A novella, released in two parts
"Who would have thought my shrivel'd heart
Could have recover'd greennesse?"
George Herbert
A novella, released in two parts
"Who would have thought my shrivel'd heart
Could have recover'd greennesse?"
George Herbert
An Adventure
Something caused The Man to wake up earlier than he normally would, but he didn’t know what. First light was perhaps an hour off, and he soon discovered that the sky was still dark and starry. The Man left his wife asleep in the loft room, slipping out softly, and then, like a quiet predator who spots something worth stilling himself for, noiselessly descending the two sets of stairs to the kitchen. A puzzle of a thousand pieces lay in disarray on the kitchen table: it astonished The Man, how dizzying the spread of disconnected parts. What woke me? The Man asked himself. He looked out at the sky through the kitchen window, gazing past the tankard of sloe gin and the little radio on the sill, their forms black and sillouhetted. Still it was night, the stars of that night further away than they had ever been before, and their lights feeble. Or so The Man thought. He had seen starry nights once upon a time that, now, would take his breath away; even remembering them took his breath away. He had looked at them, those skies of decades ago, while their stars still had their plurality and their heavenly fire. But he had forgotten to let his breath be taken away, back then, for starry skies were commonplace, before light pollution: In Suffolk, Norfolk, Margate, Chalkwell.
His Son had become upset after lunch the day before, started hitting his knees, and grimacing. At the time, his wife had been about halfway through the puzzle on the dining table (at which they rarely dined). The completed result would show a boat, a strawhatted, suited man, and a bonneted and frocked woman in that boat, blue and rippled waters, a bank of bullrushes, a brimstone butterfly by the bullrushes. Pictures had started to emerge, islands of clarity birthed into being by his wife’s efforts: the woman’s face, with its bit of freckle; about three quarters of the butterfly, in a universe all its own barely bigger than itself; the prow of the boat, and the waters where it sailed. The Man was able to remember those pieced-together parts, made visible by his wife’s labours upon the kitchen table, before it happened.
His Son had struck out at the puzzle, not in malice, The Man knew, but randomly, and had destroyed what wholes his wife had made of that dizzying many. He found it indescribable, the sinking, downward tugging feeling he felt within him, as he looked at that puzzle, re-unmade into a thousand shards. When The Man was a boy, he had dropped a beautiful mirror, an heirloom, on his mother’s bathroom floor of stone. It had smashed. His mother had been more worried about the mirror, than The Man’s feet, which had been gashed in places by some shards. But he was no longer a boy. He could look after his own feet now.
The Man made himself tea and read a little of the book his wife had bought him for Christmas. Christmas was over, yet its accoutrements hung redundant in the living room. A quietness seemed to haunt the world, in these, the year’s final days: the quietness of Time reflecting on itself. The Man used to find endings sad, just endings. Now he found beginnings sad. Begginings and ends. And middles, if he was honest. As he read his book, and only half-read the words, drank its sentences like successive gulps of wine whose taste he did not pause to savour, he realised that he was not really at the book’s beginning, nor could he really be said to be in the middle, and the end was leagues away. This made him feel better, but worse again when he remembered that the same could not be said of his life, its however many years. And soon another gone. My book of years, he thought. He cast his memory over its chapters, and his mind raced when he remembered quite how many there had been. My book, he simply thought to himself, and saw the book in his mind’s eye, standing on a pillar in the chancel of a ruined chapel. The Man wondered what it would be like to exist only in words, to find one’s substance something more tenuous, more abstract than the flesh of which he was composed: to imperfectly exist in the mind of the one who wrote the words and to exist also, as something quite different, in the mind of the one who read the printed words. And to exist as something different again in the mind of a different one reading the words. He knew that there was little chance of it, but The Man hoped a book would never be written about him, no fictions based on him, no biographical memoirs. Even an obituary would be suspect. It could give a reader the wrong idea about him entirely, what he had been, the sum of all that he had been. No, he would not allow any confusion after his death, he would allow no room for misapprehension, misinterpretation. His end would be definitive. He would walk out the door, and keep on walking, to the ends of the earth. Never reach his destination. Just disappear, somewhere along the way. God only knows where. And the note he would leave behind would simply say The End- No Afterword please.
The Man felt himself fall back into sleep again, his back against the back of the sofa, the book open on his knees. He remained like this for a brief, uncounted time. But after those minutes had passed, he was disturbed by something. He thought he heard a knock, like a knuckle knock, puny, but startling in the quiet of the house. Like an acorn dropping from an oak, and somehow bouncing off a back window. He turned his head with a start. The French windows looking onto the patio had not been curtained for some reason. The night sky was no longer black, but blue with the very first lightening of first light.
What he saw was a sight so peculiar that it didn’t actually register at first, optically speaking. The heavens behind the creature made sense to The Man while the creature himself did not. But, and there could be no doubt about it, made visible outside by the light of the living room within, there was a very pale, very white, and very old, old man just standing there, looking in. He wore the strangest smile, the gums yielded by that curled smile were toothless, he had the look almost of an aardvark, or a strange fish that The Man had once seen looking at him from behind tank glass, in an aquarium he had taken His Son to see. What a terrible day that was, The Man remembered.
The Man was startled. He looked on in something like distaste as the old man, still smiling, pawed the window glass with flat palms, and tilted his head back and forth, making his wordless plea to be admitted into the house. The Man went over to the patio doors and slid them open.
“Can I help you?” he asked the old man.
The old man just continued to smile, sweetly, placidly, imbecilically.
“What do you want?” the man said.
Still the old man smiled, wordless. He was close to The Man. The Man was able to hear the wheeze of his warm breath, and smell the unusual smell that he had about him.
“Could you go away please? You’re trespassing…”
The old man’s smile turned into a beam bigger than ever. The Man grew impatient.
“Go away. Piss off!” The Man barked.
The old man stopped smiling. He withdrew a few paces from The Man, and looked sad. Then he turned and slowly trudged away. His feet made a wet, muffled sound, like footfalls on mud and leaves. The Man went outside a little way, watched the old man trudge away, away from the house, and up the cul-de-sac.
Then The Man went back into the living room, to try and read some more of his book and finish his tea, closing the patio doors behind him and locking them twice.
He didn’t know how much time had passed, but after what was almost certainly the best part of an hour, The Man heard fast, panicked footsteps on the landing. His Son had woken. He always awoke with a start, and ran about worriedly on the first floor of the house, calling out for his mother. He always rose early. He was, and had always been, a fitful sleeper.
His Son would want his usual omelette and little fruit salad for breakfast, so The Man set about making the latter of these. His Son liked his omelettes as hot as possible, as recently dispatched from the pan as possible. The eggs could not be prematurely cooked so The Man had to wait until His Son was poised to eat, at the kitchen table to make that. The Man swept the many pieces of puzzle into the puzzle box, purposing an erasure of yesterday, its disasters. He knew it was important for His Son to be active, it was a mistake not to have gone for a walk, or a bike ride, or a scooter ride. Today will be better, he thought. He was determined that things would go smoothly. Then, a thought of juice occurred to him! Orange juice with no bits, that’s what His Son liked. Upon opening the fridge, he discovered, with some horror, that there was only a tiny dribble left in the one remaining carton. His Son would be rattled, made anxious by the absence of orange juice. So, The Man dressed himself in some clothes, still slightly wet, which had been hung upon the downstairs drying rack, and out he went.
He got on his bicycle and bicycled to the nearest Newsagents as fast as he could. They only had orange juice with bits in. With what horror he noted the abundance of bitty and the absence of bitless on the shelves. The massed cartons became a kind of orange endlessness. In frustration, he asked the shopkeeper if she had any cartons of orange juice without bits in in the back. The small, brown woman behind the counter assured The Man that she did not. Could she just go and check? No, there was nothing there in the back. She was categorical.
The Man got back on his bike and cycled up the hill to the Co-op. He wasn’t a young man, and the incline was steep. He was breathless as he paid for the juice. He stood under a tree outside the Co-op for about a minute, just to catch his breath. A magpie almost flirtatiously demonstrated his rear end to The Man, as if threatening shit, like a cloud promising rain. The Man clutched the bagged box of juice to his heart, like a baby. It was just an ordinary carton of orange juice without juicy bits. But the value of it! it had a value that penetrated deeper in The Man than even the weighty value of a thing bejewelled and decked in gold, than even that of the oldest, frailest, original folio or tome that he could think of, things of terracotta and scarab paled in comparison. His Son didn’t care much about things like that. The Man wondered how much he would pay for a box of orange juice without juicy bits, if only that could make His Son happy. If there was a scarcity, say. He reckoned the figure was probably about eight hundred pounds.
He put the bag on the left of his handle-bars. He rode swiftly across the zebra crossing and rounded the bend, keeping the optometrists on his left. He’d recently been fitted with spectacles there. What an eye opener it quite literally had been to look through the clear glass windows and to be able to see the mortar between the bricks of the terraced houses he now passed on his right. The line of houses was vari-coloured: they were deep red, greenish cream, yellow, and royal blue. The Man’s bicycle wheels turned with a quick, fat squelch upon a section of road which had just been retarred. The wheel arch clogged a trifle. The road has been retarred, he thought. The word “retarred” had been summoned in innocence, and yet the more he thought about it, the more pejorative it sounded, the stress creeping back a syllable. Rolling smooth and fast down Wintell Road, leaving a thin wake of tar behind him, he remembered that horrible exchange he’d had on a train with two men, about six, seven years ago…he couldn’t remember perfectly. They had used that word about His Son. They spoke louder than they’d meant, it was late at night, they and the whole carriage smelled of cheap cider. And smokes. The old ghost of nicotine always walked with him, a shifty companion.
The Man was lost in thought as a car approached him from behind; it ran so quietly, it must have cost a pretty penny, he thought, but only after it had got uncomfortably close to him. The Man forgot to indicate with an outstretched arm which way he was going on his bike, and the car honked at him in irritation. The Man was only moments from a sharp left swerve of the steepening hill when he noticed the precious bag of orange juice without juicy bits begin to slip. The Man reached out with his right arm to pull it back securely onto the bar but his left arm, the secondary of his two upper limbs, felt unexpectedly feeble, and was quite suddenly powerless to steady his bike as he curved down and about the hilly bend. The tar was slightly sticky and made the hill feel different in the way it met his wheels, which spooked him further. He suddenly found himself unable to avert a leftward topple towards the pavement and he fell down messily onto his rump, the bike between him, very narrowly avoiding a trauma to the legs. He grazed his left arm in the process, through his thin jacket. It would have been a lot worse if the flesh had made direct contact with the asphalt. He stood himself up carefully, the transverse bike, still clicking and whirring with the airy motion of the turning back wheel. And there they were: scars on his left arm. He would have almost have felt proud of them if they didn’t hurt as much as they did.
There were wounds to the flesh, but nothing was broken, or sprained. His wounds stung, sharply at first, but the waves of stinging sensation died down fairly quickly. His left arm was bloody, but from a number of shallow lacerations rather than one deep serious one. He was in pain but he knew he had been lucky, on that occasion. An old lady walking her West Highland terrier asked him if he was alright. He replied that he would live. He walked his bike home, quickly.
When The Man got back, he kept his wounds hidden in the sleeves of his jacket. He set about finishing the fruit salad, and was quick to break the omelette-making eggs into the frying pan. His Son was already downstairs. He was watching Prince Phillip and the fairies flee the fortress of Maleficent in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. His Son sat on the sofa, safe in his big ear mufflers, bouncing rhythmically with the urgent, strident music: racing strings, cymbal crashes, clashing brass chords, percussive exclamations with every blast from a wand, with the horse hooves thundering on stone. The images raced by. A drawbridge lifted quick, a pillar of green fire rose, the great dragon appeared through the flames. On all sides, a thick and strangling forest of purple thorns grew. Red Phillip hacked and hacked. The Man’s arm throbbed briefly with a pain, like a tug, like a hard Chinese burn. Omelette, fruit salad of grape, apple, banana, and a big mug of orange juice, the right mug, the mug His Son always drank from, and the shiniest knife, and the square handled fork, that he exclusively ate with, were also laid by.
The Man’s Son ate only a tiny portion of the omelette, and left a good deal of the fruit salad, but he drank all his orange juice. His other son always slept in late, he was a bit of a night owl. Voices were no longer raised in their house, those days were over. The sleeps of The Man’s Son were sacred. Evenings were conducted in whispers. Quietness was the name, the aim of the game in their house. An outsider would have thought the quiet of The Man’s family joyless, or sullen: the Christmas presents unwrapped and the little board games played in taciturnity, the meals that His Son ate alone, the rooms he settled in and made his own, bedded within, surrounded by an aura of solitude you would be a fool to disturb with your presence. No, quietness was the sound of love in this house...never silence, be it His Son’s feet or tapping sticks or the curved under-rails of his rocking chair or the sounds of those things he liked to watch and listen to repeatedly, turned up loud because of his noise-cancelling headphones. Love found its articulation in a voice of quietness.
The Man watched his son eat his breakfast, the mouthfuls slight and reluctant. Food had always been difficult. Food and sleep had presented him with difficulties from the very beginning. Most people like my son have a complicated relationship with eating, The Man thought to himself. And the religion of Free-from Gluten on top of it all! There was something still so little and child-like about His Son, though he wasn’t very little, and he wasn’t a child. You couldn’t wish too fervently for a brightening of that dull, sad look... strange how it was both intent, focused, and yet also strangely indifferent, impervious. Did The Man pity him? “Pity” was the wrong word, he told himself, it is so bound up with the lesser baggage of the human heart. He would give anything to relieve it, to soften it, the deep, unrelenting world of the self within which His Son found himself ever locked: its intimidating sensory height, its intense magnification of every nearby emotion, its crying out for pattern and to be maker of pattern. The Man watched with interest as His Son’s amazing hands, soft and full of Chi yet calloused by the woodland sticks he always grasped, craned their digits curiously. He was always finding out the world, troubling it feelingly to find out its terrors. When they played Snakes and Ladders the afternoon before, The Man’s other son always talking too much, always filling the priestly silence of their game with sounds of anxious inadequacy, The Man was taken with that solemn authority with which His Son designated the coloured pegs and the order of play, and then the light dexterity with which His Son dropped the dice and took his red peg- always red- on its journey along the rows of squares, dangerous with snakes and as replete with ladders, their upward hope. Sometimes he miscounted the sum of the dots on the two die, or miscounted the number of squares his peg was meant to traverse: yet even his seldom errors had an uncorrectable majesty about them. Only a fool would correct him, he wouldn’t be impressed by their correction, nor would he thank them for it. It was remarkable the giant look in his big, blue, easily affronted eyes, the quiver of the volatile mouth in its home of prickly, gently ginger beard, the tiny twitchings of that artfully paranoid fox-like face, surveying the grided battle of the board like a wise, old druid general, or an ancient Inuit.
The Man quickly stacked all the breakfast things in the dishwasher. He felt the umpteenth pang of irritation upon discovering that his other son had put dirty crockery in with the clean. He put in a tablet and set it humming and sloshing. He moved from tea to coffee, making two cups out of what was pressed in the cafetiere, putting milk in one. The white he took up the two sets of steps to his wife, helping her stir before he left the attic room; the black he drank himself, downstairs, in the front half of the living room, having cleaned the blood with wet cotton and plastered the gashes in his sore left arm. His wife had bruises and one or two scabs that marked the spots where Their Son had struck out at her, in his fast, repeated flapping motion. Now The Man had wounds to second hers on the arms with which he fought against the thorns, and the dragon who was beautiful but breathed fire and mauled with his claws.
Several sips of coffee had disappeared before The Man found himself startled. The old man, the same old man from before, with the strange, half-human smile was standing in the front garden looking in at the window. In the sunlight, The Man could see the white, mange-like hair patches on the old man’s head, tufts like the plumes of an old, grey swan, his plumage violated by age. The man’s chops yawned open a little: he continued to smile, but the curled smile now showed the dark bruise of his toothless gums. The Man didn’t know why, but the old man was threatening to him. He didn’t like him, he didn’t wish to entertain him, in his house or his mind, he wanted to be rid of the old man. The Man went outside immediately and told the old man that he would call the police if he didn’t move off the property. Looking into the old man’s strange, mammalian, potato-coloured face, the beard white and sporadic on his cheek wrinkles, The Man cried out:
“Go A-Way!” with weighty emphasis on each syllable of his command.
The old man did not budge.
“Leave me alone!” The Man cried, then: “Leave my family alone!”
The old man seemed to respond to this, as though he understood something of The Man’s point of view. He trudged off again, very very slowly, up the gravel, under the willow. He left the house behind him. He had an almost owl-like flexibility to his head, and he was able quite adeptly to look behind his shoulder, and send The Man his odd smile.
“Get out of here! Go, now!” The Man barked concludingly. “I don’t want to see you here again…”
It took an eternity, but finally the old man disappeared around the ending bend of the cul-de-sac. The Man went back inside. He stood before His Son:
“Shall we go for a walk?” he wanted activity to commence immediately.
His Son grunted his usual affirmative in reply: Yep. He seemed to approve of the idea and swiftly slid from the blobby sanctuary of his ear defenders. They had been cycling regularly, this and prior times of year. But they had to stop cycling for a while, until the purchase of an adjusted helmet for His Son’s head had been made. He’d complained that his usual one had grown too tight. So they walked. The Man left his mobile phone by his bedside table. He didn’t bring it with him, he didn’t wish to be taken elsewhere by its distractions, anywhere other than where he trod. And trod and trod.
His Son wore a bright, bold red coat, slightly puffed. His legs looked strong, the toned calf muscles gleamed as he walked with quick, intent steps, with a gait that was almost a march, as if so inspired by the heft and bigness of his boots (he called them shoe-boots). They enabled him to penetrate the damp and mud and clay and brambled clutches of the woods.
It was winter, and winter is often beautiful. The shadows were long, the sun huge but misted. Its light was a whisper, not a blaze: silken strings, not trumpets. His Son marched ahead and The Man followed behind. His Son walked, went, going, going, one could almost believe that he would walk from one end of the earth to the other if given the chance. They both left the town behind, the district of sleepy houses, heading for the silent, luminous farmland with a kind of zeal that was more like flight from something than a walk towards something. Faceless figures passed, like humans made of shadow, made sad with the final and unstoppable going of the year, in this its final quiet days. They passed a little corner of farm, where old rusted machinery idled, and a pheasant strutted uncertainly behind the gate, which was hanging off its top hinge, a little diagonally. The wide-ranging fields met them, the furrowed earth slumbering. Like a thing both singular and plural, a mist made of many mists got up, like many spirits, stirring from sleep: the imperfect souls of sleepers in that earth, beginning their journey towards heaven. From heaven- or burning from a place like (but lower) than heaven, the sun lit the mists with his light. Incense was general and splendid in this church of earth without walls, with its blue, unlit river faraway, and, here and there, its sulking groves of trees.
The Man and His Son crossed the busy road together. His Son waited at its brink for His Father to catch up and take his hand. It was a rare opportunity for their hands to touch. And then, having taken advantage of a gap in the steady, speedy back and forth of cars and double decker buses, they had crossed the road and The Man’s Son was off again, back to his usual fearless gallivant. He walked with such an instinctive sense of where to walk. The paths were remembered and yet in some, odd way they seemed improvised. If he had never set foot in this part of the world, he would have walked with the same beguiling confidence. As it was, this part of the world practically belonged to them, it was as proximate and known as a garden. The Man imagined how he and His Son’s footprints would seem in this place, if fifteen years of steps were made to linger or glow in the earth, an endlessness of tracks over tundra, crisscrossing, running, many long long streams marking where their feet had trod in and out of years. From time to time, The Man suffered one of those fast, rictus smiles and slight, little, nervous waves from His Son as he strode ahead, looking behind to catch his father’s eye. It was a strange, imperfect act of reassurance.
The Man and His Son entered the wood, its shadows and its shade, The Son first. There were holly patches, and unflowered gorse bushes. The Man’s mind corrected the empty slopes and tawny banks with the hyacinths they would be crowded with when summer came. Snowdrops in the spring. Two magpies laughed just as The Man passed under the boughs where they stood. The floor of the wood grew thicker, wetter, slippy, sticky, and the foottracks and footprints in the mud full of green-brown standing pools in which the overhead trees were imaged wavily. The Man’s Son seemed to enjoy the cloying matter of the mud, he seemed to enjoy effortfully splatting and stamping his way through this stuff of nature, through the wet darkness of a stuff as essential as water, grass, bark, or sap. A little flash of colour from the matted dereliction of the trees startled The Man, as a jay cackled and showed its wings.
They passed an old oak tree, of every leaf unclothed, almost made a monument to its own passing, long abandoned. Sheep showed in the green distance, beneath the palely blue sky, plump, and white as rice. The Man looked longingly at the litter of dead leaves pasted over the black earth, where windflowers would penetrate come spring, cuckoo-pint and bluebells come the summer, fat foamy mushrooms in autumn. Now there was nothing. The earth consumed and reingested, reassumed into its big, stomach-like mind, all it produced. The Man felt his arm smart, and he felt hungry. He looked ahead at His Son, the red-coat pinkie print of him drifting, slowing, beginning to idle casually among the wintry beams of sunlight breaking through the trees. The Man remembered when he saw a grass snake, a long, black, hungry cord, ravenously ramming its flat, fearful head into a nest of screaming chicks. Of what species they had been the babes, he had not been able to tell. In his mind’s eye, The Man was able to watch as weighty troupes of lapwings leapt swayingly and lazily into flight over the curved mudflats where the aged bodies of abandoned ships festered through decades. He remembered stealing enormous puffballs from the sheepfields in late late Summer, the sunlight blazing and the hot world weary, as now. Summer and Winter have much to do with one another. They share a kind of despair.
Then! there was a quietness, general again, the breeze having blown loud in their ears for a few minutes. Pigeons bickered in branches above. A screech of buzzard roamed from one corner of the sky to the other. The mists breathed like a whisper of last words, with a sound like a silken scream in the undergrowth. A fast pierce of swifts. Hchee Hcheeeee! The Man peered through gaps in the thicket at the sheepfields. They gleamed with dew. In some part of himself he wanted to roll in it, taste it, the silent dewfall of the early morning, still wet on the thin, wintered, deep green grass. He felt the desire in himself to reach into his pocket and check his phone for messages, emails, facebook updates, BBC Sport updates, bulletins. But the phone, its small, solid, compact bulge was not there, nor the zzz, both mastering and comforting, of its summoning vibration.
A Jack Russel appeared further up the path, near where The Man’s Son was. It rounded the bend of trees at a four-legged walking pace, before barking briefly and then picking up speed, bounding towards The Man’s Son, his hairs streaming. The Man’s Son was spooked by the dog’s enthusiasm and the short, sharp woof, which resounded in the woody world, scattering pigeons. Bird formations flew in The Man’s mind, escaping the treelines, flocks panicked into flight by sounds, gun shots, a loping predator. Starling murmurations, geese skeins, partridges bursting up like sneezes from the reeds and grasslands.
The dog’s owner, a very tall, spectacled woman with long red hair came towards The Man and His Son, walking slow behind the dog. The Man’s Son turned back to face The Man and ran towards him. His Son had no interest in seeming brave, in pretending away his panic. He feared that the dog was going to jump up and down before him and paw him with his claws and snap his jaws in his face. The woman with the dog didn’t seem to understand, less want to understand, the way The Man’s Son felt. She seemed offended by his reaction and said, rather stiffly, with locked jaw and half-rolling eyes, admonishing rather than consoling:
“He’s friendly,” before sweeping past them on her way, disappearing into the light.
The Man knew that His Son in fact liked dogs, but only in theory. In real life, they were too unpredictable. The bigger and calmer the better; small and yappy things were the most suspect. His Son knew the names of many many dog breeds, could pronounce them aloud in that strange, half-alienated, half-proud, and fetching way he pronounced words that he had learned, such as The Man had never heard another human being pronounce them. Airedale Terrier, Hungarian Vizsla, Saluki, Japanese Spitz, Border Collie, Bedlington Terrier, Australian Kelpie. The Man took a moment to lament that His Son’s speech had become more spasmodic and rushed and unintelligible as time had gone on, with a little nervous stammer ever interrupting his utterances.
Other people passed The Man and His Son. Most of them didn’t have dogs. One or two of them had children: or rather, two or three of the people that they passed were children. It can be quite amazing, how little little children are; weird, tiny people who don’t understand most of what goes on around them, forget Around them, in them. The Man knew that His Son was strange to the children, and that His Son knew he wasn’t as little as them, and yet he knew he was like them. Perhaps he was, perhaps he wasn’t. There was a gap in the trees above The Man’s head, like a skylight in the attic of a house. The sky showed through it, the sun shone down through it. The light, skyey and clear, greyer now, more lilac and whey-blue, far less golden, alighted, nonetheless, like a halo on The Man’s head, an unbright halo. Up high, buoyant and serene in his majesty, a peregrine curved: not in a rise or fall, in a capacious left turn. The predatory shape was tiny at its height, but unmistakable, and The Man could even see that its shape was clawed just as he knew the falcon to be clawed. He imagined how the talons would feel in his flesh, how weighty with potential the peregrine’s talons as they push him into flight. Tiercel? He could swoop, spook. Should he perch on a stile to roost, a human presence would startle him, he’d jump and into flight at their approach, their sure, arrogant steps on mud and twig and leaf. The Man had the notion that His Son was stranded on an isle all his own. The children disappeared. So absolute in his exile from childhood, and so absolutely alien to the adult world. The peregrine reigned in an empty tract of cumuli. And then he dived.
The Man had seen gannets dive, in the Shetland waters, by the cliffs. He had felt the perilous, proximate gliding of the bonxies from behind, and he had gazed on the fast free vertical of the gannet’s fall. Returned from his memories to the woods in which he walked, The Man heard a crack. A sharp, sinister crack, like a branch broken by a footstep. He turned around. Lingering by a briar patch, there was an old man. The Man squinted: it was the same old man from earlier, with the hardly human smile. He waded through the woods, shepherd-like, supporting himself on a staff. He looked like he was clothed in sheepskin. The Man turned around and walked further on. He caught up, closer, to His Son. A toad ventured out onto the path, rowing himself forward through the slush with all four of his wetted footpads. The Man almost trod on him. Without a moment’s hesitation he reached down and picked up the toad from the ground. The mud, which looked purple in the light, yielded, releasing the toad from the substance in which he walked. The Elizabethans might have hated toads, but The Man did not. He felt seen, seen as deep as the place where his soul lurked in darkness, as if by a strange and sometime god, by the toad’s huge crystal-ball eyes: their galactic orange, their glinting dark waters, the diamond pupil in each. The toad’s throat pulsated, the big lilypad-shaped lower jaw bobbed at exactly the same rate as press-ups The Man had recently seen someone doing in a gym. Proudly bearing his ale-coloured, rubber armour, the toad sat perched on The Man: the press of the toad’s weight upon the underside of The Man’s wrist, blue and ribbed with four or five veins, felt utterly foreign, unlike anything else in the entire world. He moved and sat and sank down with typical small-animal weight, his weight was not much different from that of a shrew or a vole, but the moist texture of him, the physiology of how he shuffled, breathed, prepared to leap, was utterly singular. The Man noticed His Son was getting quite far away from him. He gently encouraged the toad back to the ground with a finger. The toad dropped through the air, invigorating, as if with an electric current, the space between The Man’s gloved hand and the floor as he fell, finally landing with a plop. The plop didn’t sound like any other sound The Man had ever heard. A sharp snap, the same from before.
The Man turned his head. The smiling old man was still behind him, but closer. The Man wondered if he should confront the old man; or call the police, tell them he and His Son were being stalked by an old man who smiled…? But The Man felt that he could do neither of those things, like he didn’t have the strength. He began running. His breaths deepened, quickened; his steps thudded dryly on the ground, the mud and litter and stones were more compact. His Son continued to walk, he felt a world away, The Man began to feel like he could never reach him again, like he was getting further and further away.
“Run!” The Man cried out.
He looked behind him, saw the old man, his haunting gummy smile looming, growing large, larger. He wasn’t sure if His Son heard him. Then The Man stopped. He didn’t know why he was running, what had caused him to run. His Son looked at him nervously, waved a nervous wave. What was I running from? The Man asked himself.
The Man and His Son walked on together. There was distance of some kind between them but at least it was no longer measurable in feet. The Man kept looking behind him as he and His Son walked. The old man with the strange smile was always there. Sometimes he waved, a little, quick, startled wave, flapping his hand and skinny, old wrist. Then The Man and His Son both stopped.
It sounded like laughter, a woman’s laughter, so soft it was almost unuttered. The laughter seemed to be approaching them, they heard a soft crackle of litter beneath feet. Perhaps the feet were bare. Then The Man realised that the laughter wasn’t laughter, but soft sobbing. It came closer, like a shadow without flesh, as if a shadow alone could cry. The Man’s Son reacted, then The Man thought he saw something, a movement in among the oaks, and a shaking of the little lower hazels: he thought it was a sheep at first, a lost sheep, or a big lamb at any rate. It was a lost sheep, in a manner of speaking, but one in human form, and she was crying. Biped, not quadruped. She was naked and she had ginger hair, and wild, bleakly wild blue, blue eyes, like a landscape sere with famines. She was beautiful and the tears glistened on her cheeks. Her flesh was smooth, like a pale shingle pebble, like pearl or alabaster, but she was scratched by foliate roughness, and puckered in places with dead leaves and nettle stings. Blood was visible on her breasts and in her red pubic hair, though she tried to make herself modest with what covering she had in her hands, the left over the hair of her vulva, and the right cupping her two breasts and hiding the nipple. It wasn’t her nakedness but the wounds in it, that made her nakedness profane.
“E-e-excuse me,” she said, in the tiniest voice, the words made hesitant with a small stammer. “I-I-I…I’ve been…I’ve been raped. I’ve…he violated me. Please…p-p-please…help. Help me please,” she said.
The Man’s Son was worried and confused. He laughed nervously through a big, false, toothless smile, and made his eyes disappear in their neighbouring crow’s feet. Through an overhead space in the trees, a second skylight, The Man noticed a skylark rise as if pulled to heaven, by a prayerful celestial pull. From leagues away the lark cried out, crazed. It was not a gentle sound.
“Please help me,” said the woman.
The Man said that he would do what he could, he took off his coat and draped it about the woman’s shoulders, telling her that he would call the police and an ambulance if necessary. Then he remembered that he didn’t have his phone. He was mortified before he was angry. He felt irresponsible, callous somehow. The woman wailed, with great incoherency. She was mystified that The Man had no phone upon his person. The Man thought hard about what he should do. After a while, he said:
“Who did this to you?”
The woman had grown weaker. She slipped downwards, wishing to lie back and sleep. The sound was feeble but the effort was not:
“The woods did it…”
The Man was sure he had not heard correctly.
“The woods?”
“The woods…I was…I was born…in the woods,” she said. “It hurt to be born”. She seemed to drift away, a thousand miles. The Man could see he was not seen in her blue eyes.
The Man looked behind him again. The old man was still there. He was not smiling, the curl of his gnarled and crinkled lips was now a downward one. The Man wasn’t sure what he should do. Someone was coming. They were silhouette and then, it took barely five seconds, their humanity was made visible. The walker was a man, probably mid-thirties in age, quite short. He was walking quickly, tautly, with an urgency, comprehensible only to himself. The little birds fled at his coming, in a chitter of wings and notes. He had a weighted square knapsack on his back, big boots, and he was trousered in khaki. The Man suspected that this man was training himself to enter the army. Perhaps the man was lost, perhaps he had taken a wrong turn in his life, or been delivered somewhere unknown. The army man moved with pain imprisoned within him, with darkness under his eyes, and his shaved head veined with the tortured inner efforts as much of the spirit as the body.
When this man saw The Man and His Son and the woman who’d been raped and the old man behind them, he seemed to find himself repulsed. The faces of humanity were set before him, and he was repulsed. The Man tried to solicit the aid of the military man but the military man went on his way, grunting that there was nothing he could do.
The Man remembered when he’d found a little brown bird in the driveway, winged and wounded. His Son had been concerned for its welfare. The Man wasn’t sure what to do then either, could neither mend nor kindly murder. The only gesture he could make was the pretence of care, solving nothing. Yet there was something solving in the act of care being performed. What more could he have done then? What would he do now?
The Man told His Son to walk on, it was beyond all doubt that he knew the way and knew it well. They had set out on their walk not entirely sure where they were going, different routes, in their part of the world same as any, yield different destinations. But the path before them now, green and brown with the furled forms of ferns, some dead and some alive, could enjoy only one possible culmination: in the ruined chapel. Whenever the windowless, centuries-forsaken, triangular façade rose over the beeches, bushes of broom and little elms among them, the heart was lifted skyward with the rising of that façade over the hump. The Man knew that the sleepers, resting where no shadows ever fell, were surveyed in their sleep by a ruin as hollowed out and as beyond purpose as themselves. The Man watched His Son trudge happily, obliviously, on towards that place. The woman crept towards The Man, like a phantom made of moonlight, through the tawniness.
The Man beckoned the woman who had been loitering aloofly at the side of the path into his arms. He felt her succumbing to sleep. He allowed her to succumb, with a curious permission in his hands he did not know he commanded, and the woman’s beauty became somnolent. The old man was still there behind, still without his smile. Before she was able to wake from her exhausted sleep, The Man snapped The Woman’s neck, holding her body in place and turning the head fatally. He tried to do it in such a way that was gentle, as forceful as the action needed to be, but soft. He was amazed that he possessed such a faculty, such artful slaughter. Then he took his coat back from her and it smelled of her body.
He fashioned her a sepulchre in the earth, parting the leaves and sticks and mud and matter, and laid her in it. The earth seemed to heal her violations. The Man covered her up, preserving her modesty with the ground, until only her face was left, her lips, her closed eyes. The Man felt sad to behold the woman in the ground, not yet hidden from the air, but gone beyond recovery. He remembered the old tales of princes and knights and castles and damsels. The woman wasn’t a lover: she was an adopted daughter. He grieved for her. Grief is a mouse and choses wainscot in the breast, he thought, remembering Dickenson’s poem, no chance that he could remember the number. And baffles quest. Grief baffles quest. The Man wondered if his kiss mightn’t revive her, wake her up. He did kiss her, but only goodnight. The kiss was emptied of the hope of revival. Then The Man made her disappear in the earth.
The Man ran, to catch up with His Son. They were not far from the centre of their journey. A journey is like an egg, symmetrical, palindromic, home returning, and the centre is the best part of it. When finally the chapel would rise over the green and mahogany rise, with its winter furze and scrub, the outward journey would have reached its end, leaving only the homeward one left to do.
The Man was strong, and his legs were used to walking him distances of some length. Yet, he knew that something within him was weary. He wondered whether his other son was up, how his wife was faring. Had she the heart to face that ruined puzzle, that battleground of yesterday afternoon? Had she forgiven him that which he’d to ask forgiveness for? A tracksuited man and woman, in loose, dirty, hooded clothes, came stumbling down the incline before The Man and His Son, with voices raised. They were drinking from Stella cans, and a block of four others dangled by the woman’s side from her right hand.
The male of the two young people, his hair long and random with dreads and his beard as disarrayed, slipped on a muddy patch, and was sent backwards, landing flat on his back. He cast away his Stella can and screamed a profanity at the sky. He got up. The woman was huskily calling his name after him as he tore furiously forwards, his unsacred flight causing birds to flee in fright, just as he passed beneath their boughs. The twitchy anxiety in the man, and the emotion in the woman’s voice, made The Man’s Son uneasy. He shot a further desperate look behind him at The Man, craving reassurance not giving it, flapping his left hand and smiling in nervous haste. The Man caught up to his son, and was half-prepared for one of the people approaching to snap What are you looking at? But they did not. The Man and His Son stepped to the side of the path to let them pass. And through their mess, their ragged disorder, though the male of their couple said nothing, the woman thanked them. They were two lost souls, made perhaps more lost in the quiet death of another year. The woman stumbled after the man, their troubles clinging close to them both, and their voices rose again, as the Stella cans swung with the swing of the woman’s stumbling walk, clanking metallically.
It moved The Man’s heart, that a courtesy and a relative decency was able to penetrate the difficult circumstances of that man and that woman’s life. The Man and His Son returned to walking, able to walk freely again. The Man considered the few, meaningful, close-knit seconds when another person or a unified group of persons, approached him along the path and came close, walked into his world and he into theirs, just for a few seconds. And for those few seconds you knew something about them, as much as they wanted you to know, as much as they were able to show to the world. You felt it very strongly, whatever it was: a sadness, a jauntiness, good news, bad news, boredom, wellness, illness, indifference, attention, self-absorption, attentiveness. The Man tried to imagine what people saw of him when he approached them, what was declared upon him, what of his quest could he not hide? What did they see in His Son? He was certain that they didn’t see what he saw. Someone was approaching on a bike. The man on the bike rode past The Man and His Son without thanking them or slowing. He rode with a certain entitlement, as if the paths on which he rode belonged to him. But The Man wasn’t angered by this, not anymore.
As The Man and His Son were trudging through the muddy dip, green with ferns and purple with bluebells most times of the year but this, a woman with a pale face and long, silken, jet black hair, approached. She was partnered by someone. The Man’s eyes widened as he recognised something that he knew very well in the dress and manner, in the frame and the movements and the demeanour of the figure that walked beside the woman with the pale face and jet black hair. The very aura around him was perfectly comprehensible to the man. And though The Man couldn’t know this (the woman’s face didn’t give much away) she felt the same way about The Man’s Son as The Man and His Son approached her and her son. The Man couldn’t be sure of this, but the figure that walked with the woman was indeed her son. The two sons passed each other without significance, but the two parents passed each other gracefully, with a look in their eyes, shared, like the optical equivalent of a squeeze of the hand, or the shoulder. It was strange that her look caused him pain rather than healing. He’d forgotten all about his bloodied arm, but it smarted suddenly, like a flare thrown up from the darkness of his coat sleeves. The Man and His Son left the woman and her son behind, each passed from every other’s world, on their way. But The Man didn’t want the woman to go just yet. He let His Son walk on and he turned around. The old man with the strange smile was nowhere to be seen.
The Man caught up to the woman and tapped her on the shoulder.
“I buried a woman in the earth,” he said.
The woman didn’t say anything at first.
“She’d been hurt. I left no trace.”
The woman with the pale face and the jet hair, and blue cagoule, said nothing still. Her son looked The Man up and down, with an animal suspicion he knew very well.
“Was she pretty?” the woman said, out of nowhere.
The Man hadn’t expected her to ask that, it took him some effort to ascertain and reply.
“I think so,” said The Man.
“They are everywhere,” she said. “I’ve buried a woman in the earth every single day of my life, for twenty years.”
The Man looked at the woman’s son. He looked about twenty. The same as his own son.
“Would you do it all again? Would you do that twenty years again?”
And without a moment’s hesitation the woman said: “Yep” and walked on.
The Man and His Son followed the path to the ruined chapel. They entered the unconfined ruin of the stone, their boots cracking on sweet chestnuts. Rape fields of withered gold rippled in the far distance, shimmering among poppy meadows without poppies. There were yew trees in the graveyard. The dead, marked by stones that did not chain them, seemed to utter yew trees out of the earth like strange untranslatable lines of song or holy aphorisms.
The Man and His Son sat for a while on the usual bench, under a cold, white birch, by a grave which bore the inscription: Resting Where No Shadows Fall. The Man and His Son grew reacquainted with the quiet, a predictable quiet like that which reigned in their house and which they could not expect outside, but they fortunately found, in the place of the ruined chapel. The wind stirred the yews, the fields behind them, the trees above them: words, whispered and unknowable, crept into their consciousness, two different, very different minds knit into one consciousness by the focus and rarely peopled stillness of the place. The Man knew that His Son could become easily agitated by unwanted touch, could tolerate a spontaneous cuddle several years ago but could do so no longer. Distance was more loving.
The route, woody and muddy, took them somewhere else they loved. His Son called it The Adventure Park. Or The Adventure Playground. Use of the words Park and Playground had always been and had remained fairly interchangeable. The playground itself in its picket perimeter, not so much the expanse of green outside the perimeter with its sporadic tree groves, but the fenced patch of playthings, was a special place. It’s accoutred exhibits, their climbable courses and frames and suspended surfaces, so new once, had aged and bowed and grown slightly dirty with a green, moss coloured dirt. From a slightly elevated vantage point, one could see the other side of the river, the little distant town a ferry crossing away, the unswelled waters of the river, the home-side marshes, the path, the woods, the railway track and the railway crossing that linked the footpaths on either side of the tracks. His Son was avid, and immediate in his avidity, as he scaled the encompassing fence of The Adventure Playground, and leapt into motion, climbing onto and over things, sliding down things, clambering, hanging, turning on the apparatus.
The Man sat down on a bench. The catkin bench. Wearily, and only half-happily, he seated his form, its medium height and moderate built. He wondered if perhaps he was too weary to go on with his quest. He didn’t feel like giving up, but he felt as though the day had taught him something of the quest’s drudgery, that he’d failed to notice before. The bench where The Man sat was on a slope. There was a catkin bush behind both their backs, the catkin bunches hung like limp skeleton hands. They were not like necklaces or bracelets. Each close cluster of five was like a hand. The bush was full of hands. The hands were feminine, they awaited some odd, manual courtship from the living, just one betrothal. And then maybe another, and another. They were green but so palely that they looked silver to The Man. The unwarm winter sun hovered in the middle of the sky, breaking through the leafless overhang of netted twigs; there were some leaves left but they were misshapen, wrapped at their edges, and solidified; but the sun was a source so bright that it made everything in its path disappear as it blasted: from the place where the stars shine, to the place below where their shining could no longer be enjoyed. The Man heard His Son call out, but not in distress. The Man could easily discern His Son’s distress. He heard His Son giggle and the giggle resounded in the parkland, sounded like a joyful source, like one lone flower, cheering and meaningful in the universe. The Man fished for his phone automatically, then remembered it wasn’t there. He continued feeling about in his big pockets even after he remembered that his phone would not be there. Though he knew such a thing to be impossible, he couldn’t help but half hope that a packet of cigarettes might be there, though if there were he would have no way of knowing how. Of course there was nothing, nothing but for a few coppers. His left arm was sore again. It had been rubbing against the lining of his coat sleeve for a while and the wounds were newly irritated. He withdrew his arm from the blackness of the sleeve, to look at it, its scars. He remembered their creation, he remembered how he fell.
But it spooked him to discover, taking off his coat, that there was no wound on his left arm. His arm was absolutely unblemished. The Man was perturbed, and then upset, and then he was incensed. He saw His Son swing back and forth on a swing. For love of him, he said to himself. For love of him, his lips uttered like a mantra. But the wounds were gone from him, lifted from him, like an error in the universe, lifted in act of erasure as though they had been a misworded sentence. He had been sure of the pain but he wondered now if even that had been hallucinatory. He knew he had suffered, quested, fought. And he had the scars to prove it, the ocular proof; how was it that they had been taken from him?
The Man heard laughter behind him and he turned his head. The laughter came from the catkin bush. The Man turned his head back, and looked out at the world, His Son tiny and red-coated within it, going back and forth, back and forth, on the swing. He was happy.
A train sounded out its approach. It gonged its horn loud, shocking, with its interjection, the river and the river shore and the woods into quietness and fright. Birds fled at its coming, as the train of many wheels and carriages clattered over the rail crossing. When the train had rushed into the distance and disappeared, leaving a leap and dying swirl of dead leaves in its wake, the tall, spectacled woman with red hair, and her dog before her, who had been waiting, crossed from one side of the rail crossing to the other. On the other side, she thought she saw a face, peeping at her through the dark gaps of a withered bramble patch. But she wouldn’t stop to feel sorry for it. The dog bounded ahead up the hill, and the woman trudged effortfully behind, in her wellingtons. The slope was steep and she wasn’t as young as she used to be. Her heart quickened and her breaths grew more laboured. She curved towards the playground. She walked beneath the shadow of the trees. She trudged over earth full of sleepers. If she’d thought to do so, let alone had the strength to bend down and dislodge the earth and dead leaves, she would have discovered the faces of those silent and sleeping in the earth. An unoiled creak turned her head. She looked at the playground. It was empty, and lay, abandoned, untouched, as if it had been that way for a hundred years. It was almost perfectly still but for one swing. It swung but she knew it was the wind that had stirred it. Two magpies honked the rattle of their voices from a perch of twigs over her head, and scampered away. The woman’s Jack Russel stiffened at something. The woman was almost annoyed with herself for failing to notice the human life in that place. An Old Man with a mysterious, half-human smile looked out at the world from the bench before the catkin bush. He was so much a part of that pleasant, green and brown place, that place where the daffodils weren’t but soon would be, that she hadn’t noticed him as something separate from it. The Jack Russel didn’t fear The Old Man; simply crept up to him and nosed between his knees. Then, she and her dog went on their way, and The Old Man remained on the catkin bench long after they had disappeared. When it was dark, he spoke to the man. Wait for me, he softly said. Somehow the man was able to hear him say it.
In the silence of the year’s final days, deep in the depth of that blue-black town, in the attic bed of an unlighted house, a man woke from his sleep. He was not yet old. He knew that. And so he smiled.
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