing left of it but the heat that was spreading out of the stones around it. Then he turned his eyes outwards; towards the sky and beyond. This total abandon to the elements made him think of an episode from when he was a little boy living in Pakistan. He had gone for a picnic with his family near a river. It was a humid and hot afternoon and the rich food had made his parents nod off. He remembered being terrified of the snakes and other animals as he made his way down the hill, but rather than causing him to give up, the fear added to his excitement. By the time he approached the banks of the river, he felt like an explorer who had reached his goal. With a new sense of confidence and pride, he waded out into the water, though it was never his intention to go far, since he couldn't swim. When he got to about one arm's length into the water, he lost contact with the ground.

Bryce was dreaming about water when he was woken up in the middle of the night. He tried to recall what it had been. Someone drowning or maybe a running tap or a leaking bottle? He told himself that it was quite normal to be dreaming of water when you were in the middle of the desert. It was while he was attempting to record his dream in the black notebook, its pages lit by stars, that he saw them. At first they looked like rocks that were slowly gliding towards Saleem and himself. Bryce's initial thought was that they were a sign from his father. At last, he thought, his spirit has come back to communicate with me. He felt no fear, only an intense exhilaration and curiosity. He got on his feet and was about to walk towards them when Saleem woke up and staggered towards Bryce like a sleep-walker.
-Who are they? he whispered.
-I don't know, but I'm going to find out. You stay here. Wait for me.
-I'm coming with you, Bryce.
Bryce didn't want to waste his time by protesting so he just nodded, gave him a torch and the two men proceeded to make their way into the darkness. They walked side by side and kept their eyes on the creatures ahead of them. By now, Bryce could see that they weren't rocks or bushes or anything else out of the landscape. But nor were they human beings. There was a clear space of night air between them and the ground.
Saleem was determined not to let Bryce see his anguish, determined not to be a lesser man, worse, a lesser Englishman than he. By this stage, he too had also realised that these creatures were not ordinary human beings. In a way, he was strangely relieved that they weren't because that meant that combat was out of question. One didn't physically fight ghosts. Ghosts were mind stuff. And Saleem had learned over the years to have supreme confidence in the strength of his mind. After all, he was a writer. He was able to manipulate reality to his liking; give new names to old things and twist and bend the present for the sake of fiction. Nevertheless, the prospect of an encounter with real ghosts was not a pleasing thought. He had to take comfort in the fact that he was in the company of Bryce. Together they would find a way to get around this awkward situation.
When the two men stood opposite the creatures they were struck by the familiarity of their shapes and outlines. But how could that be? they thought as they looked closer. They were a motley crowd, huddled together like extras on a film set. All in all, they were a very bland group, save for the fact that they were floating in the air. In spite of their dullness, however, Saleem and Bryce had the nagging feeling that they knew or at least ought to know some of these characters the way they were bound to recognise even the most distant relatives. Bryce tried to pick a face in the crowd that reminded him of his father's, but no matter how much he looked he couldn't find a single personality trait of his in the dark. Saleem scrutinised the women in the crowd and tried to match a face with that of someone whom he had had lovers' arguments with in the past, thinking that she might now be dead and back to haunt him.
At last, one of them spoke up.
-We've come to remind you of our existence. There was a time you knew us well, you thought about us daily, sometimes for weeks, months even. You knew us intimately. You gave us shape, personality and words to speak. We had something to live for, a purpose, something to do. You gave us a path to follow, people to meet. Things happened to us! And now? What have we become now? Look at us! Take a good look! Do you still not recognise a single one of us?
Intrigued, Bryce did what he had not thought polite to do prior to this little speech and lit up the mass with his torch. Together with Saleem he peered into the group whose faces peered back at them, impervious to the sudden brightness.
-I think I do know that one to the right, he pointed to an old man who stood there scratching his beard absent-mindedly. He looks a little like a character I was thinking of for In Santa Cruz, but it got too crowded towards the end. I simply had to dispense with him. I had no other choice. The plot would have become too contrived with him in it.
-Prick! came a voice from the group.
-But he would only have become a character! protested Bryce.
-Only a character! Some of us dream of becoming only a character. You should know better than that!
-They've turned into bloody parasites, that's for sure, said Bryce under his breath.

Saleem wasn't able to react because at that moment he had discovered a myriad of little brown-faced children in the group who turned their angry faces to him. After a while of hard thinking, he recognised them as the faceless characters that his most recent protagonist had engaged telepathically with. They were the noon children themselves. He tentatively addressed them as such.
-Noon children, why have you come tonight?
-We've come to seek justice. You didn't give us names, not a word!
-But there were a thousand of you! How could I? There was no room... You played a metaphorical role...
-Metaphor or no metaphor, we demand that you give us a place in your next book. We want redemption.
-Hear, hear! came the muffled sound from the crowd.
-Until we find a page to live in, we will wander the earth like homeless souls.
-And what happens if we don't give you one? challenged Bryce.
-Then we will wander your mind and your imagination until you do. You will have no sleep, no rest and write no books until we are finished with you!

As they made their way back to their camp, they were submerged in thoughts. Even as apparitions go, these had been most unusual. At least ghosts had once been the embodiment of a human being at some point in the past, but these had not even made it to the pages of a book! Saleem and Bryce were both intimately aware of the hardship of their profession. Writing was at best gruelling, but as long as they produced something at the end of the day, they considered it worth their while. But that was while they were unaware of these spirits restlessly orbiting the world; these cast-outs, these rejects of the imagination condemned to the junk yard of deserted narrative in the Simpson Desert. Given any other circumstance, their nomadic existence would have appealed to Saleem and Bryce, who themselves had crossed the earth many times over, but this was something else. These spirits were – as much as they were wont to admit it – aborted figments of their imagination and consequently, their responsibility. The mere thought of having to find a home for these poor sods in their future novels wore them out, but both Bryce and Saleem knew they had no other choice if they wished to be left alone. Bryce secretly feared he would never be able to finish his book on nomads and Saleem's only desire was to return to his beloved England where ghosts were confined to attics and basements.
In the end, the two writers decided to cut their journey short and return to Adelaide.
-I'm sorry about Alice old chap, Saleem said.
-Alice can wait, muttered Bryce.