The Heat of the Sun

riotously. I peered at green, cracked headstones. Born Lincolnshire. Born Sussex. Born Warwickshire. And died in Vermont,
long ago. I pictured flickering ghosts. I had thought of America as new, raw, but, even in America, history tugged implacably beneath the crust of the present day.
    I said to Le Vol: ‘Why do you call it Nirvana?’
    ‘Don’t be silly. This isn’t Nirvana.’ He strode towards a curtain of vines that seethed, thick and prickly, between the trees. Leaning down, he parted the way. ‘A
tunnel, I’m afraid. You’ll have to crawl.’
    ‘You don’t seem to appreciate I’m a cripple.’
    Bent double, I pushed my way after Le Vol through a low, dense darkness. We emerged into a vault, a grey, cobwebbed cell with two heavy-slabbed tombs jammed against opposing walls and a narrow
walkway between them, carpeted with crunching leaves. A rusted lantern hung from the ceiling. Part of the back wall had crumbled, leaving a jagged slot of window that disclosed a view down the
hill, across the many-coloured trees, towards the school buildings.
    ‘The perfect lookout,’ said Le Vol.
    ‘For what?’ Gingerly, I eased myself into position on a tomb. ‘This place stinks.’
    ‘Only mould.’ He pushed back his coily red hair. A long-limbed, untidy fellow, he was inky-fingered, bitten-nailed, and his clothes did not quite fit him.
    ‘ And it’s cold,’ I said.
    ‘But I couldn’t keep Nirvana from you until next summer.’ Le Vol, on the tomb opposite mine, drew forth a pouch of tobacco. My nerves were piano strings, waiting to be struck.
I told myself I must act like other fellows: all I had to do was act like the others.
    Several sets of initials, a penis, and a libellous statement about President McKinley had been scratched into the stone. ‘Who else knows about this place?’ I said.
    ‘No one.’
    ‘Lately, you mean.’
    Firing up his pipe, Le Vol furrowed his brow with a contemplative air, and I asked him how he had found Nirvana.
    ‘I was running away, actually. From Hunter.’
    ‘You’re not in trouble with Scranway?’
    Eddie Scranway, I had learned soon enough, was the bully of Blaze Academy. Three years our senior, he was a ruthless fellow, feared by all, and had a golden retriever called Hunter. Only
Scranway, whose father headed the school’s Board of Trustees, was allowed to keep a dog.
    ‘It was last week. He was on the rampage – you know,’ said Le Vol.
    I didn’t really: not yet. ‘And you pressed yourself into the foliage?’
    ‘And found myself in a magic world.’ He passed the pipe to me. His hands, long and veined, hung between parted, updrawn knees. How many others, I wondered, had he brought to Nirvana?
I leaned against the cold wall. Puffing the pipe, I coughed a little, but only at first. Birdsong and intermittent gusts of breeze were all that disturbed the silence.
    ‘So how long have you had that stick?’ Le Vol asked.
    ‘I told you, I’m a cripple. I’ve always had it.’ Easier to lie. Why think of Paris? Why think of a green boxy sedan slamming into me on the Champs-Elysées? That I
had once been different was of no account: I was who I was now, and time would not turn back.
    Le Vol mused: ‘At least you’ve had some advantages. Just think, going around the world! And there’s me, who’d appreciate it, buried in the provinces.’ He was a
minister’s son from St Paul, Minnesota. ‘Then they send me here. Damn my father! You’ve no family at all?’
    ‘Just my aunt. She’s all that’s left.’
    ‘You’re lucky. Family’s a terrible thing.’
    ‘Only people who have families say that.’ My deepest wish was to see my father alive again.
    Le Vol was eager to hear about my travels. This embarrassed me: what had I been but my father’s passenger? Through the jagged window, Blaze Hall flared in the failing light. The main block
of the school was a fine red-brick mansion, an English country house spirited across the ocean.
    ‘Have you thought about this war?’ Le Vol gestured with the pipe, as if, of a sudden, the war were all around us. We could have been in a lookout somewhere, with the front advancing
rapidly. I strained for sounds of shelling, for the stuttering clack of machine-gun fire.
    A dog barked in the distance.
    ‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘It’s as if everything changed as soon as I left France. I think about it all, Notre Dame and the Boulevard Saint Michel and the Arc de
Triomphe, and don’t understand how