I wrote this story in various places: New York, Madrid, London and Gonder, a small town in Ethiopia. This makes it sound much more substantial and serious than it is. Almost exactly as I finished it, Audrey Niffenegger published The Time Traveler’s Wife, which is apparently similar in theme, and became a bestseller.

I haven’t read The Time Traveler’s Wife. I’m sure it’s a very good book. But this won’t take you as long to read (it’s only a novella), it isn’t meant to be a clever metaphor (unless you really want it to be), and it probably contains more sex. I hope you enjoy it.

Chapter 1

‘I’d like to tell you the stories of two sad men. Two sad men, and one woman,’ he said. ‘First I will tell one story, and then the other. I assume you have nothing better to do while you wait for your train?’

‘Nothing,’ I replied. I didn’t care. My train wasn’t due for a couple of hours, and what happened before then was not in the least important.

‘Very well,’ he said, ‘then I’ll get started.’ We were sitting side by side at the bar of a pub near the station. I had been there with my suitcase all day, staring at my reflection in the mirror behind the amber glow of liqueurs, and this man I didn’t know, about forty years old, had taken the stool beside mine. He had a gentle and persuasive tone, an accent I couldn’t finger. I couldn’t remember exactly how long he had been talking to me.

‘We’ll start with the story of the first sad man.’ He cleared his throat, and began. ‘The first time he made love to a woman, he was propelled violently backwards in time. He was aware only of a flash of white light and the sensation of enormous speed. The next thing he knew, he was lying face-down on wet cobblestones in one corner of a square in what he later found out was a small town in France in the winter of 1810.’

‘Is this a joke?’ I interrupted. ‘I’m in no mood for jokes.’ But he ignored me.

‘It was raining, and bitterly cold. Of course, he was naked, apart from one sock. His first instinct was to leap to his feet and make a dash for shelter, but he slipped on the cobbles and fell, skinning his hands. He whimpered in pain and confusion. Then he crawled on his hands and knees, and curled himself up with his eyes closed beneath the branches of an overhanging tree.

‘He remained there for what seemed a long time. Probably, it was only a few minutes. He kept opening his eyes and staring around, expecting to find himself back in Alicia’s bedroom where only a few moments before he had been – had he? – but all he saw was identical grey stone walls and rain. He thought he must have lost his mind. He was covered in mud, and trembling all over.

‘The next thing he knew, he was being hauled to his feet. An awful face thrust into view, dripping and covered in hair. He struggled, but the hands were hard and gripped him painfully. Rough sackcloth was wrapped around his body. Then he was dragged towards a lighted doorway in a wall on the far side of the square.

‘A wave of heat hit him as he stepped inside, astonished faces turned around to stare. He realised he was in some kind of tavern. People crowded round him, tweaking and poking, pulling him into the centre of the room. There was a roar of laughter, and at one point a burst of applause. A middle-aged woman hit him in the chest with what looked like a loaf of bread. A snot-faced brat tugged at the sackcloth and pulled it clean away, producing delighted hoots from the crowd. An old man in an olive green uniform slapped the brat in the mouth. They forced him to drink something strong and burning.

‘Then he found himself in another room, perhaps in another building, where a serious gentleman with a grey moustache asked him questions in what he dimly began to recognise as French. Other serious gentlemen were summoned, friends or allies of the first. They shook him by the shoulders and examined his teeth. They took his sackcloth away, exchanged it for another, and attempted to remove his only sock. For some reason this upset him more than anything else that had happened. He tried desperately to fight them off, but they pinioned him against the floor and tugged the sock off his foot. More questions were barked. They examined him all over. There was a deep pan of warm, soapy water. Finally he found himself alone in a damp stone room with bars across the window.

‘He wondered if this had happened to other men immediately after ejaculation.

‘They kept him there for several days, surviving on stale bread and thin, vinegary wine that was brought by a leering, cretinous man with warts upon his hands. Every day someone came to question him, and occasionally he picked up words he understood. Vaguely, he gathered they were trying to make up their minds whether he was a drunk, a lunatic or an enemy spy. He didn’t speak enough of their language to explain who he was or where he had come from, though once, in desperation, he mimed the act of sexual intercourse. The moustached men roared with laughter, so perhaps it helped his case in some small way. Eventually, they decided he was a drunk and a lunatic, but at least not a enemy spy, so he was passed into the care of the local church. There, he was given a smock, a jacket, torn breeches and a pair of old boots, half a loaf of bread and three apples, then escorted to the edge of town and told never to return again under threat of a beating. Excuse me, barman, a couple of whiskies, please.’

The man paused while he waited for the drinks. When the whiskies arrived he slid one across to me. I watched him dully in the mirror behind the bar, wondering why he was talking to me.

‘Thanks,’ I muttered, though I did not want a drink.

‘Don’t thank me,’ he replied, and continued.

‘There was nothing he could do but start walking back towards England, even though he supposed that when he got there he would be hundreds of years too early to re-enter his life. He travelled on lonely country roads, sleeping in hedgerows and ditches. He limped northwards in those ill-fitting boots, through woodland and frost-bitten fields, skirting the farms and villages and hiding when he saw approaching strangers. He talked out loud, delirious at times, and wept to himself in the nights. He had no money, he was weak from cold and hunger. He ached for the warmth of Alicia’s arms around him.

‘That was perhaps the only thing that kept him going, in those early days. The thought of Alicia, waiting ahead of him somewhere in time and space. But already that reality was fading from his mind. He could barely think past his hunger or his frozen, blistered feet. Frankly it seemed more incredible that he had finally lost his virginity than been flung back to another century.

‘He grew steadily weaker and weaker. He started to hallucinate. One day some men on horseback caught up with him, knocked him down and stole the boots off his feet. He lay unconscious at the side of the road. When he came to, it was dusk. He staggered towards a copse of conifers at the end of a long field. Snow fell lightly all around him, whirling against the purple sky. Ahead was a flickering orange light. He went closer, and found it was a fire. Out of his mind with exhaustion, he stumbled towards it and collapsed on the hard earth. A dark shape moved above him, and a female hand was laid upon his forehead.’

I slid back my sleeve and checked my watch. I still had a long time to wait before my train. I propped my feet on my suitcase, and took a sip of whiskey. It felt good, so I took another. Beside me, the man continued talking.

‘The next day, he woke up wrapped in woollen blankets. His feet had been bandaged, and the dirt washed from his face. He lay for a long time with no memory of what had occurred, staring up at a curved, painted ceiling. For a while he even imagined he was back in Alicia’s bed, until an unknown woman stepped into the room, and addressed him in words he didn’t understand. She had greasy black hair, and gold rings through her ears. He thought she was beautiful until she parted her lips, and he saw that her teeth were as black as chips of coal.

‘She kept him there for days, then a week, warm inside the caravan. She brewed nettle tea in a pot above the fire, and nursed him back to strength with mutton stew. Everything tasted of mutton, even the tea. He tried to thank her, but she only scowled. Neither understood the other’s language. In the afternoons he sat outside like a pensioner with a rug across his knees, watching her feed twigs into the fire. It was difficult to tell how old she was. She rarely met his eyes, and never smiled. She filled a clay pipe from a jar of carefully-hoarded tobacco leaves, and they shared this in silence in the evenings round the fire. There was never a word between them. At night she slept beside him on the wooden bunk, and made him face the wall when she pulled off her clothes. When he was stronger, she gave him a hatchet and showed him how to chop firewood. Later, when his feet had healed, she made him fetch water every morning from the stream. The nights were even colder then, and he had to smash the ice first with the hatchet. He stared at his reflection in the water underneath, and thought about Alicia. His beard had grown thick on his face by then. He looked like a different man. Weeks passed. The snow-drifts deepened. He and the woman grew used to one another.

‘I suppose things could have gone on like this. Is that so very strange?’ The storyteller was addressing me with his eyebrows raised. ‘To me, it is deeply reassuring. They could have stayed together – that could have been enough – and in time he might have forgotten his former life. Who knows? We constantly change, after all, from one person to the next, forgetting whoever it was that we were before.

‘Of course, things didn’t go on like this. It’s impossible, now, that he could have ended up that way. That eventuality didn’t occur, because another eventuality did. Because life is an endless denial of possibilities.’

I considered finishing my drink and leaving. Company was the last thing I’d wanted when I took my seat at this bar. But now this man he had started talking, suddenly I didn’t want to be alone. It was comforting, at the start of his tale, to listen to him and not think. I couldn’t afford to let myself think. So I stayed, and allowed him to keep talking.

‘One night, it was colder than it had ever been before. Icicles hung from the spokes of the caravan’s wheels. The two of them huddled beneath their blankets, wrapped up so only their noses were exposed to the air. He woke during the night with chattering teeth, and found that his feet were sticking out. Instinctively he shifted deeper into the pile, which brought him into contact with her legs. At first she moved away, but the cold was too great, and inch by inch her body shifted back. By morning, they were wrapped in the same blankets, burrowing towards each other’s warmth.

‘The next night, the same thing happened. The warmth of his body sought out the warmth of hers, and by degrees the two of them came together. The sensation of human touch comforted him more than he ever had imagined. It was what he had been longing for, through all those starving weeks. In the warm, dark heart of the blankets, his hand encountered hers. There was no resistance. Their fingers locked together. Perhaps she was asleep. When dawn came, the two of them were wrapped around one other.

‘Neither gave a sign that anything had happened, and the days went by as wordlessly as before. But night after night they pressed closer and closer, until the moonless darkness when he woke from his sleep to find her breath in his ear, and her hands upon his body.

‘Neither made a sound. They didn’t kiss – he couldn’t stop thinking of her black teeth, and her mouth gave off a stale reek – but touched each other cautiously, gradually growing bolder. He sensed her body’s urgency, half awake, half dreaming. The five cold points of her fingers touched his belly, making the skin grow tight. His left hand slid to the warmth of her chest, delighting at locating an area of softness on that tough and work-calloused body. They drifted back to sleep like that, in and out of dozing, and he dreamed it was Alicia’s hands he felt against his nakedness, trying to drag him forward through time towards her. When he next came awake the woman had rolled on top of him, clasping him between her thighs as if he would have tried to get away. Her breath grew sharp and hot. She commenced rocking backwards and forwards, roughly and tenderly stroking his hair the way you might attempt to reassure a frightened dog.

‘Then she was tugging at the cord that held his breeches, grasping at his nascent erection. Until that moment, since Alicia had been lost, sex had occurred to him only as an abstract thought, something that belonged to a time that was his no longer. It had nothing to do with the coldness or the hunger, the bruises, the blisters, the humiliation of nakedness; everything he had experienced since then. Alicia had smelt of clean, perfumed skin, while this woman stank of ancient sweat and wood-smoke. And her hands were so rough where Alicia’s had been soft, positioning him uncomfortably inside her. But he clung to her nonetheless, desperately now, because the contact of her body drove the hurt and loneliness out of him.

‘It didn’t last long, I’ll tell you that. It was, all in all, a rough, shoddy affair, punctuated by stabs of freezing air when the blankets fell away from their bodies. But it did what it was supposed to do, and the rest of my story could not have occurred without it. Almost immediately, he came.’

‘Is that the punch-line?’ I asked. I glanced around the pub to see if anyone else was listening. The barman was leaning at far end of the bar, watching a televised darts game. The place was almost empty at this hour.

The man picked up his whiskey, and swirled it inside its glass.

‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s not the punch-line. This story doesn’t have one, I’m afraid.

‘Almost immediately, he came. This was only his second time, remember. There was a flash of white light and the sensation of enormous speed. His head was filled with a terrifying roar, as if water was cascading into his ears. And then he was stretched out on his back beneath a canopy of leaves, staring up into a dazzling blue sky.

Chapter 2

‘The fact that the same thing had happened before was no preparation for the shock. He actually let out a bellow of fright, and curled up trembling in the dust. He squeezed his eyes shut and remained motionless, hoping it would all would go away. An insect ran across his neck. He sat up too quickly and made himself dizzy. Nausea heaved inside him. He was sick onto his knees. An after-effect, I imagine, of the phenomenal forces that had acted upon him as he hurtled through time and space.

‘But the sickness passed as his body adjusted, and cautiously he dared to glance around. He was screened on every side by rocks and leaves. There was no sound except the buzzing of insects, and the air smelled like a pot of mixed herbs. He rose to his feet. At least it was warm here. There was no rain or snow. He even had his clothes on, this time round. He pulled his breeches up to cover his frankly flabbergasted half-erection and staggered unsteadily through the foliage, trying to find some clue to where he was.

‘After the winter he had disappeared from, every leaf was startlingly green. The ground was hard and stony, but the woman had wrapped his feet tightly in rags, so they were protected from the sharper of the rocks. Moments ago he had been with her, or had it never happened? The woman with black teeth long gone, her smell still upon his body.

‘The undergrowth ended abruptly at the edge of a sloping field. He lurked in the shade, squinting left and right, not daring to step into the open. The field was planted with lines of gnarled trees with waxy, dark green leaves. Further down the hillside was a road. There was nobody in sight. Shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun, he traced the road until it faded into the stippled green landscape. Much further on, he could see a city, a jumble of structures shimmering through the haze. And behind the city, so blue it almost hurt him, was the sea.

‘He made a decision, and started down the hillside. Soon he was covered in dust and sweat, parched with thirst, but he carried on. And so it was that, many hours later – or maybe it was days, who can remember? – he came to arrive at a thriving port on the coast of the Aegean Sea in what is now known to us as Greece, a few hundred years B.C.

‘Have you ever been to that part of the world?’ asked the storyteller, turning on his bar-stool to face me. ‘That sea really does hurt the eyes. It’s so intense it seems almost alive.’

‘I went to Greece for my honeymoon.’

‘Is that right? Your honeymoon? A perfect place for it, I’d say. But let me continue, I’m distracting myself. Order another drink if you like.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘But I’ve got money, feel free.’ He waved to the barman. ‘Same again, please.’

I made no attempt to argue. If he wanted to buy me a drink, I would have one. Why not? I studied his clothes out of the corner of my eye, trying to decide how rich he was. He was dressed in a well-cut dark grey suit that looked as if it could have been expensive, but the sleeves were frayed. Perhaps it was second-hand.

Another pair of whiskies arrived. He took a sip, and continued.

‘Once he had arrived through the city’s main gate, he headed, almost instinctively, down to the harbour. Ships were docked along the quayside, bobbing in the glittering water. Seagulls screamed in the air above, diving for scraps of food. Clamouring crowds of people jostled past one another on the wharfs – Athenians, Armenians, Laconians, Phoenicians, whatever the hell they were back then – merchants trading their goods and salesmen yelling in languages he had never heard before. People elbowed past in tunics and sandals, bright turbans, togas, flowing robes, loose trousers rolled up to the knee. He stood in the middle of this in wonderment. A few passers-by cast him strange looks, but trade was booming and the city received travellers from all over the known world, so his appearance didn’t excite as much curiosity as you might imagine. With his filthy smock and wrapped-up feet, he looked like just another foreign vagrant. He made his way through the crowd, past piles of fabrics, sacks of spices, and along the quay, where dark-skinned men were unloading cargo from a boat with triangular red sails, until he found some steps down to the water.

‘He crept into the shade and remained there until evening, dipping his feet in the waves that lapped the stones. There were eyes painted on the hulls of boats. The blue of the sea deepened and darkened until it was almost purple, and a cool breeze blew in across the water. He drifted into waking dreams – Alicia smiling with black teeth, gazing at him from a river’s far bank – and didn’t venture out until night-time.

‘Now torches had been lit behind the windows of the houses, and the resinous smoke of cooking fires hung above low, flat roofs. Skinny cats slunk between the buildings. The merchants were packing up their goods for the day, and the quayside was almost deserted.

‘He wandered towards the marketplace, delirious with hunger. The last meal he had eaten was a bowl of mutton stew, back in another century. The thought of it made him go weak at the knees. Ahead of him a fat man with a dark, curly beard was selling little cakes from a stall. His mouth filled with saliva as he stared at them, glistening with honey in the torch-light. And then his opportunity came. Suddenly the vendor’s head swivelled, following a moving point elsewhere in the crowd. He sensed a general shifting of focus, eyes drawn momentarily away. Grabbing a handful of cakes from the stall, he stuffed them beneath his smock and started walking.

‘No-one came after him, no-one even noticed. As he glanced backwards, fear pounding through him, he saw the object of distraction passing out of view into the crowd. A tall, lithe, elegant lady with her hair piled high on her head, slipping between the watching bodies in a tightly-wound red gown. It seemed to him that the eyes upon her body made it shine, as if it was lit by spots of light reflected off many mirrors.

‘He bolted down the honeyed cakes so fast they almost choked him. Later, he lifted a couple of oranges from an old woman’s basket. That night he slept on a pile of sacking in the shelter of an upturned boat.

‘Stealing those cakes and oranges was a thing that necessity forced upon him, but he realised even then that he did it well. In the weeks that followed he became adept at thieving. We can learn anything, if circumstance requires it. Theft was the only thing that kept him from starving, the only control he could hope to exert over his situation. It sustained his body as surely as the memory of Alicia sustained his mind. Because she was always in his thoughts, even then, when he was further from her than he had ever been before.

‘For weeks, he didn’t think past his next meal. The enormity of what had happened was too great to comprehend. All he could do was keep himself alive. Thieving was easy in this city, with so many strangers coming and going. The homeless are invisible anywhere you go, people in any age go to great lengths to avoid having to see them, and he quickly learned to make use of this anonymity. He stole mostly fruit and the unleavened bread for sale on the market stalls. Sometimes his nerve failed him, and when this happened he learned to beg, crouching by gateways and bowing his head until someone dropped a coin into his cupped hands. He kept his mouth shut when purchasing anything, pointing and nodding to indicate what he wanted. Perhaps the merchants took him for a mute. He never slept in the same spot for more than a few nights in a row, fearful of being apprehended.

‘It was a filthy, lonely time, of course, but not without small joys. The hills around the city were beautiful, covered by olive groves and forests of cypress trees. He was struck by the quality of the figures that he saw, the mingling of different faces on the quay. And if he stared at the bright sea long enough he could lose himself entirely, his mind drifting off to somewhere where the sadness couldn’t touch him.

‘One day, as he shuffled through the centre of the city, he thought he saw Alicia coming down the street towards him. The shock of it made him forget where he was, and he opened his arms and hurried towards her, on the point of calling out her name. Then he jerked to a halt, aghast. The girl looked nothing like Alicia at all. The resemblance lessened with every step she took. But some aspect of her face still made him think of her. Perhaps it was only the distorting effect of desperation. She was skinny, flat-chested, with a petulant mouth. Her mouth looked nothing like Alicia’s mouth. He lowered his face as she passed him by, ashamed of his hope and his appearance. But her shoulders, from behind, looked like Alicia’s shoulders. He found himself following her back towards the harbour. She walked quickly, and didn’t once look back to see him. Part of him longed for her to do so. Part of him feared this more than anything else.

‘He watched her buying a sack of rice in a shop with a low ceiling. Her arms were long, like Alicia’s arms, and unadorned by bracelets. Further on he lurked in the shadows while she stopped to talk to a woman she knew, who could have been her cousin or her sister. He heard her laugh, and it was nothing like Alicia’s laugh. Finally he saw her disappear through the blue-painted door of a small house near the quay.

‘As he stood there, staring at the place where she had been, the loneliness came crashing in like a wave breaking on top of itself. Seeing that girl brought so much pain he thought he would drown in it. She looked nothing like Alicia. This city looked nothing like the world he knew. All at once, he was stricken by the full knowledge of his exile. He was alone, halfway insane, and lost beyond comprehension. Why had this happened to him, and not to other men? How had his life’s most intimate moment resulted in this punishment: the profoundest estrangement that could be imagined? Had he lost all control of his life? Was he impotent here, forever trapped, unable to steer himself back?’

The man paused, looking up at the ceiling. I wondered how many times he had told this story, or if perhaps he was making the whole thing up as he went along.

‘As I hope you’ve guessed by now, there was one course of action he could take.’

A small group of businessmen came in and ordered pints of bitter. He waited until they were settled at their table before continuing.

‘The first thing, it seemed, was to get himself cleaned up. Next morning he washed his filthy clothes in the sea, scrubbing out the stains with sand and pebbles. While his clothes dried in the sun, he scrubbed his body. He scavenged half a wooden comb to untangle his matted, part-dreadlocked hair. Shaving was the hardest part. His beard was stiff with accumulated dirt, and he didn’t know if razor-blades even existed yet. Eventually he hung around the boys who cleaned fish on the quay, sneaking a fish-gutting knife into his sleeve when he thought none of them were looking. This act was mistimed, someone started shouting. He broke into a run. A few barefooted boys came after him, but he got away. He stayed out of sight for the rest of the day, and shaved in the sea after moonrise. When the blade became blunt, he sharpened it on a stone. His face and neck were bloody by the time the skin was smooth.

‘In the morning he stole a pair of sandals that had been carelessly left on a doorstep. He picked a bunch of wild flowers from the fields outside the city. Then he made his way to her door, and stationed himself outside it.

‘He waited there for several hours before the girl appeared. She left the house and turned towards the centre of the city. Again he followed her through the streets, slinking along against the wall, tripping over doorsteps. He trailed her through alleyways and across a marketplace, occasionally losing the back of her head and then catching it again. He kept his eyes fixed on the nape of her neck, where an narrow alleyway of skin was visible through her dark hair. Alicia’s skin was lighter than hers, but the strong, smooth muscle of their necks was the same. He thought she must be aware of him, but she didn’t look round. He quickened his pace as his nervousness grew, until he was walking just steps behind her. At last they reached the open space that housed the city’s temple.

‘Here she paused, and stooped to flick a pebble from her sandal. A man was carrying a black piglet up the temple steps. Its squeals of panic and enragement echoed off the marble colonnades. When the girl straightened up, he stepped before her and, without warning, thrust out the flowers in an nervous, slightly pugilistic manner: a wilting bunch of wild anemones.

‘She frowned at the flowers, and then at him. He saw her eyes travel from his tattered clothes to his sun-damaged, knife-nicked skin. She took a step backwards. He tried to smile; he must have looked quite ghastly. She stared at him blankly, flicked up her shawl, and turned her back on him.

‘The next morning he was back outside her door. When she appeared, he repeated the procedure, catching her up on the other side of town with anemones in his hand. She turned away, once more, without a word. The next day, too, and the day after that, he trailed her through the city. Once he thought she detected a smile, but she hid it in her sleeve. He had no doubt that she held him in contempt, and yet she expressed no irritation. If anything, she seemed to grow amused. Her eyes glanced around for him when she stepped out of her door. It was an odd ritual. One day she even laughed when he appeared, though he knew she was mocking him. Another time he thought she waited for him to catch up when he fell behind, only to slip down an alley to lose him later. She never accepted the flowers from his hand, or spoke a word to him.

‘He began to feel ridiculous. But his sense of urgency grew. He was clumsy and naive back then, but still possessed that rudimentary grace, that force of will, which was to serve so well in times to come. I think maybe his ignorance was the reason he got as far as he did. Coupled with his desperation, it could be mistaken, perhaps, for confidence.

‘One day, there was a festival in that city. He woke from his crude nest on the beach to the sound of drums. Ivy, bougainvillea and vine was hung from the doorways of the houses. He tried to navigate his way to the blue door, but the city was heaving. People were pouring in from other towns and villages, their donkeys laden with oranges and grapes, wineskins and salted meats. Children dashed past in wild mobs, festooned in flowers. He was carried along with the crowd, towards the temple and the open ground. Girls with petals in their hair carried jars of wine upon their shoulders.

‘Men in white robes were pounding drums on the temple’s marble steps, and the leering open mouths of masks went whooping through the crowd. The hot sun dazzled off the buildings, forcing him to squint. Something was burning, pouring out smoke: a fire of black and charcoaled lumps on which women scattered pomegranate seeds, their eyes radiant, plump arms shining. A fat poet recited verses while spectators howled with laughter, and then came a black bull dragged on a rope by a man with horns upon his head. There was dancing around the temple, and somewhere, woman shrieking.

‘He looked for the girl, but she was nowhere. There were too many girls to count, and soon their features merged. The air throbbed as the day grew wild; people began collapsing from the wine. There were drinking competitions at tables strewn with flowers, and now the fat poet had mounted one of these, his face painted up like a woman’s, to upend an amphora of wine, his adam’s apple bouncing. The black bull’s throat was cut by a powerful man with a long knife, and he was dazzled by its bright blood glugging into the dirt. He started feeling dizzy. He tried to push his way through the crowd but people clung to his arms. Someone’s fingers pinched his earlobe, and wine was thrust into his hands. He gulped it down as fast as he was able. The warble of flutes tickled his ears, his eyes were stung by the greasy smoke of the sacrificial fire.

‘The sky was orange now, streaked with black. The marble columns were fluted silhouettes. Torches were lit, and shadows leaped up walls and over faces. Tunics were loosened, legs were bared, and robes began to slip away. An old man scampered naked through the crowd, cackling, penis swinging like a bell-rope; breasts loomed out of the night and passed him by. Howling dancers in animal masks chased girls up and down the streets, and it was difficult to tell if the sound they made was hysterical laugher or screaming. He started to mutter, and then to shout, furious with everything he saw. He yelled obscenities. He swaggered through the crowd like a drunk, roaring insults about their religion, their incomprehensible language, their doomed gods, their stupid haircuts. Someone grabbed him by the arms and spun him around until he fell. When he climbed dustily back to his feet, hands scraped, he was whirling with them. He had never danced before in his life, but now the only thing he could do was make the blood pound inside him, as if by moving fast enough he could leave all this behind.

‘He flailed his way to the centre of the mob, arms waving, wet hair flying. He lost himself in the dizzying whirl, centrifuging out his pain. He danced a driving, foot-stamping dance, drawing men, women and children around him, and in the orange strobe of the flames he saw bodies beginning to move together, corresponding to each other’s motions. He imagined the dancers were following him, their limbs linked to his by strings, and he could tweak and manipulate them into contorting as he pleased. He eagerly guzzled the wine-jar when it came, swung through the crowd from hand to hand and slippery with the dancers’ sweat. The wine dribbled down his chin, less red than black in the gathering night, so black and sweet and bitter it brought him joy.

‘And gradually the dancers paired, mirroring each other so closely they naturally slipped together. Couples staggered out towards the fringes. Men and women, women and boys, men and men, boys and women, reeling together into the darkness. Someone glanced past him with fingers outstretched, and caught onto his for a second, but he couldn’t hold them. The delighted shrieks and whoops grew more and more distant as the dance collapsed, and finally the drums rolled down and the maddening flutes fell silent.

‘Exhausted, elated, he slumped to the ground. His body was shaking with laughter. Nothing mattered any more. The ridiculousness of it overwhelmed him. He no longer cared about time, about home, about love, about returning. If fate had declared him a wandering madman, a wandering madman is what he would be. He chuckled and groaned and wiped his eyes, and when he looked up the girl was there – the girl who wasn’t Alicia – standing coolly over him with anemones in her hair.

‘He accepted her hand and climbed to his feet, for the first time meeting her eyes without shame. When she turned and walked slowly away, it was implicit in her steps that he should follow.

‘He followed her away from the chaos of the temple, into the darkness of the surrounding streets. The sounds of festivity faded behind them. They passed men collapsed drunkenly in heaps, couples laughing softly in the shadows. The moonlight fell on bare patches of skin – a foot here, a shoulder here, or was that perhaps a knee? – lit up as if by pale spotlights. The darkness writhed with silent bodies. People were fucking every which way. She led him between the city’s outermost houses, uphill through darkened fields. The stars rose through the branches as they walked. Her neck bobbed before him like a water snake. Everything seemed familiar in an aching, dreamlike way, like following Alicia up the stairs to her bedroom long ago. They came to a rock in a grove of olive trees, and stopped here, looking back over the sea.

‘He had no flowers to offer this time, so simply reached out to unfasten her gown. It fell soundlessly away, revealing her body to the moonlight. He touched her on the neck, the lips, the dark nipples of her breasts, surprising himself with an unexpected grace of movement. This had felt so unnatural on those previous occasions – even with Alicia, who had coaxed and guided him, button by button, giggling at his inexperience – but now a fluidity entered his body, a sense of smoothness that infused his every action. The girl seemed pleased. A breath escaped her lips. She knelt down to slip the stolen sandals off his feet.

‘A goat bleated somewhere on the hillside. The smell of the ocean carried on the wind. She smiled as she rose to bite him softly on the bottom lip, but when she drew away again her eyes were like black pebbles, holding nothing but mystery for him. In the second before he entered her, he experienced a sharp regret. He would never understand her now. He would not see that sea again. All of this was about to be lost forever.

‘But this was the path that he had chosen. Alicia lay in time and space before him. And so, of course, he did the girl, there against the rock among the olives. What else could possibly have happened?’

‘Wait there,’ I said, getting down from my stool. I crossed the pub, past the table of businessmen, to the toilet door beyond the fruit machine. I hadn’t noticed the ache in my bladder; I must have been listening more deeply than I thought. When I’d finished I regarded myself in the streaked, thumbprinted mirror. I was dressed in my grey sweater and my buttoned-up black coat with deep pockets. In one of these pockets I could see the bulge of the envelope that held my travel documents.

The moment I encountered my face in the glass, I was brought back to reality. It cut through the thankful inanity of the storyteller’s story, straight through the whiskey’s pleasant numbing. Suddenly, I was thinking of Caitlin, back in the empty house. Caitlin, sitting at the kitchen table with that half-frown half-smile on her face, the expression that agonised me. What was she doing? Had she already left? And if she had, where would she go now? I thought that I might start crying again. I ran cold water over my hands. I couldn’t cry, or he would see, and I didn’t want him to see. I rubbed water in my eyes. I had left, and would not go back. Quickly, I returned to the bar.

The storyteller was waiting patiently, and continued from where he had left off. Another couple of whiskies sat on the bar in front of him.

Chapter 3

‘And so, you see, it had begun. This is how our lives map out. One thing leads to the next, and the next thing leads to something after that, and who can tell where we will ever end up? There was a flash of white light and the sensation of enormous speed. Roaring in his ears. Swirling patterns in his eyes. As if he was trapped in a cyclone, a whirlpool, or spinning around inside a washing machine. Huge pressures bore down on his body. He felt like his lungs might collapse. And then he found himself half-buried in a stinking garbage heap, on the outskirts of a village beside a river somewhere on the Eurasian steppes in the early thirteenth century.

‘Climbing, disgusted, from the mound of waste, he cursed himself as he realised he had allowed the girl to remove his clothes and sandals. He was naked again, covered in filth, and still nowhere nearer home.’

‘He went forwards in time this time?’ I interrupted.

‘If time was strictly linear, you might say he went forwards. Forwards one time, back the next, or maybe simply around and around hitting points on an invisible wheel. There was never any way, you see, to predict where he might be flung.’

‘Then why even try? Surely the chances of landing back in his own time were impossibly stacked against him.’

‘Stacked against him, yes, but not impossibly. Few things are ever impossible, my friend. The odds of hitting his time again – even within twenty or fifty years – must have been many millions to one. But it was not impossible. That was his torment.’

‘Not impossible, but highly unlikely. He should have stayed in ancient Greece. At least the weather was nicer there.’

‘Unlikely, yes. Of course it was. But perhaps you’ve never been in love.’

I started to object, but he cut through me.

‘Let me continue. I still have much of this story to tell, and I know you have a train to catch. Hopefully, before it ends, you will come to understand him.

‘Some way away from the garbage dump, a swathe of rank and mildewed material was caught in the lower branches of a birch tree. He pulled this down and wrapped it round him. Then, after binding his feet with rags, as the black-toothed woman had taught him to do, he made his way down towards the village.

‘It was just after dawn. A clear, cold morning, the sky streaked bloody, and the river shone like steel in the sun. The track he followed was a muddy ditch, sewage dribbling downhill either side of it. The houses on the outskirts were miserable shacks, half-collapsed and full of holes, with chickens pecking outside their slumping doorways. The first people he met turned and fled at the sight of him: a collection of malnourished children with high cheekbones and suspicious Slavic eyes, poking with sticks at what looked like the carcass of a horse. He crossed a bridge over an algae-clogged steam to enter a street of shabby wooden houses. A stout woman in a shawl and felt boots made a clucking sound as he walked past. An old man with a tangled beard regarded him inscrutably, through eyes little more than dark gashes either side of a broken nose. The streets reeked of cabbage and fish, a stink of dampness and rot that pervaded everything. Half the houses were in ruins. From the bulbed wooden steeple of the church beside the river came the cold, empty clanging of a bell.

‘The rags on his feet were sopping wet. He tried to fight down panic. It seemed he had arrived in the most decrepit time and place imaginable.

‘There was nothing for him here, so he left the village quickly, averting his eyes from any people that he passed. Nobody tried to challenge him. He followed the bend of the river until he had passed out of sight of the houses, clutching his damp robe tight around his body.

‘He walked for the rest of the morning, stopping frequently to rebind his foot-rags. The landscape around him was depopulated, a monotony of mottled grassland broken here and there by firs and stands of birch trees. Storks flapped in the air overhead. An icy wind blew from the east, whipping the reeds on the banks of the river. In the distance, up on higher ground, patches of snow were visible. He wondered whether winter was approaching or receding. His feet were already numb with cold.

‘The sensation of wandering in a strange land was to become, through the twists and turns of time, only too familiar to him. Adapting himself to the unknown was a process he learned to master quickly, the same way he had adapted to the necessary art of thieving. He was still lost, deeply hurt and confused, but already his acclimatisation was swifter. And the actions that he took came to modify themselves, according to his circumstances.’

Here the man paused, hands cupping his glass, and I caught his eye briefly in the mirror. His lips curled upwards very slightly. It seemed he was smiling at me.

‘He wandered the steppes for days, weeks. Months, what difference is there? Who can now tell, and who would now care, and what does it matter anyway? Long enough for his beard to grow thick on his face, his lips to become chapped and sore. His eyes stung with tears in the bitter east wind, making it appear to anyone who saw him as if he was constantly weeping. Some days he grew disorientated and walked around in circles, repeating Alicia’s name to himself, and sometimes he would find he could no longer remember the features of her face; or, for that matter, of his own. He slept under firs and in silver birch forests, nestled in the mulch and the toadstools. He froze with fear at the distant howls of wolves, and scuttled into hiding when he saw the thing that scared him most: the scattered bands of horsemen riding far out on the plains, sunlight hitting the upright tips of their spears.

‘Every so often, he would stumble on signs of recent violence. Deserted farms and settlements, houses burnt to charcoal. Sometimes the breeze carried ashes upon it, and at night the sky glowed red towards the east. He came across slaughtered livestock and the stubble of scorched fields. There had been great movements of people in this land, migrations of Tatars, Uzbeks, Kipchaks, Kumans, yurt-dwellers from the east, from the furthest ends of the known world. He didn’t know this then, of course – he was to learn the details later, in one of the many libraries he visited throughout the ages, trying to make sense of things – but he had arrived in one of history’s great unsettled times.

‘He passed the makeshift camps of the dispossessed and traumatised. Refugees with packs and bundles, hollow, staring eyes. Religious zealots in sordid rags, whipping themselves with knotted ropes and waving crucifixes. People ripped out of their lives by forces beyond anyone’s control, cast adrift on the horizonless wasteland. Princedoms had been laid to ruin. Caliphates had collapsed. It must have seemed to these bewildered souls that the whole world was on the move, criss-crossing the land in ragged caravans, drifting down in new configurations like polystyrene chunks in a shaken snow-globe. An appropriate age, you might say, for a man like him.

‘He survived, he adjusted. Like the carrion birds, he even profited. He taught himself how to scavenge off everyone else’s misfortune. He turned from honest thief to looter, gradually coming to replace his rags with pilfered bits of clothing. A tunic and a leather belt that he took from an abandoned woodcutter’s hut. A soft hide cap, trimmed with fur, he managed to steal from a trading post where men with long moustaches haggled and fought one another for horses in the middle of a wild, wind-whipped plain. And his greatest prize of all: a pair of snugly-lined felt boots, embroidered with a pattern of red and green flowers, that he tugged from the feet of a corpse beside a river one damp and misty morning.

‘There was nothing to indicate how she had died, apart from the fact that the ground around her body had been trampled by hooves. She lay sprawled on the bank with her face in the mud, one arm outstretched as if pointing upriver and the left leg twisted sharply at the knee. At first our hero – may I call him that? No, perhaps ‘our man’ is more appropriate – at first our man went dizzy with fear, and crept away as fast as he was able. Men of his own time, you see, were not accustomed to the dead. But before long, he stopped in his tracks to glance furtively back through the mist.

‘The riverbank was silent as he retraced his steps, trembling a little with excitement. He half expected – perhaps half hoped – that the body would be somehow gone, but it was lying as before, droplets of dew quivering in its matted, filth-encrusted hair. He closed his eyes, took a few deep breaths, and got down to the job. The legs were stiff, like trunks of wood, he almost couldn’t lift them. But, seized by a kind of guilty thrill, and mumbling apologies, he managed to tug those boots off the dead woman’s feet.

‘Standing there with the boots in his hands, imagining how cosy and warm they would be, he was overcome with elation. Suddenly, everything seemed open. He felt he could do anything. The sensation was dizzying, and strangely similar to how he had felt in the olive grove, slipping off that gown. Or the elation of the dance. Almost a leap of consciousness, although that may be putting it too strongly. His feet were raw and bleeding, he was freezing, after all. His motive in this instance was survival. But in moments like this, he could feel himself propelled into becoming someone else.

‘Drunk on this feeling, he stared at the corpse. He couldn’t believe it had been a person. It looked as unreal as everything else: the refugee camps, the smouldering churches, the pennants of barbarian horsemen fluttering across the plains. He told himself that she’d once been alive, but found it impossible for this fact to seem at all impressive. What difference did it make? The girl in the olive grove was dead too, dead for centuries. The black-toothed woman in the caravan, she wouldn’t be born for hundreds of years, and that was as good as dead. Alicia, then, was dead as well. The fact she would exist in the future didn’t make her any more alive now. And what about him? Could he be dead too? These distinctions seemed academic.

‘He stood for a long time over the corpse, weighing up his options. He stuffed his feet into those boots, but still he didn’t leave. A horrible thought had come into his head. I’m sure you can guess.’

‘You don’t mean… He didn’t actually…?’

‘What?’ the storyteller smiled.

‘Surely not with a corpse?’ I exclaimed.

‘What do you think? Was he desperate enough? Was he so far gone? Our man was a man in love, remember, and love can make you do many things.’

‘It doesn’t sound like love to me.’

‘I’m sure it doesn’t, but perhaps you have a conservative view of love. Perhaps you’ve never felt it enough. No, don’t get upset, I’m only teasing.

‘You’re right, our man wasn’t that desperate yet. He didn’t sink quite that low. I’ve told you he was a resourceful man, but fucking a corpse was a step too far. I have to say he considered it, though. Yes, he thought about it.’ He took a long sip from his glass. ‘Does that seem unreasonable to you?’

I couldn’t think of a reply. It was hard to know exactly what he wanted me to say.

‘I’d agree, it does seem unreasonable, sitting here where it’s warm and dry, in this nice pub, with our whiskies. Unreasonable even to think about it. But what we do – or think of doing – is defined by where we happen to be. And when you are desperate, ripped out of your time, bewildered, and lost, and alone; well, you can surprise yourself, let’s put it that way.

‘So I admit he contemplated it. He weighed it up, as one of the extremely limited options open to him at that present time. It wasn’t completely out of the boundaries of what he imagined he might have to do. But in the end, he decided against it. He went on his way, and left the poor corpse alone. He respected the sanctity of the dead, abiding by values, moral and aesthetic, that apply in any age. There were still other avenues open, after all. And once he had those boots on his feet, he felt determined. Stronger.

‘He had woman number three – four, if you count Alicia, who, after all, set the whole parade in motion – in the knocking-shop of a miserable shtetl huddled in the crotch of three low hills. There were snarling hounds, and horses tethered, acrid smoke from cooking fires, and on the outskirts the tents of an army were lit up like hot-air balloons. Inside a mud-floored tavern sat soldiers with pointed iron helmets, grinning wolfishly at the bare-shouldered girls who circulated among them. Harsh cries of laughter and stamping feet, the twang of a ukulele. In times to come, he would be guided to places like this by intuition. It would become second instinct to him, sniffing out the dives of whores, as easy as finding the cathedral or the mosque, the senate, the governor’s mansion. These places are not hard to find. Their language is universal. He saw money passed from hand to hand, men rising from their benches, pulling the arms of women like ropes and slipping out of sight behind a red curtain at the far end of the room.

‘But he had no money. He had nothing of worth besides the boots on his feet, and he was loathe to part with these. Already, you see, he was using his brain. Planning for what might come next. He skulked on a crude bench by the wall, keeping his head bowed low, unnoticed in the general racket.

‘After some time a figure slumped down beside him, the bench almost cracking with the weight. Our man smelt sweat, long-unwashed clothes, a tang that could have been rust or blood. He turned to see a soldier with a flat face and missing teeth, a long moustache that trailed past the chin. He wore a mud-caked mail coat, and the top half of one of his ears was missing. Our man quickly looked away, but it was a second too late. He had caught the soldier’s interest, and the soldier started to tug his arm and jabber in an unknown tongue, gazing at him with drunken intensity. It seemed he was trying to communicate something. Sheepishly our man grinned back, hoping he would lose interest, but it only him more enthusiastic.

‘His language was a garbled mess of plosives and hard vowels, alternating from a guttural growl to ridiculous falsetto. Saliva bubbles popped on his lips. He stank of booze. He slurred and spat, peppering our man’s face with spittle. Our man sat there nodding and smiling, trying to extricate himself, but he was trapped against the wall with no hope of escape. Just like you and me now! That’s a joke, of course.

‘After a while, he became aware that the soldier was trying to show him something. There was some object in his hand that he had been crooning over. Eventually he held it up to dangle in the air between them, beaming with idiotic delight. Instantly, our man sat up. He had seen his chance.

‘It was a miniature portrait of a woman, a lady with yellow hair. A tiny oil painting in a tiny frame, behind a tiny pane of hinged glass. But it wasn’t the portrait that lit our man’s eyes up: it was the glittering golden chain on which the miniature was hung, a delicate piece of metalwork that looped brightly around the soldier’s wrist.

‘The soldier pointed to his sweetheart’s image, and spoke one word several times. It might have been her name, or it might have been his word for love, but our man didn’t care about that. He feigned interest and sympathy while he schemed out his next move. The soldier’s infantile joy was sliding towards drunken sadness. Our man raptly studied his face. He recognised something in it. The visage of a fearsome warrior had given way to that of a sad, lonely man, sick of campaigning far from home, of loveless nights in a foreign land. Our man could almost smell the loneliness pouring out of him. The soldier began to sniffle and snort, his wide lips trembling. He repeated the word again and again, jabbing at the portrait with his finger. Our man put a hand on his arm, made some shushing sounds. The soldier’s face crumpled; he began to sob. Tears filled his narrow eyes, snot ran down his chin. Our man put his arms around him, patted his mail-clad back. He even stroked his filthy hair, let him press his drooling face to his chest. Gradually the sobs died down. The soldier relaxed like a great, violent baby.

‘When he judged the time was right, our man helped him to his feet. It wasn’t easy. The man was so drunk he could hardly put one foot in front of the other. Eventually they staggered together towards the tavern door. Our man prayed that no-one would challenge him, but he needn’t have worried. Everywhere men were lying drunk on the floor, cavorting with half-naked women, and one pair was going backwards and forwards in a curious shuffling dance, their fingers locked around each other’s throats.

‘Cold rain was falling outside. Wet ice slopped from the gables. Our man half-dragged, half-carried the soldier through the sleeping village. Not a soul was out that night. They passed shacks with darkened doorways, figures huddled for warmth around guttering fires. They rounded a corner into a street even more abandoned than the rest, sinking up to their ankles in the mud. It seemed as good a place as any to do what must be done.

‘It wasn’t hard to get the soldier on the ground; all it required was a trip, and his drunken weight did the rest. Then he tried to kick him in the head, but missed and fell over himself. The soldier attempted to jump on him, but our man twisted away and started pummelling the back of his head while he flailed in the mud. He’d never punched anyone before, and found that it was easy. The soldier clumsily got to his feet, and threw himself at him. Together they rolled in a tight embrace, too close to do each other damage, until our man managed to drive his elbow into the soldier’s throat. He knew he was fighting for his life now, and gave it all he had. As the soldier retched beneath him, he tore the portrait out of his hand. They crashed against the wall of a house. He slammed the soldier’s head against the wall.

‘The wall was of wet and rotten wood, so he had to do it many times. He thumped and thumped and thumped, keeping time with his breath. He stopped when the soldier had ceased to move, when the shocked and outraged face had relaxed into unconsciousness, and then he disengaged himself and stumbled back towards the tavern.

‘He paused in a doorway to examine what he’d won. The chain was gold: it would serve its purpose. The miniature was useless to him. A portrait of an unknown sweetheart, probably looted anyway. He detached it and studied it in the weak light – up close it was painted crudely, not the fine work it had seemed – before pitching it into a heap of broken eggshells. After going on a little way, however, he turned and went back. Fumbling in the pile of waste until he had found it again, he returned to the soldier’s body, and, afraid to get too close, tossed the portrait into the mud somewhere near his feet.

‘No moonlit seduction this time, I’m afraid. No cooling, fragrant breeze through the cypress trees. This was a filthy, frozen affair, a painful screw in a mouldering shack with a woman who seemed to be hacked out of wood, so fixed and unyielding were her features. She accepted the gold chain unquestioningly before looking him up and down with contempt that was absolutely undisguised, and spat against the wall as if the wall might be his face. Her breath smelt raw with vodka and her mouth was like a weal. She led him through the curtained door and into an adjoining room, where she spat once again and hitched up her skirts without ceremony.

‘The room’s only bed was occupied – something fearsome was going on in there that he didn’t dare to look at – so it happened, fittingly enough, up against the wall. He couldn’t bring himself to meet her eyes. It took a long time, agonisingly long, and at every moment he expected her to fling him off with a exclamation of disgust, or else a soldier’s knife between his shoulders.

‘Perhaps you think less of him now, our man, for resorting to this. I wish I could describe what he did in rosier-tinted hues, a time-travelling seducer leaping from bed to bed throughout history – charismatic, handsome, radiating sexual power – relying on his amorous skills alone. But, I’m afraid, he sunk to these depths. And sometimes, sad to say, lower than that.

‘Some cossack or khan or kulak or other was singing behind the dripping wall. This was the last thing of which he was aware. It was a high wail of a song, pitched wildly above the ukulele’s tremble, carrying all the savagery and sadness of the times inside. He focused on this voice and nothing else. He tried to think of Alicia, but she was lost inside the song.

‘Later, he couldn’t even picture the woman’s face. He remembered her only as a jagged-edged scowl in a body as rough as the barbarians she was forced to service.

‘But then later, of course, he would sleep with more women than he would ever, could ever, remember. And also, incidentally, a number of men.

‘A flash of white light – you know this by now – and the sensation of enormous speed. And pain, this time, an agonising dizziness, his body pummelled and battered all over. A roaring in his ears, as if the universe was churning, then release. He was flung down in dense undergrowth outside a walled city in the Ganges delta, the capital of an empire so ancient that it still remains unknown to archaeology.

Chapter 4

‘Do you believe in luck?’ the storyteller asked me. The barman was wiping the counter with a dishcloth, the pub was filling up a little now. A family group had entered, wheeling an old lady, and occupied the table in the centre of the room.

‘Bad luck, perhaps,’ I replied.

‘That sounds like a cynic’s answer. But bad luck can’t exist without good luck alongside it; I’m sure even a cynic would agree. Some people think it’s a mere state of mind. Myself, I believe that we generate luck, or at least create the conditions in which it can be generated. Luck, like time, is a physical force, as evident as gravity, acting upon us.

‘Because if there is no luck, how does anything happen? How to explain the connections that hold our lives together? Luck draws us on from place to place, both good and bad, determining where we go. Would you be here now, in this exact location in time, if not shepherded to it by luck?’

I didn’t answer. I finished my drink, and gestured to the barman for another. I wasn’t feeling drunk at all, and this vaguely disturbed me.

‘Would I be here,’ the storyteller persisted, ‘would anyone? And would we have met, you and I, in this specific place, with the story of the two sad men between us? Imagine the particular sequence of consequences that led to our meeting one other, an infinitely complex web of chances that could so easily not have spun out the particular way in which it did. That’s luck, there’s no other word for it. But let me get these drinks.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘this is my round.’

‘Then thanks,’ the storyteller smiled. ‘Here’s to: chance encounters, shall we say? But I must get on. We still have a long way to go.

‘Night-time. God-knows-when B.C. Just imagine that. The mysterious city sleeping, its black bulk illuminated only by points of fire in the watchtowers. The atmosphere so humid it was difficult to breathe. The undergrowth hived with insects, strange night-screeches from unfamiliar birds, and the air vibrated with the whine of mosquitoes. The smells, too, were entirely new: pungent, sweet and heavy. A yellow moon hung in the sky. He crouched behind the jagged fronds, cradling his sorry dick in his hands, and soon the sweat had gathered in the inner folds of his woollen coat, pooling in his red and green-flowered corpse-boots.

‘He remained without moving through the long, stifled night, waiting to approach the unknown city. He watched the brilliant stars wheeling slowly overhead, and occasionally heard jabbers of speech as the sentries did their rounds. His head hurt, and his balls ached. He wanted to go home.

‘I’ll say this for him, he felt guilty as sin. As if dirt was clogged inside him. He wanted to apologise, but not to the woman – he never wanted to think of that hate-filled scowl again – and not to the broken-hearted soldier, and neither to himself, because that meant little. He wanted to say sorry to Alicia, but the hopelessness of that desire brought him close to tears. Nevertheless, he muttered he was sorry, whispered it repeatedly until the sound of the word began to soothe him. He made a decision, then, beneath the suB.Continental moon, to never sink to such depths again, no matter how bad his situation. He would treat all women decently, go down in history as a gentleman, and thus deserve his rightful place in Alicia’s bed when he found her again.

‘Needless to say, that didn’t last long. The guilt dissolved quickly enough as other events unfolded, all memory of the miserable affair fading like an unpleasant dream. He broke his promises to himself, as he broke them to everyone else. He was learning to deflect other people’s misfortune, to separate his feelings from his actions. Otherwise, how could he have carried on? How would this story have continued?

‘Entering the city in the pink and orange light of dawn, he was greeted by a sea of incredulous faces. Before he even passed through the gate, astonished spectators crowded round him. The people were little and dark-skinned, with garments of white cotton and gold bracelets on their arms. The women giggled, reaching out to stroke his hair. Children brushed their tiny hands along the hem of his tunic, an old man dropped to his knees in shock, as if his legs couldn’t hold him.

‘Then soldiers in glittering breast-plates arrived to clear a path through the crowd. Pearl earrings were set in the lobes of their ears, and their beards were braided and oiled. They escorted him ceremoniously along the central thoroughfare, and he couldn’t tell whether he was being treated as a captive or an honoured guest. He caught glimpses of mud-walled houses in the labyrinthine streets either side of him, fluttering red and yellow flags, the dome of a granary. Ahead rose a crenellated structure of red stone, its walls pocked and pitted with alcoves, carved with outlandish deities.

‘In a cool, shaded garden within this building’s outer wall, he was served water and slices of mango. The sweat was dabbed from his face and neck by a slave with a soft towel. Plump, bejewelled men in bright robes came to look at him, their moustaches elaborately curled, and butterflies danced in the air around their coiffured heads, dipping in and out of the gorgeous flowers.

‘The court of the ancient raja was lit by shafts of sunlight pouring down from the high ceiling. He received our man with astonished delight, rising from his throne to greet him. Cut gemstones glittered in his clothes as he moved. Our man bowed low, not knowing what else to do, a courtesy greeted with murmurs of approval from the attendants who crowded near. The raja chuckled amusedly, fanning himself with a peacock feather. Outside the palace walls, the trumpeting of elephants filled the air.

‘Our man was ensconced in an upstairs chamber, and servants assigned to his person. The raja’s advisers questioned him at length, but he could make no sense of their language, and when they realised he was growing tired they invited him to sleep on a low bed by the window. He awoke early in the afternoon to a meal of delicately flavoured rice, dressed in a cotton gown and slippers, and led back down to the throne room where the old man was sipping spiced tea.

‘In the following days delegations of courtiers filed by to ask him questions, scribes trailed behind him in corridors to record any words that he might utter. When it became obvious they shared no mutual language, he was encouraged to draw diagrams. He began to sketch maps of the places that he knew, rough pictures of things he remembered: impressions of Hellenic statues, a tall Turkic hat, a samovar, the black-toothed woman’s caravan. This made no sense to anyone, hardly even to himself, but his diagrams were studied meticulously and sparked off vigorous debates. They asked him, once, to make a picture of his ruler, pointing at the raja to make their meaning clear. After some consideration he tried to sketch Alicia, but the result was more like the crude likeness of the drunken soldier’s miniature. It looked nothing like her whatsoever.

‘Over the weeks that he stayed in this city, the scholars gave him lessons in their language. Soon he was able to engage in halting conversations, answering basic questions about where he had come from, but kept his explanations vague. He told them only that he came from very far away, so far he might never get back again. When they asked him how long he had travelled to get here, he replied that it had taken many years.

‘Occasionally, when humidity was low and he wasn’t too fatigued, functionaries led him through the streets to visit different parts of the city. They evidently believed he was a foreign emissary, come to witness the wonders of their kingdom. In this way he saw the stone-polishing district, the dyers’ quarter where the streets were stained with colour, the temple, the barracks, the irrigated paddocks where water buffaloes wallowed up to their knees. Back inside the palace, the raja would ask him questions about his impressions of the things he had seen, and he would respond as best he could with mimes.

‘On some afternoons they brought him up to the walls, to be viewed by the curious subjects. Crowds gathered in the street below, children waved and called out to him. On other days he was entertained with music and dancing. When he wasn’t in demand from the courtiers, he dozed in the shade of mimosa trees, languidly brushing the flies away, or else went to see the feeding of the palace elephant. The elephant was housed in a stone-walled courtyard, marigolds strewn on the ground around its feet. Its tusks were capped in gold, and its small, piggish eyes lined with kohl. Steaming piles of elephant dung were shovelled away by slaves with bald heads, and taken off to fertilise the flowers.

‘Between the lessons and the banquets, the gentle inquisition of the scholars and the sages, the tours of the city, the palace entertainments and the long evenings with the old raja, sipping tea, our man lost sight of direction and self, settling into this life as if sinking deep between the pillows of a comfortable bed. It didn’t take long for his body to regain its weight, the vigour filtering back into his muscles. His cracked and blistered feet were restored with healing salves, his hair was combed, his beard grew sleek, and his skin took on a lazy, oily sheen. Whereas on the freezing steppe he had shuffled and limped, his arms hanging loose at his sides like dead things, now he walked straight with his head alertly poised, taking time in his meanderings to examine the things around him. Significance restored itself to the objects he encountered. The world gleamed in his eyes, as if recast in precious metals. In short, he became a different man again.

‘He would become many more in the ages to come, wouldn’t always walk as tall as he did now. Sometimes he would cause others to crawl, and sometimes he would crawl himself. But this, at least, can be described as the start of his career as a handsome man.

Perhaps it should not be surprising, then, that sooner or later the night would come when he’d awake to find a woman crouched over his bed. What did I say about luck just now?’

‘You said we create it. You said lots of things,’ I said.

‘I said that we create the conditions in which it can be generated. Luck, charisma and sexual attraction go hand in hand in hand. In the darkness he recognised this woman as one of the pretty maidservants he had seen around the palace. Lazily, he reached out to touch her, but she pushed his hand away. Raising one hennaed finger to her lips, she motioned for him to follow. She led him through silent corridors where moonlight streamed through holes in the walls, and up a long flight of stairs to a carved teak door.

‘The door swung open to the touch, smooth on its oiled hinges. The room inside was hung with patterned fabrics, and in one corner stood a birdcage of bamboo, twittering with tiny songbirds. From the general darkness detached a slim figure, moving towards him with footsteps so light she almost appeared to be floating. She wore a purple veil over her face, so all he could see of her body were her arms, which wound sinuously from underneath her clothing like eels in murky water.

‘On the floor in the middle of the room were two cushions, with a low table between them. She signalled him to take a seat, and then sat down herself. The maidservant had left the room, but came back in to pour tea into cups from a vessel with a spout shaped like an elephant’s trunk. The tea was hot, and scalded his lips. He awkwardly set down his cup. The lady regarded him in silence, cross-legged, the steam curling up into the air. In lieu of her face, he studied her foot: the plump curve of the ankle and the daintiness of the arch, the smooth pink sole turned up like a petal as it rested on her thigh. Still she sat unmoving, embarrassing him eventually into lowering his eyes.

‘When he’d drunk his tea, a platter of fruit was laid on the table before him. Declining the fruit herself, she motioned for him to eat. He ate self-consciously, clumsily, aware of the eyes upon him. After he had finished, she reached out one finger to wipe the juice from his lips, as from a child. Then she rose abruptly to her feet, and summoned the maidservant to return him to his room.

‘Every few nights from that point on, when the palace attendants had gone to bed and the corridors were deserted, he was roused from his sleep to be summoned to the veiled lady’s chamber. At first she merely watched him as he ate, wiping his lip when he was done, as if content simply to observe such a rare and unknown creature. But her curiosity grew. One night when he entered the room, she instructed the maidservant to bind his hands gently behind his back. She produced a bowl of marigold flowers and fed them to him one by one, delicately brushing the petals off his lips. The next night she fed him slices of mango smeared with passion fruit seeds. When she had wiped the sticky juice from his mouth, her finger dipped out of sight behind the veil, to where her own mouth was hidden.

‘She wanted to know about his body, and explored it at her leisure. She called the maidservant over to study the varying grades of whiteness. She ran her fingernail down his arm, drawing pictures in scratch-lines on his skin. Sometimes she would blindfold him and blow softly on the back of his neck, or his bared belly, raising goosebumps, or lay her small hands on his chest to feel the heartbeat. She entertained herself with him as if he were a toy, playfully delighting in the desire she aroused.

‘She liked to dress him in jewels and beads, draping his neck in necklaces, stuffing so many rings on his fingers he couldn’t close his hands. She anointed his forehead and chest with fragrant oils. Seeing him in outlandish guises caused her and the maidservant great amusement. They seated him on a throne of cushions with a peacock feather crown, fanning him with banana leaves, supplicating themselves before him in mockery of the raja’s court. They dressed him up like the palace elephant, using bananas as the tusks, and took turns riding him around the room while he trumpeted and hooted. The lady got bored of her own games quickly, and was constantly searching for new entertainments. One night she released all the songbirds from the cage, and ordered him to run around the room catching them. Then she stuck feathers in the maidservant’s hair, and ordered him to chase her. At other times her mood grew cruel: she would pinch and torment his skin, trying to make him gasp with pain, and then she’d soothe it better with cooling balms. At last, she bade the maidservant to undress him, garment by garment. This caused him some consternation: he remembered the perennial problem of leaving clothes scattered throughout time. But the lady only wanted to look, for now. She had him stand in the centre of the room while she sat on the bed some distance away, examining him and swinging her bejewelled feet. He had never felt so controlled, and yet so powerful.

‘So he lived a double life, divided by night and day. In the daytime he was treated as a foreign dignitary, an ambassador from a distant land, schooled in the language and traditions of the kingdom. He was regarded as a respected guest and afforded every honour. At night-time, he became a pet, submitting himself to her whims. He boiled with pleasure and frustration. Often he couldn’t sleep at all as he waited to be summoned to her chamber. He searched for her figure at dances and feasts, examined the arms and the feet of all women, but never found a trace of her by daylight. Sometimes he imagined he was dreaming the whole thing, that she didn’t exist outside his head, and other times he fantasised it might be Alicia’s face he would see when the purple veil fell away.

‘For the time being, he had to be content with brief and tantalising glimpses of her body, which she gave him in reward for performing well in one of her petty games. She performed little dances for him while the maidservant dinged tiny bells and sang. She flashed her legs in the candlelight, unwound the wrappings of her body, revealed her perfect belly button, pierced with a tiny hoop of gold. He followed the chain that led from this hoop to the chain that encircled her plump waist, which in turn linked to a tinier chain that vanished mysteriously downwards. She appeared to be pierced and linked all over. When she moved her head he heard a jingling sound; he imagined her nose and ears too were threaded on this intriguing golden chord.

‘In later times, he would come to look back on this as a period of apprenticeship. She practised her techniques on him, and he became her pupil. He gathered strength and confidence, sucking like a leech on all available experience, all the time readying himself for his next opportunity to spring. For at the back of his mind, as the idle months rolled by, he knew this life could not be his forever.

‘So when, at last, came the night she finally shimmered naked before him, wearing nothing but her veil and criss-crossed by strings of golden chain – the moonlight playing like liquid on her limbs, disappearing downwards to that triangle of shadow – he was prepared accordingly. Already he had schemed for what might lie beyond her body. No more rags and begging bowls for him, he wanted no return to those wretched, starving times. Within his corpse-boots he had secreted all the precious things he could lay his hands on: rings, bracelets, emeralds, rubies, black onyx, gold, polished stones, fistfuls of the amethysts which lay scattered around her chamber. Even as she tugged off his clothes, greedily now, the games behind her – although the maidservant remained, watching from the far side of the room – he kept one hand upon his tunic, and managed to keep those corpse-boots resolutely on his feet.

‘In future, this, as an act of necessity, was to become one of his hallmarks: he never went to bed with a woman naked. He might part his clothes or strip off the top layers, but would grip determinedly to his garments throughout the act of sex; not an easy task, I’m sure you can imagine, and especially not with stolen goods on his person.

‘The bed was scattered with jasmine flowers. The songbirds whooped in their cage. A many-armed, multi-sexual god gazed down from a high alcove. After all those weeks of teasing, he sank into her with almost a sob of relief. She pulled him in as deep as he would go, writhing her hips in small, snaky motions and digging her painted fingernails into his back. Her nipples – also hooped upon that intricate golden chain – swayed from side to side like rafts on a turbulent sea. A sigh issued from underneath the veil, and her hands slid over his body in an ecstasy of touch. Her delicate skin smelt of sweat, and camphor oil.

‘Ah, let me tell you, this is what he needed. A glorious fuck to restore him, body and soul. It obliterated all memory of the wretched encounter that preceded it, just a hard, hot, lovely, blissful fuck to fling him onwards. It was dirty, tender, rough and sweet; a selfish, intoxicating, breathless fuck, one to make the monkeys howl and the elephants bellow in triumph! Please excuse me, won’t you, miss? This is a private conversation.’

The barmaid, a girl of nineteen or so, had begun her shift. She was listening from behind the bar, pretending to do something with the till. She stiffened in shock when he addressed her, mumbled something awkwardly, and hurried away to slice lemons.

‘Not a bad-looking girl, that,’ he observed as she retreated. ‘But that’s neither here nor there. You find not-bad-looking girls wherever you go, so many that it’s hard, at times, to move. Always the same, yet endlessly engaging, like looking at a kaleidoscope. It gets to the point when it’s not worth even making the observation.

‘The second before he climaxed, now, in the first throes of that agonised transcendence, he took the purple veil in his hand and tugged, wanting to see her face for the only time. Do you think he saw a not-bad-looking girl, there in that bed behind the carved teak door? Or did he see a beauty’s face, her full lips sensuously parted, eyes half-closed in a rapture of carnal bliss?’

‘A beauty, I suppose,’ I said, ‘why else would they keep her out of sight?’

‘No,’ the storyteller replied, with strange satisfaction. ‘What he saw was a rotten face, ravaged by disease. The lips and the nostrils – yes, connected too by links of gold – were pockmarked, putrefied, eaten away. He couldn’t help letting out a revolted cry, and in the moment before he disappeared saw the sadness hit her eyes like a physical blow. He tried to pull the veil back down, but it came too late for both of them. He vanished forever from her world, taking her precious objects with him.’

The storyteller turned his eyes upon me. ‘What do you think of him now, our man? Are you starting to dislike him?’

‘Is it especially important that I should?’

‘Not important in the least. I just happen to be interested in your opinion.’

‘I have no reason to dislike him.’

‘That remains to be seen,’ he said.

Chapter 5

I expected him to smile again, but his face had become quite serious. ‘And so the pattern would play itself out, over and over and over. The circumstances changed and the bodies varied, but everything from this point on was a basic permutation. Through the ages he was flung, propelled by his ejaculations.’

‘I’d like to know the science behind this,’ I said.

‘I can only assume the phenomenon was caused by the sheer force of semen blasting out. The physics, I admit, are a little oblique, but that need not concern us. Our man had other things, after all, on which to apply his energies. In the course of his travels, when the opportunity came, he consulted the experts of the times – physicists, philosophers, shamans, string theorists, alchemists, fortune tellers – but never received an explanation that was adequate in the least. Scientists snubbed him at cocktail parties, and wise men talked nonsense in caves. He discovered less, I’m afraid, from the great thinkers of history than he did from his own genitals.

‘Now from lodgings by a quiet river in Japan – I believe this was sometime in the sixteenth century – he found himself adapted once again. Looking out on a garden of cherry blossom trees, with snowcapped mountains in the distance. His foresight in the veiled lady’s chamber, you see, had afforded him immediate advantages. He was rich beyond measure when he arrived – flung down with his boots on in a rice paddy field, causing peasants to run for cover – and once he had trudged to the nearest town he traded the smallest of his stolen precious stones for food, new clothes and lodgings. The suspicion of the local authorities melted away with a few well-placed gifts, and they received him as a wealthy foreign merchant. Respectable townsmen and artisans invited him to complicated tea-sipping ceremonies, lent him the use of their sedan chairs in the rain, and graceful, unattainable wives lowered their eyes respectfully as they served him dishes of fish sliced so thin it felt like rose petals on the tongue. He employed all the manners he had learned with the raja to ingratiate himself with the local hierarchy, gaining entrance into elegant society.

‘His passage thus greased by celebrity, his next campaign was executed swiftly. In a space of time so short he astonished himself he had accomplished the seduction of the daughter of a government official: a sly, laconic girl in a black and white kimono who allowed him to take full advantage of her body in an ornamental garden beside a deep reflecting pond, from which koi carp blinked up at them knowingly.’

‘Quick work,’ I said.

‘It gets quicker,’ he replied. ‘The wheel spins faster, the details smudge. Once a pattern has been learned by heart – and I don’t mean merely memorised, but impressed into all five senses – it repeats itself without even being encouraged. You set yourself in a certain groove, and the thread isn’t easily broken. Seduction always copies itself. The peculiarities might differ, but the process and the outcome are the same. He played out that pattern on the girl by the pond as the purple-veiled princess had played it out on him. He recognised in her smart, shifty eyes what the girl in the goat-bleating olive grove had recognised – what the wine-sharpened dancers had recognised in music – and yes, what Alicia had recognised. Like the golden chain leading from the nipple to the navel, the helix of seduction, spiralling around itself, twisted from Alicia until now.’

‘You’re drunk,’ I said, as he paused. The inane abstractions were beginning to annoy me.

‘I’m drunk. And you’ll be drunk soon, don’t worry. But I understand, you’re becoming impatient. You want me to leave aside the metaphysics and get to the action.’

‘I can’t listen to this all day, I’ve got a journey to make.’

‘You’ll make it,’ he said disinterestedly. ‘There’s plenty of action in the centuries ahead, we’ll come to enough of that, don’t worry. But sex isn’t interesting enough on its own, not when it’s a self-repeating spiral. So please, allow me to infuse some sense of infinity on the way.

‘Our man laid this sly girl down beside the black, mirrored pond. He kissed her wrists, and the palms of her hands. He drew the wooden chopsticks out of her hair to send it cascading between the angled peaks of her shoulder blades. He saw that she wanted it quick, with no preamble, so didn’t go through any pretence of taking off his clothes. His pockets were carefully packed, and for good measure he relieved his subject of a pretty jade brooch, slipping it inside one corpse-boot. He didn’t very much like the girl, who had only consented to his advances to alleviate the boredom of this small, rigid town, and for the novelty of fucking a foreigner. She was using as he was using her, so he felt no guilt and little pleasure when he felt her buck and roll beneath him, and moments later he was bucking himself, all the way back to Byzantium a week before its sacking by crusaders.

‘Through every encounter, he evolved a little more. He survived the times in whatever way the times allowed him to, deceiving his way here, charming his way there, dipping into his store of jewels whenever he saw the advantage. He took what he was taught from each seduction, hoarding the knowledge inside himself until the opportunity came to use it.

‘He was bartered as a slave in the souks of Zanzibar, sold into the household of an ivory dealer, an obscenely fat and lazy man who required him to chop up elephant corpses for poufs and camel-bags. He escaped this almost immediately because the dealer’s wife – as fat as her husband, but considerably more energetic – summoned the male slaves every night to perform a very different service. He tangled with a courtesan adrift in a Persian pleasure boat; availed himself of a Toltec dancing girl at a feast attended by emperors in a palace carved with jewel-eyed jaguar gods. In an Abyssinian banqueting hall he laid a girl right there on the table, drunk half-senseless on honey wine, while orgiastic kings were occupied with slicing raw beef off a live cow, the animal bellowing in horror. He married a Chickasaw maiden in the sweltering swamps of the Mississippi, fucked the mother of a Saxon chief who was busy out raiding a Roman village. He travelled for weeks through the South Pacific in a fleet of outrigger canoes, a captive of Polynesian explorers, and when they made landfall caroused in the sea with a girl as smooth as coconut flesh, her body covered in tattoos depicting copulating partners. The delicate tracery of ink, the writhing contortions of arms, legs, hair, flowed together in his mind until they combined into dizzying fractals, a physical blueprint of ecstasy, which propelled him onwards again in the now-so-familiar blinding flash, and the roar of the surf rolling into the beach became the roar of infinity in his ears.

‘His face became sleek and indolent. Sex seeped into every pore. Those tell-tale hints at a proclivity to pleasure that imbue the features of those who grow accustomed to it: a certain sly dimple in the cheeks, a suppleness to the mouth and chin. A wink, if you know what I mean, behind the skin.

‘His lips, which once had been recalcitrant and pale, became softer, plumper, finely-tuned, turning outwards like a camel’s. His eyes dripped with smugness. Lacking all but the crudest language of the places he was flung to, he communicated by glance and gesture, quiet suggestions of the eye, insinuations, smiles, force of will. He grew cleverer, calculating, brazen and more confident. A foreigner always, wherever he went, he learned to use the stranger’s mystique just as in previous incarnations he’d mastered the anonymity of a beggar. The crippling fear and grief he had felt, in his miserable, earliest days in France; these never disappeared, exactly, but he learned to hide them from himself, as he hid himself from other people.

‘An absolute egotist, what else could he become? A sensuous, selfish, charming, calculating egotistical bastard. With a bastard’s handsome face and tricky fingers. Shot through with a streak of loneliness, enough both to intrigue and to gain pity.

‘Because the women that he fucked were lonely women. Don’t forget that. They needed him just as he needed them. The lonely always flock to their own, clinging to each other like atoms. And when he disappeared, they returned to their loneliness, just as he continued into his. Perhaps this is not so much the story of one sad man, but the story of a thousand sad women. Let’s drink to them.’

‘You mentioned men also, I believe,’ I said, as our glasses met.

‘Yes, I mentioned men,’ he shrugged. ‘Yes, men too, men too. Why not? After a while there didn’t seem to be the slightest difference. At first he did it from desperation – when he found himself in the Norse outpost in Svalbard, a womanless place in an waste of frozen sea and permafrost – but after that first lesson in rough and ready sodomy, for advantage and, occasionally, from preference. He came to view men just as he viewed women. As jumping-off points. As means to an end. As gateways of escape to nothingness.

‘He had a sweet boy aboard a Dutch tea clipper, en route to the East Indies. A shy lad from the Zeiderzee, with close-cropped hair and grey, mournful eyes, who discovered him hiding down in the hold helping himself to food supplies and rum. Taking our man for a stowaway, the boy sneaked down on several occasions to bring him tobacco and rounds of cheese, and our man repaid him urgently in a hammock that swung back and forth, back and forth, while the salt waves boomed and echoed against the hull. At first it seemed his clumsiness had returned – fumbling and uncertain again, the way it had been in his earliest days – but with the rocking of the ship and the steady slap-slap sound of the sea, and the sweat rolling down the sun-tanned body of the boy, and the smell of gunpowder fizzing like a sneeze, it became as natural as anything else, and as tender and triumphant-feeling too.

‘The Norseman was something of a heftier customer. He had just returned from a walrus hunt, and his body was larded in the fat of rendered seals. He tramped in from the frozen waste with icicles sparkling in his beard, and hauled our man – a galley slave now, captured in a raid on the Irish coast where he was halfway through seducing a girl with one blind eye but fabulous breasts – into a hut with a pelvic bone nailed to the door. At first our man put up a fight, but a playful blow to the side of the head made him reconsider, as well as the revelation that the hairy beserker wanted him to take the active role; as evidenced by the position he assumed, spread-eagled over a heap of polar bear skins, a flaming skull and the hammer of Thor tattooed upon his arse.

‘Women, men, no difference whatsoever. Mere spring-boards for incredible high dives. On at least one occasion – with a brainwashed cultist in a temple deep in the Cambodian jungle – he never knew for certain if he was doing a woman or a man, not even when it came down to the final blast-off. The blasts of breath from the Norseman’s chapped lips steamed in the Arctic air as opium smoke had curled from the lips of the cultist with the vacant eyes, the strangely phosphorescent silver skin. The malarial grin of a fever-eyed boy in the purple shadows of some forgotten casbah – the air sickly-sweet with jasmine, grease-smoke, mint, camel leather and sweat – became one with the mischievous flashing teeth of the Hamer tribeswoman with multiple scars, who giggled so wildly at his white legs that the flesh of her whole body shook like a giggling lake. His memories, confused and jammed, increasingly ran together. He remembered only shards of the lives that he lived, only fragments of the partners that he took. He danced his merry way through time from orifice to orifice – from woman to woman, woman to man, sexual infection to sexual infection – forgetting it had been another way, or ever could be.’

The storyteller had grown most intense; he glared with evangelical fervour. His voice became steadily louder, oblivious to anyone else’s presence. I was aware of drinkers around us, people studiously avoiding his attention. The family group had long since wheeled their old lady out through the door.

‘Picture him now,’ he insisted, ‘before an open pair of legs, gazing at the void that stretched before him. Poised on the jumping-off point for all things! His portal of escape, transcendence, his only hope of deliverance from limbo. What did he see, beyond those interchangeable thighs? No human organ, not any more, no mere opening of pinkened flesh, an instrument neither for reproduction nor pleasure. Before him lay only emptiness, loss, desolation! A vacuum into which he must be hurled. The entirety of earthly time swirled beyond those labia, rolling endlessly, piteously onwards. Vortexes of nebulae, galaxies being born and dying, and at the end of it nothing – nothing – nothing!’

He drained his glass, gave a kind of groan and rubbed his face with his hands. He was embarrassing me now. I listened to the distant clatter of the fruit machine, hoping he had talked himself dry.

‘I imagine this sounds like freedom to you,’ he said, suddenly turning. His voice was sharp and accusatory now.

‘Freedom? I suppose, in a way…’

‘Isn’t this the ultimate freedom sought by every man? To fuck and then to disappear? No strings attached, no repercussions. No phone calls to return. No phones! Surely this is liberty? Happiness? The greatest escape, the greatest abandonment, indulgences fit for a god?’

‘There’s no need to shout,’ I said. But he suddenly leaned in to my ear and whispered violently: ‘How much would you be willing to bet I could fuck that barmaid over there? How many minutes do you think, with a not-bad-looking girl like that, to get her on the floor?’

‘Keep your voice down,’ I said, angry now.

‘How many minutes? To prove a point? Because that’s freedom, isn’t it? Or would you like me to choose someone else? How about that bitch there by the window? Her daughter? Or, since you asked, a man? How about you? Would you like to bet on that? If freedom is freedom to fuck who you please, how much do you bet I could fuck you?’

‘Get a hold of yourself,’ I said, heaving his arm off my shoulder, half-rising from my stool. I could feel the drink inside me now. I groped for the handle of my suitcase on the floor.

‘Playing hard to get? How hard can it be? Don’t you want a demonstration?’

‘Stay and fuck yourself if you want. I’m leaving.’

‘Fuck myself? Let’s talk about that. An intriguing proposition! Let’s apply it to our man. Why didn’t he just fuck himself, and shazoom through time that way?’

‘I’ve had enough of your bullshit.’

‘He tried it many times, of course. On the steppes he masturbated frequently, all alone in his sodden rags, with wolf-howls in his ears. Again and again he fucked himself, trying to shift himself through time, desperately, to save himself, to return to Alicia’s arms. But it was a waste of energy. Not nearly powerful enough! He only skipped a second here or there.’

‘I need to catch my train,’ I said.

‘You should have seen him in ancient Egypt! In such a frenzy of frustration he managed to jack himself off five times – you’d have had to see it to believe it – skipping in and out of existence while Canaanite slaves stared in wonderment; and more than a little jealousy.’

‘Get out of my way, that’s enough.’ I was trying hard to keep my voice low, reluctant to cause a scene. One of my feet was entangled in the bar-stool, and the storyteller was sitting too close, I would have to clamber past him.

‘This story isn’t finished yet! I haven’t even started with the second sad man.’

‘I don’t care about him, nor the first. Let go of my arm. I mean it.’

‘No.’ He only tightened his grip. ‘You’re not going, not yet.’

‘My train…’

‘Don’t worry, you’ll get your train.’ A new expression came over his face, a desperate intensity. With his hand still holding me, he rose from his stool. For the first time I realised how big he was, a full head taller than me. ‘Why lie to me?’ he said quietly. I got the impression he was struggling to control the tone of his voice. His smile was repellent. ‘I want the two of us to be friends. I want us to understand each other.’

‘Why would I lie?’

‘Perhaps you don’t like me.’

‘Look, I really don’t have time…’

‘Believe me, there’s no point telling me lies. We both know you have plenty of time, and I will finish what I’ve started.’ He checked his watch. ‘Almost an hour. That’s right, isn’t it? The next express to the airport leaves at nine, for your early morning flight to Toronto, Canada.’

I realised I was sitting back on my stool. I didn’t know if I’d sat down myself, or if he’d pushed me there.

‘You’re too easily offended.’ His fingers lingered on my sleeve, ready to tighten again if needed. I could feel the latent force in them. But they were no longer necessary. ‘I was only trying prove a point. I have absolutely no wish to insult you.’

‘How do you know?’ I asked, slowly. ‘What time my train leaves?’

‘I have no desire to fuck you at all! It was only a rhetorical flourish. I wanted to illustrate something about freedom; what it might do to a man.’

‘How do you know where I’m going?’

He nudged my whiskey towards me down the bar, made a show of stretching out his arms. ‘In the short time we have left together, in this very pleasant conversation, would you rather discuss train timetables, or the carnal circumnavigation of all human history? A little patience is all I ask. I give you my word, as a storyteller, the questions you have will be satisfied. But you’ll have to get to them my way, or not at all.’ His eyes were bright and lively now, as if stimulated by the excitement. I almost expected him to wink, his manner became so avuncular and cosy.

I didn’t attempt to get up again. The power had gone out of me. I watched him dully, begrudging his voice, his confidence, his presence.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll behave myself now. I won’t fuck a soul, that’s a promise. Because that’s not freedom, however it may seem. Our man discovered that long, long ago. He wasn’t free, of course. He was enslaved. Enslaved to time, to sex and to himself. He couldn’t stop, he could never stop, never stop, not ever. A sentence that stretched to eternity. All he saw ahead of him was duplicity, tricks, deceitfulness, the sickening pleasure of orgasm multiplied to infinity until – the only end he could possibly foresee – he lost his looks and potency, and found himself finally marooned in time, unloved and alone.

Despite all his posturing, I didn’t forget that flash of desperation. I sensed he had made a tactical error, and was moving quickly away from it now. I had no idea what game he was playing. But he was right about one thing: I couldn’t leave until the end. Somehow, my presence was necessary here.

‘He grew petty and destructive. He drank himself stupid, fogged his brain with opiates, gorged himself on fat and rich meats, and nothing gave him pleasure. He came to avoid his image in mirrors, hating the sight of himself. He felt nothing but scorn and contempt for others. Increasingly, he found himself despising every seductee for not seeing through his blatancy; the same tricks he pulled off every time with the cynicism of a stage magician, performing the same tired sleight of hand to audiences that never saw the device behind even the most obvious of ruses.

‘He thought of his effect upon history. The diseases he must have spread. The possible children he had spawned, and left behind forever. He brooded on the terror that his conquests must have felt as he vanished from between their legs – did he leave a puff of smoke, a sulphurous smell, like a pantomime villain? – the countless ways he had interfered with or ruined people’s lives. Did his victims ever tell? Were they too scared to speak of what had happened? And if they did, what became of them then? Were they cast out of their communities, ostracised, exorcised? Sent to sanatoriums? Incarcerated in convents? Tormented in nineteenth-century asylums, strait-jacketed, water-tortured, restrained, lobotomised? Found guilty of witchcraft, consorting with demons? Burnt at the stake? Stoned? Trepanned? He could feel no guilt for what he might have done. Guilt he had jettisoned long ago, along with self-respect, inhibition, and every other vestige of his old, frightened self that might threaten the momentum of his mission. He started to grow delusional. It seemed his powers were infinite. He imagined himself less a man than a ghost, present at every point in time. A negative, an invisible man, who existed only in the memories of those he had abandoned.

‘Once, at the hearth of a peat-cutter’s hut in the rain-streaked bogs of Karelia, a mummer related the tale of a spirit who seduced young girls and then vanished back to hell, stealing away their souls. He referred to this ghoul as an incubus, but our man knew what it really was. He convinced himself that his misdeeds must have seeded themselves throughout time, mingling with myth. He became obsessed with the legends that must have grown around him. He thought of this as his legacy, the only evidence he had ever walked the earth. He had crossed the line from existence to imagination. He could do anything. Nothing could stop him. He was scarcely even human any more. He was a spirit, a phantom, an idea… the disappearing demon.

‘And so at last, after many fucks – a unit of measurement as particular as the light-year or the cubit – the specifics of which I won’t at present furnish, for fear of aggravating you further, our man found himself pulling his pants up once again in a foreign land. He was standing on the brink of a great canyon, which stretched from inches beyond his feet to almost the furthest point on the horizon, where he could dimly make out the folds of a mountain range.

Chapter 6

‘He rubbed his eyes and dropped his gaze into the space before him. He waited for the familiar nausea to lessen in his bowel. As was his habit, in that post-coital, post-time travelling daze, he tried to establish which part of the world he was in, and what century it was. Very far down, so deep it made him dizzy, wound the thin blue thread of a river, flanked by bright foliage that sharply contrasted with the yellow-red dryness of the canyon’s rocky floor. A long way off, the river widened into a lake, and beyond that the canyon seemed to grow greener, though all he could see of this was a distant smudge. He wiped away sweat. The sun hammered down. There wasn’t a sound, not even wind. After a while his eye caught a movement, and he squinted down to see the shadows of birds passing silently over the canyon’s floor.

‘Finding no clues in that rock-walled void, he turned to look the other way. In this direction the plateau he stood on ran gently downhill as far as he could see, rippling with bands of heat haze. No sign of any dwelling. He wiped his hands on his trousers and turned back around, deciding to progress along the canyon’s edge until he found a sheep-track or a road. He took off the rough goat-hair coat he was wearing – stolen from a nondescript nomad he’d screwed on the Silk Road in the seventh century – tied it around his head for shade, and commenced.

‘He walked all morning, through the full heat of noon, and into the early evening. For a while it seemed he was following a trail, but it petered out. By the time the first star had appeared in the sky, he was sunburnt and dehydrated. Chewing a mouthful of grass for moisture, he lay down to rest beside the canyon’s edge. The rocky walls glowed purple with the sinking sun. Animals shrieked in the dusk. When darkness had fully fallen, he stood up to scan the sky for light pollution, trying to discern the direction of the nearest settlement. He could see nothing. Only blackness covering the earth, and the bright points of the stars above him.

‘He woke before dawn, numb with cold, his mouth and throat parched. He set out as soon as the sun was up, and it took him most of the day to descend to the river. The walls of the great fissure were steep, it was difficult to find a path. He slid rather than walked most of the way, tearing his fine stolen clothes in the process, scraping skin off his elbows and his hands. He saw no other living things but lizards and rodent-like creatures that skittered into holes when he approached. Amethysts worked themselves free of their stitching and clattered, glittering, down the rocky scree ahead of him.

‘When, at last, he had reached the river, he plunged into the water. He drank until his thirst was quenched and lay on his back on the bank as he dried, staring at the cloudless sky. Then he rose and continued downstream until the gently-lapping shore of the lake, by which time it was almost night again.

‘He had hoped very much to see signs of human settlement here, but in this he was disappointed. There were no habitations, no constructions, no fishing-boats out on the water. No rising smoke, no glow of lights. And certainly no women.

‘In the dusk he foraged around the lake, and satisfied his hunger with berries and thick-skinned fruits that tasted a bit like pears. He was not alarmed, not yet. He had grown accustomed to the unknown, learning to take advantage of whatever was available to him. Changing himself to fit the times. Whatever else our man might have been, he was a chameleon. How else could he have survived? There wasn’t a challenge that history had to offer that he had not mastered, exploited, and fucked. Our man was all-confident now. He was unstoppable. A master of time, a super-being, of whom legends had been written. He curled up to sleep in the lee of a rock, and dreamed that a parade of women was following him, whimpering his name.

‘He woke in the coldest part of the night to hear strange, grunting noises nearby, along with the dabbling sound of water. Cautiously he raised himself, and peered over the rock. He half-expected to see pretty virgins sporting in the water. The moon was full, flooding the canyon’s floor with electric whiteness. The lake was a gigantic rippling mirror. Along its shore large shapes were moving: a gathering not of maidens but of four-legged things splashing in the shallows and tilting their elongated heads to drink. He squinted against the reflected brightness, trying to tell what they were. Leaves crackled as he shifted position, and several heads swung towards him. He lay still while they scrutinised the darkness, snuffing and blowing through their tapered noses, until eventually they lost interest and returned to lapping the water. For the rest of the night he lay awake. He wondered what other creatures might inhabit this lakeside. Later, he scanned his surroundings once more, when the moon was lower in the sky, but the four-legged things were gone.

‘The next day he filled his pockets with berries, and set out along the western shore. He walked until noon determinedly, stopping only to drink from his cupped hands, rested for an hour in the shade of a tree, and then continued until nightfall. The following morning he left the lake behind and began climbing a long incline that led back up out of the canyon to the plateau. There were more trees here than the other side, and the grasslands were watered by shallow steams through which he waded, scattering dragonflies with bodies as fat as carrots. Shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun, he gazed into the land that lay before him. A vast plain stretched into the distance, swallowing up all sense of scale. Beyond the plain rose the mountains again, banked high with clouds.

‘He was given no clue to what country he was in, or what century. The continent could have been Africa, Australia, North or South America. The nearest people might still have been a thousand miles distant. Never before had he been fucked to a region so underpopulated.

‘His arrogance, more than anything, drove him forward. Somewhere in this empty land, he knew, must be a woman. She couldn’t evade him, wherever she was. Even if he had to cross those mountains, he would track her down. It was inevitable. Legends had been written. He set out defiantly over the grasslands, whistling a marching tune through sun-burned lips.

‘Who knows how long he wandered? Weeks dragged into months. The sun rolled across the sky, and intermittent torrents of rain fell. He walked in the morning, staggered in the afternoon, and collapsed at night into dreamless unconsciousness. He foraged for edible plants on his hands and knees. He tried to spear fish with a pointed stick, skinned up trees in the hope of finding eggs. Once he attempted to get honey from a bees’ nest, and got stung all over his body. His beard grew down almost to his chest. He managed, in his desperation, to choke down slugs and worms. His fine clothes turned to sweat-logged rags. The soles flapped loosely on his precious corpse-boots, which eventually, after all this time, disintegrated off his feet.

‘His body, grown plump in ages past, started to wither again. His skin felt loose. His stomach caved. He found it hard to walk in a straight line. One day he pulled his precious stones free of their stitchings and laid them out in the sun. He still carried a ruby, an Aztec gold coin, a Spanish doubloon, three South Seas pearls, four silver rings, a Chinese jade necklace and a lump of fool’s gold, but none of these things could help him here; they only weighed him down. The necklace and the rings he wore, but the rest he left behind in a glittering pile, staggered onwards, and didn’t look back.

‘He searched all over the grassy plains, and the foothills of the mountains. He ranged the valleys and the ravines, the boulder-strewn woodlands on the higher slopes. He skirted the line of the sierra and searched the smaller canyons that branched out from the first. He scoured the thickets of vegetation that grew along the rivers. Sometimes he imagined he heard human voices in the wind. At other times he would become obsessed with the idea that there might be people moving ahead of him, just out of sight, perhaps beyond the next low hill or river bend, and break into a frantic, shambling run that ended when he tripped or collapsed, heaving for breath on the ground.

‘The thought of sex looped constantly. No-one had ever needed sex like he needed it now. It had never been denied to him before. The valleys denied it, the silent hills denied it, the wilderness denied it, and he ranted and cursed at the open spaces for what their emptiness prevent him from having.

‘Sometimes, far across the plains, he saw processions of animals that looked a bit like horses. At first this gave him cautious hope, thinking that there might be herders with them, but he was never able to get close enough to know if they were wild or tame. He trailed them for as long as he could, but they always vanished. There were other large creatures abroad in this land, creatures which moved by night – lumbering bulks that he glimpsed by moonlight, the musky, matted stench of them carried to him downwind – which sent him almost out of his mind with fear. He tried masturbation but it didn’t help. In his increasingly garbled mind he laid the blame for this predicament on the last of his seductees – the dull-witted daughter of a Flemish peasant – and the one before her, the temple prostitute, or was it the Xhosa witchdoctor’s wife? He blamed them for his helplessness, and the ones before them, he blamed them all, right back to the olive-grove girl in Greece and the woman in the caravan.’

‘And Alicia? Did he blame her?’ I asked, fumbling for my whiskey.

‘Of course he blamed her. It was all her fault.’

‘How can you say it was all her fault?’

‘If it hadn’t been for her – if it hadn’t been for love – none of this would ever have happened. She was to blame, just as love was to blame. Which isn’t to say she was guilty, of course. And for the record, it isn’t to say that he wasn’t still faithful to her.’

‘Faithful?’ I snorted, the whiskey fumes rising, ‘I’d like to hear you explain that.’

‘The story of the first sad man,’ said the storyteller, in a patient way, ‘is the story of the most faithful man that ever lived.

‘One morning, as the red sun rose yet again after uncountable empty days and nights, our man awoke with a fear so profound that he almost couldn’t breathe. He lay there not knowing what had woken him, but sensing that it was something too terrible to contemplate. A realisation had occurred in his sleep. Something had made itself known. He tried to push it from his consciousness, but its horror was too insistent. As if recalling the details of a nightmare, he allowed the thought to form itself. Something, perhaps, he had known for many days. Something so horrific, and so obvious, he hadn’t allowed himself to even ask the question.

‘What if there were no people?

‘This was the question that forced itself on him. What if he had arrived in a time before human beings existed?

‘And as soon as he had allowed this terror to express itself, he knew, beyond all doubt, that it was true.

Chapter 7

‘He didn’t move from this spot for days. There was no point going anywhere. There was nowhere to go. A first sheer panic held him to the ground as if gravity had multiplied its force; and when the panic faded, enervation came. He was finally alone. More alone than any man had ever been before. He would never see a living face again in his life. It didn’t matter if he walked north, south, east or west: they all led to the same nothingness.

‘When, eventually, he wandered on – more to relieve the cramps in his legs than for any other reason – he shuffled like a sleepwalker, not paying the slightest attention to where he was going. He had a vague idea to find a high place and throw himself off, but when, at last, he came to the base of a suitable rocky spur, he was too debilitated to climb. He lay down again with his face in the dust, wanting to weep, but unable. So all his efforts had come to this. His powers negated. His glories stripped. History had spat in his face.

‘And now his real timelessness began. He wandered the land without purpose or direction. When it rained he made no attempt to find shelter, just stood like a scarecrow underneath the streaming sky, letting water run in rivulets from his matted hair. He pissed in his trousers and let the shit slide cloggingly down his legs. His skin was peeling, discoloured by dirt. He slept for much of the time, wherever he happened to find himself, although it wasn’t so much sleep as fevered semi-consciousness. His eyes would slide open every so often to make him aware of the position of the sun, the heat upon his face, directly above him, and then, seemingly seconds later, it would have swung to his left or right, rising or setting, he didn’t know which, and then the sun would be silver and make his face cold and he knew it was the moon. Sometimes he dreamed when he was awake, his past lives flickering around him, images coming and going and making no sense. Mostly, though, he simply lay frozen, drained of desire or compulsion. Predatory mammals slunk up in the moonlight to sniff around the foul nest of his hair, but he smelt so filthy and hopeless they left him alone.

‘I suppose this could have been the end of it all. You may think he deserved it, after abandoning all those others, to finally be abandoned by himself. He should have lost his mind in this land before time, or died of wretched loneliness, and been pulled apart by the ancestors of the vulture. What remained of his skull would confound palaeontologists a thousand centuries hence. More likely, after his flesh had been stripped, his bones would sink without trace into the sediment. Not even a fossil to confirm he had existed. Even the stories, the legends, would perish in the end. And then, he would have truly disappeared.

‘But then, my narrative would not have been told. The story of the first sad man. Nor, I’m afraid, of the second.

‘Because history hadn’t finished with him yet. His agency had not ended. Whatever forces were steering his course, time, luck, destiny, desire – even loyalty, though you seem to mock it – were set to act upon him once again. Even if he wanted to stop, he could not. Because this is not the way that stories end.

‘It happened after he had wandered all morning, barely aware of the landscape around him, to the top of a slope that ran down towards a stream. The sudden opening-up of perspective after so many miles of flatness made him dizzy, and he tried to steady himself at the brink, swaying drunkenly back and forth, before one of the losses of consciousness that were by now quite common. His tumbled down the slope, flopping and flailing, weakly attempting to grab at clumps of grass, and opened his eyes at the bottom of the hill where the momentum of his fall had brought him. He didn’t know if he was dead or alive.

‘Then, at once, his vision cleared. There, before his eyes, was a footprint.

‘A footprint. Not a hoof print. Not a three-toed print with claws. Five rounded indentations of descending size and depth, with the smooth, egg-shaped hollow of the heel, unmistakably impressed into a patch of mud by the stream.

‘His heart started beating so forcefully he felt it in his throat. He crawled carefully forward, nose to the ground, and poked at the mud with his fingers. The surface was baked dry by the sun, but the mud underneath was moist. Someone had walked here recently. Adrenaline shot through his body. He crawled from the first footprint to a second, from the second to a third – left foot, right foot, left foot – and from there to the stream. He pulled himself up to standing. For a second he thought he was going to vomit, or collapse again. But he managed to stagger through the water to the opposite bank where the footprints emerged.

‘It was clear there was more than one person. There were at least two sets of prints, one larger, one smaller. An adult and a child. Or a man and a woman. And if there were two of them here, there must be others. He was saved, saved from nothingness! He became aware that he was sobbing, tears making tracks through the filth that caked his face. He squatted down to kiss the prints, pressing his lips into the mud.

‘Then he straightened up, terrified again. The prints may have been recent, but who knew how far away their makers were now? They were probably many miles off, vanished into the landscape. They might have even seen him coming, and fled at the most distant sight of him. He was in a condition of such debilitation that he may never catch them. This was too awful to imagine, and so without delaying further he gulped a drink from the stream and set off as steadily as he was able, following the tracks.

‘After the prints led away from the stream, they became much harder to follow. The ground was dryer and stonier, and he could trace them only by scuffs of earth and bent blades of grass. He progressed with his head bent low to the ground, doggedly scrutinising each step. There was nothing on the horizon, no clue to where these people might be heading. But the tracks, indistinct as they were, led on, and he inched after them painstakingly until nightfall.

‘In the morning he went in search of food. He hadn’t eaten for days. He hunted for edible leaves and roots, the bushes on which tiny berries grew, the thorny trees that bore the pear-like fruits. He grubbed in the earth until he found worms, relishing their soily taste and texture.

‘He followed the trail for the next four days, nosing along like a dog. Sometimes the trail led straight on, sometimes meandered through foliage, or looped and doubled back on itself, and took him hours to trace. He assumed these people were foraging as he was, and learned after time that food could be found in the places where the footprints led. He wondered what kind of folk they were. Nomads, certainly, unless they were lost, and primitive enough to go barefoot. On the third day the prints were joined by another, larger set. A man, he imagined, older than the others, who appeared to take over as leader or guide. Other than that, there was nothing he could tell about his quarry.

‘On the morning of the fifth day, he spotted them.

‘There were four of them now, in the distance, passing out of sight over the crest of the next hill. All he could see were their silhouettes, the lumps of their bodies and then just their heads. His first reaction was to throw himself to the ground so they didn’t catch sight of him. But they were a long way off, and he was downwind. He progressed faster, but cautiously now, beside himself with excitement.

‘A mile or so further on, he discovered what had delayed them long enough to allow him to catch up. In a patch of trampled mud and grass lay the remains of an animal, headless, gutted, skinned and bled. Examining it closer, he thought that it could have been one of the four-legged things he had seen by the lake, a young one, for its skeleton was small. But there wasn’t enough of it left to know what it had looked like alive. There was no sign of how it had been caught. He dabbed some blood against his lips; it was like biting down on a battery. Every scrap of meat was picked quite clean.

‘Later that day, he caught sight of them again. He was on the higher ground, spying down into the hollow of a valley. They had stopped to rest in the shade of a spiny-trunked tree. Two were lying on their backs, one was busily eating something, and the last – the tallest of the four – seemed to be keeping lookout. He was standing half-in and half-out of shadow, leaning on a long staff or spear which was driven down into the ground, moving his head from side to side as if scanning the horizon. Our man crouched in the thick grass at the crest of the hill, scarcely daring to breathe. They were still too distant to make out anything other than the shapes of their bodies. All he could see of the lookout was his beard and his thick mane of hair, and the fact that he was carrying a weapon.

‘They remained in this spot for the rest of the day. Occasionally those resting emerged from the shadow to keep vigil with the lookout. They seemed to be anticipating something, and our man waited with them, not daring to make any sort of move. In the hour of twilight before darkness, the landscape sinking into tones of greyish blue, one of them let out a cry. Our man ducked down, thinking he had been spotted, but when he raised his eyes again he saw, in the general dimness, another group of nomads filing down to join the first. They were descending the slope to his right, eight in all, including two children. If they had taken the other side of the hill they would have come upon him from behind. The two groups came together with whoops. The adults greeted each other by bumping foreheads. For the first time it was possible to hear snatches of dialogue: a cacophonous jabber of sounds that bore some similarity to Dutch.

‘Night came, and the nomads settled down. At one point there were sounds a bit like singing. He expected them to light a fire, assuming they would cook their meat, but their encampment fell into blackness along with the rest of the land. He drifted asleep in the same darkness, cold and exposed on the hillside, but triumphant. Against all the odds, in spite of everything, he had prevailed yet again. He had conquered nothingness, just as he had conquered everything else. Now all he had to do was introduce himself.

‘He trailed the band throughout the following day. They moved tirelessly, never pausing for rest, in the direction of a rocky bluff that rose above the lowlands. He was forced to maintain a steady jog, determined not to let them out of sight. He was beyond exhaustion now, running on resolution alone. The despair of his lost weeks and months had alchemised into ruthlessness.

‘The long pursuit ended in the craggy high ground. The twelve-strong group had finally returned to what must have been their home. It wasn’t a village, nor even a house, but a cave halfway up a granite cliff. Taking cover behind a pile of rocks, he watched them scramble up. Now that he could see them stark against the rock, he saw how thickset their bodies were, yet fluid in their movements. They bounded athletically up the cliff, hauling the butchered meat with them. He guessed they were dressed in tight animal skins. Then they disappeared into the cave, leaving him to ponder his next move.

‘If he felt any doubts at this point, the weight of his desire buried them. Now that he had tracked them back to this place – cornered them, in effect – he found his urgency increased rather than lessened. From what he had seen of the retreating bodies of the ones he took to be the women, he didn’t expect to find any beauties here, but beauty had long since ceased to be necessary to him. The body’s appearance didn’t matter. All that mattered was the body’s function. Anticipating that release, the flash of white light and sensation of enormous speed, the dizzying rush of propulsion through time, he already felt a sense of huge relief. He kept one eye on the cave’s shadowed opening, and a wonderful warmth spread through him.

‘He staked out their den through the evening and night. Again, there was no sign of a fire. Either they ate and slept in darkness, or the cave was deep enough for its glow to be concealed. The next morning, for the first time in as long as he could remember, he woke up with the stirrings of an erection.

‘By midday, sweating under the sun, seeing no signs of life from the cave, he could hold himself back no longer.

‘Climbing the cliff was difficult. He didn’t know the handholds or the footholds. The going was made especially hard by the recurrence of his arousal, which tented awkwardly in the shredded rags that served for his trousers, bumping against the wall. It’s extremely difficult to scale a rocky cliff while inflicted with a raging hard-on; perhaps you’ve never tried it. But he was a big man, and driven by need, and managed to pull himself up from crack to crack until, finally, he was peering into the cave’s narrow mouth.

‘There was no movement from within. He waited until he could make sense of the shadows. No human shape was visible. It seemed to be deserted, or else its inhabitants were hiding. Discerning daylight filtering through from the far end, he crept forward, hearing the crunch of what he guessed to be animal bones beneath his feet. It was then he realised it was not a cave at all, but a narrow passageway through the rock, sloping gently downwards. After a dozen steps or so the tunnel opened up again, and before him spread the vista of a grassy plateau surrounded by cliffs still higher than the first. And immediately outside this second entrance – mere metres away, with her back to him – squatted a naked young woman with dark, tangled hair.

‘Instinctively, his body shrank back. For the first time he was struck by fear. These people were obviously savages. Who knew what they would do when they saw him? But it was too late now, he couldn’t go back. There was nowhere to go back to. The woman hadn’t heard him, though her skin twitched as he approached. He took one step, then the next. On the plateau, others were gathered. He saw them in his peripheral vision, shabby figures lazing in the sun. Infants were chasing one other with sticks. A mother was suckling her baby. He took a final step; he was right behind her now. Muscles tensed in the woman’s back. Suddenly, something was wrong. He heard a surprised exclamation from below. The woman’s back, he saw, was covered in hair. Adrenaline fired in all his limbs. Something was very wrong, but retreat was impossible now. He reached out one petrified hand, and tapped her on the shoulder.

‘She spun around with an open mouth, and her face contorted in terror. Her yellow eyes bulged obscenely from their sockets. All at once, everyone was screaming. She scrambled away from him, backwards, down the slope, letting out short, frightened yelps. He, too, recoiled from the sight of her, hands outstretched in a ridiculous gesture of apology. All her body apart from feet, hands and breasts was covered in dark, silky hair, like an animal’s pelt; most of her face too, which somehow made the cheeks and forehead look obscenely bald. The gums of her heavily-jawed mouth were lined with small, pointed teeth, and the sounds that issued from her lips were more like the shrieks of a gibbon. Horrified, he turned to flee, but tripped on the sliding scree and skidded, crashing, down the slope.

‘He was back on his feet immediately. It was like landing in a zoo. The creatures were leaping up and down, bellowing in panic. The children howled as they ran for cover while their mothers beat their breasts. Some of the males rushed him with sticks, and instinct propelled him to rush back at them; he charged head-on, screaming obscenities, his face swelled up like a red balloon, and such was the fury of his terror that they dropped their sticks and ran. A large stone flew past his head. The females were pelting him with rocks. He answered them in kind, and his aim was much better – something to do with opposable thumbs – and then charged them as he had the males, putting them to flight with a Pictish war-cry remembered from long ago. They scattered in all directions, bounding over the plateau and into the rocks, and within seconds he was standing alone.

‘A whimpering noise made him turn. No, he was not quite alone. Backed up into a fissure of rock, regarding him with palpable dread through those long-lashed yellow eyes, crouched the young female whose shoulder he had touched. Incapacitated by her fear – no doubt an evolutionary fault that the laws of survival would weed out in time – she had been left behind in the general panic.

‘They stared at each other. He dropped the rock he held. She bared her teeth defensively, but her body was trembling all over. Conflicting emotions raced through his brain. That sharp-toothed grimace was animal, but the dread in her eyes was human. In her wrinkled forehead and shivering lips was the face of a frightened woman. Yet the way she crouched, and her sinewy arms, and above all that dark and silky hair that left her breasts horribly exposed, all of these things filled him with revulsion.

‘He glanced around quickly. The others were gone, but who knew when they might return? If they managed to master their fear, there might soon be a counter-attack. He saw what they’d done to that four-legged beast. They were clearly capable of organised action. He began to make soothing, shushing sounds that came out more like a menacing hiss than a token of reassurance. She shrank further back into the rock. Fear and hatred throbbed from her eyes. His legs faltered as he approached – this thing was an animal, worse than an animal – half of him couldn’t bring himself to do what the other half was beseeching him towards. But there was such intelligence in her face, such familiar nuances of rage. The shocked understanding of a child who sees, for the first time, life as it really is. All the reality, all the unfairness flooding in to fill the vacuum that innocence leaves when it expires from the world. Like the shock in the eyes of the purple-veiled princess. Like the shock of every lover he had disappeared from.

‘The decision, such as it was, was made for him. At least, this is what he would later say to anyone who cared to listen. She sprang suddenly into the air, crashing against his body. Her nails raked his face and arms, her bony fists beat down on his head, but somehow he managed to catch her wrists and twist her onto the ground. She kicked at him powerfully with her clenched feet, and he grabbed hold of her hair. Enraged, she sunk her teeth into his shoulder, and it was all he could do through the panic and pain to hang on as best he could, but grimly he contained her blows and pinned her against the rock. He was taller than her, and heavier, and desperation gave him powers he never knew he had. She started gnashing and grimacing then. He was aware of a sickening pain in one of his hands. He was amazed to find that even through the bestial mask her face had twisted into, the yellow eyes that shot hatred into his were still recognisably a woman’s. She continued to fight against his dominance, but the struggle went his way. Perhaps she was able to sense evolutionary advantage, the superiority that history had ordained for his kind. Perhaps she had simply given in. Either way, in that land before time, our man – who had once thought himself human too – finally found himself raping an early hominid.’

The storyteller slurped from his glass. It was starting to grow dark outside, and rain streaked the window.

‘It seems to me, from the look on your face, that you’ve decided to dislike him after all,’ he said.

‘How could I not? He became a rapist.’

‘He became many things, as do we all. But who are we to know how, in the mists of prehistory, affairs of this type were conducted? Perhaps this was, more or less, the way things were done back then. Perhaps – I’m only hypothesising here – his behaviour was appropriate for the age.’

‘He became a rapist,’ I said again. ‘Rape is rape, in any age.’

‘Rape is rape, in any age. Of course, I do agree. Rape is rape, and he raped her. Of rape he would now be eternally guilty. Perhaps it was only a matter of time, much as I’m loathe to admit it. But what we do, as I’ve said before, is defined by where we happen to be. If ever proof were needed of that, surely this is it.’

‘You’re talking about him as if he was just a victim of circumstance,’ I objected. ‘As if he was the only one that suffered.’

‘But of course he was a victim of circumstance, just as all those others were victims of him. No man ever suffered as much as he did. And suffering spawns suffering, I’m afraid that’s the way it goes. I’m not asking you to praise him. I’m asking you to understand the process that made him what he was. I want you to understand him, it’s most important to me. Remember I also talked of loyalty? A concept you seem to scoff at. Our man may have slept with scores, hundreds, including a particularly despicable violation of the natural order. But does this necessarily mean he was not loyal to the first?’

‘That’s exactly what it means.’

‘Is there really any meaningful difference between sleeping with one and with one hundred? What if that fifteen-second fuck with the black-toothed woman in the caravan had been enough to propel him back to Alicia’s bed? Would you label this disloyalty, though its direct effect was to bring them back together?’

‘It would still be disloyalty, technically, yes. Why are you asking me these things?’

‘Disloyalty is disloyalty. You’re truly a man of your time. But if you examine this causally, you will find that every link of the chain is vital to the whole. Without each individual affair, none of the others would have been possible. At least, not in the order they came, and probably not leading up to the same end.’

‘That end being inter-species rape? That’s your act of loyalty?’

The storyteller laughed out loud. I glimpsed a flash of a silver-capped tooth in the back of his head. ‘That’s a lovely turn of phrase, I’ll have to remember that. Although whether it was strictly inter-species or not is an anthropological question, which neither of us is qualified to answer. As our man’s behaviour shows, the categorisation of our earliest ancestors is by no means a clear-cut issue, and causes all kinds of controversy between palaeontologists. But actually, no, I didn’t mean that. That wasn’t the particular end to which I was referring.’

‘What was the particular end to which you were referring?’ I was impatient with his convolutions, full drunk on my stool. ‘Do you have a point? For God’s sake finish, I can’t listen to this forever.’

The storyteller’s expression softened. He blinked at me almost innocently. ‘Why, the obvious end to this interlinking chain,’ he replied in a slightly hurt tone. ‘The only end he could have ended up at. The end that wouldn’t have been possible without these acts of loyalty, every single one of them; and you can mock that phrase all you like. Back in his own time, of course, give or take a decade or two. Back where he belonged, in Alicia’s arms.’

Chapter 8

‘I find that extremely hard to believe.’ Rising from somewhere very deep, I became aware of an inexplicable resentment.

‘I repeat, perhaps you’ve never been in love.’

‘The same Alicia? After all that?’

‘The same Alicia. Because of all that. Not in spite. Because. As a result of that abominable act, he returned to his rightful place. Of course he did, what else could have happened? This is a fairytale, remember. I’d hate to deny you a happy ending.’

‘You said at the beginning that this story didn’t have one.’

‘Ah, very observant of you. Where one story ends, another begins. Or, to be more accurate, one causes the next to occur. They knock together like those little silver balls in a Newton’s cradle. The story of the first sad man causes the story of the second.’

‘You think I’ll be satisfied with that? A rape solved all his problems?’

‘Not all. And anyway, I didn’t say that.’

‘You said it was the result of the act.’

‘Everything is always the result of an act.’

‘That’s not good enough. I don’t believe it,’ I persisted, not quite understanding why.

‘I’m afraid it makes no difference to me whether you believe it or not.’

I took a breath, tried to calm myself. I had the unnerving feeling that something – I couldn’t have put into words quite what – had begun to go wrong some time ago, and I hadn’t noticed it happen. As if my handling had slipped, my balance gone off kilter. The problem was I’d been listening to this story so long that it seemed more real than my own life. At first I’d been glad of the distraction, but now something disproportionate had happened and somehow, idiotically, it had started to affect me. Slightly panicked, I tried to remind myself of the journey that lay ahead. I told myself I was getting away, starting something new. I must not lose my momentum now, or I may never get it back.

There was a bilious feeling inside me. I wondered if I might have drunk enough to make myself sick, in the not-so-distant future. That would probably be a good thing. That might clear the air.

‘The time he returned to wasn’t precisely the same time that he had left. But, all things considered, it was close enough. Close enough, it might be argued, to be taken as evidence that the force of luck propelled him after all. Or maybe it was fate, or maybe it was love, or maybe these are all the same thing in the end. He was altered many times over, while Alicia was older by twelve years. But they were still, despite everything, the same people they had been before. And of course they recognised each other. And of course they fell in love again. And this, my friend, is what I mean by loyalty.’

‘They fell in love again, just like that?’

‘Well there was one complication, very slight. On finally returning to the time he knew, and making his way back to England, his country, and stealing new clothes from a washing-line, and hitching a lift to the city he had lived in, and making inquiries of acquaintances and neighbours – and not being recognised by anyone – and travelling to the new city she had moved to, and finding her address through devious means, and taking up position outside her door as he had done outside other doors in other centuries, as anonymous here as anywhere else, and watching silhouettes move behind glass, and seeing a woman’s hand drawing a curtain, and feeling the happiness swelling inside him would split him apart at the seams, but noticing that there were two cars parked outside where he had expected only one, the first thing he had to accomplish was getting her husband out of the way. Alicia, he discovered, had been married for six years. To a handsome but unremarkable man who hurried out of the house the next morning, having doubtless been held up by early-morning nuptial pleasures, and drove away, presumably to work, in the larger of the cars. Our man, wild-eyed like some prophet, crept across the road and rang the doorbell.

‘Ding-ding. You know what happened next. The beginning, at least, of the happy ending I said would never come.’

‘It’s not enough,’ I cried, slamming my glass on the bar. ‘He just walked up and rang the doorbell? The husband conveniently disappeared? She forgave him everything, all the ugly things he’d done? You’re asking me to swallow that? I’m not buying it.’

‘Then allow me to expand,’ he said. ‘We’re on the home straight now.’ He was watching me with a rapt expression. I regretted my emotion at once. I told myself not to give him anything he might use to his advantage. It made me uncomfortable to imagine he thought he knew anything about me, that he could see inside me in any way. ‘You’re right, of course. It wasn’t quite that simple. Nothing ever is. The first sad man, and the second sad man, they both deserve better than that.

‘When he got back to his time and his place, he looked like a raving madman. He reeked of sweat and stale piss. The hair on his head, face and chin was tangled like rotten rope. He staggered. He lurched. He had bloodshot eyes. His finger and toenails had grown into claws. And his body was covered in bites and lacerations from the shameful struggle in the land before time, the injuries a painful reminder of the crime he had committed.

‘But remember our man, apart from anything else, was the greatest adapter in history. By the time he had tracked down Alicia’s house, in the new city she lived in, the filth had been washed from his body and the worst of his wounds had healed. His face was shaved. His hair was shorn. He had spent time observing people with their laptops and their lattes in cafés, talking on their mobile phones, buying things in department stores, he had even been to see a movie in the local cinema. He still looked stunned and out of place, but no more stunned and out of place than many other lost souls who walk the earth. He came across more like a reformed rough sleeper than a traumatised, prehistoric rapist.

‘It took him weeks to bring himself to walk up to that door. He put Alicia’s house under close observation. She lived in a normal street of normal houses, a modern urban street, with its comings and goings. Obviously, he didn’t just stand there and stare. He walked past several times a day, sweeping the windows with hungry eyes, and in the evenings he would sit on a bench a little way down the road, from where he could monitor the front porch, screened behind a newspaper or a variety of different hats. He staked the place out by night and by day. I’m sure you’ll agree it’s a positive step, demoting oneself from a rapist to a stalker.

‘The first time he actually saw Alicia, it took him by surprise. He had taken his eyes off the house for a minute – sometimes the strain got too much – and when he looked down the road again, she was standing outside the front door. Not coming in or going out, just standing in the street. He couldn’t see her face from that angle, she was twelve years older and her hair was different, but there was no mistaking the simple geometry, the golden mean, of her body. He would have known it anywhere. He knew it. It was her.

‘Before his brain could register the fact that his eyes were actually seeing her – that no more than fifty metres of air and countless infinitesimal particles of pollen, dust, dead skin and pollution separated them in physical space – she had vanished, and the door was closed.

‘He let out a breath. A long, long breath. His skin trembled, as if a great volume of liquid was pouring out of it. It was a shiver that seemed to come from the marrow of his bones. When it was gone, he felt no excitement. He felt no raging of desire. All he felt was melancholy, an overwhelming sadness.

‘As the days went by, he came to learn Alicia’s routine, and her husband’s. Her husband’s was easy. A modern working man. He left the house between eight and eight fifteen, drove off in his car, and was home by seven. He seemed to do most of the shopping, too. It was clear Alicia didn’t work, unless she worked from home. She went out in her car or for short, rather pointless walks, and sometimes friends came by the house, but mostly she seemed to be alone. Some evenings they went out together, he guessed to restaurants or cinemas, and never came back later than midnight. They were dull and domestic all round. They were a regular couple.

‘Although he studied as hard as he could, squinting to read the expressions on her face as she came and went, alone or with her husband, our man found it impossible to tell whether or not she was happy.

‘He also watched anxiously for children, but it was clear there were none.

‘Once he almost bumped into her, in the corner shop down the road. He was living on a diet of cold baked beans, bananas and white sliced bread. As he lined up these miserable items at the checkout, impatient to get back to his bench, he glanced at the security mirror and saw Alicia behind him. He averted his face. She placed a bag of tangerines in her basket, and wandered over to peruse the magazines on the shelves by the door. He watched her leafing through the pages. She only had to turn her head. He pushed his coins across the counter and hurried out, fighting the impulse to run. Afterwards, he tried to convince himself that her head had lifted slightly as he passed, that some mystic current had passed between them, but in truth she didn’t notice him at all.

‘He chose a time when he knew, from his spying, that she would be alone. As he rang the bell, he was conscious that it seemed a faintly ludicrous end to everything he had been through. When she opened the door, she looked at him with no expression at all. It was as if she was gazing through empty space; he thought for a second he might be invisible to her. Her face betrayed no sign of shock, although one of her hands stayed frozen, as if the air had crystallised around it. Then our man managed to assemble his words, and asked: Can I come in?

‘She didn’t reply initially. Her hand didn’t move. Then she said softly, with great deliberation, that she couldn’t talk now, he had to go. Could he come back tomorrow? He managed a nod, and she closed the door very gently in his face.

‘The second time, she allowed him in. He followed her through the hallway to the kitchen. She motioned for him to sit opposite her at the kitchen table. They sat for some minutes like that. Peripherally he was aware of all the trappings of a married life, the comforting domestic mess that he had never known. None of it seemed real: not the walls of the house, not the floor beneath his feet, not his feet, not his own body. Only her. She watched him with incredible calm, giving no indication of what she was thinking. Then she opened a drawer in the table, shook out three pink pills from a bottle, and swallowed them without taking a sip of water.

‘Finally she said: Where did you go?

‘Far away, he said. Very far. But I’ve come back.

‘The third time he came, they sat at the kitchen table as before. She had been prepared for him, and coffee had been brewed. He waited for her to speak first, allowing her to guide the conversation. Again, before she spoke a word, she swallowed several pills.

‘You left me a long time ago, she said, in this conversation.

‘I didn’t want to, he replied.

‘I don’t understand what you’re doing here.

‘I’ll tell you everything, he said. But it will take some time. Please trust me. Please believe I’m here. That’s the only important thing. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

‘They continued meeting. A few times a week. Then every day, when the husband was out. He started to narrate his story. She watched him, and listened.’

‘You’re saying she believed him?’ I demanded. My head had started aching. My brain was fogged, full of unsettled thoughts that swirled but wouldn’t form.

‘She gave no sign of believing him or not believing him. She only listened, until he had finished his story.’

‘Everything? He told her everything? All the rotten things he’d done to people?’

‘Everything. Especially the rotten things. It was the least he could do. And when she’d finished listening to him – offering no judgement, merely letting him speak – she told him about herself.

‘She said that the reason she didn’t work, the reason she spent all day at home, was this problem she had, these recurring panic attacks. She would be overwhelmed by the feeling that she was being crushed, she was dying, she was disappearing; she couldn’t find breath, she couldn’t move, her organs were collapsing. She never knew when it would occur. The attacks might not happen for months, half a year, and then she would have three in a row, or be too scared to crawl out of bed for a week. It made it impossible to hold down a job. For years she had been on anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, other medications.

‘When did you start having these attacks?, our man asked, but he knew the answer.

‘Since you disappeared, she replied.

Chapter 9

‘For Alicia, there had been no flash of white light, no sensation of enormous speed. Just an absence so sudden, so complete, she didn’t notice he was gone for several seconds. The first thing she became aware of – she told him this in their next conversation – was the lack of weight, from where he’d been lying on her body. She thought he must have moved away to the other side of the bed. He was no longer inside her. She couldn’t feel him touching any point of her, inside or out. She thought that perhaps she’d lost consciousness briefly, that ten or twenty seconds had passed. She lay looking up at the ceiling, and suddenly became very scared to turn her head to see where he’d gone. She entertained the thought for a moment that he’d rolled off the bed and onto the floor, but at the same time she knew that he wasn’t on the floor. She knew that he wasn’t in the room. The bed was empty. The room was empty. He was gone.

‘She’d got to her feet and searched around, to be absolutely sure. She stood for some time, trying not to think. After a while she put on a t-shirt, opened the curtains, opened the window, leaned out and stared at the street outside. There was no-one to be seen. Then she closed the window again, drew the curtains, took the t-shirt off, and went into the bathroom for a shower.

‘It wasn’t until she had almost finished, after she had washed her hair and soaped and rinsed every part of her body, that she began to shake so much that her knees gave way. A nameless terror rose inside her. She used the noise of the streaming water to mask an outraged scream – already, a large part of this terror was that someone else might discover what had happened – and then crawled out of the bathroom and frantically searched the bed again, as if he might have been tangled up in the sheets. He still wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere.

‘That night, she said, she was more frightened than she’d ever been before. Recurrent waves of dread took hold of her, churned her around and deposited her, shivering, back down in the same place. She had to keep touching herself to reassure herself she was still there. She had to make a conscious effort to breathe, or she was afraid that otherwise she would simply stop. Her fear wasn’t the fear of death. It was the fear – much worse – of non-existence.

‘The next day she’d gone to work, and tried to continue with her life. She’d stuffed the clothes he’d left behind thoughtlessly into a drawer. A shirt, a pair of jeans and a single sock; she couldn’t find the other one. A few people phoned to find out where he was. His parents called, half a dozen times. Then the police came by. She just said he’d left in the middle of the night, without warning, and she hadn’t seen him since. At the end of a month, she’d taken his clothes and dropped them into the canal.

‘People disappear all the time. The incident was reported in the news, but as our man wasn’t a promising student or some innocent, golden-haired child, but rather a loner, a shy young man without many friends, who neglected to tell his family of his movements, the story never attracted much attention. His name went on the missing persons list, along with hundreds of other missing people who, for one reason or another, never turn up again. And Alicia, she carried on, unable to think about what had occurred. The incomprehension was so great that she succeeded, almost entirely, in erasing it from her mind.

‘The panic attacks started about six months afterwards. At first they came only in the night, and then they happened at work. She took a few days off. They receded, then came back, even worse. She took a leave of absence. She went to see doctors. She was given anti-depressants. The attacks continued. The leave of absence was extended indefinitely. Her parents helped. Her friends stood by. She went to see psychiatrists, sleep therapists. Things seemed to get better for a while. Then she stopped taking her medication, daring to believe she was on the mend, and suffered a total nervous collapse from which it seemed that she might not recover.

‘She went to hospital for a long time. She was moved to different psychiatric wards and then to a private institution. Her detainment – at first she was sectioned, then voluntary – lasted for about eight months. Some weeks were much worse than others. She suffered from a recurring delusion that if she wasn’t extremely careful, that if she neglected to perform certain compulsive tics and movements, the same thing might happen to her. She would cease to exist. She also believed that when the doctors or nurses passed out of her sight, when they turned a corner or left the room, they had vanished too.

‘Gradually, her condition improved. She had regular sessions with a psychiatrist, who made her understand, in theory at least, that people did not just disappear. It was patiently explained to her that everything stemmed from the shock of betrayal. She must come to terms with the fact that her boyfriend had simply left, run away for some reason of his own. Perhaps he had moved to another country, or was even lying dead somewhere. She learned to manage her compulsive behaviour, and then to cease it altogether. She stopped trying to convince people they would vanish if they left the room. The doctors hit on the right mix of drugs. She was given day leave, various therapies. They let stay with her parents at weekends. At the end of the year, she discharged herself. She accepted the attacks would continue infrequently, and learned to reconstruct her life around them. It was hard. It was terribly hard. But Alicia was a tough person.’

‘I want another drink,’ I said. My voice sounded odd. The storyteller waved to the barman, but the barman wasn’t looking.

‘Then she moved to a new city,’ he said, forgetting my request. ‘She tried to leave her past behind. She even changed her name. Someone suggested this might be a good thing, to help with the moving on. Over the years, things got a bit better. She even got a boyfriend. It was nice, for a while, but he left her when she said she didn’t want to have sex. How could she? The thought petrified her. So she stayed single. It wasn’t so bad. Slowly, she started to feel more alive. The delusions, at least, were behind her. She couldn’t work, but she found other things. She took her drugs. She checked in with her doctor. Her parents came to visit sometimes. She began to make friends.

‘And later still, she met her future husband. He was a good man, clearly devoted. He didn’t exactly make her go weak at the knees, but going weak at the knees was something she felt she could do without. He knew she’d had some problems in the past, but that didn’t scare him off. He was kind and patient. He didn’t shock or surprise her. He learned how to handle her panic attacks, how to comfort her. After a while, she trusted him enough for them to sleep together. She got herself drunk first, to numb the fear. He wasn’t the greatest lover in history, but at least he didn’t vanish into thin air. He didn’t go anywhere at all. Just remained in her bed and snored. She watched him and stroked his hair and smiled. The feel of him, the smell of him, the simple fact he was still there: she found it reassuring.

‘After a year, they were married. The greatest act of reassurance. He was stable, a solid presence, an anchor to reality. They had a pleasant honeymoon. Greece, I believe. She felt safe with him.

‘Of course, she never told him about our man. She never told him about the disappearance, or the reason for the panics she suffered. She never told anyone. Because despite her recovery, despite the drugs, despite the logic impressed upon her by various members of the medical establishment, she still knew it had happened.

‘She hid that fact. It was easy to hide. Everyone has their secrets. Their married life went on contentedly enough, until the day our man turned up and rang that doorbell.’

‘I want another drink,’ I repeated. I didn’t move. I didn’t look at him. But he understood the tone of my voice, and called the barman over for another.

‘Are you feeling alright?’ he asked when it arrived. There was, I thought, unfeigned concern in the way he asked that question.

‘How long did this go on?’ I asked. ‘These meetings, while the husband was out?’ I fixed my eyes on my reflection in the mirror, trying to hold it steady. I felt like the walls and the bottles on their glass shelves were shakily revolving around me.

‘Not long, in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps half a year. Sometimes they didn’t talk at all, just sat in silence, watching the light change. Two damaged people. But recovering. When they did talk, they hid nothing from each other.

‘You must hate me for what I put you through, said our man one day, as they sat together.

‘You must hate me too, she replied. And then she took his head in her hands, and kissed him on the mouth.

‘Our man found it easy to come and go. He stayed in a cheap lodging house down the road. His life became a negative of the life of Alicia’s husband, its structure arranged carefully around the other man’s daily routine. He felt no guilt at deceiving the husband. At first, would you believe, he even tried to hate him. What right did this man have, he thought – this dull, moderate, modern man – to stake a claim in Alicia’s heart, to do so little to deserve her affections, after all the agony he had been through? After the agony he had caused? But of course, it wasn’t a question of rights. It was a question of being there. The husband had been there, and our man had not. Now, all he had to do was invert the situation.

‘Should he murder him? He pondered this sometimes. He could do it easily. But the idea was ridiculous, it was redundant. It wasn’t necessary.

‘He thought about the husband more and more, spying from his vantage point. Even as Alicia, day by day, came to leave her married life behind and gravitate ever closer back to him. This process was inevitable. Please, you must understand that.

‘A couple of times, on the rare occasions when the husband left Alicia at home and went to meet friends in a pub or sit in a café, reading the papers, our man followed him. He knew he was invisible, unsuspected. The husband was not the suspicious type. He sat behind him, or at the next table, and kept an eye on him. He came to know all his different clothes, and noticed when he’d cut his hair or nicked his chin while shaving. He knew, without having to ask Alicia, that they rarely slept together. The man hadn’t had any action for months. He had that look about him. He wondered if he ever cheated on his wife, but he didn’t seem the type. Not selfish enough. Not enough imagination. Our man’s attempts at hatred fizzled out quickly. He found that he rather liked him, actually. In a way – even though he knew full well what he was going to put the man through – he came to envy him.

‘Was the husband any different to the countless other men he’d cuckolded throughout history? Of course he was. He was the man who had fallen in love with Alicia. Or at least, that was what he told himself. Though they might have been lifetimes apart, they had this between them. They were strung, our two sad men, on the same single thread of time. The same single thread of luck, or love, or fate, or suffering.’

‘Cuckolded?’ I croaked. My drink was half gone. My head had a hollowed-out, echoing feeling, and my stomach felt strange. I tried to think of Caitlin’s face, but it wasn’t the Caitlin’s face I knew. There was too much hurt in the air for that, distorting it like a heat-haze.

All the times I’d been there for her, the times I’d coaxed her through her despairs, even though sometimes she made me want to curl up and die myself.

The sense of desolation I got when I looked into her eyes. Like looking through a window into a room that had been long since departed.

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said the storyteller, almost inaudibly.

‘They had sex? They made love? They fucked?’

‘I didn’t quite say that.’ His mouth hardly moved. His mood had switched again. Suddenly, his face looked crabbed and mean.

‘On one of those long, silent afternoons, they couldn’t stop themselves. She led him up the stairs to the bedroom, just like all those years ago. She looked like she was in a trance. They stood, transfixed, by the marriage bed. His mouth was dry, he could hardly breathe. He had never known such longing. She had taken off her clothes, her socks, her underwear. She removed her earrings, and the rings on her fingers. If she could, she would have stripped the polish from her nails, to give herself utterly.

‘He pressed her down upon the bed. It felt like falling from a great height, plunging towards the earth. The past had at last caught up with itself. This was the only thing that had sustained him, the only thing that had kept him going. This was the meaning of his existence. He parted her legs and she drew him towards her, an inch away, half an inch, touching. He had never known such love. Finally, he was home.

‘And then he stopped. And then she stopped. The realisation hit them.’

The storyteller’s face was old, yellow and pinched and resentful.

‘Perhaps this story has a punch-line after all. Don’t you think it’s funny?’ But he showed no sign of laughing. Instead he stared at me intently, his hands clawed upon the bar. His body was poised mantis-like, as if he was waiting for something more, something I must give him.

And at last I saw what the bastard wanted, what he’d wanted all along.

‘You want me to feel sorry for him, don’t you?’ I said incredulously. ‘You want my forgiveness.’

He started mumbling something at me, but I didn’t hear it. I was staring at myself in the mirror, trying to focus on a steady point, something immutable. The walls of the pub trembled around me. I had to get away. It took a great effort, but I forced myself to go over the things I must do next. I listed them, one thing after the other. The walk to the station in the rain. The train to the airport. The fumbling with passports. The check-in. The security gate. Being ordered to remove my shoes, take off my belt like I’d hang myself with it. The abandoned people you see at these places, unnaturally pale, and the cold clean floors. The take-off. The unreal half-sleep. The ear-popping descent.

How long would I stay away? I didn’t know. I didn’t care.

I only knew that when I came back, she would no longer be there.

I live in another place now. I’ve married again. I have a family. A woman who will not vanish on me, sucked into her own past, or someone else’s. Years have passed. I haven’t been back. There’s nothing to go back to.

When I think of our six years together, which is difficult, like peering through frosted glass, I try to see the good parts too. There were good parts. There was great happiness. Even amongst the pain. The knowledge that she needed me, that I was a strength to her. The daily job of keeping her together. The times I knew she loved me. Yet under all this, the strange sensation that I only knew one part of her, or that I was care-taking until someone else took over.

Or is that only hindsight?

Those final few weeks were the worst. Much worse than any attack she’d suffered. At least the attacks were something real, something I could respond to. This was like trying to grasp a shadow. I hardly recognised her anymore. She was becoming a different person. It was as if, every time I came home, she had been replaced with a paler, more diluted version of herself. There simply wasn’t anything left. Even her accent seemed to change; sometimes I didn’t understand whole sentences. I knew we no longer had any connection, any way of communicating, that our marriage must be over. I knew she wanted me to go, but she wouldn’t come out and say it. I couldn’t bring myself to say it for her. I imagined that would destroy me. For days I deluded myself into thinking that I had to stay, no matter how bad it got, for her sake. For her illness. I told myself that she would change. I told myself that I would. But then, at last, came the realisation – I won’t deny there was also relief – that she truly didn’t need me. That I was causing her suffering. That my presence in her life was doing her damage now.

That someone else was making her happy. That was what really swung it.

I packed a bag and stayed with a friend. He gave me his sofa. I lay on it for five nights, trying to cry, but unable. Before dawn on the sixth day, I got on the computer and searched for flights. I couldn’t stay in this country. I only called my brother afterwards. In Toronto, Canada. I’d never been there before. He sounded sorry over the phone. He said I could stay for a while, of course I could. His little family would be happy to have me. Until I had sorted myself out.

I went back to the house only once before I left. Threw some things in black bags for my friend to take care of. Gathered up my passport, laptop, credit cards, two changes of clothes. Caitlin watched me from the doorframe, as if I was an alien performing some task she couldn’t understand. I had the feeling that someone had departed just ahead of me. Before I walked out of the door, I asked her the question I’d never asked before.

Is there someone else? I asked.

She looked me straight in the eye and said: Someone from long ago.

Not knowing where else to go, I made my way down to this pub near the station. I had been there with my suitcase all day, staring at my reflection in the mirror behind the amber glow of liqueurs, and this man I didn’t know, about forty years old, had taken the stool beside mine. He had a gentle and persuasive tone, an accent I couldn’t finger. I couldn’t remember exactly how long he had been talking to me.

‘You can do what you like,’ the storyteller hissed, staring at me desperately now. His face had slid back to what it was before, a needy, greedy, tormented face, burning with scorn and resentment. ‘Take me to an unlit place outside. You can batter me to death right there on the kerb, push me under a car. If you love her. If you can suffer enough. Tell her he’s really vanished now, disappeared for good.’

I closed my eyes and shut him out. I was thinking of the flight. That loud ascent into the air.

I opened my eyes. My reflection stared back. I looked like a different man.

I picked up my suitcase from where it lay and brought my feet down to the floor. I didn’t look at him again. Seconds later, I was gone.

Nights get dark in the valley, but the lights blaze on in this house of ours. We’re hooked up to the national grid but we still have frequent blackouts. When the power goes down we light paraffin lamps, greasy oil lanterns, thumb-printed candles with moth wings and bits of dead insects sunk into the wax. Solar lamps with a wan, sickly glow. Hungry kerosene torches. We throw all we can at the night. Everything’s blazing away.

The house is constructed of dark pine, with clapboard walls and a roof of tin. A veranda runs along three sides, with four wooden steps going up to the door, and a low oak bench with tree-stump legs, and the tangled remains of a hammock that looks like a long escaped-from web. That’s all there is. A box of light. Beyond this, the valley.

There’s nobody else around for miles.

We were building this place for years and years and years.

Lichens grow on the balcony rail, faint vomit-coloured patches like space photographs of dying constellations. One of the side walls has become covered with sponge-like moss. The corrugated grooves of the roof are clogged with rotten leaves, and pale fern-like tendrils have sprouted, trembling like antennae.

And around us the great silence of the woods, like the silence of a recently-departed mansion. I find myself listening to it at night.

If you listen closely, you can almost hear the thud of the last door as it closed. A foot scuffing the welcome mat. The soft click of the latch.

There’s nobody else now. Just you and me. It’s dark, but we keep the lights on.

The yellow light rushes over the lawn, to the edges of the brush we cut back. It throws spiked shadows across the grass, creates dark sides of pebbles and rocks like dark sides of the moon. Sometimes I carry the bench down there to the jagged frontier of the light. I sit and listen to the silence of the woods with the light tickling the back of my neck. Dipping my feet in the dark.

From here I can smell the cool smells of night, the dampness rising up from the earth. The silent weight of water in the leaves.

The light shines dully on the trunks of trees along the border of the woods. Fish-wet trunks parading into blackness. Sometimes I get out the halogen torch and sweep its beam across the trees, a two million candlepower searchlight punching a hole in the night. I pretend to be a museum nightwatchman checking for missing relics.

The trunks of the trees scan past like x-rays.

Here and there a single leaf is illuminated, shockingly defined.

Over there a clump of nettles, drooping listlessly. And over there, a nest of brambles with the good blackberries mostly gone.

The great silence of the woods, and beyond this, the valley.

It’s just you and me in the house. It wasn’t always this way.

I know you don’t like me to talk about this. About the others that were here.

‘I just don’t think of it as important,’ you say when I try to remind you.

Perhaps it is not. Nevertheless.

If you sit here, at the edge of the light, if you sit quietly, and look slowly, you will see that the blackness is not uniform. It has gradients and contours, dimensions of varying deepness. There are layers in the night, blacknesses behind blacknesses, pulling your vision through the leaves and ever deeper inwards. If you let your eyes be drawn this way, your pupils seeping with their own dark, if you follow the long curve of the valley rising up beyond the woods, then dimly, you can reconstruct the body of the mountain.

She’s up there somewhere, out of sight. Looking down on the valley.

‘There’s no-one there,’ you say to me.

Sometimes a thing is so far out of sight you must close your eyes to see it.

She’s up there, where the two slopes meet. At the narrow place, the windy place, the place where trees don’t grow.

Perhaps it’s an effect of the wind, funnelling in such a way. Some space the air forgot to fill. A shadow somehow left behind after its owner has gone.

Old Afarensis, bunched up against the cold. Gorse between her toes.

Down the wrong end of the telescope. On the other side of wind and rock and rain and layers of darkness.

Is she lonely, up there in the cold?

She was always lonely.

Can she see the lights of our house?

Our house is a dream she once had.

You stare at the black heap of the mountain, and perhaps you almost remember. You almost remember remembering. But then you hear a sound from indoors – the clunk of a plate on a table, the muttered voice of a radio – and you glance back towards the house. The yellow light behind the window. A kettle has just been boiled. It’s cold out here, and the grass is getting wet. The darkness has gone from your eyes. You take one last look at the mountain but forget what it was you were trying to remember, and now you are only looking the way a tourist takes a photograph.

So you get up and go back inside the house. Back to the lighted dream.

‘Forget about it,’ is what you say. ‘That was so long ago. She was here, and then she left, and she can’t come back.’

That night we eat dinner and watch a film, and step out for a smoke before bed. Darkness is total in the valley. There’s nothing to be seen.

But she was not the only one. There were others here too. They came later, and they stayed a long time. Some of them left quite recently.

‘No, they left long, long ago,’ you keep saying, with increasing irritation. ‘And none can come back, none of them.’

I’m not saying they can come back. I’m just saying they were here.

Africanus, he was here. Remember Africanus? It’s difficult, I’ll give you that. A shadow behind a shadow. We can hardly make him out at all, he’s only a feeling we once had, an impression left behind from something long forgotten. The taste of dust. Dry hissing grass. It makes the soles of your feet itch. What do you do with a feeling like that?

‘Do what you like,’ you say.

It’s tiring just to think of him. Walking, always walking.

You feel it after you’ve walked for miles, climbing a long hill whose crest endlessly recedes. About two thirds of the way up the slope, when the muscles in your legs begin to ache, and the ache spreads through the flesh and through the bone.

Or when it’s hot and you haven’t drunk all day. The memory of water.

He was here, that was him. That was Africanus. At some point, he walked too far. He walked right off the map and kept on going.

But by that time, others had come. And they kept on coming.

Habilis and Ergaster, they came. Embarrassing uncles with unfathomable habits. Leaving their chipped lumps of rock around the garden, in the house, under the floorboards. Discomforting piles of ashes in corners. Edges of flint you could test with your thumb, and never quite draw blood.

Sometimes we still find these items in drawers, underneath the forks and spoons. Brown stains on the balcony rails. Oddly smoothed pebbles.

They stayed here a long time, so long it seemed they would never be gone. But of course, they left too.

Erectus was here before we built the house. This was all his once, everything you can see, from one side of the valley to the other, the plunging gulf of air in between. He lived here for longer than any of the others, impossible distances of time, always a few steps ahead of the world. But the world caught him up.

He left a deep disturbance in the air. Something that perhaps can never be righted. I have visions of him. Drawing his knees up to his face and moaning, with chattering teeth. Jumping at shadows. A nervous wreck. Startling at sudden sounds. Always peering fearfully into the darkness behind doors. What was it that he thought he saw?

Perhaps it saw him too.

We can still see the path he took, off into the trees. It leads away from our house, meandering into the woods, as if he was blind or drunk or confused when he passed that way. It gradually narrows, becomes less distinct. You can follow it for a while until the undergrowth covers it up, the branches close on either side, and suddenly it’s not a path anymore, only a half-imagined gap between indistinguishable trees.

It’s a path that leads only to forgetting. I wouldn’t go down it too far.

‘He had to leave. There was no other way,’ you say, putting your arm around my waist.

I didn’t realise you were in the room. You startled me for a moment.

I grip your elbow with my hand, feeling the skin move over the bone as you pull me tighter. I put my arm around you too. Together we walk out to the veranda and sit on the step, and then you fetch some beer, and we talk a while and then we fall silent and later the sun goes down. It goes down and up and down and up, and the shadows fill the valley and empty and fill the valley and empty again, and we turn the electric lights on and off and on and off in this house of ours. And sometimes, because life is pleasant here, I forget the others.

The others don’t forget us, though.

We are a dream they once had.

Some afternoons, before evening comes, we do repairs on the house. It’s old, and there’s always something to mend. The moss has to be scrubbed off the walls. One of the steps leading up to the door has split, and needs replacing. On the veranda I measure the wood and cut a plank and sand it down, and then hammer it into place. The new step springs a little under my weight. The sawed wood looks too fresh, too bright, so I rub mud into the grain.

One day we paint all the doors in the house. Another we get on the roof with brooms and clear away the rotten leaves. I find a small grey stone up there, idly scratched with concentric grooves, which fits nicely in my palm. I carry it with me for half a day, and then toss it into the bushes.

Later I try to find it again, but sometimes these things can’t be found.

Heidelbergensis avoided the path that melts away into the trees. Perhaps she walked a little way down it, stooping and frowning, pushing back branches, and then changed her mind and turned around and came back to the clearing. She spent a long time digging holes in the ground, filling them with rocks and bones. Tramping down her own paths in the grass.

One of these paths leads to our door. The ground is flattened, a trace in the sunlight. You can still see it faintly. The grass doesn’t grow so high there, and the small flowers don’t grow at all.

‘We should lay stones down,’ you say from time to time, ‘so people don’t slip in the mud when it rains.’

‘We should put a proper fence up here,’ is another thing you say.

I suppose these things will happen. We don’t plan on leaving soon.

Sometimes I have problems sleeping at night. I wake suddenly at two or three in the morning with a sour taste in my mouth, almost a flavour of burning. I get the feeling I’ve forgotten to do something, and it troubles me. When this happens I leave the bed and wander through the smoke-black rooms. The smell of the house is different at night. The moonlight gleams off sharp things in the kitchen. I sit down at the table and drink coffee.

I try to think about what I’ve forgotten, but there’s no way to catch hold of it. Just a feeling of unease, somewhere between guilt and loss, that contracts and expands when I breathe, pushing up against me.

I get up to rinse out my cup at the sink, and raise my eyes to the dark window.

There’s a black shape standing there. Someone staring in.

I stare back, and together we wait, remaining absolutely still. I’m not sure if it can see me or not, motionless inside a dark room. We wait to see who moves first.

Eventually, we both do.

When I realise it’s my own reflection, I can’t divide the relief from the fear. For minutes on end I find myself unable to step away.

If I step away, I might disappear.

That was how it was with one of the last of the others to leave us here, the one who stayed until quite recently, despite what you say. The shadow presence in our house. Always in a different room, making the floorboards creak. We could hear him breathing through the walls, keeping in time with our own breaths. It was hard to escape the suspicion that every time we walked into a room, Neanderthal had just departed, rucking up a rug as he left or repositioning a table, picking objects up and putting them down in a slightly different place, mysteriously and subtly rearranging the planes of our existence.

It was a time of being watched, or the feeling of being watched. Always imagining eyelids blinking in the cracks of doors.

Thumbprints around the edges of mirrors. The sensation that something was always just outside your peripheral vision, moving when you turned your head, only definable by its absence.

It was like the high, electric whine that tells you a television is on, somewhere not too far away, even though the volume is down and you can’t hear a sound.

‘That was no way to live,’ you say. Your hands are worriedly doing up and undoing a single button on your sleeve.

It had you checking under the bed, throwing doors open, switching lights on.

‘Of course it made me nervous,’ you say. ‘Who wouldn’t feel nervous?’

I cannot clearly remember the first time we found ourselves in the same room, but we did come face to face, increasingly towards the end. Not quite acknowledging each other. I pretended to be engaged in some absorbing and important task, and then it struck me that he was probably doing the same. We were shy and wary, on opposite sides of a room that suddenly seemed too small, standing on the edge of the light. Like children caught in the indecision between joining one another’s game, and turning to run away.

We were never quite able to look at each other. It was embarrassing, somehow. To see the resemblance in each other’s faces. The sulky mouth and suspicious eyes. The same sheepish hunch. There was almost something unpleasant about it, an echo of revulsion.

But we were never entirely able to turn our backs on each other, either. We skirted along the walls like crabs, pretending not to notice.

And so we lived, and so we lived. I don’t want you to forget that.

‘It couldn’t go on,’ I hear you say. Your fingers are picking at your fingernails, scratching the backs of your hands, doing everything they possibly can to avoid being still.

‘It was all in the past,’ you say, chopping up meat and hurling pieces into the sizzling fat of a pan. Muscles work beneath your skin. Emotional flickers run over your face as if your skin is dancing.

‘Why do we have to do this again?’ You are furious now, seething through the house. ‘He went away. He’s dead, he’s dead. It happened, it happened, don’t look at me, don’t look at me like that, don’t look at me at all.’

Sometimes when you get like this you slam the door of the house and tear your way through the woods, ripping the leaves off trees. Sometimes you hit me or scratch at me for making you hurt this way. Sometimes you grab hold of me and crush me in your arms so hard I can feel the imprint of your body when finally you let me go, shivering and exhausted.

‘I’m alright now,’ you say afterwards, glassy-eyed over a bottle of wine. ‘Just one of those black moods, that’s all. Cabin fever. It gets to me sometimes, living out here. The back of beyond, nothing else around but woods and trees and pitch-black nights and no lights and no people. It’s so quiet, your thoughts go round and round, you can’t help getting crazy sometimes. Sometimes I feel so isolated. Sometimes I wish we weren’t so alone…’

And then you realise what you’re saying, and you pour more wine.

I will not ask you what happened back there, way back, in the rooms of our house.

So instead I lie awake at night, or sit drinking coffee at the kitchen table, waiting for shapes at the window. I close my eyes and try to find an image, a vision, an archetype.

I see either a stone hammer smashing a skull, or bodies writhing together.

The light is dim. The door is half open. I can’t make out if the naked bodies are coupling or killing each other.

Sometimes both at the same time, and that’s when I get the sour taste in my mouth, almost a flavour of burning.

However it happened, he vanished abruptly. That shadow presence was gone. Sometimes I think he took Erectus’ path, sloping off between the trees, cradling his bloodied head, and sometimes I think that perhaps he sidestepped into the grain of our house, gritting his teeth in the balcony rail, knocking inside wooden walls.

Last of all, little Floresiensis. Resilient as a cockroach. She had been living here all along, out of sight, too small to even notice. When finally she emerged from the hiding place where she’d squirrelled herself away, creeping out to peer and pry, at first we mistook her for a child. We couldn’t help laughing. You played a silly joke on her, putting your hand on her head so her flailing arms couldn’t reach, and then pushing her backwards onto the floor. She made no sound, but her eyes were tiny glittering balls of hate. After that she kept her distance, working herself into ever narrower places.

And then one day we woke up, and she too was gone.

I waited, expecting more to come.

To this day, they have not.

We have the whole place to ourselves. Just you and me.

‘We are all we need,’ you say, locking your fingers in mine.

Perhaps we are. Nevertheless.

Our house feels so empty.

So we tell stories to ourselves. We populate the empty air with goblins, trolls, leprechauns, ogres, imps, pixies, giants, dwarves, golems, yetis, bigfoots, yerens, almas, yowies, orang pendeks, ebu gogos, am fear liath mòrs, agogwes, aliens, androids. To chase away the loneliness, to fill this house in old Uncanny Valley.

But we don’t believe our own words anymore. The light’s too bright. There’s no-one there. It’s just you and me in this lonely Anthropocene.

Dubai demands hyperbole. It is the city with the world’s tallest tower, the world’s biggest shopping mall, the world’s largest per capita carbon footprint. To its admirers it stands as a beacon of pride and strength for the Arab world, a place that marries free trade and prosperity with Islamic values. To its detractors it embodies capitalism’s worst excesses, where the luxurious lifestyle of the rich depends upon the quasi-slavery of millions of migrant workers.

The plight of these migrants has received much media attention in recent years, especially after a damning Human Rights Watch report in 2006. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) continues to ban trade unions, and has been condemned for its system of indentured labour, under which migrants are legally bound to a single employer. Stories of passport confiscation, withheld wages and squalid living conditions have even appeared in the UAE press, despite the government’s strict control over media. Workers building the Burj Khalifa – the towering icon of Dubai’s ambition – on wages of just £2.84 a day, rioted in 2006, attracting international coverage.

During the economic downturn, migrant workers hit the news again as tens of thousands were shipped home following the crash of the construction industry, with many placed on ‘extended unpaid leave’ to avoid redundancy payments. Liberal western commentators gave ozymandian predictions of collapse: Simon Jenkins, writing in The Guardian, perhaps outdid them all with his visions of a future in which the towers of Dubai ‘will shed glass. Sand will drift round their trunkless legs … Gangs will seize the gated estates and random anarchy will rule the soulless boulevards’.

Yet despite the half-built skyscrapers and abandoned construction sites today, Dubai’s economy is rising again. And despite the widely publicised stories of labour abuses and degrading conditions, migrants continue to flock to the city, falling into the same patterns of debt and exploitation. They come mainly from India but also from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and the Philippines, doing everything from laying bricks to driving the wooden water taxis that shuttle across Dubai Creek. Working as gardeners, shop assistants, cleaners, drivers, cooks and housemaids, and labouring on construction sites in the 50°C desert heat, they continue to comprise over 80 per cent of the city’s population.

The labour camps in which they are housed – places like Al Quoz and Sonapur, a sprawling sub-city of 500,000 men, whose name in Hindi means ‘City of Gold’ – lie on the outskirts, far from the malls and luxury hotels, as well as the sensitive eyes of western expats. The surrounding desert is carpeted in rubbish, and regular sandstorms smother everything in choking yellow dust. Workers are crammed eight or ten to a room in barrack-like accommodation blocks, with poor sanitation and faulty air-conditioning. One man summed it up to me as: ‘we are living like sheep and goats’.

‘When I came here I was so excited’, said Guriqbal, a 20-year-old Punjabi working as a security guard. ‘I saw the clean streets and the big buildings, and I thought it was a beautiful city. But they drove me straight to this camp and now I am working 17 hours a day. They promised me 2,000 dirhams (£340) a month, but I only get 500 (£85). They fine me if I forget to shave, or go to work in a creased uniform. All my wages go on my debts. How can I send money home? I thought I would fulfil my dreams here, but my dreams have fallen apart.’

‘We signed a contract’, said Wija from Sri Lanka, ‘but we found the contract was different when we arrived. They gave me a different visa paper. My passport has been taken away. They are playing with us’.

The stories of the workers I met were variations on a theme, one I heard again and again in these bleak labour camps. Back home, unscrupulous recruitment agents promise lucrative jobs in the Gulf, charging anywhere from £1,000 to £3,000 for the visa processing fee. Most expect to pay off their loans after working for six months or so, and then begin sending money to their families. But on arrival in the UAE, they find that the jobs do not exist. Already deeply in debt to the agents, they have no option but to accept different positions, with lower rates of pay. Some are told to sign contracts written in Arabic, which they cannot understand. To further guarantee their compliance, the companies routinely confiscate their passports, charging exorbitant ‘processing fees’ if they want them back.

It’s essentially a three-way con, perpetrated between the recruitment agents, the companies and the UAE government. The agents exploit the migrant workers’ naivety to trick them into coming to Dubai, the companies exploit their powerlessness and lack of access to legal services, and the government – despite officially banning practices like passport confiscation – benefits from a limitless pool of cheap, expendable labour. Deprived of legal rights, trapped in debt and desperate to send money home, they have no choice but to stay and work, despite the demeaning conditions.

Even greater misery has been wrought by the economic crisis. In Satwa, a South Asian immigrant district, hundreds gather each morning by the roadside in the hope of being picked up for a day’s casual work. Their companies have not employed them for months, and the indentured labour system prevents them from finding other employers. Worse, many wages have been withheld since the global downturn hit; I was shown dozens of time sheets dating back six or seven months, which had yet to be paid.

On a rooftop within view of the glittering towers of the Financial Centre, I met a group of 20 Indian migrants sleeping rough under plastic sheets. Their washing was strung between satellite dishes, along with a few hopeful yellow hard hats, and they had built a crude brick stove to cook vegetables and rice. With no accommodation, jobs or passports, some had been stuck here for years, surviving only on charitable donations from an Indian businessman. These men were victims of the economic downturn and the UAE’s disregard for basic workers’ rights, but also, it seemed, of an astonishing lack of information back in their countries of origin. Surely older brothers and friends, having done their stints in Dubai, would have given some hint of the pitfalls that might await them?

On the other side of the Arabian Sea, I talked to Dr Irudaya Rajan, a migration expert at the Centre for Development Studies in Kerala, India. Kerala sends more migrants to the Gulf than anywhere else in the subcontinent; some towns and villages lose one man from every household. ‘Why do migrants keep on going? For prestige, not just money’, he said, explaining the powerful social and psychological factors at work. ‘There is huge social status attached to working in the UAE. Parents say “my son was in Dubai” – they do not know he was cleaning toilets there. The migrant often feels unable to tell his family of his position. When he comes home for a visit he dresses in a new suit, takes a taxi from the airport, spends his last rupees on jewellery, so everyone thinks he is rich. They never tell their real stories, because it is a humiliation. This is what perpetuates the dream.’

Along Kerala’s palm-fringed coast, a short drive from the capital Thiruvananthapuram, the lure of this dream is plain to see. Dilapidated fishing villages have incongruously sprouted modern villas, luridly painted in purple and pink, with tinted windows and new cars in their driveways. These houses, bought with UAE money before the Dubai bubble burst, stand as gleaming advertisements for the riches over the water.

As long as a visible minority return home richer than when they left, the majority of hopeful migrants will continue to flock to the ‘Dubai dream’. By the time they learn the economic reality of the labour trap behind it, it will be too late.

A short audio documentary compressing a three-hour fantasy board game into ten thrilling minutes. Warning: contains monsters. Second warning: extremely geeky.

Talisman (10 mins 39 secs)

Passengers for Estonia. A baggy face, marshmallow-jowled, with crease-lines like a cartoon cat. He seems upset he’s not allowed to take his souvenir 42” TV as hand luggage. A squat, shaved head and eyes like stones, gleaming dully on some beach where pine trees meet the sea. ‘Bring me back an estone from the estoney beaches of Estonia.’ Sandbars, ex-Soviet submarine stations. A line of pebbles waiting to roll back towards their misty coast. Two blonde girls jimmy the vending machine, and walk away triumphantly with two crisp packets each.

The approach to Tallinn is guarded by walls of heaped and dirty snow, battlements of frozen slush, bulldozed into pebble-dashed piles and left to freeze for winter. We walk from the airport to the old town, crossing gentle motorways with bulky-coated men. Abandoned at the side of the road, a bored boy squints from a burnt-out car through starburst windscreen glass. The old town rears its spires and walls. Thick-faced Russians with sausage fingers mumble for money in cobbled squares; they greet our refusals with a kind of bafflement.

A wooden house under snow in a fringe of pines. A plate of smoked fish, sprigs of dill. ‘I hope he does not frighten you,’ says Toomas as the dog walks in, a face like a de-tusked walrus, snorting with delight. It’s the least frightening thing I’ve ever seen. A silent TV shows Russian cartoons, intricate Slavic tablecloths whisked across the screen. ‘In Soviet times Finnish TV was our only window to the wider world,’ says Toomas over pickles and wine. The landscape dies outside the window. At night, Estonia becomes its own flag: black, white and blue.

This is the last of the frozen sea, a desert of refrozen chunks spotted with blue shadows, spreading whitely out to the horizon. Hulks of boats, abandoned cranes, an icebound submarine. Dilapidated wooden houses scattered under ice-furred trees; one red door in a green wall, facing the solid water. ‘In Cold War times, the sea was off limits. You might have been trying to escape, or send someone a message.’ Half a mile out, a man is walking, ink blot spreading from a fishing hole. He walks like a determined child, lugging his fish home.

We climb the steps of a vast Soviet architectural failure: monumental concrete pile hulking low against the sea, stepped like a Mayan pyramid, now half-buried in ice. This is the future of the past, the collapse of a distant civilisation on some snowbound planet. We struggle up brutalist slopes of ice, gaze down on graffitied walls emerging from snowdrifts six feet high. Glimpses through windows of abandoned halls, disused and decayed. Once party apparatchiks in hornrimmed glasses led foxcoated ladies from limousines, attending the gala performance of some Grand Concert of the People; now only twisted balcony rails and an empty helipad.

The walls of the house are grey-green, weather-bleached, in mud and snow. The high, sour smell of sheep’s wool permeates every room. Fox and raccoon furs luxuriate the inside walls. ‘These animals are easy to catch. I can run much faster than them, and they pretend to be dead when they’re afraid.’ The kitchen is all bright pine, afternoon light splashed across the table. The TV beams subtitled reruns of Heartbeat and Little House on the Prairie. The ample-fleshed and milk-fed family eat bowls of stew and honey cakes, pickled pumpkin, slabs of rye bread, blackcurrant jam and brain jelly. ‘It is mostly ears. Ears and noses, but mostly ears,’ says our host, pouring a glass of maple syrup and slicing a goat-meat sausage. In the barn, the herbivores roll their eyes at each other through the slats of their pens. The sheep watch the goats, the dog watches the sheep, and the cat ghosts whitely above them all like a visiting apparition. There is a feeling of earnest but mutual misunderstanding.

‘Are you interested in shotguns?’ he asks, exhibiting his two hunting rifles with telescopic sights, ‘the same caliber NATO use,’ in a child-proof safe in a secret cupboard of the house he built himself. ‘I also built this amp,’ he says, pumping up Guns N’ Roses so loud the walls of the house are shaking and the youngest child is covering his ears with his hands and screaming, actually screaming. ‘Real transistors,’ he says approvingly, giving me his glass-eyed stare. He shows us the radar system he uses (three days a Border Guard, four days a farmer), a map that tracks the cargo ships moving in Estonian waters. ‘Only merchant vessels shown here. Warships, you don’t see.’ And now a map of real-time flight paths, yellow swarms of tiny planes like flies over the Baltic. He scans Russia’s emptiness balefully. ‘The Russians don’t show their planes. This says there are none over Russia at all. How are we meant to believe this?’ Suspicion of Russia’s motives runs deep. First the Tsar, then the USSR. Down the road, drab Soviet blockhouses stand alongside Estonian farms. The Russians are gone – from the island, at least – but Russia will remain.

‘Are there wolves on the island?’ ‘At least one,’ Tiit replies. We learn that it crossed the frozen sea at the beginning of winter, twenty miles of open ice. In the museum is displayed the stuffed body of a wolf that terrorised the island in the 1960s, executed for its crimes, now the stuff of legend. Back in the city, we saw a bar with a sign depicting a naked girl clinging ecstatically to a wolf’s back. The name of the bar was Hell Hunt. ‘Does it mean Hell Hound?’ I asked, thinking of the German. ‘No, it means Gentle Wolf. Hell is Gentle, Hunt is Wolf,’ said Toomas, eating dumplings with wild mushroom sauce. ‘Here, we have much respect for wolves.’

This morning we went to the south of the island, where frozen marshland merges into frozen sea, white mist and sky, an empty world of honking geese and snow-snagged juniper groves. This year’s last wolf skulks somewhere here, peering from the boggy pines. When summer comes, it will be stranded here.

He gives us directions to the end of the island: a woodhouse man with a gnome-faced squint in yellow jumper and ancient dungarees, turning the map like a steering wheel in his thick-thumbed hands.

A whippet tail of pebble beach that shakes itself off into the Baltic Sea, bound about by ice on every side. The sugary crust collapses and crunches in crystals as we reach the tip – a cairn of rocks with a fishing float flag – milky slush, frogspawned with grit, the tail end of winter.

There is nothing everywhere. Curdled expanses of not-quite colour puddled with the sky. A world of icerose, eggshell grey, mysterious streaks of amber. Like walking in a salt desert, camels stranded on the horizon in the shape of swans.

And these are the last days of the freeze. Ruptured with refrozen cracks, the ice is unzipping itself from the land. Shelving, calving, with trembling lips, musically melting underfoot. Our boots on the brink of the first yellow pool, pebble-deep, stirred by the wind, like an arrow pointing out towards open water.

The lights of Helsinki are just visible on the far side of the darkening sea. After the sauna, we eat grilled sardines behind the plate glass of the art design house, watching an ink-black band of rain driving down from Scandinavia. Kristel’s great-granddad built a boat to smuggle spirits to the Swedish coast; her granddad later crossed this water to fight the Russians in the Winter War. Having fought off Russian occupation in Finland, he returned to find Russian occupation in his homeland. They sent him to Siberia for thirty-five years. Through the Cold War, this coastal region was a restricted border zone; you had to have permission to visit family and friends; the soldiers pointed guns at children swimming in the sea. Now, Kristel’s father has built this house overlooking the beach where he swam as a boy. The sand has been replaced by rushes; no-one quite knows why. He spends his retirement travelling and fishing. This winter, he kept the frozen sea clean, for his granddaughter to skate on.

The village is at the top of a mountain, threaded to the parched plains below by a winding road. The bus beetles back and forth, nosing its way upwards. It rattles like all its screws are loose. Its wheels spin madly in the mud. Panels flap and squeal.

The mountains are very damp and green, shrouded in a clammy mist from which protrude ragged trees with dark leaves and gleaming, sodden trunks.

You watch the greenery slide by outside the steamed-up windows.

‘Today is a feast,’ says the man next to you. He is wearing sunglasses and a leather hat and a pair of bright red trousers. ‘They will celebrate by killing bulls.’

‘How many bulls?’ you ask, thinking maybe five or six: surely enough to feed a small village.

‘Two hundred,’ grins the man. You assume he’s joking.

Alongside the road you see houses made of sticks, thatched with banana leaves. The condensed mist slides off the leaves, making them shine like metal.

As the bus nears the top of the mountain, the man sitting next to you takes a bottle of honey wine and offers you a swig. The bottle is shaped like an alchemist’s flask, a phial of liquid gold. It tastes of dead bees and faded sunflowers. The man swigs deep and slaps his knees and chuckles happily.

The bus disgorges its passengers in a lake of mud at the edge of a grassy field. The grass is the colour of wet moss and the sky is the colour of rain. Perhaps a thousand people stand around in small groups, wearing brightly coloured clothes, old suit jackets and checkered shirts and baseball caps and rubber boots and scarves and plastic sandals. Everyone is drinking beer and chewing unidentifiable grains from grubby newspaper cones. Children hop and squirm excitedly. There is an air of ditsy anticipation.

One very tall, very dark-skinned man wears a magnificent tunic patterned in red, yellow and black. Another wears a khaki trench-coat and peaked officer’s cap.

Both of these men – and others, you see – cradle long knives in their arms.

Now the bulls start to enter the field. They are led, by women mostly, with ropes tied around their horns. They come willingly, their faces docile, straining to grab clumps of grass as they go. If they sense something ominous in the air, none of them shows it.

The women laugh and call out to each other and wave and command the children.

There are a dozen bulls in the field, then fifty, then a hundred. A little mob gathers around each one, tapping its flanks and taking turns with the rope, as if welcoming it to the pasture.

The bulls are dun, soft browns and creams, all toffee and caramel.

They are horned like elegant demons. Something about the sheer number of bulls, and the sheer number of people, really brings across to you the difference between the species. The two-legged ones are us. The horned ones are them. The difference is irreconcilable.

Perhaps the starkness of this difference makes what is to happen easier to witness. Because you observe it as if in a dream, as if through a coloured fog.

When a critical mass of bulls has been reached, this is how it happens:

A man loops a rope through the bull’s front legs, and tugs the rope in a certain way that brings the legs together at the knees, and the bull topples heavily onto the grass with a surprised groan.

Another man leaps from the crowd, swinging a knife as long as his forearm, and falls upon the bull like a bird of prey.

You can’t see exactly what he does because he has his back to you, and excited spectators have surged around, but it looks like an act of great physical exertion, a back-and-forth sawing motion.

In seconds, the man leaps back up with a jubilant, agile hop. The crowd parts, and then you see the deep crimson gash he has made, a yawning chasm of red.

The bull then stumbles to its feet – the rope has been removed from its legs – and takes a few cautious steps towards the crowd. It knows that something has happened to it, that a profound and terrible change has been wrought upon its body, but can’t yet grasp what it is, or what it means.

Its head flops loosely on its half-severed neck. Bright blood bubbles from the wound in its throat: fresh blood from the heart, vital blood, life blood. It cascades frothingly down its legs, splattering the dull grass.

The bull staggers round drunkenly, a look of enormous resentment on its face. It knows a cruel trick has been played, a joke has gone too far; it looks like it still can’t quite believe anyone would do this to it.

The spectators are grinning, milling around, expecting something to happen.

The bull swings its head and charges the crowd. It charges in a futile rage, like a hurt child rushing his tormentors, who simply whoop and jump out of the way, thrilled at provoking the reaction. The momentum of the charge doesn’t last. Already the bull has lost too much blood, making it weak and clumsy. It drops to its knees and collapses on the grass, exhausted.

The bull’s body no longer works. You can see its profound confusion. Each powerful heave of its heart just propels more blood out onto the ground. Its throat has become a waterfall.

Its eyes roll around in bewilderment, its tongue flops uselessly. A pinkish foam spumes from its mouth. It looks like a fish dragged out onto land, drowning in the air.

This is happening everywhere. The soft earth thuds with collapsing bulls, as if bulls are falling out of the sky, jugulars burst on landing. Heads are lolling back and forth. Throats are flapping open. The field is soaked red, littered with corpses. It’s like a medieval battlefield.

The butchery begins forthwith. Four or five men to each bull, whickering away with knives, peeling off the rubbery sheet of the skin, smashing through the joints with axes, severing legs and horns and head, slicing sinew, parting bone, lopping off the meat. Within minutes the living bull has been reduced to a few neat piles, its various parts separated and sorted, laid out on banana leaves for everyone to see. You can browse through heaps of intestines, marbled in fatty blues and whites, admire the purpleness of the liver, the undersea shades of the brain. The bull has become a museum of itself. Everything’s on display.

Bulls are still traipsing into the field, tugging idly on their ropes, pulling against the weight of the women, dribbling green cud. They huff and blow their way through the crowd, plodding down the aisles of blood, apparently unconcerned.

There are no attempts at rebellion. Perhaps they are in awe at the sight. Perhaps they do not recognise death as we do. Perhaps they only see the green grass and smell the rainy sky.

A man uses the back of his sleeve to scrape bone powder off his axe. A boy in a torn tweed jacket runs past with a platter of trembling meat.

The blood sops beneath your feet as you wander from one bull pile to the next. The raw, severed heads look like slaughtered minotaurs.

They look like totems made from meat.

They look like skinned gargoyles.

You examine these images one by one. You take one image, have a look at it and put it back where it came from. Then you take another one and do the same with that. As if you are taking them out of a bag and turning them around in the light to see which way up they go.

They look like dogs that were boiled alive.

They look like thermograms of pain.

They look like the kinds of things you’d pull out after a nuclear bomb.

‘Eat!’ cries the man with red trousers. He has sought you out in the crowd, still clutching his golden potion. Between thumb and forefinger, like something he has carefully plucked out of the sea, he holds a cube of pink and glistening meat.

The meat is sliced fresh off the flanks. Everywhere people are lopping off chunks and popping them in their mouths.

Its pinkness seems somehow indecent. You put it in your mouth, and start to chew.

You think about a race of cream-skinned demons wearing antlered battle-crowns, pantaloons of excrement, shoes of rounded bone.

No hot blood runs down your chin. Its taste is bland and inoffensive, a little bit like sushi.

You think about the aftermath of wars. Defensive longhouses on stilts, villages walled with dark, wet stones, the stones gleaming in the light as the rain comes sweeping from the south, across untravelled miles.

‘This will make you very strong.’ The man is watching happily and taking hits from his flask of liquid bees.

The meat is difficult to break down. The muscle is elastic, resistant to all changes.

You think about defeated soldiers dragging their feet across trampled grass, shrugging to keep the flies away, roped like slaves, through crowds of cheering children.

Everyone is wildly drunk, drunk on meat and gorged on wine and staggering in a tawdry, coloured daze.

You think about temples, sacrifice pits, altar stones, and kindling.

Eventually, you manage to swallow. It slides down mostly intact. You can feel it sitting inside you, a reluctant presence.

Do gobbets of strength surge through your cells? Does power flood your body?

The demon race lies hacked and chunked in a sodden field.

The road is dribbling back down the mountain, and your bus is leaving.

When life on the planet became too unpleasant, its inhabitants fled to other worlds. Some left as nations, bearing flags, in fleets of ships that filled the sky like sparks from a kicked-up fire. Some left in hordes, out for plunder, but lost their bearings in the deafening upthrust of takeoff. Some left in sects, covering their ships in idols that burnt off as they passed through the atmosphere. Some left in political factions, chanting slogans at the stars, which diminished into atonal warbles the further out they travelled. Some left gallantly, swaggering through orbit, mistaking empty space for freedom. Some slunk away ashamed, taking cover behind new moons where their old world wouldn’t see them. Some left with their families and bickered over rations. Some left with other people’s wives or husbands, venturing into erotic unknowns. Some stragglers left in twos and threes, sharing their stasis pods with strangers. Some lonely ones left with their cats and a lifetime’s supply of kibbles. Some left in cacophonous multitudes, some left in nervous swarms. Some just wandered out alone, their heads full of nothing.

Some settled on a mountainous world where the gravity was askew, and grew enormous bulbous heads and feet that trailed like weeds. Some settled on a world with colours none had ever seen before, and fell prey to violent new emotions and breakdowns of rational thought. Some settled on a putrescent planet whose core was a decaying ball, and their nostrils covered over with protective films. Some settled on a gas giant, and developed silver-winged balloons that billowed through the acid-green murk as if across an ocean. Some settled on a world with nine suns, and were followed by nine shadows. Some settled on a world of ash that plumed high above their heads, and communicated by anonymous choking. Some settled on a world of rain, where words like ‘dry’ and ‘desiccation’ vanished from their language. Some settled on a world of ice, and evolved to be shy and strange. Some settled across an asteroid belt, connecting their disparate chunks of rock with a perilous system of ladders. Some wild ones harnessed meteorites, and rode them bareback through the void. Some came across a space-capsule pointlessly orbiting a frozen sun, and lived their lives in nostalgic yearning for the photographs it contained. Some tuned in to old radio waves long-ago broadcast from their world, thought them transmissions from unknown aggressors, and scattered in terror through space. Some learned to live on suns, in protective bubbles of supercooled steel, and grew to look like furious insects with burnt matchstick heads. Some settled inside a black hole, and forgot themselves. Some didn’t settle at all, but wandered forever between the stars in the hope of something better.

Some died in chemical reactions, melting into fantastical sludge that congealed into outlandish stalagmites. Some died in brilliant sublimations, bursting into light. Some spun freezing through the vacuum, watching the breath inside their visors bloom into flowers of ice. Some turned into fiery comets whose trails were the memories of former loves. Some were beaten to death by space-brutes. Some were bewitched by galactic perverts with thin lips and quivering fingers. Some were absorbed by sentient gases. Some wandered into perilous frequencies, and became pure sound. Some comprised the dust of new worlds. Some grew huge and sad, like clouds. Some giggled themselves to atoms.

The planet they had originally left shrivelled up like an old tangerine. Some ventured back, after countless years, but didn’t linger long.

1.

Carlos Ustanza seized power in 1977. His first act as ruler was to demand that every citizen in the country – a population of 16 million – send him a signed postcard swearing a personal oath of loyalty to his regime. The resulting rush on postcards caused the collapse of the postal service, massively inflated the price of stamps, and brought chaos to transport and infrastructure. Ustanza retracted his demand, but riots had broken out in the cities. He hung onto power for another three weeks, barricaded inside the heavily-fortified Grand Palace of the People, before fleeing the country by helicopter with an estimated $12 million from the national coffers.

2.

Major Cedric ‘Uncle Bobo’ Robinson carried an emerald-encrusted pistol and travelled in a fleet of identical gold Rolls Royces. Increasingly paranoid about being assassinated, he employed around 200 body doubles, many of whom endured cosmetic surgery to look more like him. These doubles were also rigorously trained in acting and impersonation in order to mimic their leader perfectly. During the October Troubles in 1986, several dozen of these doppelgangers took to the stage in the National Congress, all claiming that they were the real Uncle Bobo. The resulting constitutional crisis paralysed the government, with different units of the army swearing loyalty to different Bobos, while the real one was allegedly beaten to death by a gang of his own lookalikes. One week later, rebels seized the capital and executed them all.

3.

During Colonel Ragamar Danik’s brutal nineteen-year reign, hundreds of thousands of civilians were murdered for perceived slights to his regime. He ordered houses to be burned, villages to be demolished and even the household pets of dissidents publicly executed. History books were rewritten, accrediting great historical advances like the discovery of gravity to members of his own family, while he himself claimed credit for inventing submarines, electromagnetism and the internet. He moved his capital five times, eventually constructing a new city named after his mother, Marigaya, and renamed the days of the week after his seven children. Danik survived numerous attempts on his life, including the poisoning of his private swimming pool with hydrochloric acid, each of which was punished with savage reprisals against the civilian population. He died at the age of sixty two, after falling down the stairs.

4.

Despite ruling over a landlocked country, Ungman Razalamovic was obsessed with creating a powerful navy and fostering a strong nautical tradition, which he saw as the keys to national greatness. Against the recommendation of advisers, he ordered vast tracts of land to be flooded to create an inland sea, the water of which was salinated by salt sprayed from converted crop-duster planes. The artificial ‘Ungman Sea’ destroyed the nation’s agricultural base, resulting in a disastrous famine in which thousands are thought to have died. Not to be deterred from his dream, Razalamovic launched a fleet of battleships and adopted the title of Grand-Admiral, but the ships were only afloat for a year before the sea evaporated, leaving them permanently beached in a salt-polluted wasteland. Razalamovic ended his days in prison, senile and depressed.

5.

Crown Prince Teoh Rao Khanthara, better known as ‘Little Rao,’ inherited power at the age of fourteen upon the death of his father. For the next five years he was held a virtual prisoner, the country governed by a council comprised of senior army officers, but on the morning of his nineteenth birthday he had its members thrown in prison, and assumed absolute power. They were later executed by being wrapped in silk sheets and thrown from the palace walls. Little Rao’s first acts were magnanimous, including a massive redistribution of land and ending the unpopular cockfighting ban, which earned him the lifelong support of the rural poor. Elevated to god-like status by a powerful personality cult, he continued to be viewed as a friend to the poor even as his expenditure – most notoriously his extravagant collection of slippers, bejewelled and soled in gold – bankrupted the nation. To mark his thirtieth birthday he commissioned a giant marble bas-relief depicting the Last Supper, with himself carved in place of Christ and Napoleon, Mao, Alexander the Great, Gaddafi and Uncle Bobo among his disciples.

6.

In 1975, with his impoverished and war-torn nation suffering an unprecedented typhoid epidemic, ethnic violence in the south, and the failure of its melon crop, Comrade General Job Mawungi declared a national purge of vermin, offering $1 for every rat tail handed in. The policy had a disastrous effect, as lucrative rat-breeding farms sprung up in towns and cities across the country, tails changed hands on the black market in what became known as the ‘rat economy,’ and the rat population surged. Mawungi attempted to bolster his campaign by drowning thirty rats in a barrel on live television, for which he was roundly ridiculed. The flood of rats quickly led to an outbreak of bubonic plague, and the regime’s collapse.

7.

Doctor Vadim Tambur Cescu, the son of a village blacksmith, ruled for almost fifteen years at the head of his National Folk and Freedom Unity League. His personal image was consciously modelled after the folk hero Bandau Boc: he addressed political rallies in a peasant’s woollen hat, and often rode a black mule, a traditional symbol of fortitude and strength. His party adopted its iconography from an imagined, semi-mythical version of the country’s history, creating a cult of physical labour, folk music and organic food. In his promotion of rural values, Cescu appeared on state television heavily-stubbled and swinging an axe, harvesting fields of hay, and hunting wolves. His elite bodyguard was handpicked from a mountain village near his home, which he believed had the cleanest air and best soil in the country. He met his end in 1979 when one of these same bodyguards, for reasons that remain unknown, cut his throat with a traditional scythe for harvesting bulgar wheat.

8.

When rebels broke down the doors of the palace of President Zoah Zam Mallam, they documented its lavish interiors with photographs and on film. The deeply-religious, conservative nation was stunned to see what lay behind the austere and fortress-like walls of the building known only as ‘The Sand House.’ Gold-plated basilisks and sphinxes crowded the entrance hall, waterfalls cascaded either side of the massive marble staircase, and the corridors were carpeted in orchids. There were fifty-seven bedrooms, many of which were connected by hidden passageways, and in a room marked ‘Armoury’ was stored a formidable collection of sex toys. Even more shocking was the discovery of floor-to-ceiling murals depicting pornographic fantasy artwork: centaurs mounting unicorns, copulating cherubim, and an elf-maiden performing fellatio on a dragon. The palace was stripped, its contents auctioned, and the artwork sold to collectors. Zam Mallam was never found, though he was rumoured to have escaped through a network of secret tunnels.

9.

President Sada Um Emit spoke at the United Nations General Assembly in 1989. In his speech, which lasted a total of two hours and nineteen minutes, he launched attacks on every one of the member states represented in the hall, working his way methodically down from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. His invective ranged from blistering tirades against imperialism and war to crude racial stereotyping and denunciation of various cuisines, prompting walk-outs from every one of the delegates whose countries he insulted. He spent the last ten minutes of his speech abusing the citizens of his own country, saving the worst opprobrium for close family members. This prompted a walk-out from his own delegate, who happened to be his brother-in-law. By the end, Um Emit stood alone in the empty assembly hall. He was observed to be trembling, and his face was flecked with foam. Then he drew a hidden pistol from his pocket, put it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

10.

‘Emperor’ Maxwell Silius Carver ruled for only seven months before being forced from power in a bloodless coup. He returned from exile one year later, dressed in military regalia and medals he appeared to have made himself, strode into the Congress building and attempted to eject the new president from his chair. After one week’s imprisonment, he appeared on a television chat show announcing he would now be known as Emperor in Perpetuity and Much-Loved Father of the Nation, returning to Congress the very next day to demand allegiance. Over the course of the next few years he was forcibly removed from the building no fewer than fifteen times, imprisoned for a total of seven months, and forced to undergo several mock executions, which he endured stoically. Eventually, the government gave up fighting his delusions. They let him have a seat in Congress, as well as a special hat, and members of the public greeted him with an elaborate salute of his own design. He became a popular patriotic symbol, tramping the streets of the capital city issuing proclamations and decrees, and paid for his meals in restaurants by dispensing homemade banknotes, which could later be sold to tourists. When he died, aged eighty four, ten thousand people attended his funeral. A statue of him was later erected in the grounds of the Congress building, mounted on a lion and staring westwards, into the setting sun.

—

‘Despots’ is available as a hand-stitched book, for the price of only £5. Copies are made to order – please contact me here.

An audio portrait of my granddad Herbie. (Seen here with my dad, Ron. Actually, neither are perverts.)

herbie-kitty-cotswolds.mp3 (16 mins 50 secs)

A spoken word track based on this story. Warning: contains nauseating sound effects.

Loss-Soup.mp3 (3 mins 21 secs)

A short and melancholy spoken word piece based on this story.

Notes-on-Stockholm-Devils.mp3 (3 mins 57 secs)

The song ‘Devils’ is written and performed by Chris Rusbridge of Apple of my Eye.

On my first day in Dubai, not yet comprehending its size, I attempted to walk from Dubai Creek – where it’s still possible to see old stone buildings and wooden dhows moored along the quays – to the skyscrapers of Marina, the expat enclave down the coast. It turned out to be fourteen miles distant, and I was soon exhausted. I found myself tramping beside a motorway, pouring with sweat in the desert heat. The motorway verges were lined with greenery, palm trees and banks of purple flowers, kept alive only by constant irrigation with desalinated water from the Arabian Sea. Stopping for breath along the way, I grubbed up a patch of grass with my shoe. Its roots tore easily away; there was no topsoil, no earth. Underneath was only desert sand.

The symbol of ‘a city built on sand’ has become one of Dubai’s many clichés, a stock retort of western critics condemning its unsustainability, its sheer unnaturalness. But I find this image as hard to avoid, when writing about Dubai, as the use of hyperbole. Dubai demands superlatives: it’s the city with the world’s tallest skyscraper, the world’s biggest shopping mall, the world’s only seven-star hotel, the world’s largest per capita carbon footprint. Add to that the manmade islands, the indoor ski-slope, the ten tonnes of gold that can be found, apocryphally, at any one time in its Gold Souk, and the city seems to turn – depending on one’s point of view – into either a modern fairytale kingdom or a consumerist nightmare.

It’s a place that polarises opinion, driving its pro and anti camps into fits of rhetoric. To its admirers, it stands as a beacon of hope and strength for the Arab world, a society that seeks to marry free trade and prosperity with Islamic values. ‘Where Vision Inspires Humanity,’ gasps the utopian slogan of Nakheel Properties, the construction firm behind some of its most bombastic developments (manmade islands among them). Such obsequious corporate literature peddles Dubai as nothing less than a testament to human ambition; and, of course, to the beneficence of its ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.

To Dubai’s detractors, on the other hand, it embodies capitalism’s worst excesses, where the decadent lifestyle of the super-rich depends upon the quasi-slavery of millions of migrant workers. Western liberals take delight in prophesying its imminent collapse; Simon Jenkins perhaps outdid them all with his apocalyptic vision of a future in which the towers of Dubai ‘will shed glass. Sand will drift round their trunkless legs. Animals will inhabit their basements… Gangs will seize the gated estates and random anarchy will rule the soulless boulevards.’

It’s almost impossible to visit such a place, having read such divergent and often downright hysterical views, with an open mind or sense of balance. I’ll admit that I went expecting the worst, partly because of the project that took me there: a radio programme about the lives of the South Indian migrant workers who make up the bulk of the city’s workforce, and how they have suffered in the economic crisis that sunk the construction industry. But I was anxious to avoid the Ozymandius metaphors, the overinflated doom-mongering that distorts so much of the debate. I wanted to keep in mind that this was a real city, in which real people lived and worked, and not a metaphor.

A few days after my motorway tramp, I covered the distance back to Marina in just over half an hour, skimming above the traffic-choked roads in an air-conditioned skytrain. From the elevated rails of the metro’s Red Line, which runs equidistantly between the Arabian Sea and the desert, I got my first glimpse of the city’s extremes. The line dips underneath Dubai Creek to surface south of Port Rashid, the gigantic commercial port with which Dubai first sold itself as a hub of global trade. It skims the low-rise sprawl of Satwa, a poor South Asian immigrant district, and snakes its way south of Jumeirah, where rich expats live in luxury villas spreading block by block towards the beach, each complete with its swimming pool and obligatory Filipina housemaid. Dimly visible to the south, looming through a yellow haze, are the Al Quoz Industrial Areas (1, 2, 3 and 4), a vast expanse of industrial plants and barrack-like labour camps that house hundreds of thousands of migrant workers. Finally come the skyscrapers of Marina – Canary Wharf in the sun – and opposite them the gated communities known simply as ‘Springs’ and ‘Meadows.’

This metro journey is a tour of the icons of Dubai’s excess, the totems of its dizzying expansion: from Dubai Mall, the biggest in the world, and the opulent Mall of the Emirates, which houses the famous ski-slope, to a glimpse of the sail-shaped Burj Al Arab on its artificial island – described by Will Self as ‘a great white grub crawling up into the heavens’ – and, of course, the jagged, tapering spike of the Burj Khalifa, towering impossibly tall, almost one kilometre, over everything.

But for me, the most unbelievable sight was one that no guidebook mentions. For minutes on end, through the train’s lefthand window, passengers can gaze upon mile after mile of construction projects frozen by the economic crisis; a necropolis of half-finished skyscrapers, abandoned before they could be completed, receding into the murk of the ruined desert. I was astounded by their scale, their sheer dystopian weirdness. These towers mark the decline in Dubai’s fortunes, the detritus left behind when the property bubble burst. It was impossible not to leap at metaphor, if only as a coping mechanism: the dire omens of collapse, of Ozymandius and the Tower of Babel, all came rushing back.

Of course, in the jargon of Dubai’s rulers, none of these projects are abandoned, merely ‘suspended.’ Just as the tens of thousands of workers who lost their jobs have not been laid off, but placed on ‘temporary leave.’ These euphemisms become meaningless when you see evidence like this: concrete, in both senses of the word.

In the month and a half I was there, I spent a long time looking at the map. You can learn a lot about Dubai from studying the names. Alongside the Arabic names of older districts (Al Rigga, Karama, Deira, Umm Suqeim), can be found Dubai Media City, Dubai Silicon Oasis, Culture Village, Arabian Ranches and Dubai Motor City. It gets weirder: Sahara Kingdom, Living Legends, Islamic Culture & Science World, Beauty Land, and – my favourite – Falcon City of Wonders. There’s even a bay called Business Bay. Many of these developments are marked with the ubiquitous (u/c) – ‘under construction’ – a reminder that this city was, until the global downturn hit, in a state of constant flux and expansion.

Every time I saw this map, I thought of the computer game SimCity, in which, which godlike omnipotence, you build your metropolis from scratch – complete with parks and sewage systems, stadiums and industrial zones – plonked down, as if from the sky, on an empty wasteland. Similarly, Dubai is a city conceived of and designed from the top, in line with the famous ‘vision’ of its ruling family. ‘In the late 1950s, the late Sheikh Rasheed bin Saeed Al Maktoum stood in Dubai’s desert and imagined a great city rising from the sand,’ as it goes in Nakheel’s blurb. ‘In the late 1990s, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum continued his father’s legacy.’

As a historical achievement – no matter to which camp you belong – there’s no denying that Dubai’s growth is pretty extraordinary. I didn’t quite realise how extraordinary until I saw some archive photos from the 1960s. They showed a town of squat, mud-walled houses clustered along the waterway, a desolate trading outpost on the edge of a vast desert. There were only a few stone buildings – the ruler’s palace, some crumbling watchtowers – most of the population lived in traditional barasti houses constructed from palm fronds. People lived by pearl diving and fishing. Inland transport was by camel. There were no schools, hospitals, roads. Britain effectively kept its protectorate – along with the other ‘Trucial States’ that would merge, in 1971, into the United Arab Emirates – in a condition of stultifying poverty.

As the UAE formed a nation, oil money flooded the region. Neighbouring Abu Dhabi – the largest and richest of the seven emirates, which became the country’s capital – was found to possess almost 10% of the world’s proven reserves. By an unlucky twist of geography, Dubai’s own oil-wells yielded little; so the Al Maktoum family cannily diversified into tourism, property and financial services, transforming their city into a global business centre. The strategy worked astoundingly well: Dubai doubled, tripled, quadrupled, blooming down the coast. Within a couple of generations, the local Arab population went from scraping a meagre existence in one of the harshest environments on Earth to having more money than they could have possibly imagined. From being a marginalised population on the forgotten fringe of Arabia, they were transformed into ultra-wealthy, globalised citizens of the world. The palm-frond houses were swept away, along with most of the kingdom’s culture. Older Emiratis who remember travelling by camel as children now take trips in yachts and private jets.

The unprecedented mushrooming of wealth explains the nouveau riche aspect to the city’s character. There was more money than anyone knew what to do with. When you suddenly find yourself rich beyond your wildest dreams, why not build the tallest tower in the world, or make it snow in the desert? Why not build an archipelago of islands in the shape of the world’s continents? It also explains, I can’t help thinking, the resentment clearly felt by some of Dubai’s critics. As with lottery winners, Russian oligarchs, or Spanish-style villas on the west coast of Ireland, there’s a distinctly snobbish air to much anti-Dubai rhetoric, which fixates on its loudness, its crassness, its tackiness, its poor taste. I’ve not heard a single western reporter comment on one of the most remarkable aspects of the UAE’s wealth: the fact that they actually managed to keep the money for themselves. Normally, when a poor, semi-literate and deeply traditional tribal society finds vast amounts of oil on its territory, it isn’t long before western companies swoop in and start siphoning it off, leaving its population with nothing; witness the chronic poverty of the oil-rich Niger Delta. But the Emiratis stayed on top, avoiding being disempowered or exploited, skilfully diverting the profits into their own pockets.

Unfortunately, they achieved this by simply exploiting someone else. Migrant workers were imported in their millions to fill the demands of the growing city, doing everything from building, cleaning, cooking, waitering and gardening to driving the wooden water taxis that shuttle across Dubai Creek. So many immigrants were shipped in that foreigners soon unnumbered native Emiratis. Today, only 17% of the population are UAE nationals. Western expats, for all their showiness, comprise under 5%. The rest – the vast majority – come from various parts of South Asia, predominantly India.

This South Asian workforce is carefully sequestered, pigeon-holed along racial lines, with workers of different nationalities slotted neatly into different sectors. It’s a bit like the joke about Heaven in which the policemen are all British, the cooks Italian, the lovers French and the engineers German; in Sheikh Mohammed’s paradise, the shop assistants are Filipino, the housemaids Filipina, the taxi drivers Pakistani, and the construction workers and labourers Indian, Bangladeshi, Nepalese and Sri Lankan.

These were some of the people I met in the course of making my radio programme. The recording took me far from Jumeirah and the bubbling fountains of Marina, away from the irrigated verges and air-conditioned shopping ‘experiences,’ and into the sprawling labour camps that lie on the desolate fringes of the city. This is a world seldom seen by visitors. Dubai’s migrant workers are housed in the desert, far from sensitive westerners’ eyes, crammed eight or ten to a room in barrack-like accommodation blocks from which they are cattle-trucked every morning to their construction sites. Swirled about by choking yellow dust, littered with rubbish, stinking of sewage and hammered incessantly by the sun, this is what lies behind Dubai’s facade.

Gaining access to this world was surprisingly easy – I went in and out by bus and taxi – despite the warnings I’d been given about journalists arrested for trespass, interrogated by the security police, in some cases even deported. Having been stung by damning reports from Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, the UAE government is acutely sensitive to criticism of how it treats its workforce. I was even more surprised at how willing the workers were to talk to me, given the risks they faced in speaking out against their employers. But it seemed their situations were so dismal, their disillusionment so great, they felt they had little to lose in telling their stories.

Their stories were all variations on a theme, which runs roughly like this: first, they are recruited by agents who come to their villages back home, promising them lucrative jobs in the Gulf, with attractive salaries and excellent living conditions. Poorly-educated and gullible, they jump at what seems to be a dream offer. In order to get to the UAE they take out loans to pay for visas and plane tickets, a debt they are told they can easily clear, despite the high rates of interest. But on arrival in Dubai, they find that the promised jobs do not exist. Instead, they must accept longer hours, worse conditions and lower rates of pay. Some are told to sign documents written in Arabic, which they don’t understand. To further guarantee their compliance the companies confiscate their passports, charging exorbitant ‘processing fees’ if they want them back.

It’s essentially a three-way con, perpetuated between the recruitment agents, the companies and the government. The agents trick them into coming to Dubai, the companies exploit their powerlessness, and the government – despite officially frowning on practices like passport confiscation – benefits from a limitless pool of cheap, expendable labour. Deprived of rights, trapped in debt, and still desperate to send money home, migrants have no choice but to work the required eleven or twelve hours a day, six days a week, for years.

Things have got even worse since the property bubble burst. In the labour camps of Al Quoz and Sonapur – a sprawling slum-city of 500,000 men, whose name in Hindi means ‘City of Gold’ – I saw the human fallout from those eerie miles of abandoned skyscrapers glimpsed from the train. When the global downturn hit, many construction firms went bankrupt and stopped paying wages. Dozens of men showed me time-sheets for work they had never been paid for. But under the strict terms of their visas, migrants are bound to the company that hires them – a system of indentured labour that human rights groups call modern slavery – preventing them from seeking employment anywhere else in the country.

On a rooftop in the district of Satwa, within view of the glittering towers of Financial Centre and the Burj Khalifa, I met a group of Indian men sleeping rough under plastic sheets. Their washing was strung between satellite dishes, along with a few hopeful yellow hardhats, and they had built a crude stove of bricks to cook vegetables and rice. With no home, no jobs, no passports, no visas, not even money to buy food – they survived on weekly donations from a charitable Indian businessman – these men were at the bottom of the bottom of the pile. Some had been stuck here for years, far from their wives and families. They could see no possibility of ever getting home.

Once I had caught a glimpse of the world that exists beneath Dubai’s shiny surface, it started to become more and more apparent. Where before my eyes had been drawn to the ludicrous buildings looming above me, now I began to notice the huddled forms of men sleeping in car-parks, in empty lots, in the shadows of flyovers, creeping across the lawns of public parks after the sun went down. This is Dubai’s silent population, one that the westerners living here train themselves not to notice.

They must also train themselves not to listen, and not to ask awkward questions. Every time I took a taxi, I would ask, fairly innocuously, what the driver thought of Dubai. At first they were normally reticent, or else unconvincingly upbeat, but after a few minutes’ conversation they became more candid. All of them told a similar story. None were happy here. The economy was down, wages were bad, they wanted to go home. They worked up to fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, and were fined if they turned up for duty unshaved or wearing a creased uniform. They were humiliated daily, bossed about, bullied, treated as inferiors. But, just like the construction workers, there was nothing they could do about it. They had no rights. They were mired in debt. All they could do was keep working.

Amongst these stories of everyday misery were ones of greater darkness. An Indian charity worker broke down and wept as he described the suffering he’d seen: workers crippled for life on construction sites and then left to fend for themselves, or else sent home with compensation so meagre it was simply insulting. In a safehouse run by a foreign embassy, I met a twenty-one year-old housemaid whose employer had repeatedly raped her. She’d eventually escaped and crossed the city barefoot, and was now begging her embassy to give her a flight back home. Unbelievably, she faced arrest herself for committing the migrant’s cardinal sin: breaking the terms of her contract by running away.

Stories like this are depressingly common. Exploitation is embedded in the system, and so many housemaids get raped it almost seems part of the job description. These abuses seem to stem from an attitude that regards migrant workers, both male and female, as the employer’s personal property. Perhaps it’s rooted in slavery, but, although slavery has a long history in this part of the world, it’s not confined to the Emiratis; the companies that humiliate their workers, and the employers who rape their housemaids, come from all over the globe, including Europe and America.

So what about the expats, the ‘Jumeirah Janes,’ whose glamorous lives in the sun depend upon this exploitation? By all rights they should be having a high old time, enjoying their tax-free shopping in the malls, living it up in the bars and nightclubs, on the beaches and world-class golf courses, downing cocktails at the yacht club. I suppose some of them are. They must be, or they wouldn’t stay. I visited a British couple in Springs, the gated community near Marina, who seemed to be doing well for themselves: making far more money than they could at home, with a luxury villa and a swimming pool, and sunshine twelve months of the year. The only problem, they complained, was the lack of culture.

But the other young professionals I met – I stayed, for a few nights at a time, with various expats through the CouchSurfing website – seemed to be living rather lonely lives, beneath the luxury. They were only there to make money; when their visas expired, they would leave. The UAE’s strict immigration laws make citizenship impossible, and only those in higher income brackets get to bring their families. This isn’t a place where people come to start a new life, to lay down roots, to establish a lasting community. Predictably, this results in a total lack of community feeling. Margaret Thatcher would have understood Dubai: there is no such thing as society here. It’s reflected in the very design of the city, in which the concept of public space is replaced by that of the mall. People are not citizens, but consumers.

And what of the Emiratis themselves? To be honest, I can’t really say. In the six weeks I was there, I never had a conversation with one; I spoke to westerners who’d lived there for years, and got no closer than me. I glimpsed them only occasionally: strangely ethereal-looking beings floating over polished floors, the men in spotlessly white dishdashas and the women clad in black abayas revealing only eyes. Writing this, I realise I am straying back towards the unreal, describing the city’s ruling class in literally black and white terms. I can only say that this is how it genuinely felt. In any society, the extremely wealthy have the same untouchable quality, an aura of superiority that keeps them aloof and apart. Aristocrats don’t mix with the rabble, or they wouldn’t be aristocrats. The Emirati population seem to regard the foreigners in their city as a regrettable, but unavoidable, consequence of wealth; a population to be tolerated – and, as I learned, exploited – rather than befriended or engaged with.

The day before I left Dubai – flying to Kerala in South India to hear the stories of ex-migrant workers on the other side of the Arabian Sea – I booked my elevator ride to the top of the Burj Khalifa. Actually, it wasn’t the top, but from the 124th floor, 1,500 feet into the sky, it still felt like looking down from the window of an aeroplane. From this height the city looked like an architect’s model. There were the construction sites below, enormous pits containing the foundations of new skyscrapers, though the sweating, blue-boiler-suited workers were invisible from here. There was the grubby sprawl of Satwa, and I wondered on which of those tiny rooftops the men I’d met were sleeping on, and how many more like them might be down there somewhere. There was the haze of the desert beyond, a mess of concrete, pylons, roads, and behind me an area marked on the map as Meydan Godolphin River City (u/c). Straight ahead, off the coast, were scattered the manmade islands of The World, which resembled little more than patches of mould floating in the sea.

I traced the routes of the journeys I’d made, criss-crossing the city by bus, taxi, metro and on foot. I’d seen many sides of it, but couldn’t reconcile them in my mind into anything approaching a whole. After all I’d experienced and everyone I’d talked to, Dubai still felt entirely alien to me, just as unreal as before.

But how could this place not feel unreal? A contrived and artificial city, built according to the whims of a billionaire sheikh, devoid of cohesion or community, inhabited by a transient population, the vast majority of which is kept carefully out of sight? Like the grass beside the motorway, the city’s residents have no roots. They are only able to exist here with the artificial irrigation of money, and when the money dries up, they will wither away.

And so I return to that first image: a city built on sand. It may be hackneyed, overused, but I can find no better description. This is why it’s so hard to write about Dubai, to find a reality independent of what previous commentators have said. It’s all there, just as they say it is: the riches and the poverty, the luxury and the slavery, the frenetic growth and the unsustainability, the indulgence and the exploitation. The clichés, the stereotypes, the wild hyperbole: all of it is true.

I travelled from Dubai to South India in the wake of the economic crash, recording the stories of migrant workers on their journey home. The programme was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on September 10th 2010, but you can listen to it here.

Supported by the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) with a Journey of a Lifetime Award.

The ocean is white and pink and purple and red and yellow and brown and green. After weeks at sea, the captain clambers up the mast of his yacht and scans the horizon with binoculars, rotating himself degree by degree until he has turned full circle.

‘This is it. I am here.’

There are nothing but plastic bottles, plastic bottles as far as he can see.

The yacht slides on, carving a V-shaped wake through the bottles as it goes. The captain turns to watch the gash – brief glimpses of a dirty blue – slowly filling in behind, erasing all traces of his passing.
He hugs the mast and closes his eyes. He feels nothing, not even the wind.

The bottles clunk gently against one another, so softly he can hardly hear them.

Down on deck, he opens the freezer and takes out a miniature bottle of champagne. He pours the champagne into a plastic cup, which he raises towards the sky. He pauses, frowning, and thinks for a while.

‘Yes, this is it,’ he says finally. ‘Yes, I am here.’

He drinks the champagne in tiny sips, gazing at the bottle-covered ocean.

All the colours in the world are there, worn dull by the waves.
When the last drop of champagne is gone, he tosses the bottle over the side. Then he tosses the cup over too. Within seconds, he can no longer see them.

The yacht drifts on for an hour. Half a day. The ocean’s surface changes. The plastic bottles become interspersed with other items of debris: footballs, tangled carrier bags, crumbled hunks of polystyrene, flip-flops, bergs of packaging foam. The captain watches it slip by with a sense of awe. He spots flower pots, fragments of fishing crates, once the half-submerged torso of a doll. He wonders if the head is here too, and if so, whether the motion of the waves will ever push them back together.

The yacht drifts on. Its prow cuts a swathe through Tupperware boxes, lids, foil wrapping, crisp packets, objects he can’t identify. Always plastic bottles, in their hundreds and thousands. He squints overboard to read the names, or recognises brands from faded blocks of colour: Coca-Cola, Pepsi, 7-Up, Schweppes, Sunkist, Mountain Dew.

Occasionally something larger bumps against the hull: half a green plastic garden chair, a refrigerator door. They could have come from anywhere, from any land in the world.

Later, the captain goes below and heats a ready-meal in the microwave. He eats chicken chow-mien from a greasy plastic tub, and, after wiping it clean, tosses the tub over the side, along with its plastic fork.
The tub drops between an empty ice-cream carton, so faded he cannot make out the name, and a four-litre bottle that once contained mineral water.

How quickly things return to their own. It satisfies him, somehow.

Night falls over the plastic sea. The captain wraps up warm and sits on deck, watching the sunset with a bottle of wine and a packet of cigarettes. The ocean is calm, its gentle undulations spreading slow ripples through the trash, giving it almost the effect of breathing. The falling sun catches on pieces of foil and shards of bright PVC. Gradually all colour leaches from the scene, leaving only spots of white that appear to glow, as if holding the light, as everything else goes dark.

‘This is it. I am here. Tomorrow begins the rest of my life.’

Alone on his yacht, it seems to the captain as if he’s never seen anything so lovely.

…

The horse latitudes, as they are known, are situated between thirty and thirty-five degrees on both sides of the equator. Wind and rain are uncommon there. The ocean is calm, subdued. The captain has always enjoyed the name as much as the legend from which it sprung: that Spanish ships, becalmed for weeks on the glassy millpond sea, would be forced to throw their horses overboard when water supplies ran low.

Of course, it’s a dubious theory. Historians suggest a more pedestrian etymology. But to the captain, the name is apt. In the days before plastic was conceived of, he imagines an ocean of abandoned horses, bobbing gently up and down, their hooves sticking up towards the sky.

The North Pacific Gyre, through which the northern horse latitude runs, is located in the Pacific Ocean between the equator and fifty degrees north. A gyre is a vortex caused by a system of rotating ocean currents; in the case of the North Pacific, the currents that turn this vast wheel of water are the North Pacific Current, the California Current, the North Equatorial Current and the Kuroshio Current, which between them spin the ocean in a clockwise direction, channelling debris to a central point from which it cannot escape.

The existence of the rubbish patch through which the captain is drifting now – wrapped up in his sleeping-bag, one arm dangling over the bunk, dreaming of nothing that he will recall – was theorised before it was observed. Researchers studying oceanic currents predicted such an effect. It wasn’t until the closing years of the garbage-strewn twentieth century that a sailing ship, cutting through the subtropic high between Hawaii and California, entered an uncharted ocean of plastic that took a full week to traverse.

The area’s true size is unknown. Estimates range from three hundred thousand to almost six million square miles.

It seems unbelievable, in an age of aeroplanes and satellite images, that such a vast region of pollution could have remained unseen for so long. But these, after all, are seas seldom travelled. They lie thousands of miles from the nearest landmass, their emptiness unbroken by islands. They lie on no trade routes, shipping lanes or notable fishing grounds. This is an ocean en route to nowhere. A convenient vanishing zone for lost, unwanted things.

Also, all is not visible, not to the naked eye. There’s more to the patch than rafts of Pepsi bottles and atolls of Styrofoam. Mostly it consists of particles that have been ground by the action of the waves to a minute, multicoloured sand, partially suspended below the surface, in the upper neustonic and epipelagic layers of the water column. Plastic cannot biodegrade. Its tightly-bound polymers cannot unravel. It can only reduce and reduce, growing tinier with each passing year, from the miniscule to the molecular level, changing the very composition of the sea.

Celluloid, mankind’s first plastic, was invented in 1855. The first entirely synthetic plastic was bakelite, fifty-two years later. This was followed by epoxy, polystyrene and polyvinyl chloride, polyethylene, polytetrafluoroethylene, polypropylene, polycarbonate, polymethyl methacrylate, melamine formaldehyde; nylon, Styrofoam, PVC, Teflon, Plexiglas, Perspex. The products were mated with themselves to develop ever-stronger bonds, polymers that could not be broken; resistant to heat, friction, crystallisation and biodegradation. The twentieth century was the plastic age, when human beings tore free from organic structure. The plastic age was mankind’s first convincing stab at immortality.

The captain mumbles the names of the plastics. He recites them to the waves, watching the colours merge and bloom. Surely the very first particles are here, in the centre of the North Pacific Gyre. Ground to a microscopic dust. They have been here for a hundred years, waiting for man to catch up.
Going to the centre of the gyre is like travelling back in time. Back to the dead hub of everything, from which nothing can escape.

…

The captain left the hospital quickly. He wasn’t a captain then. He was a man with a different existence. His wife had just come back to life.

He crossed the car-park, hopped over a fence and went straight into a phone box. In the phone box he rubbed his forehead, creasing the wrinkles up and down. He banged his head on the plastic window and moaned softly into his fist. Then he took out a mobile phone and tapped in a number.

He didn’t know why he went into the phone box. Perhaps he was simply old-fashioned.

‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘It’s me. I’m here.’

‘How are you? Is everything alright?’

The captain didn’t know what to say. ‘I’m here,’ he said again.

‘Where?’

‘I’m outside the hospital.’

‘Do you want me to come? Wait, I’m coming.’

‘No,’ the captain said. He drew breath. ‘No, you can’t come now.’

‘What did you say? I can’t hear you.’

The captain was silent for a time.

‘Are you there? Do you want me to come?’

‘No. You can’t. You can’t come.’

‘What’s going on? Has it happened?’

The captain found himself silent again. He couldn’t form the words.

He went there once or twice a week, though it used to be three or four times. The nurses and cleaners knew him well. They kept a special chair aside, made sure it didn’t get moved.

He sat by the bed and looked at his wife. Sometimes he raised her hand from the sheet and studied it in the sunlight. He tried to imagine it doing all the things it used to do, every day. He couldn’t imagine it.
He looked at the tubes and wires and machines, performing their separate functions. He watched the nurses who came and went, taking notes and measuring things and levering his wife’s heavy body to clean her and change the bedclothes.

He thought of how it used to be, before the accident. He examined pictures in his mind to see how much truth was in them. All that were left were composites, contaminated images, memories he couldn’t trust. He had already let most of the pictures go.

He thought of his life as it was now. The unreal suspension in time, the featureless months of waiting.
But mostly, he thought of the other woman. Of how the future would be.

‘Has it happened?’ she asked on the phone. ‘Come on, talk to me.’

‘No, it hasn’t happened,’ he said.

‘I thought… When I heard the phone. I just had a feeling.’

‘No. Not that. It wasn’t that.’

He stared through the window of the phone box, towards the hospital doors. At any moment, he expected to see the doctor searching for him, summoning nurses or porters to scour the car-park. But probably, no-one would come. No-one would believe that he would do this.

He knew that he was required to speak, to be strong and firm and make decisions and take responsibility. But he found no inner strength, no resources to draw from.

…

On his third day in the gyre, the captain sees a boat on the horizon. At first he thinks he is mistaken. But the boat comes closer. It’s a curious kind of boat, with a long, sharp prow like a canoe, and two fine grilles extending like wings from its port and starboard sides.

The boat is crewed by two men and a woman wearing red t-shirts displaying the logo of an oceanographic institute.

The captain watches them with amusement as they squint and stare.

‘What are you doing?’ asks one of the men when they are in talking distance.

‘Nothing. What are you doing?’ says the captain.

The man explains they have built this vessel as part of an investigation into pelagic plastic pollution in the North Pacific. He says this craft will pioneer a clean-up operation of vast proportions, to be shared between responsible nations, in which hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste will be skimmed from the ocean’s surface.

The captain doesn’t say anything. He takes a Dairy Milk bar from his pocket and breaks off a square.

The woman continues from where the man left off. She tells the captain of their studies into the effect of plastic pollution on the surrounding ecosystem and marine wildlife. She opens a freezer-box on the deck and produces a stiff, sodden albatross, its throat tangled with nylon fibre, polystyrene wedged in its gullet. In parts of the North Pacific, she says, plastic micro-pellets outnumber zooplankton by a factor of seven. Plastic has crept into the food chain, is being ingested by everything from jellyfish to large mammals. No-one yet has the slightest idea what impact this might have.

The captain watches patiently as the woman displays her other exhibits: a triggerfish with three bottle caps in its belly, a guillemot full of foam.

When the researchers have finished speaking, he eats his last square of Dairy Milk. He lets the wrapper drift away in the breeze, where it comes to rest against a polyethylene milk jug.

The researchers stare at him from their boat.

‘Asshole,’ says the woman.

‘You expect to clean an ocean with a boat like that?’ says the captain, without any malice at all.

‘Come on, let’s go,’ says the woman. She slams the lid of her albatross box.

‘And even if you skim off a tonne, a thousand tonnes, what will you do with it? Burn it? Bury it in the ground? I don’t understand.’

The woman ignores him. She puts on a baseball cap that matches the logo on her red t-shirt.

‘How long have you been out here?’ calls one of the men as their craft pulls away. ‘Where are you headed?’

The captain doesn’t answer him, but he shields his eyes to watch the boat go, growing gradually more indistinguishable, and finally raises his hand in a motionless salute.

That evening he smokes three cigarettes and drinks half a bottle of wine. He lies on his back on the deck and watches the daylight disappear. He makes noises, of varying pitches and depths. The stars are brilliant here.

…

He’d been going in as normal that day when one of the doctors who knew him well caught his arm by the lifts, took him to one side.

‘I want you to prepare yourself for a shock. Some unexpected news.’

The captain felt his heart lift off, and then come crashing down. He was aware of a feeling like pins and needles in the palms of his hands.

‘Your wife is awake. She opened her eyes about half an hour ago. She tried to sit up. We were going to call you, but we knew you were coming in. She can’t speak yet, and she doesn’t know where she is. She’s confused.’

The captain tried to smile, acutely aware that the doctor was waiting for his reaction, but his mouth was staring like an empty eye.

‘We need to do some primary tests. We can’t say anything conclusive. We can’t discount the possibility that she won’t regain full capacity. She may be brain-damaged. I want you to know that. Whatever happens, it will take time and care.’

‘Time and care. Right, yes.’

‘Well, shall we?’

‘Shall we what?’

‘Shall we go in and see her?’

The captain followed obediently, down the familiar halls. He wasn’t thinking anything. He didn’t trust himself to think. The doctor took him to the bed and quietly stepped aside.

His wife was looking right at him. He was almost surprised that her eyes were still the colour they used to be. He stared at her. Her face moved. It was like watching wax melt. To his horror and disbelief, she smiled, looking into his eyes.

He laid his hand on her hand, but he didn’t pick it up. The sheet was crumpled under her arm. He found himself smoothing it.

‘I’m going to leave you alone for a minute,’ the doctor said gently.

‘No, not yet. Stay here for one moment.’

The doctor gave him a curious look.

‘I need the toilet. I’m… in shock. I’ll be back, please stay here.’

He left the room and went to the toilet and splashed his face with water. One of the cubicles was occupied. A pair of green and yellow shoes was visible under the door.

The captain felt sick. He wanted to throw up, but he didn’t want the cubicle-dweller to hear.

He washed his hands with soap from the dispenser. The soap was full of micro-pellets, glittering green in the slime. These micro-pellets would go down the drain, pass unfiltered through processing plants, and eventually they would be washed out to sea. Rejoining with their kind.

When he turned his face back to the mirror, his expression was aghast. The pink that showed in the corners of his eyes was an image of simple terror.

When he exited the toilet he turned right instead of left, took the stairs instead of the lift, and smashed his way through the doors, letting them swing back behind him. He didn’t stop until he was in the phone box. He thought it would give him breathing space, but he could hardly breathe.

…

The engine is silent. The sail is furled. The yacht rests, curlicued with foam. The captain spends his days on deck, reading old National Geographic magazines, observing small changes in the sky, making inventories and counting his rations. One day the rain begins falling lightly, and lasts for an hour or so. It seems to the captain that rain on the ocean is a waste of water.

He doesn’t have much need to eat, and he sleeps surprisingly little.

He has seen no other boats. He doesn’t expect to see them.

The captain has enough supplies, carefully stacked in the hold, to survive for over a year in the gyre, perhaps even two if he is sparing. Assuming he eats just one meal a day, assuming he drinks exactly one half-litre bottle of water. The alcohol, chocolate and cigarettes will run out after six months or so, but he hopes that by that point, he won’t have the need.

He has also brought deep-sea fishing lines, hooks and nets and sinkers. The ocean contains fish of all shapes and sizes, even here, amongst so much waste. The fish will be saturated with plastic, infinitesimal nurdles. He will ingest vinyl chloride and di-2-ethylhexyl phthalate, carcinogenic and mutagenic, substances banned by responsible nations. In this way, he will enter the food chain. He will arrive at its apex. The plastic sea will pass into him, changing his very composition.

But for now he leaves the lines alone. It occurs to him that he packed no bait. He will have to bait his hooks with pieces of chicken chow-mien.

It is hard to tell, without instruments, whether the yacht is drifting on the waves or whether the ocean’s surface is changing, subtly shifting its patterns. The depths are far too great to drop anchor, but, without wind, he assumes he will simply remain where he is, slowly revolving around the same point. There are no other factors to act upon him now. He came here to go nowhere.

He has the image in his mind of the plastic ceaselessly spreading around him, expanding like a summer bloom of algae. Every scrap, every wrapper, every polystyrene coffee cup that finds a route from the land to the sea, from Japan to Mexico, is making its way towards him now, inevitably honing in. He sits at the centre of an orbit, dragging in lost things.

…

‘What’s going on? Please let me come,’ said the voice on the phone. He didn’t know, when he dialled the number, that this was the last conversation they’d have. He didn’t yet know what it had meant to leave the hospital. Every action is a decision. Already an ill-defined thought had stirred, something vast, imprecise and unformed, but it hadn’t yet crystallised into an image of a yacht on the open sea.

‘I can’t do this.’

‘You can’t do what?’

‘She’s woken up.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘She’s woken up,’ he said again, and this time he said it sharply.

‘I’m still going to come. Wait there.’

‘No, please. You can’t come now. They said… perhaps brain-damage. Time and care.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Time and care. Years, perhaps.’

‘No.’

The captain’s hands were twisting, his fingers clenching in feeble rage. He felt like his body was strangling him, and he didn’t know how to writhe away.

‘You can’t let her do this to you now,’ said the voice on the phone.

‘But I have to. Don’t you understand?’

‘You can’t, not after all this time.’

‘But who will take care of her? They expect me…’

‘What about me? What about everything?’

The captain made a noise like air escaping from a balloon.

He hadn’t meant to make plans with her, not while his wife was still alive. The plans had somehow made themselves. An idle word would become an idea, an idea would become an intention, and the intentions would breed with themselves to form complex, tightly-interwoven futures. Soon the futures became more real than the present or the past. The futures were what kept him going. Moving cities, continents. They multiplied around him.

And then he was shouting into the phone, mumbling, tripping over words, making no sense to himself or anyone else. He made sounds that didn’t even sound like sounds. He was trying to explain something.

When he stopped, there was silence on the line. His phone bleeped once, disconnected.

He knew she’d be hurrying to her car, driving fast through traffic.

‘I can’t do this,’ he said again. They felt like the most painful words he’d spoken, but he wasn’t even sure what they referred to.

…

Sometimes, if the captain squints, if he has drunk a bottle of wine, if he has spent the night on deck, making noises at the stars, he sees things in the pattern of the seas. Amorphous pictures that break apart and blend, dotted masses of colour. Sometimes it looks like grazing flamingos, seen from an aeroplane through clouds. Sometimes it looks like thousands of faces, all the races of the world, crowds at a great political rally at which he is centre stage. Sometimes it looks like old film footage, slowly zooming into the grain. Sometimes it looks like a pointillist painting. Meadows of spring flowers.

He has been three months in the North Pacific Gyre. The time doesn’t seem so long.

He has come to recognise familiar landmarks in the structure of the sea. An island of polyurethane foam. Tangled reefs of purple twine. Archipelagos of bottle caps.

He thinks about the horses long ago, pitched overboard like polystyrene cups. Bobbing gently up and down, their hooves sticking up towards the sky.

Caught in the balance of two things, he didn’t see then, back there on the phone, that two realities necessitate a third: the empty space between them. And that space is viable, open. It waits to be colonised.

He has a ream of paper on deck, and he spends long hours making diagrams, charting the uncharted spaces of the ocean. Inventing names for things unnamed. Making maps of a strange new world.

The girl beside me on the plane talks about her father back in Congo. ‘Guess how many children he had?’ ‘More than ten?’ I ask. She makes an elevating motion with her hands. ‘Twenty?’ ‘More.’ ‘Thirty?’ ‘More.’ ‘Forty?’ ‘More.’ ‘Not fifty?’ ‘Sixty seven.’ Sixty seven children by thirty different wives, ‘because the women loved him so much.’ A famous doctor, who once had seen hospital staff refuse to treat a woman whose baby was twisted up inside her – it tried to exit her body hand-first – unless her family came up with the money. He built entire villages of his children. ‘We all had to know who our brothers and sisters were, so we didn’t marry each other.’ There are turbulent clouds above London, and waves of hot air over Addis Ababa. The girl seizes my hand at takeoff and landing, but laughs when we arrive.

A very dark man with one half of his face seemingly collapsed. He begs politely, and accepts our refusal with elaborate courtesy. We are told he went to Canada and became a rich man; married, had children, moved back to Ethiopia and bought a truck to carry cargo to Sudan. On the journey, he ran a man down. He couldn’t pay the money that the relatives demanded; they let him go, but waited on the road, and when he came back they shot him in the brain. He lost his truck, half his face, and his memory. He can’t remember his wife or kids, or the name of the bank with his money in it. Sometimes, though, he remembers Canada. ‘I fly back there later this afternoon. Please, sir, can you help me?’

Outside the Obama Pool Hall stands a pink-eyed, moaning boy wearing a pair of strangely-buckled, mud-covered rubber boots. Then I see they are not his boots. They are his feet, several sizes too large, bulging, distended, with thickly-flaking shins, like objects from a dead explorer’s kitbag. A crowd of other children clutch and stare. Little girls have smudged crucifixes tattooed on their foreheads. The words ‘Obama Pool Hall’ are the brightest things in the scene; freshly painted on a crumbling adobe wall.

A dozen men sit gloomily watching Star Wars in the reception hall. None are guests, but still the waitresses dress in starched green uniforms, and serve us coffee on the terrace where we sit on concrete swivel chairs under rustling bougainvillea in abandoned gardens. An atmosphere of colonial decay hangs over the gravelled driveways. The tennis courts look like an internment camp. In the dining hall, fifty tableclothed tables gather dust together; afternoon light filters sadly through unclean windows. ‘You want a room? This is government hotel,’ says the manager hopefully. ‘No,’ we say. ‘OK,’ he shrugs, without any surprise. They built this hotel during the Derg regime for the dictator Mengistu. He never came.

The Israeli speaks fluent Amharic and evades every question I ask him. ‘Are you working in Gonder?’ ‘In a way.’ ‘What work do you do?’ ‘It is connected to agriculture.’ ‘Farming?’ ‘Well, not really. It is a bit like farming.’ He speaks four other languages and has a face like a small, expectant child’s. He could be anything from nineteen to thirty five. I am told of a beautiful Ethiopian wife, but I never see her. This town is like a Graham Green novel. The endless waiting on hotel terraces; local men in mismatched suits, playing chess and watching. ‘I help the German lady find her silver cross,’ says the kid with the one blind eye. ‘Give me ten birr, I ask some information.’ The man who stole the silver cross is allegedly in prison; the cross is changing hands on the black-market, and information on its whereabouts provides an irregular income. The kid’s blind eye is clouded like a marble. ‘Are you staying here long?’ I ask the Israeli. ‘I think just eight more days. Then I go to Addis. Then I have a small job in Central America. Then, if God wills it, I will come back here.’ ‘The job in Central America – is that agricultural work?’ I try. ‘No,’ he says. ‘But, it is connected.’

‘How would I get a magazine printed?’ I ask one of my students. ‘Oh, it is easy. First you get permission, then you go to the print shop. Very cheap.’ ‘Who do I have to get permission from?’ ‘The Ministry of Information. They will give permission. They will first ask some questions about what will be in the magazine, but if it is just poetry and stories there will be no problem.’ ‘Can I get it done without permission?’ ‘Perhaps. But it will be more difficult.’ ‘Why do they need to know what’s in the magazine?’ ‘In case it is something that is not what the government is trying to achieve,’ he says carefully. ‘So it’s censored? This is censorship’ He seems genuinely surprised. ‘Perhaps,’ he says, as if I have said something a bit distasteful. ‘But no, I think it is more like just permission.’ He drops his eyes to the table, embarrassed on my behalf. Presently the lights go out, and the rumoured selling of power to Sudan proves to be a more comfortable topic of conversation.

‘This, my baby – in Washington D.C.,’ says the mama of the house. In her hands is a graduation picture of a smug, gelatinous young man in mortarboard and gown. ‘Other baby – in Washington D.C.’ She proudly shows a photograph of a fat girl in a tight white dress, flashing lots of thigh before a studio backdrop of a heart-shaped swimming pool fringed with palms. ‘This, baby house – in Washington D.C.’ A picture of a picket-fenced home complete with car parked in the drive; interior shots of gleaming kitchenware, a woman in a mini-skirt posing on the stairs. The mama rocks backwards and forwards in her chair, cheerfully crunching peanuts. Her granddaughter rubs her feet with chilli paste scooped from a plastic bowl. Coffee bubbles on a charcoal-burning stove. There has been no running water for a week. On the floor sits Maree (what’s the proper term? Indentured housemaid? Slave-girl?) smiling at it all and understanding nothing.

The darkness of the unlit room pales slowly to reveal the faces of the tej-drinkers, gazing blankly from the shadows. The gulp the yellowish, faintly luminescent tej from bulbous glass demijohns arranged on the wooden table. They look like a row of gloomy alchemists in a medieval tavern. ‘Do you want to drink here?’ asks my companion. ‘Um, another time,’ I say. Back in the street, we meet the madman I saw in the market earlier tugging feathers off a dangling chicken. Now he has absentmindedly pulled most of the flesh from the bird’s bones; the carcass swings like a priest’s censer, bloody fat drips from his hands. ‘He says do you want to buy his chicken?’ says my companion, grinning. ‘No thanks,’ I say. And away he limps, in the direction of the concrete piassa the Italians made a shoddy job of before they fled in 1941, leaving only macchiatos behind them.

A former member of the Derg regime, this man was imprisoned for twelve years when the communists fell. Bouncing delicately over the gutters in powder-blue suit and immaculate white trainers, he is like a camp Samuel L. Jackson. ‘Solomon washes his body once a week,’ he translates outside a tin shack, gently interrogating an ancient grandmother with blue tattoos like telephone coils running round her neck. ‘He is healthy. He attends school every day. When he grows up he wants to be an astronaut so he can visit Mars.’ The grandmother answers his questions patiently, taking aim at a crowd of barefoot children with a piece of scrap metal from the stockpile at her feet. ‘The family pays three birr per month in rent, but it is rumoured the government plans to sell the land and demolish their house. Then they will have nowhere to live.’ I transcribe as he translates. The grandmother squints one eye. A wing-nut bounces off the nearest child’s knee; the others scatter out of range. ‘After school Solomon helps his family by fetching wood and water. He says that he is happy.’

The baboons methodically comb the ground, plucking the yellow grass to stubble and thumbing it into their ancient faces with occasional snickering, mewling sounds like cats. It’s like an illustration from a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet: the sun-drenched plateau against blue mountains, grazed by coexistent herds of horses, goats, oxen, baboons and people. It only needs a Chinese schoolgirl hugging a lion to complete the picture; and neatly-squared fields of corn to replace the vertiginous escarpments; doves instead of vultures; and a god.

‘Hello sir. Do you have one black trouser?’ A man has materialised awkwardly from the shadows surrounding my front door. I think he is the boyfriend of the girl who washes clothes. ‘One black trouser?’ I ask, confused. ‘Yes. Do you have one black trouser?’ The man looks scared and miserable. ‘Why do you want to know? I ask. ‘Because,’ he says dramatically, ‘I destroy one black trouser.’ ‘You destroyed a pair of trousers?’ ‘I destroy trouser,’ he repeats firmly. I tell him I don’t own black trousers. He looks relieved, yet somehow defiant. ‘I destroy trouser,’ he says again. ‘How?’ I ask, genuinely curious, but he will not reveal any more.

The old bastard in the piassa wears a green baseball cap and a stained boiler-suit covered in medals he probably stole off someone else. His self-appointed duty seems to be standing guard over a small yellow-painted tin shack whose function no-one ever appears to know. He spends a long time every day locking and unlocking its door with a complicated system of keys; the rest of the time is spent in the Telecafé, from where he can keep an eye on his shack, haranguing and brow-beating anyone unfortunate enough to get close. Just the other day, I hear, he picked up a rock, stood up from his table, and smacked someone who was standing nearby without warning in the back of the head. The rock was a large one. Blood was everywhere. The old bastard refused to apologise, and when he was asked for an explanation grew even more furious.

There’s probably nothing in the shack. He’s just an old bastard.

I wake up to the sound of a woman screaming in one of the tin-roofed shacks below my room. Other women in long white shawls hurry back and forth across the yard, carrying bowls of water. In the night I hear choked, gurgling noises, and can’t tell if it’s an old man laughing or else moaning in pain. In the morning, someone has died. The yard is filled with wailing women, beating their arms against their chests while the men and boys stand silently, staring at the ground. I go out for several hours and come back in the rain. They have strung a dripping awning over the body, hidden from my view. I don’t know whether it was the woman or the old man who died. The grieving song rises and falls, as if someone is tweaking the dial of a short-wave radio. It continues for three days straight, along with the clatter of rain on tin, the mewling kittens, and the chickens.

The old bastard in the piassa takes a seat at my table. We order the same thing: special fool with dabo. He asks me if he can drink the water the previous customer left behind. He drinks it sloppily, spilling it down his beard. When the waitress brings our food, he curses her and tries to hit her on the head with the bread basket. He seems insulted by the fact she brought him two loaves of dabo; turns out he has his own spare loaves hidden in a pocket. He glares and mutters as we eat, but I decide to attempt communication. I ask him about the medals he wears on the front of his stained boiler-suit. Immediately, he straightens up. His creased face gleams. He spits bread crumbs. ‘Haile Selassie,’ he says proudly, pointing at the first medal. The second medal says ‘Medal of Victory, 1941.’ 1941 is the year they defeated the Italians. My opinion of the old bastard changes. I ask, with respect, if I can take his photograph. He doesn’t say a word, but fastens every button, smoothes his collar, adjusts his medals, and gazes unblinkingly into the lens with enormous dignity.

This is an old bastard retraction. I don’t care what he keeps in that shack. The Emperor’s thigh-bone, the Ark of the Covenant. It doesn’t matter what it is. The thing he is guarding is his pride.

Every day, whatever the weather, the Pepsi Cop will be standing at his post, hopelessly trying to control the traffic. He wears an immaculate uniform and a spotlessly white peaked cap. When pedestrians try to cross the road, he strides out in front of the cars with an expression of noble self-sacrifice, and no-one takes the slightest bit of notice. He strikes me as an honourable man, an incorruptible defender of laws which are universally ignored, if they are even known. It doesn’t help that the pill-box in which he stands is topped by a concrete Pepsi Cola bottle about the same shape and size as him. (Pepsi won the cola wars long ago here; their adverts cover every wall in town; magnanimously, they have allowed a single Coca-Cola billboard to remain, now faded to a dirty pink.) The Pepsi bottle has the effect of turning him from being merely ineffectual into appearing completely ludicrous. I feel sorry for the Pepsi Cop, but even I can’t bring myself to do anything he says.

Sheltering under an awning from the rain, I see a delegation of children making their way expectantly towards me. Five are black and one is white, a surprising sight in this village. Then I see he’s not white, but albino. The little girls flanking him approach with giggly anticipation, urging him to step forward. Instead of greeting me as a long-lost white-skinned brother, the albino turns his back, happily waggles his hands in the air, and screams nonsense at the sky. The little girls seem put out, as if they’d been expecting something more. ‘His mother saw you, and sent him to meet you,’ someone explains. ‘What am I supposed to do about it?’ I ask. But the girls are leading him away again, with obvious disappointment. He doesn’t even look at me. Seconds later, the albino delegation has vanished into a hut.

A very calm and respectful old man wrapped up in his shawl and beard. ‘Do you need money, father?’ my friend asks. ‘Yes , I need money. I’m a beggar,’ he replies, after careful consideration. ‘How much money do you need?’ ‘How much can you afford to give?’ ‘I asked you first. How much do you need?’ The old man thinks for a little while. ‘I need five birr,’ he says at last, ‘I’m on my way to buy bread.’ Five one birr notes are counted out. I go to offer some as well. ‘No,’ he says, his hand on my arm, ‘thankyou, but I don’t take money from foreigners. Not from foreigners, or breast-feeding women. I don’t want to give them my trouble.’ He smiles kindly and shakes my hand. I start to introduce myself. ‘Thankyou, no,’ he stops me again. ‘I don’t want to know your name.’ I ask why not. ‘I have trouble,’ he says, as if talking about rheumatism or gout. ‘The trouble has followed me for a long time. I’m worried that if I know your name, I might remember it at a bad time, and then the trouble will transfer to you. I care about you. I don’t want to give you trouble. So please, don’t tell me your name.’

On my way up to the bar, I am stopped by a couple of revealing girls. One is pretty in a mean sort of way, and the other is fat in a mean sort of way. The mean fat one seizes my hands, while the mean pretty one reaches out and removes the glasses from my face. She puts them on, and gives me a look which might be cute if it wasn’t so mean. I smile and try to take them back, but she holds them out of reach. ‘St George beer,’ she demands. It is less a flirtation than a mugging. I pretend not to understand. ‘Are you lonely?’ she asks. ‘No,’ I say, and manage to prise my glasses from her. Then I shoulder my way past and go upstairs to dance with my friends.

The mean fat one soon tracks me down. I am busy doing something groovy with my feet when she appears in front of me and manfully grabs my wrists. Her fingers have a fearsome strength, but my arms are sweaty so I slip away. I turn my back and continue dancing. She quickly moves in front of me again, as if I have misunderstood. She does ten seconds of aggressive grinding and then seizes the back of my neck. ‘Drink,’ she says. ‘I don’t speak Amharic,’ I say in Amharic. ‘Drink,’ she says again, with more force. ‘Sorry, I don’t understand what you’re saying.’ She seems genuinely offended and retreats to a bar-stool, glaring with undisguised scorn at my moves. I find it quite hard to enjoy myself now. I manage to dance to half another song before the mean pretty one reappears, having finished simulating sex with most of the other men in the room. She seems to regard me as a professional challenge. I make my dancing as complicated as possible so she can’t get a step in. Only by moving furiously can my flailing limbs keep the mean girls at bay, but I know this tactic won’t hold up forever. The next track is a slow number.

He’s affectionately known as YNG: Young Naked Guy. Occasionally he wears a shirt, but never any trousers. He does own trousers, but chooses instead to carry them over his shoulder like a flag. He’s tolerated remarkably well by the people of the town, who give him food and water every day, and sometimes try to make him wear trousers, without any success. He wanders from one neighbourhood to another, doing inexplicable things. Today he is fascinated by a bottle, turning it around and around in his hands to watch the motion of the liquid sliding about inside. He has a truly enormous penis (it almost reaches his knees) but is utterly innocent of sex, and seems completely happy. I’m told the local women say with regret: ‘the right dick on the wrong man.’ Occasionally he tries to board a minibus, which causes a commotion. He also loves chasing cars, and it’s a fine sight to see him sprinting at top speed barefoot down the hill, his penis flapping joyously in the wind.

Old Naked Guy is a different matter. He’s a truly malevolent old fucker who has built himself a horrible nest on the street outside the Ethiopia Hotel, where you can’t easily avoid him. His nest is constructed mostly of rocks and mysterious knotted plastic bags that probably contain awful things. His main activity seems to be burning: burning cigarettes down to his fingertips, burning tangled clumps of string, burning electrical cables and rubber, things that shouldn’t be burnt. Every time I walk that way I try not to meet his eyes, but I always do. He has a piercing, venomous stare that sometimes makes me trip on the kerb or stumble over a rock.

ONG does wear a pair of trousers, but only pulled halfway up his thighs, which is somehow much more indecent. For the record, his penis is tiny. It looks like the knot on a burst balloon. One day, perhaps he’ll burn it.

At last the land looks African: vast and stubbled and studded by cactus and comical-looking acacia trees, the sunlight pouring through a yellow sky, and on the horizon the blue haze of mountains at distances impossible to tell. Long-horned cattle and herds of camels rip spiked leaves from the lowest branches, the men wear sarongs and AK47s, the women grimace disinterestedly as our bus guzzles past. Clusters of rounded mud huts like beehives circled by fences of thorns. ‘These are very dangerous people,’ says the man next to me, gathering the tenderest leaves of khat in his palm for my consumption. ‘If our bus kills one of their sheep, they kill everyone on bus.’ He draws his finger across his throat. The land goes on and on and on, never getting smaller. The federal police at their half-fucked checkpoints look too tall, too nervous for this land. This is a different country.

The Muslims sleep and fast all day. ‘We do not even swallow our own saliva.’ But after dark, the houses come alive. I am ushered into a curtained, cushioned room to share enormous platters of food. Then comes tea. Then comes coffee, plates of halva, dates and sweets. Every half hour, someone goes out and comes back with another bag of khat as big as a pillow. There’s enough to carpet the whole room. ‘It’s not enough,’ they keep saying, ‘get more, it’s not enough!’ it’s only midnight; they’ll stay up til dawn, chewing khat, drinking coffee and smoking hashish to take the edge off it all. In the background, a silent TV shows fuzzy news footage from Somalia: jihadi fighters in red and white headscarves patrolling some demolished street. ‘Those people are monkeys,’ someone shouts, ‘what in God’s name are they doing?’ next to me, a girl in a hijab is laughing as she shares cigarettes and prepares the coals for a sheesha pipe. An enormous black man in a vest is chuckling contentedly on the floor, and every so often someone reaches over and slaps him on the belly. ‘The Christians here love Ramadan, because they get to have fun all night with us.’ Islamic jazz-pop blares from the speakers. The reception on the TV is bad; the jihadi fighters drown in static. ‘What do you do when it’s not Ramadan?’ I ask the guy sitting next to me. ‘We drink,’ he says contentedly. Allahu Akbar.

On all sides of me middle-aged men are screaming, pushing and slapping each other. Sometimes they form alliances to push and slap other people. This has been going on for two hours. No-one is moving anywhere. I keep my hands tight on the railings, determined not to be buffeted out. This is a queue for a bus ticket. I can’t imagine how the process could possibly be so complicated. I try to work out if it’s one argument, or multiple interconnected ones, but it’s impossible to tell anything other than the fact that everyone is furious. (There is something about buses, and especially bus stations, in poor, hot countries of the world, that causes people to become inexplicably angry.) Every so often the ticket window opens and the ticket man glares out in extreme dissatisfaction, then slams it shut before anyone can actually try to buy a ticket. Now an old git in a dirty cloth cap has insinuated himself to the front and is hanging onto the grille with both hands. ‘He is a big dictator person,’ grins the guard who doesn’t take sides, who is finding everything very entertaining. The dictator unites the front half of the crowd to barging him off his illegitimate perch, the ticket man whacks his clasping fingers with a cane, and eventually he is jostled away, foaming with rage. The ticket window has slammed shut again. ‘When will he start selling the tickets?’ I yell at the guard who doesn’t take sides. ‘Soon, soon,’ he says casually. He’s been saying this for the past two hours. ‘But how long? I have an appointment.’ ‘Oh, you have an appointment?’ he says, and everything instantly changes. He knocks politely on the window. ‘This man has an appointment,’ he says. ‘Oh, he has an appointment?’ says the ticket man. He writes me a ticket, takes my money, and closes the window again. The process took about twenty seconds. I’m expecting the crowd to react with fury, but nobody seems to care. I clamber away, and leave them all still pushing and slapping one another. They don’t seem to be in any hurry. I guess they must enjoy this.

‘Hello, photo!’ the blimp with the telephoto lens yells at a rake-thin African child who barely comes up to his knees. The chubby finger slams down on the button; the blimp checks his photo, gives a satisfied grunt, and shambles away without looking back. The child stares at the giant buttocks undulating inside their white shorts. ‘Hello, photo!’ the blimp yells at an old man sitting in the shade of an acacia. The old man holds three fingers out for money. ‘Hey, no, I paid already!’ the blimp roars. He is unstoppable. He’s like an albino elephant seal wading through a nest of stick insects. Elsewhere, a six-foot Russian blonde in a skimpy red vest and pair of denim shorts so small you can see every crease and fold snaps away on a mobile phone; a half-crippled Frenchman with a creepy beard and beige socks pulled up to his knees minces desperately after a group of semi-naked, picturesque kids; a Japanese woman wrapped up like a mummy, with only her sunglasses poking through, helps her koala bear-faced husband (who is dressed, for some reason, like a fisherman) aim a camera as big as a telescope at a woman breast-feeding her baby. ‘White people embarrass me sometimes,’ I say to my guide, sitting back in the shade. ‘You’re white,’ he replies.

‘This is the place my father died,’ says my guide, pointing to a nondescript depression of scrub lying just off the dirt road. ‘He was killed by Konso people. He worked an illegal job, taking cattle to the north, then bringing back Kalashnikovs to sell to the South Omo tribes. Sometimes we didn’t see him for months. One time he was caught by the military government. They sentenced him to death. He escaped from Arba Minch prison by bribing the guards and getting them drunk. He hid for a year with the Gamo tribe, because he had learned their language. After the military government fell, he went back to his old work. He was a very hard man. I had many fights with him. He used to make us drink the yolk from an ostrich egg every morning as soon as we woke up, to make us strong. It just made me sick. I was eleven when the Konso caught him taking cattle through their land. They shot him with an AK47. The Konso people are not strong, they do not have brave warriors. It was better he died by the Hamer people; at least there is honour in that. Many years later I was in a village in the highlands, and I met an old friend of my father’s. ‘How many Konso have you killed?’ he asked me. I told him I hadn’t killed any. Times are different now. I don’t live like that. ‘Then you are not his son,’ he said. And then the tears came.’

Extracts from the notes of Nikolai Oksotavich, a Russian émigré who fled to Stockholm in 1973. In 1981, he was found dead in the toilets of a public library. Coroners could find no cause to think his death suspicious.

Machinery functions particularly well. Outboard engines make no sound. I am told this has something to do with the quality of the light.

Young people do not share houses, but live alone in one-bedroomed apartments with floors that look like frozen lakes of pine. Instead of curtains they hang gauze, allowing passers-by vague glimpses into their private lives.

People’s hair turns blonde in the summer and white in the winter. For this reason, it is impossible to estimate anyone’s age.

A pan of water takes around twenty minutes to boil. I am told this is due to the relative proximity of icebergs.

In bars, all smoking must occur inside special booths of curved glass, from which the smoke is removed by extractor fans. These also serve as memory booths. If you spend five minutes inside, you’ll remember the circumstances that led to every cigarette you’ve smoked.

Water has an oddly viscous quality. Sometimes a raindrop will hang in mid-air for several minutes, only falling as you turn away.

A conversation can begin at a bar with the woman standing next to you mistaking the shadow on your arm for a map of the Baltic coastline.

The empty hours are conducive to perfecting techniques of poaching eggs. Poached eggs have no shape or form. It feels like cooking ghosts.

It is impossible to know what anyone really thinks of you. You practice smiling in the mirror. When you shake hands, you find yourself holding on a few seconds longer than is socially comfortable.

Machinery functions less perfectly the further you travel from Stockholm. This is also true of human organs: in particular the kidneys, lungs, and heart.

If you leave your bicycle unattended in the street for more than a day, it will make its own way down to the sea, and quietly drown itself.

If you ever find yourself walking home at five o’clock in the morning, every other person you meet is returning from a one-night stand. They politely avoid eye contact, but treat one another with care. If, from your physical appearance or demeanour, it is sensed that you didn’t get laid, someone may touch your elbow lightly at the bus stop, in condolence.

In winter, the clouds have icicles. When spring comes, they fall like frozen spears.

Poached eggs are best eaten alone, behind a window covered in gauze. This way you can enjoy the shadows of trees, the pale underwater light. Watching the sunlight slide across the walls brings silent happiness.

The Swedish king is believed to dwell inside a frozen waterfall. They pushed him in there when he was a child, before the water froze.

No matter how many times you try to memorise the map of Sweden, you cannot fix it in your mind. When you try to sketch it freehand it looks like nothing at all.

Perhaps the world’s suffering will not end until everyone has slept with everyone.

The ferry to Finland takes two days, and you must sleep on the frozen deck in a special rubber suit. The sea grows steadily thicker the closer you get to the Finnish coast. As the shoreline looms into view, the ferry moves just a few inches an hour. Through the gritty air you can see the lanterns glowing in the towns, and the people moving on the quays, dragging wet knotted tangles of rope behind him. You can wave, but they don’t wave back. Once, you think you see a girl’s smile, though not directed at you. And then the captain turns the ferry around. It’s time to go home.

My wife designs beasts. This is what she does. And every day, I must hunt the beasts through the dark pine forest that surrounds our house, and drag their pelts home through the snow to lay before her fire.

She releases the beasts before dawn, when I am still in bed. She opens the door and sets them loose, the beasts she has designed. Sometimes they are reluctant to go, I hear them rasping and moaning in the cold, and my wife must shoo them away with a broom or pelt them with lumps of coal. And then she brings me hot sugared tea, porridge, thick bread, slabs of butter and cheese, and she makes certain I wolf it all down because she does not want me to stumble, despair or succumb to the freezing wind.

Together we wait for the sky to turn the colour of blood and gold. My wife dresses me for the cold, in my layers of fur and my winter hood and my ropes and my sacks and my snowshoes. She slips leather gauntlets on my hands, and gently wraps my fingers around the slender hunting needle I use to lance the beasts through their tiny hearts and send their bright blood bubbling into the snow.

I set out at a steady pace, following the tracks of the beasts where they leapt, hopped, slithered, crawled, lurched or bounded over the hill, and from there descended into the woods, to merge with the shadows of pines. From their tracks, I make assumptions about the forms their bodies have taken. I note the scrape of a trailing wing, the indentation of a horn, the prints of toes or talons or stumps, the drag-mark of a tongue.

Through the black and threatening firs I plunge, with no thoughts in my head. I must chase the beasts to the end of the earth. That is what I must do. My snowshoes crash through deadwood and crunch deeply in the snow. They slip and slither over frozen streams, and sometimes I trip and go tumbling down, face-first into whiteness. I pick myself off, dust the snow from my clothes, and continue without respite. I do not allow myself to tire. I do not allow myself to pause. There can be no rest until I have the beasts at my needle’s point.

It has been this way for a year and a day. Ever since our wedding night, when my wife designed her first set of beasts. Ever since our honeymoon, when she first sent the beasts out into the snow. Ever since she made it clear that she wanted me to deliver their pelts, soft and warm and wet with gore, to where she sits by the fire at night, toasting her feet before the flames.

The tracks run together for the first few miles, and then they split different ways. They diverge along separate paths, weaving complicated knots through the trees, in an attempt to throw me off and force me to turn back. This means the beasts have heard my pursuit, pressed their misshapen heads to the ground to feel my thudding footsteps. I imagine they imagine I can simply be confused, that I can be made to falter. But the beasts should know I will not be stopped. That the pattern will never be changed.

By noon, I have run the first to ground. Made dizzy and careless with exhaustion, it will have paused to catch its breath, sucking the frosted air through its snout, or its beak or its swollen purple lips. I fall upon it through a mist of powdered snow. The needle slips through matted fur, rainbow scales or casing of bone. I hear the muffled pop of its heart. Steam pours from the tiny hole. Its blood paints a red map on the snow. I gently stroke its head as it fades, wiping away its teardrops of blood, smoothing its crumpled feathers.

Deftly, barely pausing for breath, I remove its pelt with the notched, bone-handled hunting knife that hangs at my side. I loosen the muscle and flesh from the bone, and slip its skin from its skeleton as if I’m tugging a woolly jumper off the body of a sleeping child. I roll the pelt up like a rug and stuff it into one of the sacks that dangle from my shoulders. I clean the needle with a fistful of snow, draw breath, and plunge back into the trees. The others will still be far away. Mindlessly, pointlessly running.

Deeper into the woods I go, where the trees darken and the ground becomes littered with rocks and fallen branches. I stagger uphill, crashing through the thickets of thorns that tangle my path, tearing into my winter furs, whipping across my face. After hours of pursuit, I come upon the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, scattered at intervals in the trees, foam-flecked, flanks heaving. Sometimes they have injured themselves in a fall, smashed headfirst into the trunk of a tree, or fallen through a thin patch of ice halfway over a frozen river. Sometimes the joints of their limbs have popped. They might attempt to continue like this, dragging useless extremities behind them, and I will find tattered strips of their skin caught on protruding branches. Sometimes their lungs will have given out. They will be too weak to go on. They are not designed to run too far. My wife sees to this.

I dispatch them cleanly, efficiently. I don’t like to shout or make a fuss. By this point I’m as exhausted as them, and I take no pleasure in it. Occasionally they try to fight, flailing, bellowing, kicking up snow, but most of the time they await the needle in silence, even expectantly. Sometimes they seem almost relived. Sometimes I think they understand why their deaths must happen.

It’s dark by the time I get back to the house. My entire body hurts. I see the lights glinting through the trees. I smell the rising wood-smoke. I stamp off snow at the front door, and collapse into the room. My wife unwraps my ropes and sacks, tugs the frozen furs from my body. She drags me over to the fire, rubs my arms and legs with hot towels, and coddles me in blankets. She bathes my wounds. She brings hot spiced wine. She unfreezes the skin of my face with kisses. And then she unrolls the pelts I have brought her, and while I nod off to sleep in my chair she kneels on the wooden floor, examining them meticulously in the flickering orange light.

I see the pleasure on her face. I hear her admiring words. I’ve been doing this for a year and a day, ever since we married. My wife designs beasts. This is what she does. There can be no rest until I have the beasts at my needle’s point.

One day, I am too sick to go out. I moan as my wife pulls away the covers, and cannot swallow the tea she brings, and gag at the sight of porridge. My chest is glistening with sweat. It looks like the underbelly of a fish. I lie there and stare at my chest as it heaves, and my heartbeats boom inside my head.

Perhaps it was something I caught in the cold. Perhaps one of the beasts showered me in poison. Or perhaps I didn’t eat enough thick bread, or drink enough hot sugared tea. When my wife insists I get out of bed, my legs buckle and I fall to the floor. My head feels strange. I don’t know up from down. Sweat pools in the backs of my knees.

All morning my wife tries to bring me back to strength, growing ever more impatient as the sun climbs in the sky. She rushes back and forth from the kitchen, trying to spoon things into my mouth. She brews chicken broth, nettle tea, dark medicinal concoctions steeped with forest herbs. She sticks cones of garlic in my ears. She steams my feet in spearmint tea. She presses hot bowls upon my back. It only makes me sicker.

I swim in and out of nightmares while my wife fusses around me. Beyond the wall, I can hear the beasts. They must have gathered around the front door, huffing the air through the crack where the draft blows in. They want to get out, but she will not let them go. As the day goes by, their anxiety grows. They begin to shriek, pawing at the floorboards. I can hear their nails raking the wood. The next time my wife leans over the bed, adjusting the blankets I have thrown off, I take her shoulders with my clammy hands and tell her I cannot leave the house. I say she must let the beasts go without me, on this one occasion. She presses her fingers to my lips, instructs me to be still.

I cannot move for five days and five nights. It feels like a year. Gravity holds me to the bed, and the sickness spins inside me. My body feels yellow, then black, then green. My fingers have turned into thumbs. My hands feel bloated, full of dense liquid. I imagine them swollen to the size of hams, but when I drag them before my face they appear completely normal. A heavy stench lies over the bed. My skin is leaking like a muslin cloth. My condensation drips down the walls and windows.

My wife continues designing beasts every night while I am sick. I want to tell her that she must stop, that she must wait until I’m well, or there will be too many.

The beasts are filling up the house. They don’t have anywhere to go. They crowd against the windows and doors, desperate for release. The walls shake as they bang into them, the crockery rattles on the shelves. My wife cannot stop. This is what she does. I do not know what will happen.

On the fifth night, my sickness peaks. It plunges me through swirling clouds, clouds of lurid pink and green. The sky is flashing horribly. I am lost in a storm of beasts. I close my eyes to make it dark. Through the darkness, my wife comes. I think it is my wife. A dark shape bending over me, a blackness blacker than the black, devoid of form or features. She watches me through a mist of dreams. She holds me with her eyes. I want to touch her, to speak some words, but I cannot move a muscle. She watches me through the long, black night. She never makes a sound. Later, I find I can move my hand. My body is starting to function again. I attempt to reach out for my wife, but she is no longer there.

I awake to white light streaming through the window. Its brilliance hurts my eyes. I pull myself up to sitting position and wipe frost off the glass. Everything is white outside. The world is clean and cold. Above the boundary of the pines, the sky is turning the colour of blood and gold.

My feet find their way to the floor. My fingers grip the bed-frame. My legs tremble, but support my weight. I stagger from the room.

There is silence throughout the house. The fireplace is cold. A cloud of ash hangs over the hearth, and the embers are dead grey. I cannot remember this happening before. There is no tea, no porridge, no bread. The furniture is disarranged, and the floorboards deeply scored. My wife is nowhere to be seen. A blue and white china plate lies broken on the floor.

The snow is all churned up outside, and a stampede of many tracks, far too many tracks to count, leads towards the forest. They must have had several hours head start. There is no time to lose. I do not allow myself to tire. I do not allow myself to pause. I am stumbling through the snow, following the tracks of the beasts where they leapt, hopped, slithered, crawled, lurched or bounded over the hill, and from there descended into the woods, to merge with the shadows of pines.

Before I have reached the crest of the hill I am bent almost double, staggering for breath. I have to drag myself up the slope with hands already turning blue. It is at this point I remember something. My hunting needle is back in the house, in its rack on the wall. I turn my head, peering back down the hill. There is wood smoke rising from the chimney. The door is standing open. Something moves in the white field, and it is now that I see the man, in his furs and his winter hood and his ropes and his sacks and his snowshoes, hunting needle in gauntleted hands, lift his head from the tracks at his feet and begin to run, in long easy strides, towards me up the hill.

Tekatay and Solomon part the curtain to reveal a dimly-lit room in which men sit in quiet groups, sipping Ethiopian coffee. This is where they gather to chew the stimulant leaf khat, whiling away the long, rainy, jobless afternoons. Tekatay rolls up a ball of leaves and shows me how to hold it in my cheek. ‘This is a safe place,’ he says, ‘we can talk freely here. First we will chew for half an hour, then we will tell you everything.’ My two friends, young Ethiopians who make an unsteady living as tour guides, have brought me here to air their views on their country’s politics.

The khat-house is fittingly cloak and dagger, but there is nothing melodramatic about their choice of location. Tekatay and Solomon are scared. Even here, where they feel secure, they speak to me in hushed voices, using the clatter of rain on the tin roof as cover for our conversation.

‘We never talk about these things publicly. The government pays money to informers. If one of these people overheard the police would come for us in the night, they would kick us, break our bones. We would be taken to prison. They might not kill us for saying these things, unless it was election time, but they could easily paralyse us. We have seen it happen.’

‘Most people won’t tell you these things,’ adds Solomon. ‘We are only doing it because we are desperate. Things are getting worse all the time. We see no possibility of change. It is too much pain for us.’

Suppression of dissent in this country – unlike in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or al-Bashir’s Sudan – goes largely unreported in the west. Ethiopia is, on the surface, a multi-party democracy with strong pro-western leanings, and one of the most disciplined armies on the African continent. More importantly, it is seen as a vital ally in the war on terror, a bulwark against Sudan, Eritrea and the chaos of Somalia. All these factors help explain the international media’s silence as Ethiopian democracy is eroded from within.

For 17 years the country has been ruled by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), headed by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. The party appeared in the civil war against the communist Derg regime which, since 1975, had ruled through state terror. Supported by two armed groups, the Tigraian People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), the EPRDF entered the capital Addis Ababa in 1991, setting up a transitional government with Zenawi at the helm. Four years later, his rule was cemented in Ethiopia’s first ever democratic elections.

Over the next decade, however, Zenawi’s popularity waned. One of the EPRDF’s first moves had been to federalise the country, and the former Italian colony of Eritrea voted for full independence in 1993. Following Eritrea’s secession, a deeply unpopular development that deprived Ethiopia of its coastline, relations between the former wartime allies in the TPLF and EPLF rapidly degenerated into open hostility. A brutal two-year border war resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, and much of Zenawi’s support evaporated, especially in the cities.

The elections of May 2005, billed as the freest and fairest in Ethiopia’s history, were marred by allegations of fraud and widespread human rights abuses. In response to accusations of vote-rigging, Zenawi declared a state of emergency and ordered military units into the capital.

In early June, as the opposition continued to claim the vote had been stolen, protests erupted in the cities. The government responded with a massacre.

‘When the police came, everyone started running,’ says Tekatay, rolling another ball of khat. ‘The police shot into the crowd with live bullets. My uncle was killed. Many others were wounded. Me and my friends spent two months in prison without charge. They didn’t beat us, but other people were tortured badly in other prisons, members of the opposition.’

An independent report estimated that 193 civilians died at the hands of Ethiopian security forces between June and November, when results of the contested election were published. ‘This was a massacre,’ said investigating judge Wolde-Michael Meshesha, who later fled the country after receiving death threats. ‘These demonstrators were unarmed yet the majority died from shots to the head.’ The EU’s chief observer Ana Gomes agreed that ‘there were massive human rights violations.’

The massacres in Bahir Dar, Addis Ababa and other large cities did make international headlines, and an embarrassed British government suspended £70 million in financial aid. ‘It is time the EU and US realise that the current regime in Ethiopia is repressing the people because it lacks democratic legitimacy,’ said Gomes. But Zenawi’s position on the international stage was unassailable by this point. A member of Blair’s Commission for Africa, he was working to foster development and democracy across the continent. Ethiopian troops were soon to enter Somalia to battle the Union of Islamic Courts, which the US and Britain claimed were linked with Al-Qaeda. The prospect of internal unrest in this strategic Horn of Africa state was anathema to the west, and the story of almost 200 protesters shot down in the streets was quickly forgotten.

Also largely overlooked were the mass arrests that followed the killings: an estimated 20,000 people, including opposition leaders, activists, journalists and aid workers. The government accused the main opposition party, the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD), of conspiring to seize power by force, and prominent members were put on trial for treason and even ‘attempted genocide.’

‘After that, we were too afraid to protest,’ says Tekatay. ‘There were no more demonstrations. The government taught us a heavy lesson. They will win again in 2010, there’s no other choice now.’

Soon afterwards, my friends stop talking and ask me to put away my notebook. Solomon gestures to a man at a nearby table. In the dim light I see the man has a symbol like the figure 11 tattooed on his face. ‘That tattoo means he’s from Tigray, and he’s speaking Tigrinya. I think he was watching us just now. It’s better that we stop talking.’ A moment later, he laughs nervously. ‘You see, we are all paranoid now. We just don’t know who’s listening.’

Tigray is the mountainous northern province from which the TPLF appeared – the rebel faction that swept the EPRDF to power. Zenawi is from Tigray, as is the majority of his government. People in other ethnic regions like Amhara and Oromia complain that resources are diverted north, that money is flooding into Tigray at the expense of the rest of the country. It’s a familiar African mix of tribalism and cronyism. More than once, I am told: ‘Ethiopia has become a colony of Tigray.’

–

‘After the post-election massacres, doors started to be closed one by one. Every day the government tightens the noose around what remains of the opposition.’ Later that day I meet Getachew, a young university professor. As we sit sipping macchiatos – a rather improbable legacy of the short-lived Italian occupation – he tells me about the effect of the crackdown on the country’s legal system and media.

‘I originally wanted to train as a journalist, but I couldn’t work in this climate. Critical journalists and editors are attacked in the street. The journalism they teach at universities is a sham. The teachers can’t say anything about free press or censorship – partly because they don’t want to get their students in trouble, and partly because they can’t trust them. Someone in their family might be working for the government. They might have connections with Tigray.

‘All the good jobs in the country are reserved for EPRDF members. If you don’t join the party, it’s impossible to work. This is how the government forces people to support it. University workers like me must sign their allegiance as a condition of employment. Even by speaking to you like this, I’m breaking that condition.’

Getachew describes the 2008 Political Parties Registration Law, which obliges all parties to disclose the identity of their donors. In Zenawi’s Ethiopia, a regulation that would be standard in any healthy democracy is viewed as an attempt to intimidate the opposition. In the words of Temesgen Zewdie, an MP from the CUD, ‘the status of our political culture is clear: no-one would give money to the opposition if they know the government will get their names and addresses.’

2009 saw the passing of another controversial law that drastically curtails the remit of civil and human rights groups. Opponents say the law is designed to shut down any organisation critical of government policy. The EPRDF has long been suspicious of NGOs, both domestic and foreign, claiming they are a cover for activists working on ‘other issues.’

These developments have been mirrored by a steady squeeze on the press. Dozens of newspapers have been shut down since the unrest of 2005, and journalists tried on charges of treason. Independent papers do exist, but all content must be vetted by the Ministry of Information, which has the power to revoke the licenses of offending editors. ETV, the country’s only TV channel, is owned by the ruling party. Now Ethiopia is ranked 142 lowest of the 173 countries listed on the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedoms Index. (Its rival Eritrea comes 173, one place below North Korea.)

‘In the Derg regime, there was a Red Terror,’ says Getachew. ‘The government would murder its opponents in broad daylight. Today there is a White Terror, and it’s much more sophisticated. The government will do something bad without leaving any traces. You might have an accident, or be attacked by an anonymous gang. It happens to journalists, editors, politicians. You will just disappear.’

We hold this conversation in a public place, so Getachew urges me not to take notes. He agrees to talk further a few days later, at a location of his choosing. I wait a week, and he doesn’t call. When I try his phone, he doesn’t answer. Another week goes by, and my calls are being blocked. I can only assume he’s decided that talking to me is too risky. I hope his sudden change of heart isn’t anything more serious than a case of cold feet.

This is what I come to recognise as a typically Ethiopian symptom: getting tantalisingly close to the full story only to meet a brick wall, an inexplicable silence.

–

My final meeting takes place in the city’s poorest neighbourhood. Here I am introduced to Abebe, a former government worker imprisoned for speaking against the ruling party. ‘I supported Zenawi at first,’ he tells me as we make our way down a rutted, muddy track towards a collection of flimsy shacks at the bottom of the hill. ‘But I opposed Eritrea’s secession. When a country is landlocked, it’s like its eyes are closed. I said this at a public meeting. They threw me in prison for six months. When I was released, some party members came to me: “we don’t want you in our party, and you must not join any other political party, ever.” So now I cannot do anything. I have been exiled from politics.’

Abebe takes me on a tour of the slums. He is obviously held in high regard here. We enter mud-walled, dirt-floored huts with leaky tin roofs and shared pit latrines, where residents provide for their families on little more than 30p a day. But their lives are getting even harder. In every house, they tell the same story: inflation is rampant, food prices skyrocketing. Worse, the rains are late this year, a desperate worry in a country where 70% of the population survives from subsistence farming.

‘This is the reality of Ethiopia,’ says Abebe, gesturing at the filth, the malnourished children, the parents crippled or weak from AIDS. ‘This government has turned its back on its people. They don’t care how the poor suffer. They are only interested in enriching themselves and their cousins in Tigray. If anyone heard me saying these things, I would go straight back to prison. But how can I not say them? I’m a true citizen. It’s my duty to speak.’

On the way back, he stops to exchange some words with a man in the road. Later, he tells me this is the person the government assigned to keep an eye on him. ‘He sees that I don’t get in any trouble, go to any meetings. He is an EPRDF member. He is from Tigray.’

–

The government does, undoubtedly, have points in its favour. Infrastructure is being improved: for the first time, with heavy Chinese investment, highways are being tarmacked and telecommunication cables laid. New universities have been opened. In the countryside there are government campaigns against child marriage, female genital mutilation and the spread of HIV. Even taking into account the post-election massacres, it’s an undeniable improvement on the conduct of previous regimes, from the absolute rule of the much-mythologised Emperor Haile Selassie to the Stalinist purges and state terror of the Derg. Zenawi has even publicly mooted the idea of standing down as leader (though recently he announced his intention to govern for at least five more years).

But the image the west so badly wants to see – Ethiopia as a beacon of African democracy – is clearly wishful thinking. Zenawi may still charm western leaders, and his troops may be back in Somalia fighting the spread of Islamism, but his government has systematically smashed opposition and stifled dissent, discouraged political debate and shut down the free press. Support is maintained through coercion, bribery and fear; and, if ever these safeguards fail, the EPRDF has shown itself willing to fall back on old-fashioned terror.

Even the government’s strongest critics concede there exists no other party strong enough to threaten Zenawi in the upcoming elections. Much of the opposition has fled the country. Opposition leader Birtukan Mideksa, portrayed by her supporters as Ethiopia’s Aung San Suu Kyi, was recently sentenced to life imprisonment for refusing to apologise for ‘crimes’ committed after the last elections (her crime was encouraging anti-government protests). Opponents from other ethnic regions, particularly Somali and Oromia, have been tried on terrorism charges. The threat of armed resistance to the government is used to justify repressive measures against political activists; human rights groups claim the armed forces have been given impunity to detain, torture and murder suspected ‘terrorists.’

Meles Zenawi is taking no chances. Having fought a civil war to overthrow a bloodthirsty regime, and having been dazzled in the limelight of the international stage, he seems to feel, in the manner of so many African ‘big men,’ that only he and his cronies are entitled to rule the country. His native Tigray, historically oppressed by the emperors of neighbouring Amhara region, is at last enjoying wealth and influence. The coming elections will demonstrate how much further he’s prepared to go to destroy the democracy that he himself created.

‘Zenawi tried democracy once,’ in the words of professor Getachew, ‘and he may even have meant it. But democracy bit the hand that fed it, and he won’t make the same mistake twice. He’s too clever.’

For our three-day trek, 14,000ft up in the Indian Himalayas in Kashmir, we’d come prepared with waterproofs, walking boots, sleeping bags and a tent. Guru Shanker Abharshila, on the other hand, had only a grubby white robe, plastic flip-flops and a small bag of apples. That, and a wooden board strung with rope on which he would prop himself up to sleep (a Hindu sadhu, or holy man, he had made a vow to Lord Shiva that he would not sit or lie down for 12 years). Others, including stooped women in their 80s, went barefoot, and there was even a one-legged sadhu who overtook us on crutches. This was no ordinary mountain walk; we were on the annual pilgrimage, or yatra, to the Amarnath cave.

There lies the Shiva-lingam, an ice stalagmite that forms in the cave between May and August. For Hindus it’s a manifestation of Lord Shiva, who chose the cave to reveal the secret of eternity to his consort Parvati. Since time immemorial devotees have been making the arduous 30 mile trek, zig-zagging up steep mountainsides and crossing streams of glacial melt-water to pay homage to the miraculous appearance of their god. Pilgrim numbers have peaked at 500,000 in recent years. Unfortunately, the Shiva-lingam has not always been there to greet them. Due to both global warming and the sheer body heat of so many people, the ice stalagmite has failed to form, or else melted unnaturally early.

In the town of Pahalgam, two hours from Srinagar, we organised a luggage pony and guide for £30 for three days (food and tents are provided free on the trek) then took a taxi to Chandanwari, one of the yatra’s main starting points.

The first leg of the journey is one of the toughest, a 2,000ft scramble up a steep, rocky hillside, accompanied by throngs of orange-clad pilgrims. The slopes echo with cries of “Jai Shiva shankar!” and “Bom bom bhole!” (“hail Lord Shiva!”, “all hail!”). At the summit at Pissu Top, we sheltered beneath a plastic awning, sharing a hookah and Kashmiri chai with pilgrims, dreadlocked sadhus and soldiers.

A shock awaited us at the lake of Sheshnag, our first designated camping point. I’d expected something resembling a lakeside hippy festival. But instead we were greeted by razor-wire, dilapidated pre-fabs looming out of the mist, rows of sodden khaki tents and mounds of plastic waste.

Once settled in, our spirits improved. There was a langar (a free food tent) offering dhal, rice and chapatis, and we were hustled to the front of Hindu prayers to have our foreheads liberally smeared with red kumkum powder.

The second day’s trek was easier – the clouds finally burnt away, revealing snowcaps and glaciers on higher peaks, the minute scale of this human journey against the impossibly vast Himalayas. We understood why these are regarded as the literal abode of the gods.

Descending a long, curving valley, we refreshed at another langar at Poshipathri, then continued to the final campsite. directly beneath the holy cave. The site can only be described as a glacial shanty town. It had been occupied for almost two months, and looked as if the cave’s wide mouth had disgorged a tide of tarpaulins – temporary dwellings and stalls selling glitzy religious tat.

But amazing hospitality compensated for less salubrious aspects. We stayed inside the main langar, presided over by a stern-looking man propped up in bed with an enormous trident, and a friendly soldier warned us of the dangers of landslides and bears, who emerge after dark, apparently, to eat chapatis.

First thing the next morning: at last, the holy cave. Sadhus lined the path, sitting by little fires, smeared with ash, necks hung heavy with charms and medallions, dutifully getting stoned.

Inside the cave were bells, flowers, incense, statues of gods. But no Shiva-lingam. It had melted weeks ago. All we could see beyond the yellow guardrail was the rock at the back of the cave. But the pilgrims still gave offerings, revering the space where the stalagmite had been. The atmosphere was hushed, respectful, awed. Our new friend Salil Kumar explained why it’s still sacred. “Even though there is no Shiva-lingam, there is holy snow. Even if no holy snow, there is holy water.”

Does Salil connect the melting with human activity? “Of course. We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. Also, we give out body-heat. But it’s beyond our control. It is the will of Lord Shiva.

This echoes what other pilgrims told me. Many are aware of climate change, but few see any connection to what’s happening in the cave. The lingam has never been explained, and the divine – by definition – goes beyond human understanding. “No geologist, no scientist has ever found the source,” says Salil. “It’s a holy mystery.”

Salil assures us that in this holy place all wishes will be granted, for the betterment of humankind. One of my wishes is that Amarnath will be saved from pollution and tourism, religious or otherwise. It would be a tragedy if ever-increasing throngs, in their devotion, destroy the very thing they love.

Alexei and Alden stand at the porthole, eating freeze-dried ice-cream. The two men are naked apart from the magnetised boots that hold their feet to the floor. The unreal glow of the Horsehead Nebula streams through the triple-reinforced glass, bathing the fronts of their bodies in light, casting the rest into shadow. A faint smear of Alexei’s semen glistens on Alden’s belly.

‘Which one you like best?’ asks Alexei, crumbling ice-cream between his wide lips.

Alden squints at the purple diffusion of hydrogen gas swirling in space, the clouded mass of interstellar dust that resembles a rearing horse. In the twenty weeks they’ve spent up here, measuring the radiation emitted by collapsing stars, supernovae (though the finer points of their technical duties have been somewhat overlooked in recent weeks), they’ve seen so many wonders he feels he has lost the capacity to judge.

Alden touches his forehead to the glass. He stares at the universe. ‘I can hardly tell them apart anymore,’ he says. His breath mists the porthole. ‘Once you get past a certain stage, seeing beauty like we’ve seen, you reach a kind of saturation point. I don’t think I can say.’

‘No. Which ice-cream flavour you like?’ The burly cosmonaut starts to laugh. Specks of powder detach from his lips and spin frictionlessly away. Alden starts to laugh as well. He slips his fingers round the Russian’s waist, where the sweat has cooled.

-

Alexei heaves at the rowing machine while Alden checks the charts. Each man is wearing a white vest and a pair of lightweight, silvery trousers. Now and then Alden can’t resist looking up from the screen, his face awash with blue light, to watch Alexei’s arms at work, the muscle flowing beneath the skin, his jawbone’s perfect line.

When Alexei works out, Alden has observed, his eyes become immutably fixed on one or another opposite point: a distant star system, a bolt in the wall, once on the bump of Alden’s knee as he stood in the doorway, watching. The man’s concentration is absolute. He cannot be distracted.

‘You know how muscle builds up, right?’ Alden asks, watching the big man’s shoulders heave and roll, heave and roll.

Alexei’s brow wrinkles, he scowls, but he doesn’t break his rhythm.

‘You’re aware of the physiological process going on in your arms? You tear the tissue a little bit every time you pull. You gradually rip the muscle apart. And then new tissue grows to fill it in. The more you damage it, the more it grows.’

‘Body wastes quicker in space,’ grunts Alexei, pausing for a second to flick sweat off his brow. The sweat falls to the metal floor. The gravity is on. ‘Some spacemen, when they get up here, they let themselves go. I’ve seen it. Me, I like to stay strong. Disciplined is better.’

‘Disciplined, huh? Is that what you call it?’ grins Alden, moving close.

‘You think I work out in order to look good? Up here, where there’s no-one to see?’

There’s me, Alden thinks, but he doesn’t say it. Then he says it. ‘There’s me.’

‘You?’ says Alexei, heaving at the chain. ‘You, I think you have seen me already.’ He hurls himself into each pull as if he’s trying to escape his own body. His triceps look like the moving parts of some complicated instrument, a church organ made of muscle and bone, but the only two notes the organ can produce is the suck and whistle of his breath.

Alden listens to the cosmonaut’s fugue and returns to his screen. He cannot bring the data into focus. He is thinking of the power and concentration of Alexei’s stare. His vision is like a laser beam. That time his eyes fixed on his knee. As if it had been nailed to the wall. He almost expected scorching.

-

‘Seriously, which one you like best?’ Alexei’s voice rises from below, breaking the artificial silence of night. Alden is lying on the top bunk and Alexei is lying on the bottom. The bunks are so narrow and cramped the two men never think to share. Besides, it wouldn’t feel quite right, somehow.

‘Nebulae, or ice-cream now?’ Alden is almost asleep, about to start dreaming of trees and kites, things blowing around in the sky. Wind is something you don’t feel here. Wind is one of the few things he misses.

The lights are down, and the cabin is lit by the nebula’s eerie purple glow. At first they used to pull down the blinds to help maintain a notion of night, but lately they’ve taken to leaving them open, this protocol, like the rest, having diminished in importance now, so they can look out at the stars.

‘Most people, when they see pictures, they say they like Horsehead best. Horsehead is something that looks like something. It is something they recognise. But to me, it just looks like chess piece. Resembles only symbol of horse, not horse itself.’

Alden listens to the familiar voice, the only voice he has heard in twenty weeks. He can feel the deep bass rumble in the frame of the bed.

‘Al-den? Are you listening?’

‘I’m always listening,’ says Alden. He enjoys the way Alexei pronounces his name, splitting it into two parts. As if it is something to be divided, measured.

‘Same with Cat’s-Eye Nebula. Looks a bit like eye of cat, or maybe, the symbol of eye of cat. People down there, they are always trying to look for things they recognise. Saying this collection of stars is like bear. That one is like twins. Twins? Me, I always thought that was dumb. I could join them up myself and say it’s like submarine.’

His voice goes silent for a time. Alden wonders if he’s gone to sleep. He listens for the sound of his breathing, but can only hear the tiny clicks and muffled bleeps and hisses of the ship, sounds as familiar to him now as the Russian’s voice. Every single sound he hears he can trace back to its source. Every single sound happens for a reason.

‘Crab Nebula I like best,’ resumes Alexei, as if no time has passed. ‘You know why? You know why, Al-den?’

‘No,’ says Alden. ‘Tell me why.’

‘Because it doesn’t look like crab.’ Alexei sounds satisfied at this. There’s a soft thump from below as he rolls onto his side.

‘You know, when I was a kid,’ says Alden, ‘I preferred the clouds that didn’t look like anything. I guess that’s kind of the same thing. Seeing faces and animals and stuff made me feel kind of claustrophobic.’

‘So, which ice-cream flavour you like?’ Alden can tell from the sound of his voice that the Russian is grinning down there. This makes him grin as well. He pictures the lines around Alexei’s mouth, the feeling of his stubble.

‘They all taste like fucking chemicals. Which one do you like best?’

‘Raspberry ripple,’ says the Russian. ‘That one is the best.’

-

The two men make love without gravity, gently bumping off the walls. They schoon from the ceiling to the floor, getting wedged in the narrow doorways. They put the ship on standby mode, disconnect communications. There is no hurry up here. There’s no time at all.

The first few times, ridiculously, Alden found himself drawing the blinds before they took off their clothes. Alexei laughed so hard his belly shook. Now they do it in the nebula’s glow, in the pulsing luminescence of the stars. Sometimes Alden tries to calculate how long the light that illuminates them will take to travel back to Earth. Will people exist to see it then? Will there be anyone left to understand?

When Alexei comes, his semen forms a whirling galaxy of pearls, pale planets and moons, perfect spheres, finding their own orbits. Alden blows a stream of air to channel them this way and that. Sometimes he spends minutes at a time, until the globs are as cold as chilled water, arranging them in recognisable formations, to test the cosmonaut’s knowledge.

‘Which solar system does this represent?’

‘If that big one’s Jupiter, and that speck is Io, what’s this medium-sized one over here?’

Alexei laughs. ‘Do I look like God? Do you think I look like God, Al-den? If I’m God, what are you? You must be Holy Ghost.’

When Alden comes, it sometimes feels like the walls of the ship have disappeared. That everything is rushing out of him, into the vacuum of space.

If technology would only permit, Alden would like to make love outside the ship, their breaths clouding the screens of their helmets, surrounded by nothingness. But their suits haven’t been designed for this. The access points are in the wrong places. So they content themselves with mere floating, holding hands through bulky space-gloves, connected only by umbilical cords of air.

-

‘It’s always reminded me of frogspawn,’ says Alden once afterwards, sharing a thin regulation blanket that’s more like a paper tissue. ‘Come. It’s like frogspawn. Don’t you think?’

‘What is frogspawn?’ asks Alexei.

‘You know, the stuff that frogs produce. Eggs, I guess. It looks like the tapioca balls they put in pearl tea. You see it in ponds when you’re a kid. At least, you do when you’re a kid in the States.’

‘What is pearl tea?’ asks Alexei. He is resting his big head on the metal shelf that runs along the length of the bed. He has the ability to make himself comfortable in any situation.

‘Never mind,’ says Alden. ‘It’s just a thought.’ His own head is resting on Alexei’s stomach. He can feel the contraction and expansion of the muscle wall. He wonders if they have frogspawn in Russia. They must do. They must have frogs.

-

Back there on Earth, there’s a room somewhere in which the data they collect is compiled and analysed. Where streams of figures, binary-encoded, pour down flickering screens like rain. Teams of scientists translate these figures into graphs and models and charts, drawing conclusions about radiation, half-life, temperature, the speed of stars, the lifespan of planets, the collapse of galaxies. In deserts thousands of miles apart, in Kazakhstan and Nevada, combined control rooms make adjustments to the course of their ship measured in hundredths of degrees, where the slightest error could send them hurtling helplessly into space, into vast uncharted regions from which they would never return. Alden thinks about these things sometimes, but none of it seems real. He thinks about his old colleagues, his apartment, his neighbours, his dog Dog-Star, who’s in kennels now. None of that seems real either. He can hardly even remember the faces of his friends.

-

They are eating bowls of instant noodles at the brushed steel table. The noodles are topped with sliced carrots, pak choi, water chestnuts and rehydrated pork. All of it comes from shrink-wrapped packets with codes that indicate the day of consumption. There are little sachets of soy source. They eat the food with plastic chopsticks. This sort of thing is meant to provide variety, to stop them getting bored.

Alexei complains about the food, but Alden doesn’t mind it. These artificial meals don’t bother him. It isn’t really so different from what he eats at home.

‘You realise we’ve only got twenty days left?’ he says, after they’ve finished. They are drinking tiny shots of sake now. This was another inspired stroke to stop them growing despondent up here, one 5ml (CHECK) tot of alcohol in every twenty-four hour period. There’s a timer system on the alcohol sachets, so only one measure is dispensed per day. Of course, if they wanted, they could stockpile spirits and have a big session in a fortnight or so. But they’ve never felt the desire for this. Getting drunk in space feels strange, like it will never stop.

Alexei grunts. He licks his lips, getting the last taste of sake.

‘It’s not long. Three weeks. And then back down.’ Something is tugging at Alden’s chest, an impulse he knows he should ignore.

‘I know that,’ says Alexei. ‘It’s long enough. Days don’t feel like days up here. Everything gets stretched out.’

‘It’s not long, Alexei,’ says Alden stubbornly. The cosmonaut has got to his feet and thrown the plastic plates and food containers into the vacuum-crushing unit, which compacts them to the size of grains of rice and fires them into space. ‘It isn’t very long at all, not after the time we’ve been up here.’

‘What do you want me to do about it?’ says Alexei, turning back to him. There is no harshness in his voice, just a simple question.

‘Well nothing, I guess. What can you do? It’s the end of the mission, right? That’s that.’

Alexei hovers uncertainly, frowning. It’s strange to see such a big man uncertain. It doesn’t suit him. Alden doesn’t know what he wants to say, or if he wants to say anything at all, but now Alexei seems to be expecting something.

‘So what’s going to happen?’ he says at last.

‘What’s going to happen when?’

‘When we get down. When we get back home.’

‘There will be a big party,’ says Alexei, folding his arms across his chest and standing with his legs splayed wide, like some kind of circus strong-man. ‘A big party, with champagne and caviar. No more fucking little sachets like this. Our presidents will shake us by the hand. They will take our photos for magazines. Women will put their arms round us. But only for a few weeks.’

‘You know what I mean. After that.’ Alden wants to stop speaking, but he can’t stop now. He knows his voice sounds sulky, juvenile. But all he can do is go on.

‘After what, Al-den?’ Alexei’s voice jumps up a level. It rings off the steel walls and ceiling of the tiny dining area. ‘You know what. We talked about this. Two times, we talked about this. Why do you want to talk about it again, this same thing?’

‘I know we talked about it before, so what? Are you keeping score?’ Alden’s voice is rising too, but he quickly drops his tone again. ‘I just want to know, okay? It’s just, three weeks. It isn’t long. I need to know what happens next. After we get down.’

Alexei sits. Rests his arms on the table. The hairs on his forearms look like they’ve been combed.

‘Alright, I tell you again,’ he says. His voice is quiet now as well. There is no hardness in it, but it’s firm. Alden raises his head to look at him, and Alexei’s face suddenly looks like the face of an older man’s. ‘Down there, on Earth, I have my wife. I tell you this many times. I have two beautiful little girls. Lisaveta and Natasha. Twins. I tell you all this.’

‘I know,’ says Alexei. ‘I saw their pictures in the paper.’

‘So. That’s what happens next. You will go to the United States. I will go to Russia. That’s what was always going to happen. You understand. You know this.’

They sit opposite one another for a time. The thing that Alden hates the most is the embarrassment he feels. All of this was unnecessary. He didn’t need to start this conversation. He’d known that from the beginning.

‘Al-den. You should have someone too.’

‘What do you mean, have someone?’

‘Down there. A woman. You should have a wife. I tell you this, as a friend.’ For a second, Alden thinks that Alexei is about is to reach out to touch his arm. But he doesn’t do it. Alden knows the feeling of his hand so well, every callous, the soft parts of his palm, that he can feel it anyway. Even when it’s not there. ‘A man should have a wife, Al-den. Otherwise, what reason to return to Earth? What reason to come down?’

-

Later it’s a long time getting to sleep. They lie there on their separate bunks, Alden above and Alexei below, with the ship making its regular noises, and the sound of their separate breathing. Alexei turns over three times, as if he can’t get comfortable. Alden listens to the sound of him, and when he knows he’s fallen asleep he can’t stand listening any more, so he gets up and climbs down the ladder and turns the air dispenser on, which covers every other sound with a gentle hum. In the morning he tells Alexei he was cold.

-

‘It’s a man’s universe up here,’ Alexei was saying a month or two ago. ‘A man’s universe. But it’s a woman’s world. You know what I mean?’

‘No, I don’t. What do you mean?’ They’d just finished imaging another nebula. Now they were sharing a chocolate bar, which didn’t really taste like a chocolate bar, and filling out the requested questionnaire. That was another, smaller duty, something to do when there was nothing else: giving feedback about the food, the taste, consistency and so on, to improve future missions.

‘What I mean is man’s eternal urge,’ said Alexei. There was chocolate round his mouth. ‘To send the rocket into space, to hit the moon. The sperm and the egg. Men get out and put a flag in the ground, like planting a little seed. How many sperms get to the egg, whenever a man comes? One in twenty million. See, that’s us. We’re the successful ones.’

‘Right. I guess,’ Alden said. The cosmonaut’s philosophies amused him. The seriousness on his face made him want to laugh, but he knew that Alexei would get offended. Their senses of humour sometimes weren’t compatible. Alden would laugh at things that filled Alexei with honour and importance. In return, Alexei would laugh at things that Alden actually found quite sad.

‘That’s right. We are only following a pattern. We are going with the flow. The flag sprouts up. We must plant new flags. Look at how many eggs out there, we can’t count, there are billions of them. So, more phalluses shooting out. Man can never stop.’

‘Phalli,’ says Alden.

‘What?’

‘It’s phalli. Not phalluses. Like cacti and cactuses.’

‘You think I am not being serious. But everyone knows, Al-den. We keep thrusting forward. Into this void. Because we must. There is nothing else. A man’s universe, and a woman’s world. Phalluses, phalli, however you like. But have you ever seen a space-rocket shaped like a vagina?’

Alden had to admit that he hadn’t.

-

They make love twice, after that conversation they had as they were eating noodles, but nothing about it feels right. It feels like something mechanical. Like another function of the ship, something that has been pre-programmed. Alden has an image of two flesh-like robots, thrusting away at one another in a capsule millions of miles from any living thing. With no-one to see it and no-one to care. The image makes him want to cry.

Even worse is the way Alexei acts towards him afterwards. He acts as if he’s done something wrong, as if weakness made him commit some mistake that needs making up for. Alden doesn’t want him to be apologetic. He wants him to be like he was before, without a flicker of shame or contrition. Heaving a contented sigh and stretching his limbs out luxuriantly, grinning, rubbing his stubbled chin, like a lion after a feast. With pearls still orbiting in the air, splashed against dashboards, screens. It’s like he feels pity for him now. Alden can’t bear that.

He wishes he’d never been so pathetic, starting that conversation. They are still weeks away from Earth. Anything could happen up here. Alexei was right, three weeks in space is a long time, much longer than three weeks. The days and the nights could have stretched out endlessly, like matter sliding into a black hole, like one of Einstein’s elastic bands. It could have been like it was before. They could have wrapped time around themselves, stretched those few weeks into a lifetime. But, by starting that conversation, he ruined it all.

Alexei acts differently now around the ship. He is less booming, less strident. He makes less noise when he moves from place to place. His manner is slightly withdrawn, almost cautious. It’s like he’s already pulling away, Alden thinks bitterly, re-acclimatising himself, preparing to plunge back through the atmosphere. Getting drawn into Earth’s gravitational field. Back to that woman’s world.

Up until now, when Alden thought of Earth, he hadn’t really felt anything. He missed the wind. He missed his dog, but mostly he didn’t miss his dog. The planet was just a speck in the blackness, one of untold millions. Now, when he thinks of Earth, it casts a feeling of dread. Dread and dullness. Disappointment. Nothing will have changed down there.

They still work together, eat together, drink their sachets of alcohol together. They do their jobs as they did before. Where else could they go?

-

‘I’ve been thinking,’ says Alden one day. It’s afternoon, according to the system of time they follow on the ship. But really, of course, it isn’t afternoon. Or, perhaps, it’s always afternoon. Night-time, morning, midday, afternoon and evening are conflated here, and it’s always all time at the same time, or no time at the same time. It doesn’t feel like afternoon. It just feels like space.

‘Thinking about what?’ They are putting some final reports together, making sure the data’s in. Alexei is eating a freeze-dried banana. It looks clownishly small in his big hands.

‘That it’s fine. You’re right. That’s the way it has to be. I’ve been thinking about it, and it’s fine.’

‘What is fine?’ asks Alexei, frowning. He eats the freeze-dried banana whole.

‘About us. Sorry, I don’t mean “us.” About the situation. This mission. You’ve got a wife down there, a family. I understand. You’re right, that’s the way it is.’

‘Okay. Good,’ says Alexei. He continues clicking away on the keyboard.

Alden watches the side of his face. He doesn’t want to look like he’s watching him. Before, he could have stared for hours – he could have reached over to feel his rough skin, or the very soft skin behind his ear – but now, if he looks too long, he feels like he’s being demanding. Like he’s acting in a childish way. Like he’s making some unreasonable request.

And Alexei doesn’t look at him, not the way he used to. Not with the same laser-beam stare, like the time it felt his knee had been nailed to the wall. It’s as if he’s scared that his eyes actually might do those things. Like they might fix Alden in a certain place, and he wouldn’t be able to pull him free again.

‘But,’ says Alden, moving his gaze from the side of Alexei’s face to the screen, where the numbers are falling into place in neat, decimal-pointed rows. ‘But, let’s keep it the way it was, huh? For these few weeks. Like a holiday. Let’s try to forget about Earth just a little longer. Earth is Earth, and space is space. We’re still up here, after all.’

For a time he thinks the Russian hasn’t heard, or is pretending he hasn’t heard. When he speaks he hardly moves his lips. ‘Space is space,’ he says.

They make love that night, on the bottom bunk. It still feels like robots.

-

They are two weeks from the end of their mission when the message comes.

‘It’s a request for assistance,’ says Alexei, bending over the screen. He is bare-chested, wearing only navy-blue boxer shorts patterned with little silver stars and moons. Alden knows these were a gift from his daughters, Lisaveta and Natasha. He also has another pair that shows a rocket blasting off, surrounded by clouds of smoke and flames. These ones are from his wife.

The transmission signal woke them both from sleep, clambering from their bunks. Alden had been dreaming about flags, washing-lines. Things flapping around in the wind.

‘Assistance? What kind of assistance?’ he asks, trying to focus on the message. His eyes are a long time concentrating, as if they are full of dust or smoke.

‘Chinese space-station,’ says Alexei. ‘Only twenty hours from here. Something wrong with their power supply. It’s manned by a single astronaut.’

‘What? They want him to evacuate?’

‘Control room wants us to bring him aboard. We’re taking him back to Earth.’

-

Twenty and a half hours later, Alexei and Alden are standing side by side at the air-lock doors. For some reason Alden has felt the need to put on his cap, which he’s never worn before, emblazoned with the logo of the mission. Other than that, both men are still wearing their vests and silvery trousers. The stubble is thick on Alexei’s chin. It makes his body look even larger, somehow.

A light comes on above the door which indicates the pod has latched on, safely suckered to the outer wall of their ship. Then another light comes on, which tells them the outer door is open. Then these first two lights go off. Thirty seconds after that, a third, brighter light comes on, and a siren sounds from the ceiling. And then, with a sigh, the door opens.

Alden realises, stereotypically, that he’d been expecting a little guy. But the Chinese astronaut is tall. Almost as tall as Alexei, though slimmer, not nearly so broad across the chest. He’s wearing a sky-blue t-shirt and sky-blue tracksuit bottoms. On his feet are a pair of plastic flip-flops that look like they come from a cheap beachwear stall. His hair is cut in a buzz-cut, like an American marine. He has a warm, easy smile.

He gives Alexi a firm handshake, then he high-fives Alden. After that, he bows from the waist, and straightens up with a grin.

‘You’ve got all the bases covered,’ says Alden.

‘Space is a celebration of diversity,’ says the Chinese astronaut. ‘That’s one of my mission slogans.’

-

The Chinese astronaut is called Hu. He’s been up here for eight months. Originally he was one of three men manning the Chinese space-station, but the other two were recalled to Earth and he elected to stay up alone, to carry out additional research. ‘I like it up here,’ he says. ‘I would have stayed half a year longer.’ But there had been damage to a solar panel, and he had been running on emergency power, and without a partner there was no way he could fix it.

‘So now they want me back on Earth. Thanks for letting me hitch a ride.’

‘What will happen to the station?’ asks Alden.

‘They’ll blow it up,’ says Hu.

They are sitting at the table in the dining area. Alexei and Hu are eating hamburgers, dipping them in barbeque source, while Alden is eating something that’s meant to taste like duck a l’orange. The food units were only programmed to dispense two portions at a time, but they’ve managed to rewrite the code to get three meals out. The duck a l’orange was meant for tomorrow’s dinner, which means that tomorrow the unit will dispense one duck a l’orange along with two different meals, and the sequence will go on like this, always an odd one out. Alcohol sachets they will share: the coding on that dispenser is harder to interfere with.

There are only two chairs in the dining area, so Alden is sitting on one of the crates that contain medical supplies. For a second, when they took their seats, he thought of sitting on Alexei’s lap. What would the Chinese astronaut do then? Probably he’d be too polite, and pretend not to notice. But Alden didn’t do that, of course. He didn’t think Alexei would like it.

The three of them make space-talk until bedtime. Hu is lively in conversation, but the lines around his eyes and the purplish shadows in his skin hint at a deep inner exhaustion, an after-effect of long hours alone, working in stressful conditions. He starts yawning at eight o’clock. They make him up a bed beside the bunks, a foam mattress covered in spare insulation blankets from the survival kits.

‘Seems like a nice enough guy,’ says Alden, after Hu has gone to bed.

‘He’s done a good job. Professional,’ says Alexei approvingly.

‘It’s kind of a shame though, isn’t it?’

‘What shame?’

‘You know. Three’s a crowd.’

Alexei doesn’t say anything. Maybe he doesn’t know the expression. They put the empty food containers into the vacuum-crushing unit, where they will be compacted into rice-sized grains.

-

That night, Alden lies awake and listens to the sound of a whole new breath. A whole new respiration system, labouring away in the darkness. Hu’s breathing is pitched higher than Alexei’s, and sometimes his throat makes a kind of click, as if a string of mucous is catching somewhere. Alden concentrates on the rumble of Alexei in the frame of the bunk. It reminds him of when he was kid, living in the house behind the railway line, with the sound of the trains going through the night, shaking the window-pane. But now there’s this Chinese astronaut, whistling and clicking. It sounds disturbing and unfamiliar. It’s a sound as ominous to Alden as if the ship had started making new noises, whistles and clicks it shouldn’t be making, some subtle shift in the mechanism. After a while Alden climbs down, steps carefully over Hu’s sleeping body, and turns the air dispensing unit on. It hums.

-

They carry on with their work as before. Hu watches their procedures with interest. Sometimes he discusses his work at the station, without revealing too many details. Much of it is classified, of course. But their conversations are convivial.

After one meal, a meal in which Alexei was the odd one out, eating ravioli with tomato sauce while Alden and Hu ate beef stroganov, the Russian brings in a portable viewer and shows Hu some of the images they’ve made of various nebulae. Hu is delighted by the pictures. He says the colours are clearer and cleaner than any pictures he’s seen before. He says that in all his years of space-work, immersed in equations and complex mathematics, he’s never lost his simple amazement at the aesthetics of the things he sees. He says the knowledge that these colours are caused by the mere diffusion of gas, by the way hydrogen reacts with light, has never undermined his appreciation for the beauty of the universe.

‘I think that’s what all spacemen feel,’ says Alden. ‘Otherwise we wouldn’t have chosen this job. Otherwise we wouldn’t be up here.’

‘Which one you like best?’ Alexei asks Hu, pointing to the thumbnail images.

‘I like them all,’ says Hu.

For dessert they eat freeze-dried ice-cream. Alden has strawberry. Hu has vanilla. Alden hands Alexei raspberry ripple, but Alexei doesn’t seem to notice.

-

Alden is in the shower unit, listening to them laughing. The shower is not a lot of fun. It seems to involve more procedures than going on a space-walk. It involves airlocks, double doors, a complicated system of nozzles that suck the water droplets away, to stop them dispersing around the ship and damaging electrical components.

Alden and Alexei made love in this shower, one time long ago. The space was so cramped, with two people in here, that they could hardly move. They did it very slowly, and the limited space seemed to amplify the tiniest movements. Alden felt it was like having sex under a microscope. Afterwards, they’d dried each other’s bodies using the suction nozzles, carefully removing every drop of water and of sweat.

They have been laughing for a while. He can’t hear any of their words. Alexei’s laugh is a deep vibration, while Hu’s is like the sound of a spoon clinking round in a coffee cup. Alden has this feeling in his gut. It reminds him a little of the feeling he gets about ten seconds after blast-off, when the world is getting left behind.

He comes into the dining area smelling of lemon soap. Alexei and Hu look up as he enters. Alexei is leaning back in his chair, with one of his bare feet up on the table, his arms crossed on his chest. Hu gives Alden a friendly grin. He is still chuckling.

‘What’s all the laughing about, guys?’ asks Alden, feeling stupid.

‘I always thought Russians had no sense of humour,’ says Hu. ‘This is what people told me. They said, Chinese people are always laughing, and Russians are always scowling. Now I find it isn’t true. I look forward to telling them this, when I get back down.’

‘We were talking about women,’ says Alexei. The lines of his laughter are still on his face, even though he’s stopped smiling.

-

On a ship this small, in such cramped conditions, it shouldn’t be possible for one man to feel like he’s ever alone. Alden discovers now how easy it is. Alexei and Hu talk like he’s not there. Joking, wisecracking, comparing experiences. They get into humorous arguments about conflicting points of protocol, the best way to make minor repairs, methods for reducing gravity sickness. Their language is the language of space, the same language that Alden speaks, but he cannot enter these conversations. He hovers on the margins.

He concentrates on his work. He makes sure all the information is in order. He rechecks data he’s already rechecked, backs up files he’s already backed up, tries to memorise figures he already knows.

There’s a kind of steady buzzing in his brain. It seems to crackle when he moves his eyes, when he turns his head. It’s a bit like when he was a kid, back home, and their TV signal was so bad that if you stood on one part of the floor, the picture would fuzz up with static, and if you moved to another place it was fine. He doesn’t know why he keeps thinking like that, about these times when he was a kid. He left it all behind long ago. He left it back down there on Earth, on the woman’s world.

The first time he sees them brushing hands, he turns away and goes to the porthole and looks at the stars a long time. He thinks about constellations, the imperative to put a name on everything, to join the dots into bears and twins and crabs. He closes one eye and sketches lines across the black, from star to star, covering millions of miles of empty, lonely space. ‘This one’s a cactus. This one’s a gun. That one’s a submarine.’

The first time he sees their fingers lock, he goes to the computer and starts to type messages for Earth, which he knows even as he writes he will not send. ‘I am writing from the Combined Space Mission to report some changes to our night sky. The moon isn’t shining anymore. The stars have all gone out.’ It’s pathetic. ‘The planets have stopped orbiting their suns. Everything is getting further away. It’s cold up here, it’s dark up here, and everything is fucked.’ He’s ashamed. He deletes it all, watches the cursor gobbling the words. Like it’s going back in time. He sits with his head in his hands, not moving. He stays like that for a long time.

The first time he hears them kiss goodnight, he makes himself wait for fifteen minutes, then scrambles down the ladder and shuts the door behind him. He knows they didn’t mean for him to hear. It was only a light peck. But he has become an expert now in every creak, every hiss, every small vibration of the air.

He goes into the storage area and takes out his space helmet. He puts it on, adjusting the straps so it fits snugly on his head, eliminating all sound. His head is immersed in a heavy bubble. Nothing can get in. He makes his way to the dining area, bumping the helmet on the doorframes. Then he opens up a survival kit and drags out one of the insulation blankets, lays it down on the chilly metal floor.

When Alexei and Hu come in the next morning, after six hours sleep, they find Alden sprawled out on the blanket, wearing his vest, his boxer shorts and a space helmet. It takes him some time to get the helmet off, he can hardly see through the tinted visor, and he gets it jammed for a moment underneath the table.

‘Morning, campers,’ he says when he’s got his head free at last. His arms and legs are goosepimpled, trembling from the cold.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ demands Alexei. Hu turns away, confused.

-

During his training, Alden was put through endurance tests of every description. He was made to crawl through metal tubes so narrow that if he got his elbows jammed, they would have to cut him out with special equipment. He was suspended upside-down for up to two hours at a time, wearing headphones that blasted out white noise. He was forced to hold his breath under water until a red mist rose in his brain, spots of blackness blooming and dancing sickeningly across his vision. They spun him round in a gyroscope and made him subdivide equations.

He’s a highly-trained professional spaceman, one of the few. ‘The successful ones,’ as Alexei said. He’s been taught to carry on, to function on only ten minutes sleep, to keep his mind clear, to operate when the air supply drops to dangerous levels. He’s used to being starved of oxygen. He’s used to induced sickness.

But no-one ever trained him for this. Not this sinking in the gut, not this constant pain.

-

When Alexei moves off his narrow bunk and starts sleeping on the floor with Hu, Alden loses it.

Alexei wakes from a heavy sleep, his arm draped across Hu’s chest, to find Alden tearing at his hair, kicking at his body. Hu tries to roll from under the blows but Alden claws him back by the arm, chopping at his stomach and ribs with an open hand. It’s like he can’t decide which one of them deserves the force of his blows, which one he wants to hurt the most. Alexei launches himself from the floor and grabs Alden in a powerful squeeze, trying to pin his arms. But Alden is going at it like a madman. He gets his leg free to kick Hu in the ear. He has Alexei by the hair. He fights in silence, not making a sound apart from vicious exhalations of breath that sound like a front crawl swimmer. Alexei slams him down to the floor, and Hu hangs onto his feet. Alden lands one good, solid punch in Alexei’s eye. But now they have him heavily pinned, and it doesn’t last much longer.

‘I hate you,’ says Alden calmly, fifteen minutes later.

‘You shouldn’t say that,’ says Hu. ‘It’s a very strong word.’

‘I wasn’t talking to you,’ says Alden. ‘It’s got nothing to do with you. You shouldn’t even be here.’

They are sitting at the steel dining table, onto which has been emptied out the contents of a first aid pack. Alexei is holding an ice-pack to his eye and is bleeding a little from the head, where a clump of hair was torn out. Hu is holding an ice-pack to the swollen cartilage of his ear. Alden is pretty much unscathed, apart from some light bruising.

‘We should eject you back into space,’ Alden says to Hu.

Alexei suddenly starts to laugh, although it makes him wince. ‘Shut up, Al-den,’ he says. ‘Just shut up. You’re the one we should eject.’ His eye looks like a burst fruit. It’s already turning livid.

‘Why did you do it?’ asks Alden, later.

‘Do what?’

‘Do anything. With him. Didn’t you think about how I’d feel?’

Alexei frowns and looks confused, as if he doesn’t understand the question. He removes the ice-pack from his eye and touches the swelling with one finger. It puts his face all out of balance. It almost looks like he should topple sideways.

‘Space is space,’ he says after a while. ‘Space is space, Al-den.’ He looks at Alden for a few seconds that feel much longer than a few seconds, as if the ship has got snagged somewhere, caught itself in a fold of nothing, and then passed out again.

-

When the air-lock light comes on about an hour afterwards, Alexei and Hu are at the table, watching a nature documentary. They’ve been watching it for half an hour. It’s about polar bears getting in trouble, because the Arctic has melted. They aren’t watching it because they think that polar bears are interesting, they don’t really think any animals are interesting, it was just the first video file they found. And there’s nothing else to say. Alexei has one foot on the table, and Hu still occasionally dabs at his ear with ice. Their bodies aren’t touching.

After clearing away the medical supplies, they sat at the table and ate two chicken kormas and one cottage pie. None of them was really hungry, but they got most of it down. Then Alexei made a flask of coffee. They got two measurements of Polish vodka, and put the vodka in the coffee. Earth is only six days away now. The clock says it’s the middle of the night, but it feels like another afternoon. They pulled up the video screen.

When the air-lock light comes on, neither Alexei nor Hu notices at first. They continue to watch as a polar bear flops around on a lump of half-submerged ice, slipping off and clambering back on. Then they become aware of the siren. It’s a sequence of sounds they both have ingrained. Alexei frowns. Hu opens his mouth. They turn to look at one another, puzzled. Hu’s mouth is pink inside, like a cartoon frog. They turn their heads, and register that the dining area is empty. They stand up almost as if synchronised, and make their way quickly, profesionally, along the passage to the air-lock doors.

Alden is standing at the porthole, staring into space. He is leaning forward so his forehead is resting against the triple-reinforced glass. He is gazing hard at something that is out there.

‘Look at ‘em go,’ he says.

Alexei and Hu take their places at the porthole either side of him. They are just in time to watch the packets of freeze-dried raspberry ripple ice-cream rushing into the vastness of space, into the infinite black.

‘What are those?’ asks Hu, confused.

Neither of the other men responds.

‘You are like a fucking child,’ says Alexei, some time later. With a cautious finger he is mapping out the new scab on his hairline.

The three of them are still standing there, in the same alignment. They can make out the packets, but only just. They look like a scattering of tiny comets.

‘I’m sorry,’ says Alden, after yet more time has passed.

‘I’m sorry,’ says Hu.

‘I’m sorry,’ says Alexei, finally. The comets are not visible now. The three men turn away.

-

Alexei, Alden and Hu stand together, on the podium. Behind them hangs a blue velvet curtain, spangled with silver stars. The words ‘Welcome Home!’ are written in red, white and blue letters, and below those words hang the American, Russian and Chinese flags.

They wear fresh uniforms, pressed so sharply the creases down the legs are like blades. They have fresh-shaven faces and fresh haircuts. Spotless moon-boots are on their feet, boots they never had a reason to wear. Each man holds his space helmet, its visor polished to a dazzling mirror, under his right arm.

Every so often, one of the three men raises his left arm, or gives the thumbs-up, and smiles at the cameras. Their smiles are tight, economical, because they’ve been smiling for hours now, since the second they climbed down off the ship. Hu keeps flashing the V for Victory sign.

Alexei’s black eye, which has faded to yellow, or purple, or something in between, has been artfully covered with foundation, dusted with powder to match his skin. You can hardly see it now. It just makes his face look larger, uglier. You can hardly make out Hu’s swollen ear, especially if he keeps his head dead-centre, and he distracts from it with a baseball cap emblazoned with the logo of his mission.

Alden smiles, waves, thumbs-ups. He has to squint his eyes. All he can see is a barrage of flashbulbs, light pulverising his eyeballs. The camera flashes are like the bursting of a hundred suns.

-

There is champagne and caviar, just as Alexei said. The three men stand in dinner jackets, trying to balance tiny plates and champagne flutes in their hands. They wear bow-ties. Hu still wears his baseball cap. On stage a silver-tuxedoed band plays lounge jazz versions of themes from sci-fi shows.

Alden holds out his hand for people to shake. He allows them to slap him on the back. Some of the Russians even kiss his cheeks. Every time anyone approaches him, a camera flashes somewhere. The American president shakes his hand. The Russian president shakes his hand. The Chinese president shakes his hand, and Alden feels embarrassed that he didn’t know who he was.

His colleagues are there, people from training, the guys from the control room. Former astronauts and cosmonauts punch his arms and say, ‘good job, kid.’ Old generals from the army are there, stuffing their bulldog faces with canapés, military chiefs-of-staff rubbing shoulders with world-renowned astronomers, astrophysicists, Nobel Prize winners, experts in international relations. All of them want to shake his hand. All of them want their photo taken with him.

-

The three men are standing on another stage. A final photo-shoot. There is a rosette pinned to each of their chests, at the centre of which lies the emblem of two hands joined in front of a satellite. They have never seen this symbol before. It must have been invented for the occasion. Alexei holds a huge spray of carnations. He looks like he wants to put them down, but can’t find anywhere to put them.

They are all standing some distance apart, waving and thumbs-upping. Alden doesn’t want it remembered like that, with each of them standing alone, in their separate places. So he gets between them, pulling them close. He puts his arms around the other men, around Alexei’s big familiar shoulders and around Hu’s skinny back, squeezing them tightly together. The audience swells with applause. Alden squints at the cheering crowd, invisible behind the camera flashes, and he smiles and smiles.

Then all kinds of people come on stage, to shake their hands and slap their backs and pretend to wisecrack in their ears all over again. Alexei’s family come on stage. Alexei hands his wife the carnations. There are whistles from the audience. Alden gives Alexei’s wife two quick kisses, one on each cheek, but afterwards he doesn’t remember her face, not even remotely. What he does remember is the two little girls, Lisaveta and Natasha. They are wearing new frocks, one bright red and one midnight blue, and they look confused and thrilled by everything.

‘I’ve seen your dad in his boxer shorts,’ says Alden in a stage whisper. ‘He wore them all the time in space, the ones you gave him. To remember you by.’

The twins giggle and cling to each another, falling about the stage.

Alden kisses them both on the forehead. They smell of soap and flowers.

-

Dog-Star has put on weight. He always does in kennels. Alden decides to walk him twice a day from now on.

Alden’s apartment hasn’t changed. He paid someone while he was away to drop by every week or so to open the blinds, water the plants, sort through the junk mail.

He lies on the sofa for a long time, looking at the ceiling. He listens to Dog-Star padding about. This is the first time Alden has been alone for seven months.

Later, he gets up and opens all the windows, to let the air circulate. His apartment is on the thirty-second floor. He feels the wind on his face and neck. He closes his eyes, standing there.

Later still, when it’s dark over the world, he takes his telescope from its case, the telescope his parents gave him as a kid in the house behind the railway lines, and spends a long time carefully fitting all the parts together. He aims the telescope at the night sky and gazes at the emptiness where, in the future, their love affair never ends.

I first became aware of the worm on a dentist visit. I’ve never liked dentists. I don’t trust them. It isn’t that I’m afraid of them; I just don’t know what they want. This was my first time in six years. I’d hoped never to go again. But a month before, on holiday in Syria, I’d cracked one of my molars on a pebble – it’s a rocky country, full of pebbles, perhaps you will go there yourself one day – and at night the pain made me feel as if I was in an aeroplane, but instead of flying through normal clouds I was flying through clouds of pain. The right side of my mouth wouldn’t chew. My face was becoming unbalanced. And that was why I was in the dentist’s chair, gazing up at the underside of the dentist’s facial features, and it was while I was in the dentist’s chair that I became aware of the worm.

Another reason I don’t like dentists is because they are so clean. They have an unpleasant glistening quality, a bit like dolphins, who I don’t trust either. And all the instruments around them are clean, glistening also, like the instruments dolphins might use for whatever unpleasant things they get up to down there, in those underwater caverns where no-one can see them. This dentist was clean, like all the rest. The lights were so bright and white I could see into every pore of her skin, and not a trace, not a mote of dirt, could ever be concealed in there. ‘How did this happen, then?’ she asked, smiling a dolphin smile.

‘On a pebble,’ I said awkwardly, as she pushed back my lips with a rubber-gloved thumb that smelled like a condom.

‘What were you doing with a pebble in your mouth?’ she asked next, an expression of horrible interest rippling over her face.

It’s an old desert trick, I wanted to say. I also thought of saying: I was perishing of thirst. But I didn’t want to be forced to converse in such an undignified fashion. ‘Just fix my tooth,’ I said. ‘Please.’ The dentist smiled, another dolphin smile, a smile like a dolphin trying to pretend that it isn’t a dolphin, but something else entirely. She produced a little mirror on the end of a stick, and lowered her face towards mine.

‘Okay, open wide,’ she said, corresponding to cliché.

In the second I opened my mouth, which caused seams of pain to shoot around my jaw – or in the very first fraction of that second – a long, fine tendril like a hair coiled out from between my teeth and stroked the dentist’s face.

She brushed her hand over her forehead as if a stray hair had fallen. I closed my mouth instinctively and ran my tongue over my teeth. I couldn’t feel anything inside, but I knew what I had seen. The dentist did a good job of hiding the look of shock and surprise on her face. ‘Open wide,’ she said again, as if this might reset the situation. I obeyed her command. Nothing emerged. She stared tentatively around my gums, but nothing was forthcoming. She brandished the little mirror again, and the ordeal proceeded as before.

You might expect me to say here that I thought I must have imagined it, that strand reaching out for the dentist’s face from the sanctuary of my mouth. But actually, I accepted it. I knew I’d seen it as clear as day, the way you know you’ve seen a speck of dust the sunlight briefly catches.

Anyway, the dentist fixed my tooth, and then scrutinised my other teeth and went through the standard motions of grave, even wounded disappointment, as if my teeth did not belong to me but were merely on loan from some kind of charity. She gave a short speech about brushing and flossing, staring with interest at my mouth as if she’d had the sudden idea that the thing that brushed her face was perhaps a strand of dental floss; dentists, as you may well know, have little imagination. And then I paid an extortionate fee and went home to tell my wife all was well.

That was my ex-wife, you understand. I’m not talking about your mother. I’m telling you this so you know how it happened. I think you’re old enough now.

I studied myself in the mirror that day, forced my mouth open as wide as it would go. I took a pen-torch and shone it inside, watching the shadows of my teeth wash across the rippled walls, scanning every fleshy nook for traces of the strand. I saw nothing. Perhaps it was a freak occurrence. My wife appeared at the sink beside me and started brushing her hair. We gazed at each other’s reflections like two frogs regarding each other in a swamp, frogs who don’t know the other is there until a bright light is switched on. Then my wife squinted; a dull, froggy squint. ‘There’s something in your eye,’ she said, without pausing her rhythmic scraping. I bent closer to the mirror. Sure enough, in the white of my eye lay something very thin, much thinner than an eyelash. I stared hard. I saw it flex. And then it slid quickly across the lens, disappeared for a moment in the blackness of the pupil, bisected the iris as it passed, then vanished from sight around the other side of my eyeball.

I rubbed my eye with an index finger knuckle, and then rubbed the other eye too, for effect. ‘Gone?’ my wife asked, dragging the brush with a noise like a corpse sliding on a concrete floor.

‘Gone,’ I said, and left the bathroom. But I knew it wasn’t gone.

From that point on, the worm appeared – it was undeniably a worm, a worm that seemed as thin as a single atom, but a living, moving organism beyond any doubt – with increasing frequency on my person, or rather, just inside my person, like a deepwater fish that comes up to the surface every now and then to feel the sun. It came up from my throat and tickled my lips, it slid through the gaps between my teeth, and glided, as I’d seen in the mirror, across my eyeballs quicker than I could blink. It seemed very busy.

I could never tell when it might appear, or in which region of my body. It appeared to travel at great speeds inside me. Initially I saw it in my face, ducking and weaving through the upper orifices as if this were its primary dwelling place. Then it discovered how to glide beneath my skin, travelling a couple of layers below, using my epidermis as a highway to access other regions. Sometimes I’d see it underneath a fingernail, lying there like the splinter of a splinter. I’d tap the nail sharply with a pencil as if I was knocking on the window of a zoo, and the worm would quickly travel on.

Sometimes, if I was sitting quietly, it would protrude from the tips of my fingers to brush against teacups, the pages of books, exploring the outer world. I permitted it to wander, though not too far. I had no idea how long it was. Clearly it had a will of its own; perhaps its own agenda.

I toyed with the thought of getting rid of it, unravelling it like a loose thread and throwing it in the bin. Once I made a grab for it, seeing it extending from my knee as I sat in a tepid bath, finishing a glass of tequila. I caught hold of its tip between two wet fingers and tried to draw it out. It resisted. I pulled it out about thirty centimetres but it tugged back like a fish on a line, and after a short, indecisive tug-of-war I let it slip away. I examined my knee with a feeling of vague guilt. It hadn’t left any perceptible mark. It was so fine it merely squeezed between the pores. It had done me no injury, no more than a spot or blackhead would.

I knew where I’d picked it up, of course. Parasitic worms, it is known, inhabit exotic, otherworldly countries, and I had only been to one country like this in the past dozen years. That fortnight in Syria with my wife. The holiday was her decision. Syria was mine. She’d lobbied for a Turkish beach, but something about Syria called to me, something about the strangeness of the name, a twisting, twining sort of name that hinted at ancient mysteries. A worm-like name, in retrospect. It seemed to make a kind of sense. Although at first, I admit our destination wasn’t nearly as exotic or as otherworldly as I’d hoped. My first impression was that someone had piled a heap of concrete boxes on top of each other, concrete boxes covered in dust, and then rigged satellite dishes and wires onto every available surface.

We saw the usual tourist sights, the crumbled remains of ancient things, the mosques that looked like evil space-rockets, rockets built by ancient robots that hid the true purpose of their design with coloured tiles and intricate patterns that might have been computer codes. My wife swam in the hotel pool. I dipped my feet in the hotel pool, but its colour reminded me of cleaning fluid, and I felt aloof and disappointed and yearned for some private adventure. Before we left London, I’d had an image – foolish, I know, but a man has to dream – of myself struggling through luminous sands, my face swathed in a turban I’d made by wrapping a t-shirt around my head, the sky dark with swirling clouds of sand and dust that blocked the sun and gave the scene an eerie brilliance, dying of thirst, or at least half dying, just about to stumble on some glorious oasis where I could swim to my heart’s content and feel manly and triumphant at coming so close to death. I tried to explain this to my wife, and she smiled and offered me a dish of warmed almonds that a waiter had placed on our table. I ate the warmed almonds methodically, but my vision didn’t fade. So that afternoon I told my wife I was going for a walk, took a knapsack and a bottle of water, and set off for the edge of town.

After an hour, I had drunk half the water, and was making my way down a rocky track that led off the main road towards a horizon that struck me as suitable. There were low hills in the distance. I could see no buildings, no pylons or satellite dishes. Admittedly the terrain through which I was passing was not so much desert as arid scrub, littered with sun-bleached plastic bags and occasional twists of metal. But I imagined sand dunes ahead, tracts of desert between me and the hills, perhaps an oasis after all. It was certainly closer to my vision than the hotel pool.

After two hours, I had finished the water, and the hills felt no closer. The plastic bags and twisted metal were gone. There were occasional bones in the rocks, bones of sheep, I supposed, or other ruminants. The sun was less distinct than before, hidden by a yellowish haze.

After three hours, the sand storm hit. Actually, it was more dust than sand, like the bursting of a giant vacuum cleaner bag. It blocked the sun and obliterated the vague shapes of hills on the horizon, hurling the dry earth on which I walked into my eyes and nose. I carried on, but the dust disrupted all sense of time and direction. It was like being trapped in a filthy snow-globe being shaken by an idiot. I could hardly distinguish up from down. The sky was the colour of orangeade. I sweated, and the sweat hardened with dust. I took off my t-shirt, and made a turban by wrapping it around my head.

Actually, the storm didn’t last long. Maybe only about five minutes. It was more like an unusually long, ragged gust of wind than a storm, if I’m truly honest about it. Nevertheless, its violence spooked me. When the dust settled again the sun seemed hotter, much hotter than before. I coaxed one last drop of water from the dust-covered bottle. I felt like the dust was in my lungs, clogging up my veins. The thought of water was more like an ache. I wondered if I could drink my own sweat, but the idea was unappealing.

It was then I remembered the old desert trick. I picked up a pebble and stuck it in my mouth. This is supposed to generate saliva. I sucked it, but it didn’t help much. My mouth and throat felt like quick-drying cement. I rolled it around. I held it in my teeth. And then I tried chewing it, and heard a crack inside my head and spat out a little bit of tooth in the shape of a trapezium.

After three and a half hours, I stumbled upon my oasis. Perhaps the term oasis is a little romantic. There were no date palms, for example. Very little in the way of greenery, except an ugly thorn-covered bush that wasn’t even green. My oasis was actually a concrete tank about the size of half a tennis court. The water wasn’t azure, or even blue, but a murky grey surfaced with a coat of yellow dust. There was some type of valve at one end, and a dirty plastic pipe that snaked off between the rocks. On reflection, I think it must have been part of some irrigation system.

Nevertheless it corresponded to my vision, if only symbolically. I plunged in – it came up to my knees – and splashed around for a while, falling forwards onto my face and spurting water out of my mouth until I started to feel a bit ridiculous and clambered out again. I’d gulped down a few mouthfuls, and it didn’t taste so bad. At least the filth was washed from my body, and now my skin was coated instead with a tepid layer of slime. I stood there drying in the sun, and was just starting to wonder what a concrete tank full of water was doing out here, in the wilderness, so far from civilisation, when I noticed the telephone lines above my head, a faded billboard advertising soap powder, and, a few metres away, the road that led back to our hotel.

‘You swam in a lake?’ my wife exclaimed when I finally tramped back in, powdered grey, a dripping sandman, halfway through eating a box of dates I’d bought in a shop on the way.

‘I had to,’ I said. ‘I was hot. I was thirsty.’

‘A lake? Here? You swam in a lake?’

‘Well, it wasn’t a lake exactly. More like a concrete tank…’

‘You can’t swim in lakes in countries like this! Standing water carries parasites. Didn’t you read the travel advice? There’s worms that get in through your skin. Everyone knows you get infected that way. Everyone knows that.’

‘I feel fine,’ I said. I did. I had survived a sand storm, a desert. I had stumbled upon my oasis. I felt manly and triumphant, just as I’d imagined. I’d come close enough to my vision to justify the hotel pool and the mosques, the dull inertia of coming on holiday and not getting on with my wife. ‘Actually, I feel more than fine,’ I added, treading sand across the carpet. ‘Apart from the fact my tooth hurts a bit.’

‘Your tooth? What’s wrong with your tooth?’

‘I cracked it on a pebble…’

The holiday didn’t go well after that, but there were only two days left, so it didn’t really matter. I was done.

That, it seems, is how the worm first came to inhabit me, gliding through my internal pathways at its own leisure. It smuggled itself back to London in my body, undetected by customs. I didn’t resent its presence at all. I even grew a little protective. On one occasion, as I was driving, my wife reached across and made a grab for it, the tips of her nails like a pair of tweezers fashioned from mother-of-pearl. ‘You’ve got a nose hair,’ she said, as the worm wavered for a moment in the breeze, and I automatically twitched my head like a horse evading a fly. The manoeuvre wasn’t necessary. The worm, with its lightning quick reactions, had withdrawn in an instant. ‘Why won’t you let me look after you?’ my wife asked, aggrieved.

‘I don’t like you pulling the hairs in my nose while I’m trying to drive,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that reasonable?’

‘You’re never reasonable,’ she replied. Since the holiday, we were finding it increasingly hard to get along.

As my wife and I hit the doldrums, the worm became more bold. It extended itself, little by little, perhaps being aware of a vacant space it could tentatively explore. On rainy, grey East London days it would waver from the tip of my thumb as if it was tasting the air. Once, on the tube, it emerged from my elbow to brush the moustache of an old man, and sometimes it brushed the faces and breasts of women who stood close to me. The old man didn’t notice anything. The women sometimes shivered or adjusted their hair or impulsively checked their mobile phones, as if vaguely disturbed by a sensation they couldn’t identify. Sometimes I would meet their eyes, but they’d look away quickly.

As time went by, it grew stronger too. It developed the ability to move things. I felt a soaring sensation of pride the first time it shifted the page of a book, pulling it almost imperceptibly closer to my hand. It did the same with a paperclip. It idly rolled a pen across the table, whipping back into my finger at once as if it had startled itself. Sometimes if I sat very still, scattered objects within reach would be drawn little by little towards me – crumbs of food, cigarette butts, dust-balls – giving the impression my body possessed some force of magnetic attraction. Once, in the street outside, as I went to work with a lollypop stick to gouge chewing gum from the tracks of my shoe, a five pound note nudged up against my fingers, drawn by that hairline strand.

That was when it occurred to me that these scraps were offerings. A payment, of sorts, for inhabiting my body, comprised of whatever pickings lay within reach. It made me feel generous and expansive. I felt like a grateful god.

The five pound note incident wasn’t repeated. The worm appeared indiscriminate in the nature of the objects it chose. I imagined it was incapable of distinguishing between high and low value offerings, that it simply dragged in whatever was close. I know different now.

My wife and I were eating Thai green curry from the pan-Asian takeaway. The worm had been especially active that day, and now I imagined it curled up safely somewhere, in the crook of my elbow, perhaps, or coiled snugly beneath my left nipple, recovering from its efforts. I wondered where this would all end. What length had it attained? Had it infiltrated every part of me? Was it tangled inside my brain? Could the worm hear my thoughts, could it influence my actions?

It was at that moment that my wife – as if she’d felt the cold wind blowing, as if she somehow sensed its powers – told me that she’d booked me an appointment at a tropical diseases clinic.

When we got back from holiday, I’d confidently agreed to sort this out myself. I’d gone as far as looking up the number of the tropical diseases clinic and writing it down on a piece on paper, attaching that piece of paper to the fridge with a magnet in the shape of a camel I’d bought in the airport coming back from Syria, despite the fact that we hadn’t even seen a Syrian camel. But my wife kept persecuting me about it, telling me to be responsible, asking me why I hadn’t booked an appointment yet, and this constant barrage of admonition only made me want to shirk the duty.

‘You have to be pre-emptive,’ she said, which put the image in my mind of rockets falling on a desert city, one of those cities in Syria, say, all concrete boxes and wires and satellite dishes. ‘I looked into it myself, seeing as you can’t be bothered to lift a finger. Immediate treatment is recommended if you suspect you might have been exposed. I still can’t believe you were thoughtless enough to swim in a lake, in a country like that…’

‘It wasn’t a lake,’ I repeated, ‘it was a concrete irrigation tank,’ and as I clarified the point yet again I saw the oasis of my vision shrivel to a filthy puddle, the date palms wither like neglected daffodils.

‘Standing water is a magnet for diseases. You might as well swim in sewage. These parasites enter through your skin. Sometimes the symptoms don’t show for months. You haven’t noticed any symptoms, have you?’

Gloomily, picking up a prawn cracker, I neglected to reply.

‘An early symptom is peeing blood. You haven’t done that, have you?’

‘Oh, please,’ I said, grinding the cracker to powder in my hand. I wondered if the worm had stirred. I imagined it doing manoeuvres in my spine, weaving in and out of vertebrae, blissfully unaware of the ominous course the conversation was taking. ‘No, I have not peed blood.’

‘Well I booked you in for tomorrow afternoon. Will you please go, for your own sake? It says that water-dwelling parasites can cause blindness if you don’t get treated. They can cause brain damage later in life. I’m not having you getting brain damage. Do you promise me you’ll go?’

Inevitably, I agreed. I was a weak man, I admit it. It had always been the same, for as long as I could remember. There seemed to be nothing else for it, it had been a pleasant few weeks but the worm would have to go. So midway through the next afternoon, I was sitting on a green plastic chair in the waiting room of the tropical diseases clinic, staring with a sense of doom at the medical posters on the wall, which gave information on dengue fever and yellow fever and hepatitis and rabies and polio and pig flu and other barely credible afflictions.

The waiting room in which I waited was eerily identical to the waiting room that had preceded the dentist’s. I suppose all waiting rooms are the same, wherever you go in the world. And as, a few short weeks ago, I’d been sitting in the dentist’s chair, where I’d first become aware of the worm, soon I’d be sitting in the doctor’s chair, where presumably that awareness would cease; or rather, lying on the doctor’s couch, if those things are even called couches, those shiny beds with metallic legs, covered by a blanket no thicker than a paper napkin, the sort of napkin you might find while eating in a very cheap restaurant, the kind of restaurant that’s so cheap they have carefully cut the napkins at the folds to produce four single sheets from each one, the kind of restaurant, I imagine, you might find in Syria if you went to a working-class district of town, though my wife would never have considered eating at any place like this. Those beds that are usually blue or lime green, the colour of detergent, or the way detergent smells, and over which you know for a fact all manner of bodily fluids have been spilled, perhaps bodily fluids you’ve never even heard of, for doctors have a way of getting to these things, of accessing secret juices.

As a rule, I don’t dislike doctors as much as I dislike dentists. They don’t have that glistening dolphin quality; doctors are generally grubbier. That isn’t to say I like them, however. They make me feel vaguely repelled. There is something unpleasantly sexual about them, something like bonobo monkeys. I imagine this is because their profession involves as much proximity to sex as it does proximity to death, and a simian masturbatory essence somehow must rub off.

The worm had not shown itself all day. Perhaps it was hiding in the deepest part of me, rolled into a tight ball in the marrow of my bones, where in its dark, wormy way, it imagined it would not be found. Of course, this wouldn’t save it. They’d blitz my system with pre-emptive pills, dropping fizzing payloads of poison to penetrate every hiding place, no matter how deep it burrowed. It would be purged, liquidated. There was nowhere it could hide.

Again, I had a sensation of guilt. The worm wasn’t doing any harm. It only wanted a place to live. I felt certain I would miss its comings and goings, its thoughtful, if useless, offerings; its touchy-feely fascination with the world.

Just as I was thinking these things, someone else entered the room. It was a young woman with short, dark hair and sunglasses over her eyes. She sat three chairs away from me, took off her jacket, crossed her legs and settled down to wait. I glanced at her without much interest, brooding on my worm. And then she picked up a magazine about healthy diet or home decoration or reading matter equally as dismal, and took the sunglasses off her face. And I found myself looking again.

My head swivelled, my eyelids opened. It felt like my features rearranged themselves. A tendril of incredible fineness reached from the corner of my eye and honed its way towards her through the air. From her eyes, which were green, I noticed, or greyish green like light falling through water, an answering tendril hesitantly emerged and crept its way towards mine. They met in the centre of the room, briefly drew back from one another, then quickly bound together. And then we were staring at each other, and we couldn’t stop.

Strands began creeping from my fingers, sliding out from the nails and skin, reaching for the corresponding strands that had begun their stealthy approach from the tips of her fingers, which, I noticed, were slender and appealing. They threaded, tightening like wires, tugging our hands together. And then, though neither of us knew how, we were sitting in neighbouring chairs, and our arms were fumbling for each other’s bodies, delving this way and that.

‘Why are you here?’ I asked, dry-mouthed, as if the question was needed.

‘I have some sort of parasitic worm,’ she mumbled in an unsteady voice, and then something about backpacking, a stagnant lake in Equatorial Guinea, but already our mouths were closing on each other and we both became lost for words.

We left the waiting room before we were called, clumsily gaining the street. With urgency, we found a cheap hotel, almost dragging one another up the narrow staircase, where rapidly clothing was removed, new tendrils emerged from unexpected places and tugged us together in gratifying ways, and gifts of a vastly more personal nature than paperclips or five pound notes were duly offered, and accepted. By the next morning we were so tangled up it took a coordinated effort to extricate ourselves enough to get dressed.

And that is how I met your mother. That’s how you were conceived. Nine months later you popped out, perfect in every way. And when we examined you, of course, gliding through your grey-green eyes, which I’ve always thought have the quality of pebbles, pebbles plucked from the desert and polished by the sea, we glimpsed just the hint of a hint of a strand, a mere tendril, the width of an atom, so fine we might almost have missed it.

And that’s why our love for you won’t be unravelled. That’s why you will always be protected in this world. No matter how far you might drift from us, dear, we will reel you back in with love.

A week ago, I chanced upon the sixth and penultimate fragment of the Si’i-Aamos Tablet. I only shifted my weight in bed; I felt its hard edges against my back; somehow, the fragment had been wedged between the bodies of myself and my wife as we lay sleeping.

I have long since ceased to feel amazed at the places they appear. Ever since I happened on the first, in a sandcastle I demolished with my feet on the Irish coast when I was five years old, and came to realise there would follow a second, and a third, and later came to understand more fully what the whole thing entailed. The first fragment was the biggest, and remains the dearest to me. With it I discovered a fragment of myself, and my larger mission in life. Its sharp edge split the skin of my foot. I have a little scar on my toe.

My wife was still fast asleep. I stroked her back cautiously. Then I wrapped my fingers round the fragment and tucked it under the waistband of my boxer shorts. I slipped my feet to the floor, put a pullover on and went quietly down the corridor to the bathroom.

Once inside, I locked the door and examined the fragment in the honeyish glow of the shaving light above the mirror. There was no doubt. There never is. It was exactly how I knew it would look, even down to the chips along the shortest side. It was rhombus-shaped, as I knew it had to be. That pinkish-brownish-silverish colour that’s something like salmon, and something like smoke, the familiar unknown metal.

I held it in my hand for minutes, using my palm as a scales. The material possesses a strange density, as if gravity is not pulling it, but some other force is pressing from above. I rinsed it under the cold tap, washing off the soft grey dust that always layers the pieces, then patted it dry and wrapped it in toilet paper. I went back to the bedroom, took a chair to the wardrobe and, hearing out for my wife’s deep breathing, slipped the fragment into the gap between the top of the wardrobe and the ceiling. Then I got back into bed with my wife.

She woke up and started kissing me at some point after that. Sometimes she will want to kiss for hours, that’s all she wants, she will not get bored. And sometimes she won’t feel like kissing me at all, and on those days I suppose I get more done.

That morning, she wanted to kiss for a long time. The alarm clock didn’t go off. We had breakfast. She saw me smiling as I cracked the eggs, and playfully tugged my moustache. I didn’t tell her what I was smiling about. I felt so happy I cracked six eggs when we only needed four.

My name is Doctor —. I am forty-three years old. I now possess six of the seven lost fragments of the Si’i-Aamos Tablet.

It wasn’t until after lunch that I put the parts together. My wife went to the ice rink with a friend, as she does every Sunday in the winter. I went from place to place around the property, gathering all the pieces. I keep them separately, for security. The fifth rests in the gap above the wardrobe, where I stashed the sixth. The fourth is hidden beneath a loose tile outside the kitchen door. The third is between two beams in the attic, next to the water tank. The second is taped to the bottom of the bathtub. And the first, my private nod to origins, is buried in the sandpit in the garden, where once our children played.

You may wonder why I don’t have the fragments locked up securely. You might visualise a portrait on the wall that slides inwards on silent runnings to reveal a lead-lined combination safe, or a secret vault beneath the floor protected by a web of infrared beams. Why not at keep them in a bank, at least, so I don’t have to worry? But I believe it’s safer this way. My protection is my anonymity. The less attention I draw to myself, the safer they will be.

And, until now, it’s worked. I’ve never attracted outside interest. No-one knows about my work, and no-one knows I had them. Through the course of my career, I never suspected anyone else was looking for the fragments. No-one really believes they exist. They have been consigned to mythology, or at least to exaggeration. Occasionally, in the course of my researches, I’ll come across some reference or other, buried in some obscure text, but the conjectures are so hypothetical it only makes my secret more secure.

For thirty-eight years, there’s only been one direct threat to my completion of the tablet. This was when I was eleven years old, back in the days when I still carried them around with me, my personal charms, one in each pocket. I was holding the second fragment in my hand, admiring it innocently, and an older boy tried to grab it off me. He wanted to throw it at some ducks. We scuffled, and in my panic I smashed the piece against his mouth. It chipped his front tooth. He howled and howled. I was so relieved the fragment wasn’t damaged I don’t even remember being punished.

Not that the fragments could possibly be damaged by striking tooth enamel. This is one thing I have learned. The material is indestructible, immune to chipping, cracking, snapping, grinding or extremes of temperature. But the incident impressed upon me the precarious nature of my work, the daily risk of theft or carelessness, and from that day I determined to hide them. In every place I’ve lived in since, I’ve sought out secret nooks and crannies, judging their relative security on an instinctive level. When I was an undergraduate at — University, I secreted the four fragments I had at opposing compass points of the campus. When I was married to my first wife, I sewed one piece into an embroidered cushion that her family had handed down for generations. Sometimes I still jump up the night with a single thought – ‘that piece isn’t secure’ – and then I have to get up and retrieve it, and won’t allow myself back to bed until I’ve found a recess that feels right.

When I’d gathered the six fragments together, knowing my wife wouldn’t be back for hours, I went to my study and locked the door behind me. Safely inside I drew the blinds, and laid the pieces before me on a strip of green baize.

The fragments fitted together so perfectly it was impossible to make out the cracks. For a long time I studied the cuneiform script, etched into the metal so finely I can only imagine it was done with a diamond-tipped hair. I marvelled at how the archaic hieroglyphics merged, after all this time, seamlessly with the ones I’d spent so long pouring over before.

Of course, I cannot translate them yet. The message cannot be deciphered without the seventh fragment.

After a couple of hours of study, I returned the fragments to their hiding places. I found the right place to hide the sixth, surrounded by stuffing in the hole I slashed in the back of the sofa. Just as I finished stitching up the gash, I heard my wife’s car in the driveway. She came in glowing from her ice skating, saying her ankles ached. Her teeth felt clean and cold inside her mouth, and then she said, ‘let’s go to bed.’ So we stayed in bed until evening fell.

That day was a kissing day.

The Si’i-Aamos Tablet has received remarkably little attention throughout history. When I was younger, a young buck, a rising star in the archaeology department of — University (where I work to this day, a tenured professor), I was convinced that most of the references had been deliberately suppressed. I suspected the Vatican, the Rosicrucians, the Masons, Mossad, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and of course (how could I not?) the Knights Templar. But now I believe the tablet has simply been overlooked, incredible as that seems. There’s a reference on a Ptolemaic altar-stone to ‘The burnished plate/ That knows more than Men,’ and the chronicles of the Persian scholar-king Xinopses II mention something about a silvery disc containing a startling revelation, but apart from riddles of this nature there’s little in the way of hard fact. Certain scholars have come close – a medieval society of Flemish alchemists seemed to be on the right track for a while – but having never seen the fragments, let alone laid their hands on them, they’ve been forced to hypothesise its existence from its absence. The way astronomers predict the existence of a planet through orbital wobbles.

In fact, the powerful wall of silence surrounding all allusion to the tablet has only strengthened my certainty that the pieces are out there. The less evidence I found of them, the more I believed. Generations of lonely scholars have thrown up their hands and despaired, giving up all hope of tracking them down. Only I have persevered. I’ve survived on faith alone.

I used to imagine some esoteric order hot on the trail of the fragments and myself, a society of baleful cultists relentlessly hunting me down. In Cairo once, at a conference, at the height of my paranoid beliefs, I became convinced I was being followed by a sinister Oriental type with a limp and a white umbrella. I dodged him through the alleyways, hopping in and out of shops. He kept popping up in the crowd, and I felt sure he was tracking me down to ransack my hotel room in search of the fragments, which I’d hidden, somewhat unimaginatively, in the toilet cistern. That was back in the days when I travelled with them, hauling them around the world. I wouldn’t attempt such risks anymore.

That paranoia is behind me now. The sight of a white umbrella no longer quickens my pulse. I know there’s no-one after me. If there was any secret society dedicated to uniting the fragments, if anyone was even close, I’d have sniffed them out by now.

At least that’s what I thought, until last week.

A few days after I’d found the sixth fragment, I saw a letter lying by the door.

Right away, something put me on guard. A prickly feeling ran through me. Some other letters were scattered on the doormat, but this one had landed vertically and was standing straight up, like a shark’s fin. I felt an inexplicable foreboding. Part of me wanted not to look at it, to push it straight back through the letterbox. I had to examine it, of course. It howled with significance. It bore a local postmark, no clues there, and my name and address in turquoise pen, written in a hand I didn’t know.

It’s a mark of my growing trepidation that I opened the letter in the bathroom, flushing the toilet to mask the sound of the envelope ripping open. I thought of simply flushing it away, like I’m driven to do at times with letters from my ex-wife. But curiosity overcame me. I knew it could not be ignored. Also, I doubted that it would flush. Envelopes don’t go down.

Inside, there was a single piece of paper. It wasn’t the writing I saw first. The thing I saw first was the coffee stain at the bottom of the page. It was only an inch across, and less analytical eyes than mine would have assumed it was simply a splash, a careless, hurried mistake. But I recognised its shape at once. It was a rough diamond shape, with one of the sides rounded like the edge of a plate. The recognition produced a plunging, soaring feeling in my stomach, somewhere between exhilaration and terror. The unmistakable shape of the final piece, the missing seventh fragment.

In the same turquoise pen were written the following words:

Doctor —,

I have something you want. There’s only one way to get it. Meet at the bar of the — Hotel at 9pm, Thursday night. I want only you.

I covered my mouth with a towel and moaned, deeply, softly. I plucked the soap from the dish by the sink and mashed it to paste in my fingers. Then I stared at myself in the mirror, wondering whether I should trim my moustache or let it grow for a while. I cannot possibly express my horror and excitement.

Presently my wife called up the stairs.

‘Fried or scrambled? We’re out of Tabasco.’

‘Fried,’ I managed to reply. I hate scrambled eggs without Tabasco.

I folded the letter and envelope as small as they would go, and secreted them in my sock. I couldn’t think what else to do.

Then I cleaned the soap from under my nails, and descended for breakfast.

For the next few days I lived in a stupor. I was dimly aware of my wife, coming and going as she always does, popping off to Pilates classes or yoga or Eastern European film nights or salsa or Spanish lessons, periodically filling and emptying cupboards, sometimes kissing me and sometimes not. I couldn’t stop reading the letter in my mind. Why a turquoise pen? It seemed an odd colour. Crudely cut-out newspaper letters would have puzzled me much less. Did the colour of the ink have some significance? Did it relate to something I was missing? In my study I gathered all the texts relating to the Si’i-Aamos Tablet, which I have hidden in a box of old shoes in the attic, safe from my wife’s curiosity. I methodically scanned the pages, looking for a connection. There was nothing.

What about the calligraphy itself? It gave little away. Was it a man’s or a woman’s hand? Probably a woman’s. Was it the hand of a malevolent cultist? There was nothing to suggest that. It looked sober and suburban. If you saw that letter casually lying on a table, you’d mistake it for a shopping list.

That, I thought, only made it more ominous.

And the clue itself, why a coffee stain? I knew that coffee had originated in the southern highlands of Ethiopia. Did that point to some cryptic African connection? Or was it a nod to Central America, or other coffee-producing regions of the world? Why coffee? Why not wine? Why not blood? There had to be a reason.

I couldn’t think.

As Thursday loomed, I snapped out of my funk. I knew I had to take action. If this sinister correspondent knew where I lived, there no way of telling how long the house had been under surveillance. Moving the six fragments was risky, they’d been safely hidden until now, but I couldn’t risk the possibility that their locations were known. I turned in with my wife as normal and feigned sound sleep until half past three, then crept quietly out of bed. I felt calmer in the light of the moon. I studied my wife’s sleeping face.

To the various hidey-holes I went, gathering up the six fragments. I took no torch, but felt my way among the nooks and crannies. I could have done it blindfolded. First I ripped loose the stitches in the sofa, then went to the gap above the wardrobe, followed by the loose tile, the attic, the bathtub and finally the sandpit. The grass was wet beneath my feet and the damp sand clogged my nails. I froze to listen in the still of the night, suddenly scared that eyes were upon me, but no sound came from the surrounding foliage. I crab-walked back into the house.

I put the six fragments together in a handbag my wife never uses any more. Out of concern for her safety that night, I went to sleep on the sofa downstairs, clutching the handbag tight against my chest. Shortly before dawn I drank a cup of coffee, and left in my wife’s car.

I took sensible precautions on that drive. I drove erratically, jumping red lights, sometimes doubling back on myself and turning corners sharply without warning. I saw nothing in my rear-view mirror, but this only increased my trepidation. If I was being followed, I thought, it was by an expert. First I drove a few miles out of town to the woods my wife and I sometimes walk in, where we used to come with the kids in the summer. I parked at the end of a familiar lane, and slipped between the trees. I remembered a hollow in a rotten old oak where my son had once found a pornographic magazine. There was no smut in there this time, just an old wine bottle clogged with mud, so I moved it aside and pushed the sixth fragment into the mulch at the bottom. I went ducking and weaving back to the car and took a different route back into town.

I drove around for a couple of hours, making the various stops. I functioned on gut feeling alone, allowing instinct to guide me. I buried the fifth fragment in a rose bed in my wife’s favourite park. In the public library I positioned the fourth behind a volume on megalithic dolmens, which I doubted anyone would take out in the next ten years. The third I secreted in a grit bin, knowing no snow would come for months, the second I threw into a duck pond in my wife’s handbag, weighed down with stones, and finally I drove to my ex-wife’s house and buried the first fragment in her front garden.

Strange safe places, I admit, but they just felt right.

I ate a late breakfast in a sandwich bar, and afterwards bought some tobacco for my pipe and took a long stroll along the seafront. Profound relief settled over me. I had stepped up to the challenge. I had done all I could reasonably do. My enemies would not take me by surprise; I would be ready for them.

When I got home it was almost midday. My wife was in the garden, planting bulbs.

‘I had an early appointment on campus,’ I told her. She hadn’t asked where I had been, but I wanted to take the initiative. ‘I didn’t want to wake you, so I just crept out.’

‘Anything interesting?’ she asked.

‘I met an old friend. An old colleague, who’s back in town for a lecture.’

‘Anyone I would know?’

‘I don’t think so. He came on sabbatical from the University of Nairobi. He wrote a brilliant thesis on megalithic dolmens.’

‘Sounds fascinating,’ said my wife. I squatted down beside her and took a bulb from the brown paper bag. She was watching the side of my face. I thumbed the bulb down into the earth.

‘Did you sleep on the sofa last night?’ she asked.

‘I got up early. He flew home today. I didn’t want to disturb you in the night.’

We planted bulbs together for a while. She took my hand and we trowelled together, getting our fingers covered in mud.

Later, when we were in the kitchen, she said, ‘I think something dug up the sandpit. There’s sand thrown right across the lawn.’

‘Badgers,’ I replied. ‘They always talk about that cull, but no-one ever seems to get round to it.’

When I was younger, in the days when my career was taking off, my name first starting to appear in well-regarded academic journals, I used to fantasise about how I would break my secret to the world. I imagined a murmuring lecture hall, a buzz of anticipation. I saw the lights going up on the stage as I stepped out, somewhat bashfully, from behind a red velvet curtain. I would be wearing a safari suit, perhaps even a monocle. The completed tablet would be wheeled in encased behind bullet-proof glass, and the hieroglyphics would bleed with gold as I explained their meaning. I imagined glossy fold-out sections in popular culture magazines, pictures of me bending over the tablet, magnifying glass in hand. University annexes would bear my name: the — Lecture Hall, or the — Memorial Wing. I’d be invited to speak at conferences all over the world, Johannesburg, Addis Ababa, Rio de Janeiro, New York, New Delhi. My wife would come with me on these trips. We’d live in a restored farmhouse or a renovated water mill.

But increasingly, over the years, these daydreams have lost their appeal. I’ve grown older, less showy, I suppose. The closer the tablet has crept towards completion, the more I’ve shied away from fantasies of fame. Now I just want the tablet for myself. I know that will satisfy me enough. To have and to hold, to enjoy endlessly, my private talisman. For surely my claim on it is greater than anyone else who ever lived. For thirty-seven tricky years I’ve painstakingly gathered the pieces, patiently, even humbly, never knowing when the next might appear. I’ve woken up with the cold night-sweats imagining some terrible mishap – what if the next fragment fell in the sea? It might have been tossed in a volcano! – palpitating at the possibility that the others might have vanished forever, while my wife (or before her, my ex-wife) dozed on unwittingly beside me. Watching old footage of the moon landings I even became convinced for a moment that I spotted the fifth one lying up there, before Buzz Aldrin’s booted feet, coated in lunar dust. Those bastards! They took it to the moon! So that’s what this was all about! I’ve had to douse my head in cold water to quell these fears at times.

You may attempt to lecture me about my professional responsibility, my perceived duty to humanity, but I deserve the Si’i-Aamos Tablet. The Si’i-Aamos Tablet deserves me. And when it’s complete, I will know its message. I will possess its truth.

Is this really so much to ask? A single moment of truth, for one man?

I doubt I will even tell my wife, though I love her. I really do.

On Thursday night, at a quarter to nine, I parked opposite the — Hotel and sat there breathing deeply.

I had been surprisingly calm all day. My mind was alert and focused. It reassured me, reminded me that I was as prepared as I could possibly be, ready for sudden shocks and surprises. My wife was out for most of the day, so I had the house to myself. I had prepared my cover story, telling her that I would be dining with a fellow academic that evening, someone anxious to talk to me about ancient Etruscan architecture. I had seldom lied to my wife before – with the exception of not telling her about my life’s secret work, which, I’m sure you will agree, is not a lie but an absence of truth – but she didn’t even bat an eyelid. It was easier than I imagined. I made a light, nutritious lunch, packed with protein and carbohydrates. I knew I’d need energy for that night. I might need stamina.

An hour after lunch, I did press-ups and chin-ups. I jogged on the spot, holding the weights my wife uses for her power-walks. I hung a cushion from the tree in the back garden and boxed it, practicing upper cuts and left hooks. It was the first time I’d exercised in years. For forty-three, I’m in pretty good shape. I broke a sweat, and it felt good.

As it grew dark, I cracked the blinds and scanned the road in front of the house with the binoculars my wife takes on her bird-watching trips. There was nothing that suggested I was under surveillance, but I couldn’t be sure. Then I scanned the back of the house, but there was nothing suspicious there either. If there was anyone hidden out back, they’d have witnessed my boxing routine. I wanted them to see.

I showered and changed into jeans and a dark sweater, something loose, that would give me room to move. I put on a pair of comfortable trainers. Finally I put on a bulky coat that would conceal the antique duelling pistol I’d wrapped inside a handkerchief and stuffed into one of the pockets. Its chamber had long since rusted up, it hadn’t fired a bullet in two centuries, but it was a good visual threat. It made me feel safer.

Just before I left the house, I spent a few minutes with a sharp piece of wood scraping claw-marks in the earth around the sandpit, to corroborate my badger story.

After that, I was ready.

I locked the car, and crossed the road to the entrance of the — Hotel. I put my shoulder to the revolving door, and swung my way in.

The hotel bar was mostly empty. A business group in lilac shirts occupied the centre table, and sitting in the dimmest corner was an intimate Japanese couple, talking to one another softly with their foreheads almost touching. A man with leather patches on his elbows was reading the menu at the bar, and as I approached he looked up and stared at me arrogantly. I met his stare. He looked away. I decided to ignore him.

I bought a glass of Diet Pepsi and took a seat at a table near the wall. I checked my watch. It was nine minutes to nine. I had a sip of my drink. Then it occurred to me that from this seat I couldn’t keep an eye on the door, so I moved to another table, in the middle of the room. But that one didn’t feel right either. I preferred to have my back to the wall, so no-one could creep up on me. So after some thought, I moved again, crossing to the opposite side of the bar. That position felt a lot better. Years of finding hiding places for the fragments, selecting the right spots intuitively, have given me an sixth sense for these things. I checked my watch. Five minutes to nine. I scanned the bar once more.

The man with the leather patches on his elbows was staring at me again. He had shifted halfway around his stool. I tried not to look at him directly, but curiosity got the better of me, and our eyes met. He held the stare. It seemed like a challenge. His eyebrows went up and down. He was about sixty years old, and had an earring in one ear. I had another sip of Pepsi. I was starting to get nervous.

The bar was plush and overheated, and now I could feel sweat nudging down under my armpits. I didn’t want to remove my coat, for fear at being at a disadvantage if I needed the gun in a hurry. I forced myself not to look at the man and concentrated on the other customers, all the while trying to watch the door in my peripheral vision. The Japanese couple were still talking. The man had his hand on the woman’s arm, and she was giggling softly. Then suddenly she moved her eyes, and gazed right at me. In the same instant, I spotted something propped up underneath their table. A white umbrella! My blood leapt. I almost rose to my feet, but managed with an effort to restrain the impulse. I told myself to be logical. The woman had turned back to her partner, and now he was giggling too. I squinted for a better look at the umbrella. It had frilly edges, I observed, and was decorated with pink cartoon bunnies. It was not the umbrella of a murderous occultist. I looked at my watch again.

Two minutes past nine. The sweat was running now. I glugged on the Pepsi. When I turned back to the bar, the man was still staring. Was he trying to menace me? Or was this some kind of distraction, to cover other movements? Were there any other possibilities? I tried to remember what the barman had looked like. He seemed to have gone off somewhere. He had one of those ethnically ambiguous faces that could come from anywhere from Latin America to Turkey. There were no clues for me to go on. I couldn’t ignore the man with the leather patches on his elbows. I turned to face him, meeting his challenge, and refused to look away. All of a sudden, he puffed out his cheeks in an arrogant, toad-like manner.

A wild thought came into my head: he has it in one of his cheeks! I didn’t pause to consider the plausibility of this notion. I was on my feet in a second, and making my way across the patterned brown carpet. I rested one elbow on the bar, and addressed him softly.

‘Good evening,’ I said in a level voice. ‘I believe you’re expecting me.’

‘Doctor —?’ said a voice. Panicked, I swung round.

Standing behind me was Anna —. Anna — is one of my seminar students.

She was wearing a long suede coat, a black scarf wrapped around her neck.

‘Doctor —,’ she repeated. ‘Sorry, I’m a bit late.’

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. Anna — was drinking vodka tonic, and without thinking I’d allowed her to buy me one as well. The bubbles fizzed against the ice-cubes. We were sitting across from one another at the table by the wall.

‘I think we both know the answer to that,’ said Anna —. She was wearing lipstick, which she doesn’t wear in class. It made her look strikingly different. Her earrings, I registered dimly, were the shape of Ancient Egyptian ankhs, a detail which struck me as tacky. She had removed the suede coat, and underneath she was wearing a kind of black gown with a Japanesey look.

‘Did you send that letter?’ I demanded.

‘What do you think, Doctor?’

I tried to gather the facts in my mind, to index what I knew about her. The truth was, Anna — had never stood out in any way. In the couple of years I’d known her, I had formed no particular impression, certainly nothing to bring her to mind when seminars were over. She was a competent student, with a good attendance record. She came to my lectures. Her work was adequate. She’d written a satisfactory, but no more than satisfactory, dissertation on the Axumite obelisks, which I vaguely remembered grading at the end of last year.

She did her work, she kept fairly quiet. She rarely asked questions or argued. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, to suggest that she was in possession of knowledge about the missing seventh fragment, or even – it didn’t seem remotely credible – of the fragment itself.

I decided to be methodical. I thought back to the day’s preparations, the press-ups and the boxing moves. The badger marks scraped around the sandpit. I was ready for her.

She took a slice of lemon from her glass, and sucked the vodka from it.

‘Did you send that letter?’ I asked her again.

‘Yes. Of course I did.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I wanted to see you.’

‘You see me twice a week in class. If there’s something you want to discuss, why didn’t you bring it up then?’

‘Because I wanted to see you privately. I didn’t think you’d want me to say it out loud, in front of everyone.’

‘What do you mean? Say what out loud?’

‘Come on, Doctor. Have a guess. You’re a very intelligent man, I’m sure you know perfectly well.’ Her fingers moved on the tabletop. I didn’t take my eyes off her face, but I realised what her fingers were doing. They were sketching the shape of the seventh fragment, I was sure they were. That diamond shape with one rounded side, her red-tipped fingernail tracing the outline like a laser pointer.

‘I’ve been watching you,’ Anna — went on, halting the movement of her hand and bringing it up to cup her chin as she looked at me. Her eyes had the gleam of mockery to them. I forced myself to breathe slowly. ‘In seminars, in lectures. After class. I’ve been watching you a long time. I’ve always found you interesting. Different from all the other tutors. That was why I joined your seminar group, why I switched classes. There’s something about you, isn’t there, Doctor? Something you try to keep hidden.’

‘You don’t know anything about me.’

‘I know a little bit. I’ve seen the way you look at me. You may be a brilliant academic, but you’re terrible at keeping a secret.’

‘I never look at you.’

‘You’re looking at me now.’

‘I never look at you in class. I hardly even notice you’re there.’

‘That’s not very nice,’ she said. Her face suddenly looked hurt, all the sharpness fleeing from her lips. ‘I do have feelings, you know, Doctor. I took a big risk with that letter. I’m stretching my neck out for you.’

‘I mean, of course I notice you’re there. But I don’t look at you like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Not like anything! I didn’t come here to play games with you. I demand you give me a straight answer.’ I couldn’t speak its name out loud, not here, not to her, not to anyone. My voice dropped to a rasp. ‘How do you know about… about that? How could you possibly know? Do you have it? If you have it, I demand… I demand you give it to me.’

‘You’re making a lot of demands,’ she said, and it seemed she was about to start laughing. I noticed two little lines when she smiled, elongated dimples in her cheeks, like they’d been scored with a knife. ‘I don’t want to sound dramatic, but you’re in no position to make demands. Not when you answered my letter, Doctor. Not when you know why we’re here.’

I knew I had to get the upper hand, recover my authority. All I could think about at the time was how much I was sweating. As I unbuttoned my bulky coat, Anna —’s eyes went wide.

‘What’s that in your coat?’

I looked down. The handle of the antique pistol was sticking out from the handkerchief.

‘Is that a gun? Have you got a gun in there? Oh Doctor, how exciting! You must have thought that meeting me would be very dangerous.’

‘It’s not real, it doesn’t have bullets. I didn’t know I was meeting you. It could have been anyone. I didn’t know what the risks were…’

‘But it is a risk, isn’t it? It’s a big risk, us meeting like this.’

‘Please, just tell me, where is it?’

‘Where is what?’

‘Don’t play games with me!’ I cried, losing my composure. ‘I’m warning you, it’s no laughing matter. I have something you want, that’s what you wrote, that’s what you said, in your childish letter. How do you know what I want? How did you possibly find out? You have no right to taunt me like this, not after all these years. You could never hope to understand everything I’ve been through. What is it that you want from me? I demand you tell me!’

‘I can’t refuse a man with a gun,’ she smiled sweetly. She drained what was left of her vodka tonic, and spat an ice-cube back into the glass. It made a rattling sound. ‘I told you, Doctor, I’ve been watching you. You may think you’ve been keeping it hidden, but I can see, clear as day. You give everything away. I know exactly what you want. I can tell when you’re dreaming about it.’

‘You can?’ I said incredulously. It was true, the Si’i-Aamos Tablet was often in my thoughts. In seminars, in between slides at lectures, with rows of dull faces gazing at me, my mind would return to the missing fragment, worrying at its mystery. The final piece to the puzzle of my happiness. How could I not dream about it?

‘I’d think any girl could tell, when you get that look in your eyes. But I was the first to sit up and take notice. I know what’s in your mind when you smile, by the way your lips move. You may try to hide them under that moustache, but you have very expressive lips. Your lips give everything away.’

‘They do?’ I was reeling now. I’d lost all feeling in my hands. What things had I let slip over the years? Had I mumbled to myself, fantasised out loud? Did I mutter in my sleep? Had my wife heard anything? Did my colleagues hear?

‘And those eyes of yours reveal so much,’ Anna — went on. ‘It’s like you’re trying to wear a mask, something that disguises what you really desire, but you can’t cover up the eyeholes. You can’t keep these things hidden, not from a girl like me.’

I felt the slow dawning of horror as I realised how true her words were. How could had I have got so careless? If she had seen through my apparent normality, who else might have guessed? I’d become middle-aged and complacent, thinking my quiet scholarly achievements and respectable academic position would be enough to conceal my true purpose, the single obsession that threads my life together. When I rid myself of my paranoia, my misapprehensions and false fears, I had jettisoned all caution. When had I stopped being vigilant? Perhaps as long as a decade ago. Since marrying my second wife, since telling myself I was content. Since allowing myself to grow careless with happiness.

I must have underestimated them, those others, those dark unknowns. I had consigned them to myth long ago, deluding myself. While I was making eggs for my wife, or spending afternoons in bed with her, kissing, they had been out there, restless souls. Never sleeping. Searching. Younger, stronger, more ruthless than myself. The way I had been, in the early years. Before I dropped my guard.

But it least it wasn’t them that tracked me down, I reassured myself. It wasn’t an order of goat-worshippers or a Jesuit assassin squad. It was a twenty-two year-old girl, wearing lipstick and a high-collared gown, the neck of which, I noticed now, had been unbuttoned to reveal the pale skin below. She was wearing a necklace made of mah jong pieces. There was a freckle below her collarbone. It could have been someone much more dangerous, this is what I told myself.

Unless – could this be possible? – she was working for someone else. What had she got herself mixed up in? I stared at her with renewed doubt and fear. I knew absolutely nothing about her. Who was Anna —, really?

‘You can’t hide it from me, Doctor,’ she was saying now. ‘I know your mind isn’t really concerned with ancient systems of crop rotation, or broken plates dig up in Turkey, or irrigation channels. I know exactly what you want, because I want the same thing.’

‘You want it?’ I whispered, leaning close. ‘So you still don’t have it, then?’

‘I will have it, very soon. Don’t you think so?’ Her voice was soft, confident. A pink flush had risen in her cheeks, and she was gazing into my eyes with a look of such candidness that I knew I was going to have to trust her. There was no other choice.

‘When will you get it?’ I asked, still whispering. ‘How can you be so sure?’

‘I’ll get it as soon as you want me to get it,’ she whispered back, smiling.

‘What? But I don’t know where it is! I’m looking for it too.’

‘I know you are,’ said Anna —. Her hand was on mine now. Our foreheads were almost touching, just like that Japanese couple. ‘You’ve been looking for a long time.’

‘Years. I’ve waited years for this moment…’

‘I know you have, Doctor. So have I.’ Her hand was on my shoulder, her fingers gently caressing. I suddenly wanted to tell her more, things I had never been able to tell anyone before. For surely she understood my quest, no matter how young and inexperienced she was. Surely she felt something similar, the same deep, burdening urge, a shadow of the same desire. I fought hard to restrain myself. I knew this compulsion was dangerous. I mustn’t lose self-control, not at this crucial point. ‘I know how hard it was for you,’ she said, her lips almost brushing my ear, ‘pretending all along that everything was normal, that there was nothing there. But you can stop pretending now. You don’t have to pretend with me.’

‘We’ll find what we’re looking for together, will we then?’ I asked, taking her hand from my shoulder and holding it in my own. My mind was working all this time. It had never raced so fast. I still didn’t know how she had found out, she had cunningly evaded revealing this, but that detail wasn’t important now. The important thing was the seventh fragment. It must be close. She would lead me to it, but I didn’t know what would happen after. Thank God I’d had the foresight to move the others to new hiding places. She couldn’t know where these six were hidden, I was sure of that. So I had one advantage over her. I had that up my sleeve.

‘Just you and me,’ she said. ‘We need each other, Doctor.’

‘Yes, I know, I see that now. We must join forces, work as a team. We both want the same thing.’

‘Let’s not wait. Finish your drink and let’s go, let’s go now.’

‘Go where? Is it far away?’

‘Not far at all. Upstairs, to the bedroom I reserved.’ She must have seen the amazement on my face, for she added, ‘I hope you don’t think that was hasty of me. But I felt so sure. I knew it would be like this, I never had any doubts.’

I drained my vodka tonic in one go. Ice-cubes clattered against my teeth. ‘I see you’re a very competent woman,’ I said, reaching for my coat.

‘You’ll soon find out that’s not all I am,’ she said cryptically, taking my arm. We crossed the bar, and on the way to the door I met the eyes of the man with leather patches on his elbows. He looked Anna — up and down, and then, to my alarm, seemed to give me a wink. This caused a ripple of consternation. What could that possibly signify? Was he connected after all? Was he trying to communicate some message? Anna — gave no sign of noticing. She pulled me into the lobby.

Perhaps I had been mistaken. I was getting jumpy again. I forced myself to take five deep breaths, some Taoist thing my wife recommends, to keep my mind focused on what lay ahead. It was essential to remain calm, to maintain full control. Whatever questions I had about this girl, about her baffling level of involvement in my life’s most secret mission – questions I’d crammed to the back of my mind, determined not to let them distract me – must wait until afterwards.

When I had the fragment to myself.

Anna — was clinging to my arm. For a moment she seemed to hold back, as if she was suddenly unsure of something. I couldn’t allow her to back out now, so I steered her firmly towards the lifts. As the doors opened, the confidence seemed to flow back into her.

We shared the lift to the seventh floor – had she planned this symbol too? – with the Japanese couple from the bar. They were holding hands, and the woman was holding the white umbrella with the frills and the bunnies. Neither of them looked at us. They seemed a bit embarrassed. As we ascended, Anna — reached into her handbag and took out a hip flask. ‘I know this is a bit naughty,’ she said. ‘But, what the hell.’ She took a swig and handed it to me. It was whiskey. Cheap stuff. Then she slipped her arm round my waist, and gave me a pinch under the ribs.

The Japanese people looked uncomfortable. A neat move, I thought. They’d assume we were a couple, and not ask any more questions. The girl was clever, I had to give her that. She knew what she was doing.

-

On the way down the long corridor, which we walk alone, past identical doors, I think about how it will feel. To put the fragments together at last, after so many centuries. I can picture them all in my mind, I know the exact weight of them, their colour, their texture, their tiny chips and flaws. They have been with me for so long, even the missing seventh fragment. I know its shape by its negative. I know it by its absence. The seven fragments are parts of me, revealed section by section over time, through the years of my life, filling me in one piece after the other.

I think about the secret script, the writing etched in gold. At last, I will decipher its message. What power and what revelation does it hold? How will its truths change me?

She is kissing me outside the door, while her hand fumbles for the key. Maintaining our cover until the end. I have to admire her cunning. I hold her face in my two hands, as if I am holding the tablet before me, fused at last, those broken shards, never to be parted.

What will I do? Will I grab it and run? Or leave the room on some pretence, and hastily make my way down to the car? Can I outpace her, if she comes after me? She’s twenty years younger than me, but I’m wearing trainers, running shoes, while she has a pair of high heels. Those heels might be the tactical slip that end up costing her the game. But for now I must wait, just a few minutes more. She has opened the door of the room. She hasn’t turned on any lights. She has let the door click softly shut behind us.

She is kissing me beside the bed, her arms around my neck. I hold her, trying to glance around to see if I can see any clues, a duffel bag or an envelope, anything, a Bible with the pages cut out, that might contain the thing I want, the thing I need more than ever. But the room is too dark. I must wait, just a few minutes more. I let her pull the sweater over my head. I’m ready to make my escape.

I drove past Fung’s a few days ago. Of course, it isn’t Fung’s now. It’s an empty building surrounded by weeds, an ugly breezeblock shell. There’s plywood over the sliding doors, and a spindly tree, or maybe an enormous weed, waving from the roof. The car-park contains a single shopping trolley, once painted green.

I slowed the car, but there wasn’t much to see. Even the sign has come off. I remembered when we erected those letters, Ranjeet and I, with Leena below: banging them up there one by one to spell F, Fu, Fun, Fung, Fung’s. Perhaps they rotted and fell down like that, one at a time, beginning at the end. Undoing the name.

It hasn’t been Fung’s for fifteen years, but what other name could it have? Every place needs a name, or else it’s just dead space.

Of course, it was dead space before it was Fung’s. Dead space of a different kind. Somewhere that pretended to live and was all the more dead for trying. Now it’s reverted to dead space again, and this time it’s properly dead. But between those stretches of dead space, there was a period of time – it wasn’t much more than a couple of months – when there was a flowering of wonderment. I lived through the glory days.

I drove past Fung’s, and then left it behind. I could have stopped, but what would have been the point? You can stop, but you can’t go back.

—

Mr Fung took over the Superway when I’d been working there for five months, back when I was nineteen years old, lost and out of school. He assembled all staff outside the walk-in dairy fridge and delivered a short speech. ‘I am your new manager,’ he beamed. ‘I’m in charge of this store now.’ He was dressed in a Superway shirt and slip-on carpet shoes. ‘I want to achieve big changes here. I want to make this store a beacon. A true retail experience.’

No-one reacted. The shelf-stackers glowered. The only sound was the slow clack-clack of gum.

‘We start today,’ he announced the next morning. I was getting ready on the deli counter, pulling on my sanitised gloves. ‘The deli counter is closed,’ he said. ‘No customer access from aisles ten to fourteen. I want to move some things around. Things are going to look a bit different.’ We exchanged puzzled glances. A doss, we imagined. But Mr Fung had other ideas.

The first thing he wanted us to do was drag the deli counter out so it protruded at right angles from the wall. It required ten members of staff to shift. In order to make space for this we had to reposition several aisles, which meant first removing all the products from the shelves. ‘Stack them up against the back wall,’ said Mr Fung. ‘Customers will still want to buy these things, so let’s try to create an orderly new zone.’ But that wasn’t easy. At nine, the doors opened, and customers began filtering in. They were pretty confused. The supermarket looked like a construction site. ‘We apologise for inconvenience today,’ announced Mr Fung with a microphone at intervals throughout the morning, ‘several aisles are temporarily closed as part of Superway’s reorganisation. Feel free to look for the products you desire along the wall at the back of the store. Things will be back to normal soon, enjoy your Superway experience.’

‘I want to get some biscuits,’ a customer told me, gesturing bad-temperedly down the twelfth aisle. Access was blocked by a barricade of trolleys we’d erected where the shelving began, and members of staff were ferrying products to the growing heap by the wall.

‘This aisle’s closed today,’ I said. ‘Everything’s getting moved around.’

‘Why is this happening?’ asked another. ‘It’s impossible to find anything.’

‘Sorry, you’ll have to look in that pile,’ was all I could suggest.

‘Good work,’ said Mr Fung at the end of the day. The automatic doors were closed and the checkout assistants were cashing up. ‘We’ve made a good start. You’ve all done well. Things look a lot less linear now.’ He nodded approvingly down the shop floor, where aisles ten to fourteen had once stood. The symmetry of the aisles had gone. Aisles ten and eleven were positioned at right angles, and twelve and thirteen protruded diagonally, creating a confusion of planes. ‘That’s just the beginning,’ he declared.

Over the course of the following week, under Mr Fung’s direction, we systematically disordered the remaining aisles, starting with aisles five to nine, then aisles one to four, and finally the various counters. By Saturday, the shop floor was unrecognisable. Some of the aisles led to dead ends, and the positioning of others created small, poky rooms to which access could only be gained through a narrow gap between shelves. We confusedly wandered these new lanes, trying to make sense of what we’d done. The experience was disorientating. It was like a badly-designed labyrinth.

‘Excellent,’ said Mr Fung. We were gathered around him in a semi-circle, eating the chocolate ice-cream bars he’d handed out in appreciation of our efforts. ‘I think this creates a much more interesting space. This will be a retail experience. Next week’s job is getting products back on shelves. We can’t expect our customers to root round in that pile forever.’ He grinned, and gave an exaggerated wink. None of us knew what to make of it.

On Monday morning, Mr Fung explained his plans for reorganising the products. ‘We’ll mix things up a bit,’ he said. He was wearing a shiny purple suit and casually tossing a tangerine from one hand to the other. ‘Customers develop patterns, you know. They buy the same things time and time again. They adopt certain habits. That’s not good for retail diversity. That’s not good for business.’ He wandered over to the mountain of products heaped chaotically at the back, and gazed at it intently. ‘Stack these according to taste,’ he said. ‘Salty things starting from the right hand side, spicy in the middle, sweet at the far left. There will obviously be some crossover zones, sweet and spicy being the most obvious example. Any questions on classification, ask me. Right, let’s get started.’

No-one moved, or said a word. We were pretty dumbfounded. Mr Fung regarded this inertia, then drew back the sleeve of his jacket and consulted his watch.

‘It’s four minutes past seven,’ he said. ‘We’re open for business in two hours time. By eight fifty-five, I want to see this Superway divided into those three declared zones: salty, spicy and sweet. It’s a big job, what are you waiting for? Let’s go!’ With this, he flung the tangerine directly at Tony, the surly eighteen year-old who usually worked at the fish counter. The fruit plumped into Tony’s chest, and splatted softly on the floor. Tony stared in disbelief. ‘Let’s go!’ yelled Mr Fung again. There was no disagreeing with that.

The task was enormous, and ridiculous. There was no way we’d have finished it by nine. But it turned out that didn’t really matter, because barely half an hour later, Mr Fung made another announcement.

‘Okay, change of plan,’ he cried, bounding down the aisle. ‘I’ve been rethinking our marketing strategy. This division of products won’t work. It’s too simplistic. Customers won’t like it. They’ll think we’re patronising them. I’ve also brainstormed a number of products that may present some difficulties – fall through the net, as it were.’ He consulted a clipboard. ‘Yeast, for example. So, what we’ll do instead is this: stack everything alphabetically.’

‘Do what?’ someone asked in disbelief.

‘Start with the A products at the far left – almonds, anchovies, aniseed, aspirin – and work our way through the Bs and the Cs all the way down to Z. If we have any products beginning with Z. It’s possible we don’t. This, I believe, is the most novel yet logical way to order the store. It will also be educational for junior customers. Any questions?’

Wasim, a balding shelf-stacker with a large Adam’s apple and watery eyes, spoke up doubtfully. ‘Are fruit and veg included in this? Do we put apples between… uh, aniseed and… uh, aspirin?’

‘Fruit and veg are exempt for now. I’ve other plans for them.’

‘How about refrigerated goods?’ asked Leena, the Slovakian girl.

‘For now, refrigerated goods will fall under category F, for Frozen. Or perhaps under I for Icy, I’m not sure. Please consult me further on this when you get towards the end of the Es.’

So we set to work. There were cynics amongst us. ‘No fucking way is this going to work,’ said Ranjeet, my fellow deli counter worker, in his habitually put-upon tone. ‘I’ve worked in enough supermarkets, man, and I’ve never seen anything like this. This is not how supermarkets go.’

‘This is not how most supermarkets go,’ said Mr Fung. He was standing behind us, holding an economy tin of butter beans. His soft-soled shoes meant you couldn’t hear him coming. Ranjeet and I both stepped back, eyeing the tin nervously. ‘This, however, is not most supermarkets. This is a retail experience. In time, you will learn this.’ He gave Ranjeet’s arm an encouraging slap. Ranjeet looked even more unhappy.

When nine o’clock came the doors were still closed, and I could see the faces of customers peering through the tinted glass. ‘We’re only on D,’ Wasim explained when Mr Fung came back to take stock. ‘We have to keep rearranging it all. We find another thing that starts with B, and we have to move all the other products down.’

‘We can’t get this done. Not with customers in. I mean, no fucking way,’ said Ranjeet.

‘Okay, I’m taking a managerial decision,’ announced Mr Fung. ‘The store will not open today. We are closed for re-categorisation. Things will be back to normal soon, we apologise for inconvenience caused, but this is an important part of Superway’s reorganisation.’ He pointed at me. ‘Go out and tell them this. Be polite but firm. Don’t let them bully you.’

‘Sorry, we’re not open today,’ I said to the people waiting outside. I only opened the door halfway in case one of them tried to squeeze through. ‘We’re closed for re-categorisation. Things will be back to normal soon and we apologise for any inconvenience. It’s an important part of Superway’s reorganisation.’

‘What’s going on in there?’ asked an old woman I recognised. ‘Why have you done that with the aisles?’

‘This is ridiculous,’ said someone else. I gave them an apologetic smile and slipped back inside.

‘You can’t close a store down like this, man,’ hissed Ranjeet disbelievingly, as we sifted through the product mountain for things starting with E. ‘That’s not how supermarkets work. It’s just not something you can do.’

But, as we were starting to discover, Mr Fung could.

When we opened up again two days later, the Alphabetisation was complete. Walking the aisles, already disordered, or ‘de-linearised’ as Mr Fung termed it, was a strange and bewildering experience. It went against every retail convention ever known.

The various sections were demarcated by capital letters painted on cardboard in Superway’s trademark lime green. Fish-counter Tony had painted the letters, and his calligraphy skills weren’t good. The letters were drippy and badly composed. ‘We’ll get proper signs made up,’ said Mr Fung when Leena complained they looked unprofessional. ‘Nothing is permanent, you know. The important thing is to see what works. We learn by a process of trial and error. This store is a living experiment.’

But dissent was growing in certain quarters. There were those amongst the staff who objected to living experiments, or experiments of any kind. The staff were an unexperimental bunch, the usual minimum wage collection of school dropouts, cynics, slackers and hard-working recent immigrants; for some this was essential employment for sending money home to their families, while others had nothing to spend their wages on but weed. If anything united us, it was the unquestioned assumption that employment in a Superway store could never turn out to be anything but a monotonous repetition of tasks. In other words steady, non-challenging work, with no sudden shocks or surprises. And most of us quite liked it that way. There was a certain comfort in boredom. Living experiments weren’t in the job description.

The first to jump ship were Gabby and Nicole, two best friends who worked on the tills, and whose names I could never get the right way round. They were attractive in a dull kind of way, but clearly had what Mr Fung termed a ‘low imagination threshold.’ The changes simply freaked them out. They didn’t turn up for work one morning, and soon afterwards they were joined by Mike, who worked in the unloading bay, and a chubby stoner called Doff who suffered from a bad skin condition. From that point on, the Superway experienced a slow but steady haemorrhaging of labour. Mr Fung didn’t appear to mind, and never made any visible attempts to recruit extra staff. ‘This is what we call a streamlining process,’ he said, in one of his morning meetings, when Wasim pointed out the fact we no longer had any security guards. ‘This store is downsizing. Re-evaluating. And anyway, we don’t really need security at present.’

This was true. The doors had been closed for a week while other changes were implemented. Mr Fung had ordered carpets to be laid down the length of each aisle, to give the shop-floor a ‘warmer feel,’ and drapes to be hung from the ceiling to make the place ‘cosy.’ Following his emotive tirade against the strip-lights which made the store ‘like one of those places you put corpses in,’ we had also spent several days fitting incandescent bulbs and rigging up paper shades to diffuse their glare. It did not matter to Mr Fung that none of us were qualified to rewire electric lights. He provided overalls, directing the proceedings from a swivel chair he had wheeled from his office to the middle of the store. Occasionally he leapt up from this throne to patrol the evolving aisles, stopping now and then to scribble notes in his pad. His ideas changed rapidly and without warning, and it wasn’t unusual for a team to spend an entire morning on one task, only to have to dismantle it after lunch. But Mr Fung was exuberant. His enthusiasm was boundless. And the more his detractors fell away, the more his strange zeal came to affect those of us who remained.

‘He’s out of his tree. He’s wrong in the head,’ said Ranjeet one evening after work, after he had spent the whole day painting the trolleys green to make them look ‘less like cages.’ ‘I’m telling you, man, it’s too fucking weird. If it goes on like this much longer, I’m getting out.’ But I could tell that – like most who remained, who weathered the desertions in our ranks and stayed to work at the Superway through its many incarnations – he was secretly fascinated.

Already, in those early days, I think a few of us were starting to see Mr Fung for what he really was: a retail visionary.

He took me aside a few mornings later, the moment I got to work. I don’t know why he singled me out, but he appeared to have it planned. He was wearing a different suit that day, a slightly louder shade of purple, along with a truly hideous veined purple tie.

‘What’s your usual position in this store?’ he asked. ‘I mean, before.’

‘I normally work at the deli counter.’

‘Deli,’ he muttered, as if he hadn’t thought of that. He looked confused and worried for a second. But then his face brightened up again. He had taken me by the elbow, and was guiding me towards the front of the store, where the sliding doors were. ‘Well you won’t be at the deli any more. In fact, we may not even have a deli. I want you to be in charge of organising the garden.’

‘The garden?’ I asked, confused.

‘Tell me, when a customer enters a supermarket, any supermarket, in any country, what is the first thing he sees?’

‘Newspapers. Magazines. Fruit and veg.’

‘Correct. And why does he see fruit and veg?’

‘Because it’s green and fresh, I guess. It makes the place feel healthy.’

‘Exactly, yes. Green and fresh. And this Superway store will adhere to that principle. There are some conventions that can’t be changed. However, they can be improved, re-imagined. Where does fruit and veg come from?’

‘Where does it come from? Lots of places.’

‘I’m speaking fundamentally,’ he said, snapping his fingers impatiently. ‘Does it come from a factory? Out of a tin?’

‘Uh, from trees, bushes, the ground…’

‘Exactly right,’ beamed Mr Fung. We had reached the fruit and veg shelves now – they were empty, having been bare for a week, with only a few root vegetables and wilted stalks to show what they had been before – where he gestured expansively. ‘You think our customers want to see these green, fresh things on those plastic shelves, in those temperature-controlled compartments, under those glaring lights?’

I shook my head. He was staring at me. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted. He unfolded several sheets of paper covered in diagrams.

‘These,’ he said proudly, holding them before me, ‘are my plans for Fruit Eden.’

I stared at the diagrams on the paper. There were incomprehensible.

‘Fruit Eden?’ I asked uncertainly.

‘That is how it will be known. The concept is based, loosely, on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.’

I studied the papers in more detail. The plans looked entirely improbable. From what I could tell from the ‘artist’s impression,’ oranges, apples, bananas and melons were clustered together in some sort of steaming tropical forest. Brightly-feathered birds circled above, carrying bunches of grapes in their beaks. There was a meadow of salad leaves, a kind of Japanese garden bristling with herbs, and what appeared to be a waterfall cascading down one of the walls.

‘This is only provisional,’ Mr Fung said, as if sensing my doubt. ‘The exact details of the plans may change in the execution.’

‘And I’m in charge of all this?’ I asked.

‘I’m giving you full control.’

‘And how… how do I make this stuff?’

‘It’s up to you to implement the vision in the way you see fit. I’ve been watching you work. I trust your abilities. You must use all materials at your disposal, and hand-pick a small team of assistants. It is my intention that Fruit Eden will be one of this store’s greatest assets, a true retail experience. You have two weeks to complete the project, after which time the doors will reopen to the public. Any questions?’

Dumbly, I just shook my head. I didn’t know what else to do.

For my team I selected Leena, because I liked her seriousness, Ranjeet, to get him off painting trolleys, and a Kurdish guy I barely knew called Kasim, because I liked his face. I also picked surly Tony, who, against all expectations, had stuck it out against Mr Fung’s occasional tangerine assaults, and appeared surprisingly unfazed by the store’s gradual slide into madness. Tony seemed a good solid type, and proved to be useful when it came to hammer-work and heavy lifting. We had our first meeting later that day, smoked a pack of cigarettes between us, cordoned off the proposed work area, and dragged the old shelves into storage.

That afternoon, using the expense account Mr Fung had set up for us, I ordered twenty bags of concrete, five rolls of Astroturf, ten tarpaulins, thirty metres of hose, twelve bags of soil and twelve bags of fertiliser. The next morning, Ranjeet and I drove to the nearby garden centre in a home delivery van to load up with ivy, ferns, assorted creepers and vines, a dozen rubber plants, ten banana trees, and as many potted herbs as we could stuff into the racks. We spent whatever money was left on orchids and Venus fly-traps. The bill ran into the thousands.

Fruit Eden evolved haphazardly. We had no idea what we were doing. Tony and Kasim had both had previous jobs on building sites, so all the concrete and structural work was their responsibility. By the end of the fourth day, they had constructed two large ponds and a monstrous standing concrete feature, which was supposed to look like rocks for the cascading waterfall. Ranjeet and I tried to get it working, running hosepipes up the wall, but the water came out in a pathetic dribble so we decided to cut shelves into it and turn it into ‘Citrus Rock,’ which would display lemons, limes and oranges and be festooned with flowering bougainvillea. Instead of a waterfall, we had to settle for a couple of trickling fountains. The concrete ponds we filled with water lilies, on which could be balanced little plastic signs informing customers of important price reductions.

The five of us came to enjoy a minor celebrity status in the store. Select groups of other employees were engaged on other notable side-projects, but most were still slugging away at the seemingly endless re-categorisation of products. Mr Fung had long since had doubts about the Alphabetisation system, and for three days had become obsessed with what he call ‘Full Product Spectrum,’ or, sometimes, ‘Consumer Rainbow.’ His new idea was to display everything according to colour. The left-hand side of the store would be red, and then orangey-red products would give way to an orange section, which would blend seamlessly into yellows, following the colour spectrum through greens, blues and purples into blacks, against the right-hand wall.

Or at least, this was the idea. It didn’t prove popular. The prospect of taking all the products off the shelves again and putting them back in yet another order caused a minor rebellion amongst the staff. There was a rash of further walk-outs. At first people refused to get involved, and when they did, they did the job badly, so it was less a Consumer Rainbow than a mish-mash of different colour patches, the result of which sent Mr Fung into a rage. It was the first time, I think, that anyone had seen him angry. He stormed off into the loading bay, muttering furiously to himself, and remained in there for several minutes. When he came back, to the amazement of everyone, he publicly recanted. ‘I’ve brainstormed the Full Colour Spectrum for the organisation of products, and concluded the concept will not be adopted by this Superway store. After careful consideration, I’ve decided the rainbow effect may well prove distressing to some customers. There are certain psychological effects that cannot fully be predicted – people getting angry in the reds, or nauseous in the yellows. Aisles of unbroken grey might well create depression. In light of these potential risks, the process of re-Alphabetisation will begin forthwith.’

Critics of Mr Fung used this speech as evidence that he lacked overall vision, that he was growing confused and indecisive. His supporters said it showed that he was listening to his workers’ concerns, that he was not the maverick egotist his detractors made him out to be. Further rifts began to grow among what remained of the staff, from which those of us employed on Fruit Eden were happily exempt. We were working on a higher project, something with scale and grandeur. We didn’t need to involve ourselves in these petty intrigues. Our exclusivity didn’t make us popular, however: there were rumours we were being paid more, that we enjoyed special privileges from the boss.

By the end of two weeks, our Fruit Eden looked like a half-built theme park. We asked for more time. We were given four days. We worked flat-out for the whole period, staying after work until midnight to finish laying Astroturf, spreading fertiliser over the beds, pressing flowers into the moist soil. Tony really took to this. He had never planted anything before. Gradually, unbelievably, the project came together. Mr Fung sat in his swivel chair, checking his charts and eyeing our work, until we finally put down our tools and left at the end of the night.

In all the time I worked for him, I never saw Mr Fung leave the store. There were rumours that he slept in his office on a bed made of packing crates, but these stories were never confirmed, because no-one had ever been in there.

On the morning of the grand reopening, we stocked the shelves with produce. In several areas we had borrowed from Mr Fung’s Full Product Spectrum concept, and Leena had created gorgeous displays of fresh fruit. Citrus Rock was spectacular, rising from lemon-yellow at the bottom, through diffusive grapefruit tones, into topmost shades of deep blood orange-red. It looked like a thermometer about to burst. Other fruit was clustered together into something that loosely resembled the original tropical jungle plans, with bananas, pineapples and melons displayed in a glistening forest of green leaves. The herb garden looked pretty shabby, but I was confident it would improve with nurturing. Leena’s main addition to the project was the creation of the ‘Lettuce Meadow,’ an expanse of salad leaves arranged across a wide sloping area, access to which could be gained by a narrow wooden bridge.

The last things to go in were several industrial humidifiers, which had raised the cost of the project by another few thousand pounds. They covered the area in a fine mist. It was like being in a tropical greenhouse. The disadvantage of the humidifiers was that anyone entering Fruit Eden got soaked to the skin in seconds, but we planned to supply waterproof ponchos for customers to use free of charge.

Mr Fung announced the grand reopening over the loudspeakers. Today, he said, was the culmination not only of the Fruit Eden project, but the ‘re-imagining’ process that had taken place across the whole store, from Fish World and the Frozen North right through to the bloody spectacle of Meat Zone. He congratulated all remaining staff, those of us who had stuck it out, who had not shied away from experimentation or faltered before bold ideas. Tomorrow, he declared, the doors would reopen, and ‘a new supermarket paradigm’ would at last be unleashed on the world.

Then he popped a bottle of Cava and raised his plastic glass to Fruit Eden. He donned a poncho, crossed the bridge over Lettuce Meadow, plucked an apple from the Tree of Knowledge – this, surprisingly, was Tony’s inspiration, an ungainly concrete construction enwrapped by a serpent made of painted hosepipes – and took a ceremonial bite. The humidifiers steamed up the glasses on his face, mist condensed on his forehead. We watched him, anxiously, for an opinion. He appeared absolutely delighted, almost childishly happy.

Our final touch was the most spectacular, and we had been saving it for this moment. At a prearranged signal from me, Leena disappeared into the stock room and came back with a large cardboard box draped in a red blanket. She curtsied towards Mr Fung and theatrically pulled the blanket away, releasing seven budgerigars, five love birds and a cockatoo, purchased from a pet shop that morning with the very last of our money, which soared up into the steaming clouds to circle their new home. Actually they didn’t soar exactly, but hopped rather cautiously over the floor, blinking at the fruit in a puzzled way. But it seemed to fulfil Mr Fung’s vision of the paradise he had imagined, and he said in a voice quite choked with emotion: ‘I knew you could make it happen.’

After this short ceremony, staff were encouraged to spend time wandering around the store, in order to familiarise ourselves with the new developments. I stuck with my team, each of us swigging from a mini bottle of white wine, which Mr Fung had distributed from a loaded trolley. We saw the Frozen North, the icy bunker that comprised the new frozen foods department, and had a look at Fish World, which was unpleasant. We sat down on the sofas, armchairs and chaise-longues that had appeared halfway along some of the aisles, to provide ‘pacific spots of calm’ for when customers grew fatigued. We explored the bewildering labyrinth of shelves, which had changed shape four or five times since I had last been involved, and made even more disorientating by the erection of screens and the hanging of curtains, all part of Mr Fung’s self-declared ‘war on linearity.’

‘Um, what about security?’ Wasim had asked several weeks before.

‘Security?’ said Mr Fung, as if he scorned the word.

‘I mean, CCTV cameras and stuff. How will they see the shoplifters now? There are blind spots everywhere, all over the store.’ Wasim, despite his permanent expression of fear intermingled with doubt, was one of those loyal employees who had stuck it out.

In response, Mr Fung had told a surprising story.

‘After the revolutions in France, the government redesigned Paris. All the new roads were built in straight lines, a bit like conventional supermarkets. Do you know why? To give cannons a clear line of fire. That’s the same principle behind security cameras. To give them a clear line of fire, to eliminate blind spots.’

The assembled staff were puzzled and impressed. At times like these, I had the sense that Mr Fung was hinting at something that went beyond new retail experiences and supermarket paradigms. As if he was revealing something bigger.

‘Do we want to create that sort of store?’ Mr Fung went on. ‘A supermarket founded on the fear of the very people it serves?’

‘But what about the shoplifters?’ asked Wasim, standing with his mouth slightly open.

To this, Mr Fung had only smiled.

We finished our mini bottles of wine, and trundled Tony around in one of the trolleys that Ranjeet had painted. We practised locating products under the Alphabetisation system, in preparation for the opening next day. It wasn’t as straightforward as it sounded. It was very hard to guess, for example, whether a bar of milk chocolate would appear under C for chocolate, M for milk chocolate, or even B for bar. People had told Mr Fung of these concerns. He’d called them ‘teething problems.’

My team wandered off. It was dark outside. All the lights were blazing in the store. I kissed Leena when we were alone, in one of the semi-secret rooms created by the repositioned aisles. It was a hasty, clumsy thing, and both of us laughed afterwards. We were surrounded by L products: lager, lard, lasagne sheets, lemonade, lipstick, Listerine, lollipops. I tried to sit her in her own shelf space, between leashes (dog) and leggings.

‘This is one of Mr Fung’s blind spots,’ I said, putting my lips against her neck. I don’t know if she got the reference. I thought it would seem embarrassing later, but it never did.

We resumed trading the next morning. The doors to reality opened.

The reopening hadn’t been advertised, so it took a long time before any customers started to filter in. Mr Fung was there to greet them at the door. He was wearing his purple suit, with a pink bougainvillea flower in the lapel. He shook their hands, welcomed them to the store, and personally handed them a shopping basket or matched them up with a trolley. ‘Take your time,’ he said as they moved off. ‘Make yourself at home.’

The customers entered cautiously, with a look of trepidation. The first thing they encountered was Fruit Eden. The humidifiers were on full-blast, and before long the condensation built up and dripped from the ceiling like rain, which we hadn’t anticipated. We had to hand out umbrellas to go with the waterproof ponchos. Despite these protections, few of the customers actually ventured over the bridge that spanned Lettuce Meadow. They were not adventurous. Some took lemons from Citrus Rock, but to get to the ruby grapefruit and blood oranges they had to climb twelve feet up a ladder, and none attempted that. Besides, most of the budgerigars had taken up residence at the top, gorging themselves on the fruit, and it seemed to put people off. They stood around at the edges and stared. They wiped perspiration from their foreheads. ‘It looks nice, I guess,’ one man said. But nobody else said anything.

From there, they entered into the aisles, groping their way uncertainly. Tony’s sloppy letter signs had been replaced with smarter ones, printed in the Superway green on plastic notices, but they still seemed to find the system confusing. They constantly had to ask where things were. They seemed upset by the lack of straight lines, and half the little rooms remained unexplored. They came upon darkly watchful employees positioned at every junction, staring at them to see how they reacted.

The wheels of their trolleys snagged on the carpets. Some of them got hopelessly lost. They kept knocking things off the shelves. There was a growing irritation.

At the end of the day, when the last of them had found their way back and been ushered out, the sales on the tills were disappointing. We’d received sixteen complaints, with one man threatening to sue over slipping on the wet floor at Fruit Eden. Comments included ‘disorientating,’ ‘nightmarish and Kafkaesque,’ ‘an impossible environment to shop in,’ and ‘a revolting joke.’ This last was a comment about Meat Zone, which seemed to have caused quite a stir.

‘Teething problems,’ said Mr Fung, in his subsequent de-briefing. We were gathered around the tills, passing round the packet of rich tea biscuits he had handed out. ‘Of course it takes time for new ideas to filter through to the public. They have never seen anything like this before. They are simply overwhelmed. The more revolutionary the concept, the harder it is to comprehend.’ He appeared defiant and up-beat, hopping round energetically and beaming at us all. He assured us that sales would pick up, that customers would come flocking before long.

At the end of the first week, as customer footfall increased slightly, Mr Fung was still confident enough to initiate a new rota system he called ‘Staff Switcheroo.’ The idea, he explained, was to counter any monotony that might start creeping in as we all settled down to our regular jobs, now that the excitement of the reorganisation was over. He didn’t want a workforce of automatons. He didn’t want us to grow despondent. Throughout the day, at random intervals, an announcement would be broadcast overhead: ‘All staff switch, all staff switch, with immediate effect.’ Upon hearing this, all employees would immediately move to a new position: check-out staff would turn into shelf stackers, shelf stackers would man Fish World, Fish World servers would go collecting trolleys, trolley collectors would rush to the loading bay. We all carried laminated sheets that told us the roster of duties.

We did a trial run before opening, and everything went pretty smoothly. But when the customers were in, the changeovers became chaotic. People would complain about shop attendants charging off in the middle of helping them track down some product beginning with J, sometimes leaving halfway through a sentence. An elderly woman was almost knocked over in the rush to get through the aisles. ‘Things will settle down,’ said Mr Fung. ‘After a few weeks, Switcheroo will become so effortless and natural you can do it blindfolded.’ He frowned, thinking for a moment, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d whipped out blindfolds there and then. But instead he turned away.

At the end of that month, Mr Fung was smiling less often. The bounce had gone out of his step; he appeared to grow more tired. Things were going badly wrong, despite the reassurances and pep talks he gave us in the morning meetings, which even some of his loyal supporters had started to call propaganda. Sales, which had initially picked up following that first teething week, were steadily falling. The tills took less and less each day. Our regular customers had deserted us. New customers came once, sometimes even twice, but not again. The only regulars we managed to attract were a collection of mad old tramps, who came to put their feet up on the chaise-longues or wander the aisles for the afternoon, smiling happily to themselves, trying to feed the love birds biscuits, picking things up and putting them back in the wrong places.

It was either a tribute to Mr Fung’s inclusiveness, his generous soul, that he didn’t have those tramps thrown out, or a mark of his desperation.

Employees continued to fall by the wayside. We were down to a skeleton staff. It was me, Ranjeet, Tony, Wasim, Leena and a score of irregulars. Kasim had quietly vanished a week ago. And then Tony quit as well. He claimed he had to study for exams, but I lost all respect for him.

‘You’re not going to quit, are you?’ I asked Ranjeet one day, after he’d been bitching about the long hours and the fact we were still on the minimum wage.

‘Quit?’ he said. ‘I don’t quit, man. I’m not quitting smoking, and I’m not quitting Fung’s.’

This, I think, was the first time that anyone had called it this. Out loud, at any rate. Perhaps we’d all begun to give it this name in our minds long ago. He was right: it wasn’t Superway now. It was Fung’s. There could be no other name.

I still kissed Leena from time to time. On the bridge over Lettuce Meadow, or in the chaos of the Switcheroo. She’d write a single letter on the back of a receipt and we’d meet in the Gs or the Ks or the Ns, rush through the motions of a brief, fumbled tryst, and then hurry back to our duties.

But Fung’s plunged deeper into problems by the day. It was like being on a sinking ship. We’d practically gutted and rebuilt the place in a couple of inspired weeks, and now our deficiencies in design, planning, construction, engineering, electronics, hydraulics and everything else were becoming alarmingly apparent. Fish World stank. Almost no-one could enter. The Frozen North was in crisis. There was some problem with temperature control, and thick ice now covered the walls and floor, with icicles starting to grow down from the ceiling. Chisels had to be provided to hack away rock-hard sausages that had become imbedded in the walls, like prehistoric corpses. Meat Zone was another liability. Children had run howling from the sight. There was blood seeping through one of the walls, and no-one could work out where it was coming from.

By the end of a fortnight, it was clear that even our beloved Fruit Eden was failing. Digging out wilted produce and getting fresh stuff onto shelves proved to be a long, laborious business, and with the staff shortage and the constant Switcheroos the job just wasn’t done properly. The area was nearly impossible to clean. Putrescent matter built up in the cracks. Citrus Rock was covered in bird shit, as were the nearby newspaper racks and the O section from Ovaltine to ox-tail soup, which the love birds and the cockatoo had colonised respectively. The bright hues of the tropical fruit slowly faded to muddy brown, and Lettuce Meadow turned into a decomposing swamp. Dark shadows of damp appeared on the walls, and the humidifiers had to be decommissioned. Clouds of fruit flies circled ominously, despite the Venus fly-traps.

The worst thing of all was the change in Mr Fung. We watched as his energy drained away, with occasional resurgences of zeal, the fervour repossessing him, sometimes for hours at a time, and then dissipating again. The vigorous speeches became less frequent. He no longer threw things at people. He spent more time sitting in his swivel chair, gazing at the slow train-wreck of his store, turning circles with his feet. Just going round and round.

We all waited for the next big idea, the next doomed, inspirational scheme to get things moving, to turn things around, to check the steady rot. We would have gone along with it, too, we who stayed with him to the end. We would have followed any fresh, crazed vision, even if – perhaps especially if – we knew it could only fail. It would have been worth it, just to see the old eagerness filling him again, his face lighting up like a fridge when its door is eagerly thrown open.

But we all knew the fridge was empty now. There was just nothing left.

It happened one day shortly after closing, when the tills were being emptied of their miserable takings, the lights switched off in the grottoes of Fruit Eden. It was Wasim who opened the doors, apprehending that the two men outside, the two men with the suits and the briefcase, were not customers arriving late but a portent of something else. Something ominous and official. They were both tall, clean and middle-aged, with the kinds of haircuts tall, clean, middle-aged people have. They looked like the sort of people who know the names of all the motorways and listen to traffic reports. They asked to see the manager. We led them towards the office. I could see their eyes flicking around as we navigated them through the aisles, but the expressions on their faces never altered. I was the one who opened the door, and I tried to see if there was a bed made of packing crates in there, but all I could see was a neat desk, with files, folders and a laptop arranged on it.

Mr Fung received the men with a calm, acceptant smile. He shook their hands and stepped aside to let them through, then closed the door. There was something embarrassing about the glimpse I had of him, just before the office door closed. He suddenly looked ridiculous, smiling away in an ugly purple suit that was slightly too large, a wilted bougainvillea in the lapel. I felt a rush of shame.

‘That’s it. He’s in the shit now,’ said Ranjeet, half an hour later. The office door was still closed. None of us had left.

‘Why? Why do you say that?’ demanded Leena. She was sitting on my knee. It wasn’t very comfortable; she was a bony girl.

‘I reckon they’re the guys who own the franchise. They’re the guys from Superway.’ He was sitting at a cash register and smoking, knocking the ash into one of the empty coin drawers.

The two men left after half an hour. When their car had gone, the car-park was empty. We waited another fifteen minutes to see if Mr Fung would come out, but he stayed in his office. It didn’t seem right to disturb him.

The next morning, he made a short speech. This Superway store was closing, he said. He was stepping down as manager. It was not economically viable. He hoped it would reopen under different management, so we could keep our jobs. He was sorry things hadn’t worked out. And he wished he could give us some severance pay, to last until things were back to normal, but there was no money available. Head office had refused it.

‘That’s it?’ said Wasim. His Adam’s apple went up and down. I thought he was going to cry.

‘Yes. That’s it,’ said Mr Fung.

‘What about everything we’ve done?’ demanded Ranjeet furiously.

‘There’s nothing more to do,’ said Mr Fung. ‘This store is perfect, in every way.’ He smiled sadly. ‘I’m very, very proud.’

The doors didn’t open that day. Or ever again, for that matter. I don’t know if Superway planned to reopen under new management, to wipe away everything we’d done and return things to the way they were, but with the economic situation and the general pattern of closures nationwide, I suppose the odds were pretty much against it. I’m glad, of course, it has been this way. I’m glad that nothing came after. Given that the Superway brand itself went bust about a year later, laying off thousands of staff across the country, it might seem, to a fantasist, almost a vindication. But history has no jurisdiction to vindicate men like Mr Fung. He needs no-one’s approval.

It was Ranjeet who suggested it, though he said it as a joke. It was me who took the idea up and made the others follow it through. We got to work that afternoon, the last afternoon we spent at Fung’s, cutting the letters from balsawood with a hacksaw in the car-park. We painted them lime green with the paint that Tony had used for his letter signs. Then we got a ladder and climbed onto the flat, gravelly roof.

It was hard to get the old sign off, but we managed it with a mallet and a crowbar. There was no risk in cutting the wires, because the electricity had been disconnected earlier that week. Under our feet, the fruit flies were swarming over the rot of Fruit Eden; the Frozen North was melting now, loosening its grip on the sausages. We sent the Superway sign crashing down in three broken pieces to the concrete below. Leena let out a scream and jumped around. There was no-one else to applaud or cheer. No-one to witness the final switcheroo.

We banged the letters into place with ten-inch nails, right into the wall. F, Fu, Fun, Fung, Fung’s. There was no way to light them up, of course, but they stood out brightly, lime green on grey-black. Then we went to find Mr Fung.

He stood there for a long time, looking at the sign. There was no expression on his face at all. He wiped his glasses, put them back on, and nodded his approval. Leena laughed. So did Ranjeet. Myself and Mr Fung remained silent.

Finally we followed him inside, back into the unilluminated store.

‘Take what you want,’ was the last thing he said. ‘Anything. It’s all yours.’

Leena took the cockatoo, and we just let the other birds go. Perhaps they managed to breed in the wild. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.

But we didn’t really feel like taking much else with us, in the end.

I never saw Wasim again. I imagine he’s doing okay. I hung out with Ranjeet for a while, but we started to annoy each other, and after I went to university we lost all contact. All we talked about was Fung’s, and when there wasn’t anything else about Fung’s left to talk about, we didn’t really have much to say to one another. I saw Leena on and off that summer. She got a job in a family greengrocers. She was the first girl who let me take off her clothes. The cockatoo was watching.

I’ve lost touch with her as well, since then. Perhaps she went back to Slovakia.

And Mr Fung, what became of him? What’s he doing now? I’ve asked around. No-one seems to know. He wasn’t the kind of man you could ever find again.

Was he married? Did he have a family? Where the hell did he even come from? No-one seems to know that either.

Sometimes I wish I’d talked to him, asked him more questions.

The story of Mr Fung’s Superway has since become a textbook case of mismanagement at the highest level, of doomed retail strategy. It is studied in business studies seminars, held up as an extreme example of how a franchise can go badly wrong if chains of command are not adhered to and oversight not maintained. CEOs talk about ‘doing a Fung.’ Health and safety legislators do Powerpoint presentations about it, pointing out the lack of fire extinguishers and flagrant disregard for safety signs.

Those little men, those little women. I can only pity them. I know how it really was. I lived through the glory days.

—

I drove past Fung’s a few days ago. Of course, it isn’t Fung’s now. I drove past Fung’s, and then left it behind. I could have stopped, but what would have been the point? You can stop, but you can’t go back.

Donald Fullwood left Jamaica almost 30 years ago to start a new life in Shashamane, Ethiopia. A devout Rastafarian, he was following in the footsteps of the Rasta pioneers who came here to settle the land granted them by Emperor Haile Selassie, who they worshipped as an incarnation of God. He lives in a bare breezeblock house, tending a small garden that grows potatoes, corn, carrots, peas, scotch bonnet peppers, mangos and strawberries. ‘There was nothing here before,’ he says as he leads me around. ‘But when Haile Selassie gave us this land he said we must be productive, to utilise and develop it for the welfare of our community. And he said we must live in love, in parallel with Ethiopian life. Ethiopians and Jamaicans are blood brothers.’

Donald came here on his own, leaving his family behind. He raised money for the migration fee by dancing. He regards it less as a move to a new land than a spiritual ‘repatriation,’ a return to ancient roots, following the ‘back to Africa’ call of black spokesmen like Marcus Garvey. ‘We read the Bible, particularly the Book of Exodus. It states that we should find our brothers. I came to know Ethiopia as the true womb of Christ, a place where Christ-like people live. It was a catastrophe that brought us to the West. Now we have returned to our rightful place.’

The cult surrounding Haile Selassie – Ras Tafari, the Lion of Judah – was born from a legacy of oppression. For Jamaicans living under the thumb of the British colonial government, whose ancestors had been brought to the New World in chains, Ras Tafari symbolised many things: a powerful and respected black leader, ruler of the only African country to successfully fight off colonisation, and, in his claim to be a direct descendent of King David, the heir to ancient Biblical power and wisdom. Despite pressure from British authorities attempting to curb the rebellious new movement, the Emperor neither confirmed nor denied his divinity during his reign. When he visited Jamaica in 1966 his plane was met on the runway by thousands of jubilant Rastas. A decade before, he had made a gift of 500 hectares of crown land to followers of the rapidly-growing religion.

Since then the Shashamane community has expanded from 12 founding families to about 200 families from all over the world. But life in this long-sought spiritual homeland has proven far from easy. Haile Selassie was deposed in a military coup in 1974, and the hard-line socialist regime that followed reduced the community’s land from 500 hectares to 11. That regime fell in 1991, but the current government has pursued a confused policy towards the settlement, by turns reassuring and threatening it, and the community now exists in a bureaucratic limbo. Members talk of land confiscation, persecution by the police, and threats by the local government to bulldoze their houses.

‘I tell you, man, it’s miserable,’ says Donald. ‘They do some horrible things. They are trying to suppress our way of life. Rasta land has been confiscated, and at the same time they want us to have more money for tax. Our biggest interest is to have legal entity with the government. We desire a proper Jamaican ambassador to protect our rights. We want someone who can feel and know the pain we go through.’

A further problem, even more worrying to those who see this place as their salvation, comes from within the community itself. The popular image of Rastafarianism has created a new generation that flocks to the lifestyle of reggae and ganja, but shows little interest in the ideals – or religion – on which the settlement was founded. Donald, as one of the elders here, fears that the community’s true mission is in danger of being lost. ‘The spirit of Shashamane has changed. Everyone is material now, everyone wants money. The young people don’t want to work. They are selfish and greedy. They don’t worship God properly. There is much disrespect for authority, disrespect for people.

‘We left Jamaica with a religious consciousness, otherwise known as zeal. But if we don’t see it being established in reality, it’s a degraded covenant. The dream needs humbleness. It needs a renewed sense of consciousness that God is with us.’

And how are the Rastafarian settlers viewed by the local population? It’s fair to say that most Ethiopians – themselves either Muslims or Orthodox Christians, as Haile Selassie was – are perplexed by the worship of their former emperor, who presided, after all, over a feudal and autocratic state, and even tolerated slavery in the early part of his reign. ‘The Orthodox Christians don’t understand,’ says Donald. ‘They refuse to discuss the subject of the continuation of the Davidic kingdom. They don’t recognise our religion, they only see ganja and dreadlocks. We don’t want to have a criminal stigma. We don’t want Ethiopians to feel that we are cattle down here, eating ganja for our lunch. Rastafarianism is not a threat. It’s about the behaviour of the individual. It’s not about mind control. It’s about how this present generation is going to face reality.

‘I have happy memories of Jamaica, but I don’t want to return there. Too much violence, thieving, murder. I don’t even like to hear about it. Despite all our problems, Ethiopia is better. I believe this is our true home. It’s our promised land, in reality. But I still want things to be better.’

–

150 miles to the north, in the capital Addis Ababa, lawyer Ato Eshetu Mamo also talks of a promised land. But for him, the path to his spiritual home leads out of – not back to – Africa. Eshetu is a member of the Beta Abraham, which, along with a larger community called the Beta Israel, are the remnants of Ethiopia’s ancient population of black Jews.

Known as Falasha by other Ethiopians – a term that translates roughly as ‘exiles’ – the Beta Abraham and Beta Israel practice an ancient form of Judaism that has stayed largely unchanged since Old Testament times. Scholars disagree on whether these groups are the descendents of Jews who migrated to Africa, or the descendents of African converts to the Jewish faith, but either way Judaism has played a major role in shaping Ethiopian history. The Ark of the Covenant itself, the ultimate symbol of the Israelites, is believed by most Ethiopians to reside in the Orthodox church in Axum.

‘Before we came, there was only paganism. After the tribe of Judah was established, the Ethiopians turned to God,’ says Eshetu from behind his desk, which is covered with books on legal matters and texts about Judaism. He is an articulate and passionate speaker, accompanying his words with emphatic hand gestures. ‘In the past, the Jews were the kings and rulers of Ethiopia. The Christians stole everything from us. The Orthodox church is really Jewish culture. The Old Testament is ours. Even the Ark, which came from Jerusalem, they took from us and kept as their own. Whenever you think of Ethiopia, you are really thinking of Israel.’

After being displaced by the rise of Orthodox Christianity, Ethiopia’s Jews retreated to the remote highlands of the north. In common with Jewish people worldwide, they endured centuries of persecution. Many pretended to convert to Christianity, but continued to practice their faith in secret. ‘The Christians said the Jews were evil, that they ate people with their eyes. Still there is discrimination. The situation has improved in recent times, but still people don’t look on Jews as human beings. Even now we are suffering. Whenever I think of this, I can’t control myself.’

After receiving belated recognition from the authorities in Jerusalem, Ethiopian Jews were granted the right to ‘return’ to Israel in 1975, a process known in Hebrew as ‘Aliyah.’ Since then, many thousands have made the long journey back to what the Bible tells them is their birthright. During Ethiopia’s civil war, the Israeli air-force carried out the audacious Operation Moses, secretly airlifting thousands of Jews to Israel from the deserts of Sudan. The exodus later continued under the codename Operation Solomon, which saw over 14,000 make the journey. Today a mere 10 or 15% of the country’s former Jewish population remains, mostly waiting in Addis Ababa for their applications to process. The procedure takes longer than an air-lift now. Emigrants must submit proof of their Jewishness through the maternal line, and organise their future housing, schools and employment. The process can take a very long time. Some have been waiting in Addis Ababa, supported by aid organisations, for up to 12 years.

‘This isn’t economic migration. It’s based on our faith,’ says Eshetu. ‘It’s about identity. Jews must get to Israel in order to know who we are. All Jews must be restored to Jerusalem. This is the word of God. I believe in the prophecy of the Third Temple. The chosen people will return to Zion. That’s why we Jews are living in hope here. The God of Israel will emancipate us from the persecution we have suffered.
‘The Orthodox Christian kings of Ethiopia all claimed Judaic descent. Haile Selassie said he came from the line of Solomon and David, but we’re the ones who really come from the tribes of Judah. Haile Selassie persecuted us worse than anyone. Up until now, we have been slaves. In Israel, we will be free.’

–

Donald and Eshetu both come from communities that have suffered centuries of inequality, having been displaced from an ancient homeland. The legacy of slavery has shaped their religion and culture. Both are part of a diaspora: one outcast in the Caribbean, seeking return to Africa, one outcast in Africa, seeking the Middle East. And whether their epic journey is termed ‘Aliyah’ or ‘back to Africa,’ both see their people’s salvation in a return to long-lost spiritual roots.

Most strikingly, both narratives are suffused with the language of the Old Testament: both talk longingly of a return to Zion. For Jews, Zion is the Holy Land to which they must be restored, the concept which gave birth to the Zionist movement. To Afro-Caribbeans in the 1930s and 1940s, reinterpreting the Bible to make it relevant to their own experience, ‘Zion’ came to mean a return to their mystical, African roots; just as ‘Babylon,’ as one of the enemies that persecuted the Israelites, became a cipher for colonial oppression, and the polluting influences of materialist culture. The Beta Abraham and Beta Israel believe they are descended from the Tribe of Dan, one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel who were dispersed around the world. Within Rastafarianism, the Twelve Tribes of Israel is the name of a prominent ‘mansion,’ or branch, illuminating the supposed link between King David and Haile Selassie, the self-styled Lion of Judah. Both Rastafarians and black Jews see themselves as bearing the torch of the Davidic lineage, the physical or spiritual heirs of that divine power.

The experience of both communities also shows that the promised land can be far from paradise. When Rastas came to Africa they experienced suspicion and hostility from the governments that came after Haile Selassie, and the general incomprehension of the local population. Ethiopian Jews, in turn, face hardships in Israel. Leaving aside the small matter of the Palestinian conflict, many report discrimination from longer-established Jewish groups, which leaves them at the bottom of society with bad housing and menial jobs. Ironically, escaping religious prejudice here in Ethiopia could simply lead to racial prejudice in their long-lost ‘homeland.’

These narratives are linked by parallels of history and suffering, but above all the enduring belief that there exists a perfect land, where life can be pure again and the grass is always greener. And yet the two men also show it’s possible to plant a foot in both worlds, to have more than one identity at the same time. ‘We are here, citizens of Ethiopia, but by blood we are citizens of Israel,’ says Eshetu as he rises from his desk to show me out. ‘Now I’ve been here so long I am Ethiopian by nature, but still I have Jamaican roots,’ echoes Donald, standing in his small garden. ‘You must always know your roots, otherwise you lose yourself.’ He inspects a leaf on his mango tree. ‘That’s what Bob Marley said.’

The name Kashmir invariably conjures up two very different images. The first is that of a green paradise nestled in the Himalayas, famed for its apples, apricots, saffron, and the Raj-era houseboats serenely floating in Srinagar’s Dal Lake. The second is that of a war-torn hellhole split between India and Pakistan, a source of unending antipathy and conflict between the two nuclear-armed states. Today, a third image jostles for attention—that of a region shortly to feel the full impact of climate change which will have enormous implications for the people and their environment.

The glaciers that water the Valley of Kashmir, like glaciers across the Himalayan range, are melting at an unprecedented rate. The Himalayas contain the largest store of fresh water outside the polar ice-caps, feeding rivers upon which up to two billion people depend. But despite the enormity of the threat—or perhaps because it is simply too overwhelming—the governments of South Asian countries are doing little in the way of mitigation. In the case of conflict-wracked Kashmir, this lack of preparation is especially pronounced. Until very recently, the region has been too politically unstable to allow scientists to monitor glacial retreat, essential to formulating a response to future environmental change.

“There is a dearth of information in India,” says Professor Syed Hasnain of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). “We have no data on temperature, humidity, rainfall, greenhouse gases or Asian Brown Cloud (the drifting South Asian smog that could be a factor in raising temperatures). Various models suggest that heat is being generated by this, but we have to establish a scientific link.”

In August 2008 I joined Hasnain on a visit to the Kolahoi glacier which lies just a few miles from the Line of Control that separates Indian from Pakistani controlled Kashmir. The purpose of the expedition was to assess the glacier’s suitability for inclusion in an index of benchmark glaciers spanning the Himalayas from east to west, part of a long-overdue attempt to monitor the rate of decline across the range. After two days on foot over difficult mountainous terrain, what we discovered was even grimmer than expected. The glacier’s accumulation area—where snow packs down to form new ice—appears to have almost entirely converted into ablation, which would mean it has entered a state of irreversible melting. According to the inhabitants of the nearby village of Aru, in 1985 the glacier’s snout stretched half a mile further down the valley.

“This is the headwater for Kashmir,” says Dr Ghulam Jeelani from the University of Kashmir, who accompanied the expedition. “If glaciers like Kolahoi disappear, Kashmir could go from being a water-rich area to an
area of water stress.” At its present rate of decline, Jeelani believes this particular glacier could vanish in a mere 10 years.

Kolahoi itself might be doomed, but by studying its decline, TERI will gather much-needed information on exactly why glaciers are melting—and what can be done to counter the effects. Although this case corresponds to an overall pattern of glacial retreat throughout the Himalayas, glaciology is a complicated business, and many local climatic factors must be taken into account before future impacts on the environment can be predicted with any accuracy.

At the moment, we can only guess what the future of Kashmir might hold, based on scenarios elsewhere in the Himalayas. Of particular concern is the formation of large, unstable lakes of melt-water, which can burst their banks without warning and devastate downstream populations; these glacial lake outburst floods have frequently occurred in Bhutan and Nepal. Hasnain estimates some Indian rivers could initially see their flow increase by up to 30%, leading to widespread flooding, followed by severe water shortages as the glaciers that feed them disappear. This would have an enormous impact on the water systems of Kashmir and the human cost would be immense if the valley’s fertile fields and orchards withered. As for geopolitics, it’s impossible to say how climate change might impact on the region’s intractable conflict, but experts like Dirk Messner of the German Development Institute have identified South Asia as a zone of major potential conflict as local and national players compete over diminishing water resources.

“In India, glaciology has not received the attention it deserves,” said TERI director R.K. Pachauri, who also chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, at a 2008 summit in Delhi. “ We’ve been ignoring it at our peril. Adaptation measures are crucial now.”

It may be too late for Kolahoi, but if TERI’s expedition opens the eyes of governments and instills an appropriate sense of urgency, potentially catastrophic upheavals may yet be mitigated. Authorities in India and
Pakistan must put politics aside and wake up to the disaster looming over their shared environment. If climate change strips Kashmir of its paradise and water shortages hit this already deeply troubled and divided territory, it could make past disturbances look like child’s play.

Harar, the ancient walled city in the eastern badlands of Ethiopia, is a place of many apparent contradictions. In a mainly Orthodox Christian country, Muslims consider it to be the fourth holiest city in the world for its collection of 90 mosques and shrines. Once the base of the warlord Ahmed Gragn, who led his armies on an annual jihad against the Orthodox Christian empire that ruled the highlands of the north, it now enjoys UNESCO status as ‘a city of tolerance, peace and diversity.’ Above all, it’s a place where cultures meet: the Harari, Amharic, Somali, Afar and Oromifa languages can all be heard within its walls and bustling marketplaces.

Harar is utterly unlike other Ethiopian cities. With its intricate, winding lanes it bears more than a passing resemblance to the old towns of the Arab world. Its houses are painted white, green, startling pink, or powder blue the shade of Morocco’s ‘blue city’ Chefchaouen. Entering through the Showa Gate, one of five old gateways cut through the sixteenth-century wall, the roadway slopes gently downhill into a maze of narrow streets in which tribeswomen from the surrounding villages lay out colourful displays of coffee, spices, vegetables and cotton. There are low wooden benches where you can enjoy a breakfast of special fool – a spicy mash of beans and scrambled eggs – for as little as 3 birr (around 15 pence), along with a glass of sickly-sweet tea or Ethiopian coffee. And it won’t be long before you’re invited to chew the mildly narcotic leaf khat, on which it seems the entire population is hooked.

Partly due to their incessant khat-chewing, Hararis have a reputation among other Ethiopians as people whose main goals in life are pleasure and relaxation. During Ramadan, I was invited to share feasts of lentils, rice and steaming mounds of spiced vegetables, followed by coffee, dates, halva and perfumed Arabic sweets. ‘During the day, we are not allowed even to swallow our own saliva,’ I was informed by my host. ‘But then we stay up and party til dawn. The Christians here love Ramadan, because they get to have fun all night with us. They drink, and we chew khat. But, you know, when it’s not Ramadan, most of us drink too.’ These words pretty much sum up the spirit of the City of Tolerance. It’s a friendly and permissive place that confounds common preconceptions.

My main pleasure was wandering the streets, getting agreeably lost in alleyways that seem to reveal a new surprise around every corner. But for around £5 a day you can also hire a guide, which is helpful in locating some of the city’s hidden treasures. The guide I found (or rather, who found me) was Grima, a gentle and softly-spoken man who alluded frequently to a profound revelation he’d had recently, the details of which he never quite revealed. It didn’t matter; he showed me other revelations I’d never have found on my own. These included traditional homes, the cool, spacious interiors of which are hung with intricately-woven baskets (again I was reminded of Morocco), and various tucked-away tombs and shrines to sheiks and saints throughout history. We saw the former residence of the poet Arthur Rimbaud (or Rambo, as he’s known round here), who settled down as a merchant here; his old house is now a museum, where, through the coloured glass of the windows on the topmost floor, you can see beyond the city walls to the stippled brown and yellow hills that roll away to Somaliland, 90 miles to the east.

It’s worth taking the road this way, too. A minibus ride of less than an hour brings you to the Valley of Marvels, an arid, acacia-studded landscape dominated by fantastical pillars of precariously-balanced rock that looks like something from the set of a sci-fi film. You can follow a trail through dense cactus thickets to get a closer look at these formations, including one prominent column of granite that was allegedly shelled by a tank during the short-lived Somali invasion (they missed). If you linger here towards evening, you may hear hyenas and the distant roar of lions.

On the way back to Harar it’s worth stopping at Babile, a Somali village that holds a vibrant camel market every Monday and Thursday. Somali clansmen from miles around bring vast herds of camels to trade – I was told there were 20,000 there – and the market is also visited by the local Oromo people, distinctive in their brightly-coloured clothes and beaded jewellery. Upon arrival I was grabbed by a talkative man in a blue turban, who took it upon himself to fill the many gaps in my knowledge of camels (for example, they can retch up their throats and wobble them out of their mouths like a tongue; one of the more disgusting sights on offer). Another man then accosted the first. ‘What are you doing with that Amhara?’ he demanded furiously; the Amhara region is the heartland of Ethiopia’s Orthodox Christians, and I received this label as an apparently Christian-looking outsider. A vigorous argument developed, which seemed to be about to lead to blows, until both men burst out laughing and slapped me on the back. I guessed it had all been a joke, but I couldn’t be sure.

The Valley of Marvels and Babile road eventually snakes to Somaliland, and on the way you pass a steady stream of Isuzu trucks carrying bags of prized khat east, and coming back loaded with contraband – electronic goods and knock-off designer clothes such as the popular ‘Abibas’ t-shirts – from unregulated ports on the Red Sea. The smuggling, pretty much ignored by the police, lends a distinctively roguish flavour to the many pleasures of the region. But it cannot be emphasised enough that despite the relative proximity of a chronically unstable state, Harar is one of the most relaxed, least threatening places to visit in Ethiopia.

One of the city’s strangest attractions are the famous Hyena Men, who follow an obscure tradition of feeding the wild hyenas that gather outside the city walls at dusk. The Hyena Men call the hyenas by name, and it’s an unreal, eerie sight to see these powerful predators emerging from the shadows of the bush and prowling into the light. There they are fed cuts of slaughterhouse meat, which the Hyena Man offers by hand, and if he feels like showing off he dangles the meat on the end of a short stick clenched between his teeth. When I was there the hyenas, after obligingly wolfing down a few of the bloodier hunks, laid down in the dust and went to sleep. The Hyena Man seemed a bit put out, until someone reported a dead cow in the field just down the hill; the hyenas had clearly feasted on that first.

This bizarre understanding between man and hyena is a perfect emblem for Harar, a city where different religions and cultures not only coexist peacefully, but with respect and genuine friendship. If you needed another symbol of harmony, I’m sure any guide would direct you to pass through the Passage of Agreement, an alleyway with such narrow walls that unless you agree with whoever you meet coming in the opposite direction, there won’t be room for both of you to squeeze through. With such a multicultural mix, the city is perhaps best summed up by the words of one resident I met, lazily chewing khat in the shade of a crumbling wall: ‘Some people say Harar is like Allah. It’s all things in one.’

I’m standing on the brink of a devastated landscape. The entire mountaintop as far as I can see has been torn open by heavy machinery, exposing dark layers of coal beneath, interspersed with streaks of dirty snow. 250-tonne Komatsu excavators toil in the mud far below, scooping up the exposed coal and sending it crashing into the beds of 100-tonne-payload trucks. The scale is almost too vast to take in. Regarding this bleak industrial scene, James Poyner, joint managing director of operating company Miller Argent, invites me to have a vision.

‘In 17 years, all of this will be restored to a pre-Industrial Revolution landscape. There will be rolling hills with sheep grazing on them, trees, places for people to walk their dogs. It will be there for the benefit of future generations. It will be lovely.’

It takes a lot of imagination to envisage the sight that lies before me transformed into the rural idyll that Mr. Poyner describes. I’m in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales, looking at one of the UK’s largest opencast coal mines. Or, as my host insists: one of the UK’s largest land reclamation schemes, which ‘incorporates the extraction of coal by opencast methods.’ This may sound like splitting hairs, but the distinction is important.

The Ffos-y-Fran Land Reclamation Scheme opened for business, to a storm of protest, in 2007. Over the course of 17 years, 1000 acres of ‘acutely derelict and dangerous’ ex-industrial land will be restored to its former condition and returned, at no cost to the public purse, to common ownership. So far so good. But there’s a catch. Before this restoration takes place, 10 million tonnes of coal will be extracted from the ground, much of it destined for the nearby Aberthaw power station. The actual land reclamation bit – replenishing the topsoil, planting the grass – will take a grand total of two years, plus a five-year period of aftercare. The coal mining bit, which Miller Argent claims is ancillary to the overall scheme, will take 15 and a half.

Mr. Poyner is at pains to emphasise that restoring the land on such enormous scale could not possibly have been financed by the local council. ‘There were huge areas of dereliction. Without the recovery of coal, nobody could have afforded to do this.’ He points out that the scheme was not conceived by conniving coal industry bosses, but by the Local Authority and Welsh Assembly Government, who granted Miller Argent access to the coal only on the condition they performed the land restoration. While opponents have decried Ffos-y-Fran as the rebirth of opencast mining in Britain, Mr. Poyner insists the project is merely the third and final stage of the larger East Merthyr Land Reclamation Scheme that dates back to the 1980s.

So what’s the true nature of Ffos-y-Fran? Is it, as the authorities claim, a clever, cost-effective way to fund long-overdue land improvement? Or, as the objectors maintain, merely a cynical ploy providing cover for the exploitation of coal on a massive scale?

Unlike the snow-patched quarry before me, the story is not black and white.

…

There’s no doubt that something had to be done to improve the land’s condition. Merthyr Tydfil, once at the vanguard of the Industrial Revolution, has served as a dumping ground for much of its waste for centuries. Formerly Wales’ most populous town and the biggest iron producer in the world, its fortunes went into terminal decline when the ore ran out in the late 19th century; it is now one of Britain’s most deprived areas, with the country’s 13th lowest life expectancy and 54% of its population classed as ‘economically inactive.’

Generations of heavy industry have taken their toll on the environment. The site that comprises Ffos-y-Fran is riddled with abandoned mineshafts, some dating back to the primitive bell pits dug in the 16th century, prone to unpredictable and potentially fatal collapse. There were three illegal landfill sites choked with industrial waste, one of which was even found to contain an unexploded World War II bomb.

The 1966 Aberfan disaster – when 144 people, including 116 children, died when a mountainside of mining slag collapsed onto houses and the village school – occurred just five miles from Merthyr Tydfil. Much of the debris from the clean-up operation was subsequently dumped at Ffos-y-Fran, a poignant symbol of the need to right the wrongs of past industrial development. Mr. Poyner invokes the ghost of this tragedy to emphasise Miller Argent’s role in cleaning up the land, protecting the local community.

‘We’ve also gone to enormous efforts to safeguard the ecology,’ he adds, citing the preservation of an ancient wooded valley and an iron age settlement, as well as the ‘translocation’ of protected lapwing breeding sites and endangered great crested newts. The company, apparently, has even installed an 8.5km ‘newt fence’ to stop the newts returning to the mine, which, Mr. Poyner assures me, is patrolled daily.

These arguments certainly sound convincing. It seems Miller Argent has all the bases covered. But if the Land Reclamation Scheme brings such glowing benefits to the area, why does it continue to be the subject of so much controversy?

…

To find out, I visit Alyson Austin, one of the more prominent voices of local campaign group Residents Against Ffos-y-Fran (RAFF), which has been fighting the scheme since its inception.

‘Everyone knows the land reclamation is just an excuse to get at the coal. People aren’t stupid,’ she says. ‘It’s true the land was full of mineshafts. This whole town’s like a Swiss cheese. But we believe it could be reclaimed without spending 15 years digging coal out of it first.’

Mrs. Alyson, a middle-aged mother of two who’s never been involved in activism before, doesn’t exactly fit the stereotype of the ‘usual suspects.’ She became involved with the campaign after moving into a new house situated, as Mr. Poyner delights in telling me, on land that had itself been reclaimed in ‘Phase I’ of the East Merthyr Land Reclamation Scheme. That house lies only 400m from Ffos-y-Fran’s outer boundary.

‘You can hear the machines from inside the house,’ she tells me over tea. ‘People come in for a few minutes and say “that’s not so bad.” But it becomes unbearable when you have to hear it all the time. If you are sitting quietly, you hear a constant drone. It stops at ten o’clock at night and starts again at seven in the morning. This is six days a week. It drives us mad. It’s like Chinese water torture.’

The house of RAFF chairman Terry Evans is even closer to the mine, lying just 37m from its perimeter fence. Under Welsh Assembly regulations, opencast mines must be situated at least 500m from residential areas. But of course Ffos-y-Fran is not an ‘opencast mine.’ It’s a ‘land reclamation scheme.’ It now becomes clear why Miller Argent are so insistent in applying that term. The euphemism has allowed the company to effectively skirt the regulations designed to protect inhabitants from dust and noise pollution.

Much controversy surrounds the effects of opencast mines on the health of those who dwell in so-called ‘opencast communities.’ Campaigners claim that particles of coal dust – PM10s and PM2.5s – cause asthma and other respiratory problems, particularly in children. Miller Argent denies this, citing the Pless-Mulloli ‘Newcastle Study’ (‘Living near opencast coal mining sites and children’s respiratory health’) in 2000, which failed to find a definite link between opencast mines and health problems.

‘There’s plenty of other evidence, but they choose to ignore it,’ says Mrs. Austin. ‘The Newcastle Study can’t be accurately applied here. It was carried out around opencast mines that were worked between two and five years, whereas Ffos-y-Fran has a 15-year lifespan. The particle monitors they used in that study only measured PM10s, not the finer particles. You can’t gamble with children’s health on the findings of a single study.’

RAFF have been a thorn in Miller Argent’s side since 2005, when they successfully got planning consent quashed in the High Court. The Welsh Assembly subsequently got that ruling overturned in the Court of Appeal, but RAFF delayed the mine’s opening again by petitioning the House of Lords. That petition was ultimately unsuccessful, and in 2007 the diggers moved in. Now, having failed in a recent application to secure a Judicial Review, the objectors plan on taking their protest to the European Parliament. Miller Argent claims the combined legal actions have cost the company millions of pounds, and dismisses the objectors as a handful of implacable wreckers who refuse to see reason.

But RAFF’s campaign has now spread far beyond Merthyr Tydfil. The ominous spectre of a revival of opencast mining in the UK has drawn the attention of environmental groups around the country. Despite Miller Argent’s insistence that Ffos-y-Fran is merely the final stage of a local land reclamation project, it would be naïve not to see the scheme in a broader national – and even global – context.

The coal industry in the UK is currently enjoying a renaissance. The confederation of UK coal producers CoalPro talks breezily about ‘a new sense of optimism,’ brought about, to a large degree, by a seismic shift in government policy. New Labour was firmly opposed to opencast mining in 1997, but since then its position has changed radically. ‘A number of government statements supportive of indigenous coal production have changed the picture significantly,’ CoalPro noted in 2006. According to Minerals UK, the British Geological Survey’s centre for sustainable mineral development, planning permission was approved for a total of 14 opencast sites in 2007, while not a single application was denied.

Coal, as the government knows well, is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. The objectors point out that the mine is not only ruining their lives today, but will impact on the rest of the world through future carbon emissions. George Monbiot estimates the coal from Ffos-y-Fran ‘will produce 29.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide: equivalent, according to the latest figures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to the sustainable emissions of 55 million people for one year.’ Now is the time, the campaigners argue, for the government to turn its back on coal, whether opencast mined or not, rather than promote the extraction – and incineration – of millions more tonnes of it.

Mr. Poyner counters with energy realpolitik. Whether we like it or not, he says, coal will continue to play a large part in Britain’s energy mix for the foreseeable future. Moreover, in terms of emissions, it’s actually more environmentally sound to extract coal here in the UK, rather than ship it from distant parts of the world. ‘I’m as concerned about climate change as the next man,’ he says. ‘But you’ve got to be practical. If you stop burning coal, which school do you close tomorrow? Which hospital? Electricity is the lifeblood of economic growth.’

‘You’ve got to look at the wider picture,’ says Mrs. Austin. ‘You’ve got to look outside Merthyr Tydfil and see what’s going on in the rest of the world. All the carbon that’s being mined here will end up in the atmosphere. What’s the point of having a few hundred jobs, and a nice green mountain to look at, if the rest of the planet is under water?’

…

There are two separate visions at Ffos-y-Fran. Miller Argent claims its opponents lack, or pig-headedly refuse to see, their long-term vision for the land: cleared of landfills and abandoned mineshafts and restored to its pre-industrial beauty (although the recent revelation that American company Covanta are planning to build an incinerator here, on Miller Argent land, somewhat spoils that picture postcard image).

But the objectors, in drawing the links between extraction of coal on a local scale and catastrophic global climate change, actually have the longer-term vision. They have looked beyond local concerns and seen the true cost of opencast mining, recognising that ultimately, it will blight us all. To engage with the threat of climate change we need leadership, intelligence and courage, but also the imagination to look beyond immediate realities. This, in the end, is the vision we need. Not the false comfort of corporate greenwash, or the euphemism of an opencast coal mine masquerading as environmental improvement.

Two years ago Tim Otte and Kim Otte-de Hoop gave up their jobs managing a toy store in Holland and moved to Ethiopia. They came to the shores of Lake Tana, the third-largest lake in Africa, to start an eco-tourism and community development project near the quiet village of Gorgora. The result is Tim & Kim Village, a cluster of stone-walled, grass-thatched lodges with views over water that stretches beyond the horizon like a vast copper-coloured sea.

‘When we were travelling around Africa we saw a lot of not-for-profit projects,’ says Kim, cooking up pancakes in her tiny kitchen to feed half a dozen hungry guests. ‘We took the ideas we thought were working to help people have a better life, we asked the local people for their knowledge and experience, we picked out the good things and mixed them all together. If you want to learn, you can learn a lot.’

The project employs 11 local people, including two cooks, a gardener and skilled workers currently engaged in putting the finishing touches to the traditional tukul lodges. It aims to provide the nearby village with a steady and reliable source of income, channelling profits back into the community in the form of education, water and sanitation projects. In the future, Tim and Kim are planning to hand the day-to-day running of the site over to local managers.

‘We are not fond of giving,’ explains Kim. ‘Simply throwing money at people doesn’t work. It’s better to help them work themselves by giving them an opportunity. You provide the rod and they’ll supply the fish – it’s better than giving them the fish. We’re talking of a kind of micro-credit: we buy a chicken, they look after the chicken, they pay us back in eggs, and they know we’ll continue buying eggs from that point. Then we can buy another chicken. That’s the process.’

There are currently seven tukul lodges, grass-roofed in the style of local houses, as well as four comfortable tents underneath thatched shelters. A large, open-air tukul hut provides a dining room in which you can eat fresh lake perch with traditional injeera bread, there are surprisingly hot solar showers, and a small organic garden. Gorgora also lies near the ‘overlander’ route from South Africa to Sudan – the Sudanese border is a day’s drive away – and lake-view sites can accommodate travellers with their own vehicles. The cool, breezy highland air gives overlanders a welcome relief from the heat of the desert lowlands; some linger here for several weeks, making light repairs and scraping the muck off their dust-encrusted vehicles.

Guests can walk along the lakeshore or into the grassy hills above in search of the region’s abundant wildlife: there are kingfishers and eagle owls, baboons come to drink from the lake in the evenings, occasional hippos are spotted nearby, and when you come back you can fall asleep listening to the distant yelps of hyenas in the hills. It’s also possible to explore the lakeshore by taking out a traditional tankwa, a small papyrus canoe with a strangely Ancient Egyptian look (Lake Tana is, after all, the source of the Blue Nile, and historians believe there were ancient connections between what was then Abyssinia and the land of the Pharaohs). Half an hour of vigorous paddling brings you to the Orthodox Christian churches on a couple of tiny wooded islands to the west, on which, unfortunately, women are forbidden to set foot.
If you get bored of natural beauty, there are plenty of other historical sites within close reach of Tim and Kim’s: the ruined palace of Emperor Susneyos and the Debre Sina Maryam Monastery (which does allow women to enter), with its centuries-old murals, both hint at the region’s past imperial glory. On a hill nearby – talking of imperial – can also be seen Mussolini’s Tower, an imposing observation post constructed by the Italian fascists during their short-lived 1940s occupation.

A two-hour bus ride from Gonder to the north, the ancient city that’s a prominent feature on Ethiopia’s ‘historical circuit,’ Gorgora is easily accessible even to those travellers who don’t come equipped with their own hulking continent-crossing vehicles. An altogether less hurried option for getting here is a two-day boat trip on the Lake Tana ferry, which departs weekly from the town of Bahir Dar, on the lake’s furthest shore, passing the famous island monasteries that lie to the south.

The couple have come a long way to reach this point, and been through a lot to make it work. They’ve had their tent almost shredded by hailstones, and Tim suffered a night of agony after being stung by a scorpion (‘like having my arm held over a naked flame.’) But the project is starting to come together. ‘It’s an experiment, in a way,’ says Kim. We are watching one of the local workers making repairs to a thatched roof, expertly tucking the yellow grass and tamping it down with a small wooden paddle. ‘We try one thing, and if it doesn’t work we do it again in a different way, until we find the right one. A community-based project like this is a very new concept here. We hope to form a constructive relationship between tourists and the community, to give local people an investment for the future.’

I sit between the window and a girl from Bombay. She is leaving her boyfriend, who lives in England, to resume work for an IT consultancy firm. She talks about IT for a while and I have no idea what she is talking about. On one occasion, she uses the word “technosolutions.” She is open, intelligent, thoughtful, downcast. It seems a most mature sadness. As the nose of the plane lifts off the ground, we bemoan long-distance relationships. The lights of London look like a magical emblem. If people in ancient times had seen that road, striped with golden pools of light and threading through the blackness of the earth, they’d have thought it a band of pure god: dreamtime, songlines. The girl from Bombay talks of the global economic slowdown. Incredible that on the train this afternoon, pulling out of Hackney Central, an old Caribbean man talked to me about this exact same issue. From India to London to the Caribbean islands, our world is threaded on this same golden gently-glowing string.

When I flew to India nine years ago, I sat next to an ancient Sikh who refused to eat anything but fruit, babbled in prayer at takeoff and landing, and painstakingly collected every kinked white hair that detached itself from his beard for storage in the breast pocket of his shirt, as if terrified of losing pieces of himself on the flight. Now I sit next to a smart, pretty girl who works for an IT consultancy firm. Is this chance, or have things changed?

In attempting to cut a sort of rubbery vegetarian sausage with my plastic fork, my breakfast tray somehow leaps from my hands and sprays fragments of hash brown over a wide area, including the girl’s right shoulder and all of my chest and lap. I spend the next ten minutes carefully picking them out of folds in my clothes and wrapping them in a napkin. Perhaps things have not changed after all; it’s just that the girl has become who I was nine years ago, and I have become the lunatic old Sikh.

The tour guide tells me of the beauty of Kashmir. “Too much peace. Too much paradise. Too many mountains.” He uses “too much” as a compliment. I like this. “When you go there, all your dreams will come true. It is like a second Switzerland on earth.” His friend tries to take my hat. Politely, I take it back. Later he catches me up again beside a wall of pasted-up newspaper sheets to explain the current political crisis. The Prime Minister will lose a vote of confidence. The BJP will take power from Congress. (In the event, this does not happen; Congress wins the vote, and on the main bazaar of Paharganj they celebrate by lighting firecrackers in the middle of the road. Rickshaws and motor-scooters swerve. Sacred cows jog away in alarm. Some people guide the cows to safety.) Still later, he bumps into me again. Writes his name and number on a travel agency card. “My name is Bharat Singh. He was a famous freedom fighter. The British hang him.” “I apologise,” I say, “for my ancestors.” He shakes my hand. He is missing two fingers.

The ear-cleaning men pursue me through the park. I am being pursued by ear-cleaning men. They have showed me faded photographs of young Westerners like me having their ears cleaned; the expressions on these young Westerners’ faces are quite extraordinary. They have showed me a book of written testimonials in which people from all around the world describe how much they have enjoyed having their ears cleaned. They have taken hold of my ears and peered inside, telling me how dirty they are, and given a preparatory poke with one of the long cotton-swabbed silver instruments they carry tucked between their foreheads and their red bandanas. The older man has assured me that he’s been cleaning ears for forty-five years. I attempt to make my escape across the park. One of the written testimonials claims that the process “removes the evil from your ears.” But I don’t want the evil removed from my ears! I want the evil to remain in my ears, so I have something to block out the calls of the ear-cleaning men as they rapidly close in from behind.

“Which church you are?” asks the flat-faced Nigerian who has decided to sit opposite me. “No church,” I say, “I’m an atheist.” “But you have a religion?” “No, I don’t. I’m an atheist.” “You believe in God?” “No.” “But you are a Christian?” “No.” He cannot take this information in. He simply doesn’t hear it. “Indians don’t speak English well. They do not understand you. They are an underdeveloped people. They need to be socialised. How much change you give me?” he asks the restaurant owner suddenly, leafing through his wallet. “I keep five rupees back,” says the restaurant owner, “I was going to give it to you tomorrow.” He looks a little alarmed. “What? You keep five rupees? When were you going to tell me this?” “You were talking, sir. I didn’t want to be rude.” The restaurant owner gives me a secret sad and sympathetic look. The Nigerian gives me an angry leer. I don’t trust this man. He has weird eyes. “Don’t give that man anything,” the restaurant owner hisses at me as the Nigerian talks for a moment on his phone. When he has finished the conversation, he leans in close to me and says: “Indians do not want to be friends. They are underdeveloped. It’s so hard to meet Indian gays.” I don’t know whether he said gays or guys (Indians are easier to understand). But he wants to know the name of my hotel, so I take the restaurant owner’s advice, and leave without giving him a thing.

“Drum?” asks the man, pulling out a drum. “No drum, thanks,” I say. “Pipe for smoke?” “No pipe, don’t smoke.” “Snake-charmer flute?” He has one of these too. “Genuine-leather riding crop? Postcards? Chess? Backgammon?” They appear in his hands one after the next. Where is he getting all these things from? He is only wearing a shirt and shorts. Perhaps he has a magical sack that stores unlimited items. “Magical sack?” I would like to ask. “No magical sack,” is all he would say. “Chess? Backgammon? Drum?”

The soldier – khaki uniform, rifle, four-foot bamboo cane – searches bags at the entrance to the Delhi metro. He does not actually search them, however. Instead he makes an elaborate show of carefully lifting the corner of each flap between thumb and forefinger, and narrowing his eyes as if this will somehow permit him to see the entirety of its contents. His job, I see, is not to search bags but to be the searcher of the bags, so that when a terrorist bomb goes off the government can say: “It’s not our fault, we did our best. We have soldiers searching all the bags.”

In a similar way, the man on the platform whose job it is to organise passengers into neat queues in preparation for the train’s arrival is not meant to actually ensure that everyone boards in an orderly way – as soon as the doors open, chaos ensues – but to be the man who makes people form queues. And so the tourists take photographs of monuments they don’t want or need. These are the traditions of the caste.

One crippled leg folded over the other, seated on a low wooden cart, a flip-flop on the palm of a hand acting in place of a foot.

Two men: one with no hands, and blind, the other with eyes but no legs. The blind one pushes his companion in a cart, using the stumps of his elbows, while the legless but fully-sighted man issues directions.

A boy without the use of his legs dragging himself along the ground with his hands. Each hand holds a small wooden block; they make the sound of hooves.

Children fly their small square kites on the steps of the Jama Masjid mosque. The mosque is not a mosque at all but a piece of sculpted air. It’s as if they papier-mâchéd an onion and then took the onion away, but instead of saying “that was a papier-mâchéd onion” you say “that was papier-mâchéd air.”

We are studied with sweet bewilderment by quiet men in white robes. Pigeons crenulate the outside dome. Delhi recedes into its pink haze, a rusted city at the bottom of a lake. This morning I caught a taxi before dawn, when the streets were still wet from the rain and full of sleeping cows, and saw these men like carrier bags floating through innumerable archways. A man was wheeling a vat of hot tea along an empty street. Amazing that this can be, after all, a sweet and peaceful city.

Soldiers stop our bus a few miles outside Jammu. “They say we can’t go on,” says our friend. “There is a mob in the road ahead. They make trouble for buses.” “But the soldiers are letting other buses through,” I say. “Yes, but we are a government bus. It’s the bus the soldiers care about, not us.” Soldiers are everywhere on this road, scowling and swinging bamboo canes. After making us wait half an hour they motion us to go on. “Has the mob gone?” I ask our other friend. “No mob,” he says, “just some rocks on the road.” So the mob has become a landslide. Our journey for the next six hours reveals evidence of neither. Later someone else tells me there was a suicide in Jammu; this is why the soldiers were uneasy. “As a protest?” “Yes. There are many troubles.” “Was the person Muslim or Hindu?” “I am not certain,” is the regretful reply.

Truckloads of soldiers constantly overtake on the narrow mountain road. Sandbags, machinegun nests, cigarettes, guns. The wooded hills are dense and green with wild marijuana. The script on the walls of shops and temples juggles between Hindi and Persian. We stop to buy fruit and vegetables from a market hanging on the edge of a mountain. Our friend offers me a cucumber from the three he has bought. “I can buy,” I say, out of Englishness. “I know you can buy,” he says, “but I am offering. That’s the problem with foreigners – you always can, but when something is offered, you do not.”

Past glories are remembered here. I am shown a delicate china plate, flower-patterned, from the days of the British Raj. Only this and some teacups and saucers remain; painted dishes for marmalade and jam. “All others destroyed in the fire,” he says. “Everything goes. What now?” His father and his father’s father maintained houseboats like these. Ceilings and verandas of carved cedar wood, steps that dip down to the water. But then the roofs were not made of tin, but carpeted with grass. The houseboats drifted from lake to lake; now the government sets mooring locations. That Kashmir is like a children’s book, and just as far away. An English winter fantasy: snow piled feet deep, snowshoes woven from grass, wood-smoke over the lake. “What now we have?” he asks again. The lake has shrunk to half its size, and there are soldiers everywhere. The Indian tourists just want to make noise, and they use their hands to eat. “When I put down teaspoon on saucer,” he says, “you cannot hear a sound.” His father taught him how to serve. He still wears that pride. “I’ll tell you more!” He is drifting away, balanced on a shikara boat, waving his hands in the air. “When I come back, I will tell much more. How it was, before then.” But when we next see him, one hour later, he is sunk in exhausted sadness. His head is almost between his knees; he can hardly speak. After the length of two cigarettes, he stands and brushes his knees with his hands. “I think, sleep now,” he says with a smile. “Yes, sleep is better.”

I am buying saffron from the Saffron Man. The Saffron Man has a tin about the size of an encyclopaedia, stuffed full of saffron from Kashmir. From his bag he also takes a delicate pair of hanging scales; into one bowl he drops a three-gram weight, and into the other he drops three grams of saffron. “Three hundred rupees,” says the Saffron Man. I hand over three grubby brown notes depicting Gandhi’s crumpled face. A small crowd has gathered, as it always does. The Saffron Man waits for a moment or two, and then takes a second tin from his bag. “You want s-?” he asks; a word I cannot remember. “What’s s-?” I ask. He opens the tin. Hands me a lump of something that resembles sticky black tar. “What is it?” I ask. “S-,” he replies. I smell it. It doesn’t smell of anything at all. “What is it for?” He shrugs and smiles. “What do you do with it?” “Millik,” he says. “You put it in milk?” “Yes, millik,” he says. “Do you eat it? Is it medicine?” He shrugs again. He isn’t saying any more.

“What is this?” I ask the growing crowd. “S-,” one gentleman replies, “for make you power.” “For power? It makes you strong?” I ask. I really want to know what it is. I’ve never seen anything like it before. “Do you eat it?” “Drink with millik,” he says. “But what does it do? Do you use it?” I point at the man. He looks uncomfortable. “No,” he says, in an evasive kind of way. “Why not?” I demand, trying to narrow this down. He looks at his feet; his friends look away. Like the Saffron Man, he isn’t saying any more.

The Saffron Man slowly puts the s- back in the tin, and puts the tin back into his bag. Then I feel a hand on my arm, and a man’s face close to my ear. “Only… for … the… pants,” he hisses, and then fades quickly back into the crowd. “Ahh! I see! No, I have no need of that!” I say (perhaps a little too quickly). But the Saffron Man seems to think I do. He meets me again a few hours later, as I am trying to enjoy some chai. “You want s-?” he asks again, now that we are alone, one man to another, with no crowd to judge. “For expansion,” he adds, with a helpful gesture; obviously a word he has subsequently learnt. “Not for me,” I say again, “no, don’t need any expansion.”

He frowns, and leaves me in peace, for now. But he may be back. He may know something I don’t. It may come to pass that I will find myself hoping and praying to meet him again, with his bag and tin and scales, in some disappointingly unexpansive future hour of need.

“Yes, what you like?” asks the restaurant owner. Or perhaps he is not the owner. He just happens to be in the restaurant. “Omelette and coffee.” The restaurant owner thinks. “Coffee is not possible. Tea is possible. Omelette, I do not know. Wait, please.” We sit down. He goes out and comes back after a few minutes. “Eggs are not possible.” “Why not?” I ask. “Problems in Jammu. Road closed, fifteen days.” “The road is closed for fifteen days? Why?” “Problems in Jammu,” he says. “So there are no eggs?” “No, eggs are not possible.” This doesn’t make much sense to me. Jammu is a nine-hour drive away. How can this possibly effect the local distribution of eggs? “If you like,” says the restaurant owner, “I make aloo gobi, rice, paratha. Maybe –” he thinks for a second or two – “maybe thirty minutes.” We leave the restaurant. We want an omelette. Perhaps it wasn’t a restaurant at all (there didn’t seem to be a kitchen). We attempt breakfast in another place. It’s air-conditioned; there are no flies; surely they will have eggs here. “Yes, what you like?” asks a uniformed waiter. “Omelette and coffee.” “No.” “No?” “No, eggs are not possible.” “Why not?” “Strike in market,” he says. “Problems in Jammu. No eggs in town.” I cannot believe this. This town must have eggs. I’ve seen chickens! Only last night we marvelled at a street-side stall that sold omelettes of truly unbelievable size: if I stretched my arms full-length, the tips of my fingers would only just touch the edges. I want to say: “You’re being ungrammatical. Eggs exist as a possibility; eggs are not only possible, eggs are a fact. It may be possible, indeed, that this town crashed its entire egg supplies on producing that outlandish pile of omelettes, or maybe militants have indeed struck at the vital egg supply chain to Kashmir – the global jihad will stop at nothing to disrupt and dismay the population – eggs may be hard to come by, my friend, but eggs are possible. Now I want an omelette.” But I know the only reply would be: “No, eggs are not possible.” We settle for tea and butter toast.

“You cannot leave this place today. There are security issues. No-one may proceed.” We are attempting a return to Srinagar after three days of a Hindu pilgrimage, but the army has shut down all the roads. “You must stay in this camp until 3 a.m., and then leave as part of a military convoy,” we are told. Is there no other way? We are filthy and exhausted; last night we slept in a temporary slum 14,000 feet up in the Himalayas. Our friend Salil has a brother who knows an officer working at this base. A local man says he will drive us to Srinagar, if we get special permission to leave. “Follow your conscience, Nicholas!” Salil shouts as I make my way towards a sandbagged machinegun post; myself, the driver and the Hindu holy man who attached himself to Anna and I on the far side of the mountains. We are thoroughly searched, the sadhu most of all. He has nothing to search except a grubby white robe and a cotton shoulder bag containing apples. His ID paper says: ‘the above noble man is a pious man and a devotee of Lord Shiva.’ Once clear of the checkpoint, I am led to a sorrowful official with a dachshund face, doubtfully eyeing a telephone. “No,” he says, “it is not possible. There are security problems on the road. No-one can go to Srinagar. I am sorry.” Then he says in exactly the same tone of voice: “Go to see my superior. Perhaps he will say it is possible. If he says it is possible, then you may go.”

I am led there by a jolly soldier who chuckles and slaps me on the back. “You are married?” he asks. “Yes,” I lie (this ruse is meant to cut down on hassle for Anna). “Any children?” “Not yet.” “Oh ho!” he says. “Ho, I see. You try, but nothing happens. Am I right? You try, but nothing is forthcoming, yes?” I try to protest, but we have reached the next tent. I am led to a stern-looking man at a desk. “No, it is not possible,” he says. “I cannot allow it. Please, sit down.” He asks my name and occupation. I try to make it sound respectable. After a few minutes of guarded small-talk, he rises and says: “You will come with me. I will take you to the Camp Commander. You will explain yourself to him.” We cross the base to a small tin hut. He knocks, and respectfully ushers me inside. The Camp Commander is half out of bed, and looks as if he has recently suffered an enormous tragedy. His head is sunk deep in his hands; he answers the officer’s tentative enquiry with nothing but a troubled moan. I am ushered out quickly; the door is closed. “You see,” says the officer, “nothing can be done.” But now the jolly soldier has joined us again. “Have you enquired to the District Chief of Police? I recommend you state your position to him.”

On the way across the camp again he cracks jokes about my impotence which I am too exhausted and confused to counter. (He is most insistent on this point; perhaps he’s on commission from the Saffron Man.) My ‘wife’ is sitting with our bags, surrounded by a crowd of about thirty people who have all taken an interest in our plight. I leave her there with Salil and the sadhu and make my way towards a distant plastic awning, under which sits the District Chief of Police. The District Chief of Police is the exact stereotype of a corrupt Third World official. He has heavy stubble and lazy, sliding eyes, an ugly pockmarked nose. He sits surrounded by subordinates who take hits off a hookah pipe. Before him on the plastic Coca-Cola table is a handgun and a walkie-talkie covered with flies. “No. Nothing leaves this place,” he says after I have made my case. “No pilgrims, no tourists, no foreigners, nothing. No. I cannot permit it.” A subordinate offers me a cigarette. “So it’s definitely not possible?” I ask. “No.” We sit in silence for some time. He glares at the flies on the walkie-talkie. After some minutes, he repeats: “It is absolutely not possible. Nobody can leave.” “OK,” I say. I wonder if I am expected to offer a bribe, but have no idea of the protocol. So I just wait. He sits and smokes. His face I associate with dripping concrete cells, rubber truncheons, electric shock machines. He is absolutely assured of his power over men. At one point he says: “You can go.” I stand up. “Sit down,” he says. I sit down. Still, he waits. After five more minutes he glares up and says, without the slightest explanation: “Your driver is waiting. You can go. Bring your luggage and wife.”

We say goodbye to the waiting crowd. Hugs for Salil and the sadhu (the sadhu we’re forced to leave behind as a condition of our departure). The jolly soldier is in the crowd. I hear hoots of laughter, and look up to see a dozen faces grinning at me. “I tell them you try, but nothing is forthcoming,” he cries, not even trying to conceal his mirth. “You try, but no results! Am I right? So, you must keep trying!”

The barber whips up the lather with a small shaving brush, and liberally applies it to my face. He shaves my three-week beard with a cut-throat razor, using small flicking motions and wiping the excess lather on the back of his hand. Then he lathers me up again and uses a second blade to skim off the last remaining memory of stubble, pinching my skin lightly as he goes to ease out the follicles. Various salves are applied to my face. Various unguents follow. I could almost fall in love with this man. It’s a special shaver’s love. He slaps and rubs with his fat oily fingers, tenderly cupping the side of my head in his arm. All the while he is shrieking in Hindi to someone on the far side of the road, but I know he cares about me. It’s a special shaver’s love that women could never understand. The last lotion is the best: it makes my face burn and sing with cold fire, and I rise from the barber’s chair like Poseidon emerging from the deep. I am Poseidon. I’m a freshly-shaved god. As I stroll down the crowded street, humming to myself and smoking a cheroot, these words run through my head: “It’s a fine thing to be a man.”

I catch sight of myself in a mirror a little way down the road. My lips look small and pouty-pink. I am chewing the inside of one cheek. I look like a startled pig.

Minding my own business, I am suddenly accosted by a man dressed up as a grotesque monkey being. His face is painted bright red, with a thick black smear running up his top lip, which gives the impression of a cleft pallet. He has an elaborate crown on his head, a hairy tail dangling behind him, and an enormous golden club clutched in his fingers. Extremely alarmed, I grab his hairy arm as he tries to smear my forehead with paste. “No, no, it’s OK,” he croons, and then emits a revolting snort which I imagine is meant to impact simian encouragement. I am not encouraged. He twists his arm free and succeeds in daubing red paste between my eyes. “I am Hanuman, the monkey god,” he says, as if this explains everything. “I have come to give you puja.” Puja means blessing. I don’t want to be blessed; certainly not by something that looks like an extra from The Labyrinth. He makes his snorting sound again, thrusts a medallion against my forehead and knocks his golden club against each of my shoulders. Then he screeches in my face several times and says: “One hundred rupees.”

I argue. “I can’t give you a hundred.” “It’s OK, I have change,” he says, rapidly switching from a monkey god to a businessman. “But I didn’t want that.” “I gave you puja. You have been blessed by Hanuman.” “Yes, but I didn’t want to be blessed.” I’m afraid he’s going to snort again. I don’t think I can handle that snort. I look vaguely in my wallet, hoping for small change. There is only a note for fifty rupees. “Twenty?” I say. “Fifty,” he replies. “You have been blessed by Hanuman.” Now I just want him to go away. Lamely, I hand over fifty rupees. By way of thanks he makes gibbering noises, and then bounds away to harass some other mug.

Next morning, I come out of my room in search of the two mangos we’ve been saving. A perfect way to start the day: a breakfast of delicious mangos, so ripe they melt in the mouth. But the bag is empty. The mangos are gone. Furtively scaling the opposite wall, I spot a large monkey with one of our mangos in its mouth, the other clutched tightly in its fist. After it has gained a safe distance – if there were stones about, I would throw them – I am forced to bear the indignity of watching one of the monkey god’s minions insolently gorge itself on my morning mangos. Every so often it glances at me, mouth and fingers dripping with juice. Its expression is one of utter indifference, even when it stuffs more mango in its face. Hanuman seems to have something against me. I think I prefer humankind.

At the banana stall in the rain, a young man with a loopy smile is fumbling open a jar of green paste. “What’s that?” I ask. “Masala,” he grins, smearing it on his banana with a spoon. “Masala, for bananas?” I ask. “Yes!” he cries delightedly. “Masala banana! Banana masala!” We both laugh a little too loudly. His eyes shine with maniac glee. “Dr-i-i-i-inking!” he giggles, showing me the bulge of a whiskey bottle tucked into the waistband of his trousers. Ah. Now I understand.

This is where they burn the dead bodies. Boats arrive, stacked high with wood. Men bear stretchers towards the flames. Something flops out; it might be a leg. “Look, here comes a corpse!” cries the man I imagine will ask me for money, plucking at my elbow. I don’t look. I don’t want to be in this place. Tourists look on in bored fascination, trying to sneak photographs. I know when the skull cracks in the heat the soul attains moksha, salvation, but I don’t want to see a stranger’s skull crack. I don’t want to see a stranger’s soul. “Burning is for learning. Cremation is for education.” So goes the man’s creepy little mantra. I start to laugh. “It’s not a joke, man,” he says with deep disapproval. Now he wants me to make a donation; I should buy wood for someone’s funeral pyre. “Some people give two hundred dollar. Two hundred dollar is very good karma.” I offer him nothing; I want to leave. Rightly, he becomes offended. “You don’t come back here tomorrow,” he says. “You have bad karma – you don’t come back.”

The alleyways leading away from the ghat are utterly dark; things squelch underfoot. Smoky light illuminates house-scenes: naked children, sleeping cows, the gigantic, ridiculous faces of gods. A man smears a statue red with his hands. A monkey’s shadow creeps across the wall, but I cannot see the monkey. Here there is a lamp-lit skull, sitting on a windowpane. It doesn’t surprise me at all, somehow, until I realise it isn’t a skull but the living, staring face of a man, eye-sockets sunk deep in shadow. Through the rat-maze clutter of lanes, a swirl of the oily river. The Ganges is swollen; temples are submerged. It feels like a drowning city.

These things I see at the burning ghat: great piles of wood, the greasy brown river, a dozen slimy water buffalo slopping around at the shore. Six fires, each of which contains a corpse. The bodies slung on the pyre with no ceremony, wrapped in their red or white funeral shrouds. A man’s naked torso – burnt away to the waist – prodded up into sitting position by a worker with a bamboo pole, then flopped face down into the flames, useless arms lolling. Up closer, the back of a human head, skin and flesh melted away to reveal the crenulated line where skull has fused to skull. The heat is immense and terrifying; it feels as if my own skin is melting; I think of that naked skull.

And in the half-collapsed building behind, whose latticed windows overlook the pyre, ancient people wait to die and be thrown on the fire themselves. To right my bad karma, I give money to a woman so old she looks as if her skin has been crumpled up and smoothed out every morning for the past hundred years. Her eyes are milky; she has no teeth. She places blessings on my head. This money, I have been informed, will go towards the cost of the timber on which she will be burned.

“Did you go to the burning ghat? Did you give money to the old mama?” asks an intelligent little girl later, attempting to henna my hands against my will. “Yes, I gave some money,” I say, imagining she’ll think me a kind-hearted soul. “Ooh, very bad,” she scolds. “The old mama spends all that money on opium.” It looks as if my karma is fixed in inverse proportion to the old crone’s daily opiate intake. Stoke up the flames and let’s fly to nirvana. It’s only life and death.

Varanasi ghats: The burning ghat is so sacred that bodies make no smell when they burn. The following bodies do not burn at all: holy men, pregnant women, lepers, babies and victims of cobra bites. These bodies are ferried into the Ganges, and sunk with heavy stones.

Jain temple, Sarnath: The Jain priest explains to us how peacocks reproduce. These birds are so pure they make no physical contact; instead the male peacock lets a single tear fall from his eye into the female’s open beak. This tear, somehow, contains the sperm. It’s an almost-immaculate conception. This is why Jain monks use only a fan of peacock feathers to brush the tiny insects from their path.

Holy cave, Amarnath: “Oh, my goodness, I was incorrect!” exclaims Salil, translating the words of our holy man. “The baba does not just get buried up to his neck! No, he is entirely buried from tip to toe – no-one can see him – he goes without food, drink or even breathing for ten days! Can you imagine that?” This annual ritual is the holy man’s private prayer to Parvati, goddess of love and devotion.

I return to the hunting grounds of the ear-cleaning men. I’ve decided to submit. I want my ears cleaned. There’s great relief in the act of surrender; my mind is calm and prepared. Slowly I step onto Ranjiv Chowk, waiting for their charge. But no red-turbanned men emerge to pursue me. No-one seems interested at all. On my second circuit of the park, I turn to find a solemn, portly man walking at my side. He wears a long garment of white lace, and his hair has been hennaed bright orange. “Perhaps you will come to sit with me, sir? Only for five moments.” I agree to sit with him. Perhaps he can tell me where I can find the ear-cleaning men. “But I am an ear-cleaning man. My father, my grandfather, my uncle, my brothers, and my son. All of us are ear-cleaning men. It’s an ancient family business.” “But where’s your red turban?” I ask, as a test. With a flourish, he plucks it from his pocket. They say heroin dealers can spot junkies from the look in their eyes. It must be this way with ear-cleaning men. Or maybe they can smell the wax. With perfect grace and solemnity, this one has drawn me in.

“Oh my god,” are his first words as he pokes around with a twist of cotton wool. “Oh my god. My god.” “Is it very bad?” I ask apprehensively. “Oh my god,” he says. “Is there a lot of wax?” I ask. “My god. You are a dirty man indeed.” He shakes his head and groans as if he has suffered a personal blow. “You are a very important boy,” he adds in a suddenly softer tone. “And your ears are the most important part of you.” He twists my head parallel to the ground and pours liquid from a little bottle into the cup of my ear. I see a long silver implement pass through his chubby fingers. Then I feel the sensation of scraping, deep inside my head.

It’s a great act of faith to let a fat stranger poke around inside your head. I try to move my head away but he clamps it in his arms. I see another implement, this one with a little hook on the end, emerge from somewhere in his sleeve and pass from my field of vision. Then I feel a tugging sensation in my ear canal. “Open your mouth!” he commands. I do, and the pressure subsides. “Look,” he says. “My god. My god.” He has extracted a lump of hard wax the size of half a conker. I am genuinely appalled by its size. “You see?” he says, “you understand?” He wipes the wax accusingly on the back of my hand.

It takes him ten minutes to clear both ears. The lumps of wax keep coming. It’s like altitude dropping in an aeroplane; the sounds come clean and clear. When he is finished his fat head lolls, his heavy eyelids droop. “My mind … is spent,” he moans dramatically, like a clairvoyant emerging from a difficult trance. “Thank you,” I say. I really mean it. A bubble has popped around my head. He’s removed the evil from my ears. He doesn’t respond. He is overcome. “My god,” he says. “My god…”

Within the space of a few surreal minutes, a quarter-mile length of this busy London road had been transformed into something between a tented town and a carnival. It started with a gradual filtering of bodies slowly filling the traffic-free street, then suddenly tents popped up like mushrooms and bunting was strung between lampposts. A kitchen appeared out of nowhere, cycle-powered sound systems started up, and the police – after initially attempting to drag away the first tents that appeared – decided it was best to let it happen.

The action was the brainchild of Climate Camp, who pulled off similarly spectacular feats at Kingsnorth power station in 2008 and Heathrow in 2007. Bishopsgate was chosen because it’s the location of the European Climate Exchange, the largest carbon trading centre in the world (for info about why carbon trading’s bad, see this page at climatecamp.org.uk).

Elsewhere in the City, protests turned rough – a branch of RBS was smashed up, and police ‘kettled’ thousands of demonstrators at Bank – but the camp itself was nothing but peaceful. Office workers mingled with the crowd, there was hot food served, open workshops and discussions, and the police were relaxed and non-confrontational, strolling about, chatting with protesters and being handed bunches of daffodils that matched their fluorescent jackets.

At about 6.45pm – when most of the businessmen and city workers mingling with the crowd had gone home – this changed very abruptly.

Without asking anyone to disperse, or giving any kind of warning whatsoever, police in full riot gear charged the southern boundary of the camp. The attack was unprovoked and unexpected. They trampled tents and used shields and batons to beat back protesters who, until then, had been sitting in small groups eating, talking and listening to music.

People surged forward to stop the police cutting a swathe through the camp, holding their hands up and chanting ‘This is not a riot.’ I found myself in the front line, where I got booted in the leg by a cop whose features, behind the tinted visor of his helmet, were contorted with rage. He screamed ‘Get back, you fuck!’ in my face. I shouted at him that I couldn’t move, I was sandwiched between the police and the crowd. In response to this he kicked me again – leaving a cut and bruise on my shin – and when I held out my palms to show I wasn’t trying to fight, he smacked me in the hand with his baton.

Other people were coming off worse. I saw people grabbed and hurled to the ground. Others were clubbed and punched. A girl was kicked between the legs. It was pretty sickening to witness unarmed young men and women beaten by bulky men with shields and protective clothing. Amazingly, no-one responded with violence (apart from a few plastic bottles being thrown, and even then the people throwing them were condemned by other protesters). People continued to hold their hands up and even attempted dialogue with the police: ‘Can’t you see we’re not fighting you?’ ‘Why are you doing this?’

By sheer force of numbers we held the police lines back. If they’d managed to break through and sweep into the camp itself, a lot more people would have been injured.

It was the second transformation of the day, and it was entirely deliberate. In the same length of time we’d transformed a busy City street into an environmental camp, the police transformed a carnival mood into an atmosphere of fear, suspicion and anger. Having failed to break us up by violence, they now opted to kettle us in for the next six hours. They blocked every exit to the camp, refused to allow access to food, water or toilet facilities, and regularly attempted minor advances which served no conceivable purpose other than to stir up the increasingly frustrated crowd. I eventually got out about midnight; the brave people who stayed on were violently dispersed a couple of hours later.

The rationale for this unnecessary assault can only have been to try to stir up a peaceful crowd into a violent mob. Despite the constant provocations, the protesters never obliged with anger (unless you count the damage to the riot vans the cops unwisely left unattended inside the camp before they attacked; these ended up with a little less air in their tyres than before). It’s to the Climate Camp’s great credit that people didn’t take the bait, and refused to give those thugs the riot they wanted.

There are several different etymologies of ‘Lapp,’ the term formerly used to describe Europe’s only indigenous population. One theory says the name is derived from a word meaning a ‘scrap of cloth,’ suggesting raggedness and poverty. Another says it comes from ‘periphery’ or ‘margin.’ In Finland I’m told another theory: the word Lapp is associated with ‘loss.’

The term is now considered offensive, and the people who inhabit Europe’s far northern fringe – a forested wilderness stretching through Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia’s Kola Peninsula – prefer to call themselves Sámi. However, the connotations stick. The Sámi are a peripheral people, existing on the outer limits of European consciousness as well as on the edge geographically, and their culture has long been marginalised by Scandinavian societies.

The idea of loss also resonates strongly, not least in regards to language. Of the 11 distinct languages once spoken by the Sámi, two are already extinct (the last speaker of Akkala Sámi passed away in 2003), five are listed as ‘nearly extinct,’ and three as ‘seriously endangered’ in the UNESCO Red Book on Endangered Languages. Even Northern Sámi, which is merely ‘endangered,’ claims no more than 25,000 speakers.

In remote Finnish Lapland, deep inside the Arctic Circle, two mutually-unintelligible tongues cling on around the shores of Lake Inari. Skolt Sámi and Inari Sámi (both ‘seriously endangered’) number around 300 speakers, teetering precariously on the brink of language death. When I visit in mid-December it’s a frozen landscape of snow and ice, huddled under the darkness of kaamos, north Finland’s long ‘polar night.’ Sámi communities have subsisted here for thousands of years from fishing and reindeer herding, accumulating centuries of knowledge that has enabled them to survive in such an extreme environment.

But the culture’s future is now uncertain. This fact is immediately apparent from a visit to the school in the tiny Skolt village of Sevettijärvi. ‘When I was at this school, there were 100 students,’ says teacher Seija Sivertsen. ‘Now there are 11.’

The story of this endangerment is only too familiar to linguists studying the phenomenon of language death; or, as the Finnish linguist Tove Skuttnab-Kangas prefers, ‘linguistic genocide.’ This term drives home the fact that languages rarely disappear by chance; often their demise is intentional, or at least approved. Demographics and ethnic discrimination, backed up by oppressive government policies, have combined with specific historical upheavals to erode the resilience of minority communities, undermining their sense of identity and severing connections to their past. In the case of Inari Sámi, the dominant Finnish population has long played a colonial role, looking down on their culture as primitive and backward, and discouraging the teaching of the language to the young. The Skolt Sámi have suffered even worse. Dispersed and uprooted when their homeland passed from Finnish to Russian control in World War Two, they became a minority within a minority, suffering discrimination even more than other Sámi groups.

This resulted in what many Sámis refer to as the ‘lost generation,’ the post-war generation of adults who – often of their own volition – ceased passing the language on to their children. ‘It became a taboo,’ explains Annika Pasanen, a Finn who has been working with the Inari Sámi for the past 20 years. Annika’s work involves the revitalisation of Finno-Ugric languages from Inari Sámi to Russia’s Karelian, minorities under similar historical pressure to assimilate into a majority culture. ‘They were told that they must be civilised, their language and culture were not important, so they taught their children Finnish. A kind of trauma has been caused. People were made to feel ashamed of what they were.’

‘People said the Sámi were uneducated,’ agrees Tiina Sanila, a young Sámi woman who fronts the world’s only Skolt-language metal band. ‘They were stupid, dirty, living from nature, old, drunk, living in tents. This caused a kind of shame, a feeling that it was better to be like others.’

This parallels the experience of indigenous cultures from Australia to the Americas, and the story of Sámi language endangerment reflects the great extinction crisis currently taking place across the world. Minority languages are disappearing at an unprecedented rate. Despite flashes of media attention – global headlines were made when the last speaker of the Alaskan tongue Eyak died in 2008 – the scale of the catastrophe mostly passes unnoticed. Incredibly, the UN estimates that one language disappears every fortnight, and that half the languages spoken today will have vanished within the next century.

It’s impossible to know what impact this will have on human culture across the globe, because nothing like it has ever been witnessed before. Of course, languages have always gone extinct – Carib, Etruscan, Tangut, Manx, history is littered with the names of vanished tongues – but never at such an extraordinary rate as this. In an attempt to understand the potential implications, linguists have drawn parallels with the other major extinction crisis taking place in the world today: the decimation of the planet’s biodiversity. While we should be wary of conflating two different processes, there exist similarities that can provide an insight into just how much our world looks set to change.

Luisa Maffi of Terralingua, an organisation that studies what’s known as ‘biocultural diversity’ – drawing together the three diversities of language, culture and biology – writes that ‘loss of diversity at all levels spells dramatic consequences for humanity and the earth.’ It’s argued that linguistic diversity has been as essential for human development as the diversity of the environments in which our cultures have grown. She draws on the work of linguist Dave Harmon, who describes the intricate links that exist between nature and culture as ‘the pre-eminent fact of existence, the basic condition of life on earth,’ and suggests that if biocultural diversity continues to be lost, it will endanger the very evolutionary processes out of which human society has grown.

But what, in practical terms, does this mean? We know that eroding biodiversity is bad because the planet’s natural systems are inextricably bound together, and damaging one part of the whole inevitably produces a reaction elsewhere. For example, we know that when a forest is felled, it causes a reduction in precipitation and erosion of the soil. How does this relate to languages? The disappearance of one language or another won’t necessarily have a knock-on effect on other existing forms of expression – although we know that different languages do influence one another profoundly – but what it may do is weaken the resilience of human culture itself. As anthropologist Russell Bernard notes, ‘any reduction of language diversity diminishes the adaptational strength of our species because it lowers the pool of knowledge from which we can draw.’

In the words of K. David Harrison, an expert in Siberian languages, ‘most of what humans have learned over the millennia about how to thrive on this planet is encapsulated in threatened languages. If we let them slip away, we may compromise our very ability to survive as our ballooning human population strains earth’s ecosystems.’ If minority languages vanish, he says, ‘so will important, long-cultivated knowledge that has guided human-environment interaction for millennia. We stand to lose the accumulated wisdom and observations of generations of people about the natural world … The sobering fact that both animal species and human languages are going extinct in tandem portends an impending loss of human knowledge on a scale not seen before.’

Like other indigenous tongues, Sámi languages have evolved as highly nuanced repositories of knowledge about the ecosystems around them. They possess 30 words for different types of snow, and hundreds of words pertaining to the intricacies of reindeer herding, describing the animals’ age, size, colour, shapes of antlers, and even how they walk. While some Skolt or Inari Sámi might have switched to speaking Finnish at home, the old languages still cling on in jobs like reindeer herding or fishing – jobs in which traditional environmental expertise is essential – because Finnish lacks the gradations needed to describe them accurately. If Skolt and Inari disappear, sophisticated systems of classification, taxonomies accumulated over centuries of painstaking observation, will vanish with them. ‘If people feel their knowledge is worth keeping, they will do so,’ writes Harrison. ‘If they are told, or come to believe, that it is useless in the modern world, they may well abandon it.’

Jarmo Pyykkö, a Finnish environmentalist who works with local Sámi communities, provides an excellent example of how indigenous systems of knowledge are being disregarded. He’s fighting a long-running legal battle on behalf of Skolt reindeer herders whose forests are being systematically felled by the state logging company Metsähallitus. In a recent court case, the herders provided evidence that their animals were going hungry in the winter because of the loss of the tree-hanging moss on which they depend when other food is scarce. ‘The authorities were too prejudiced to listen to what they said,’ he claims. ‘What other explanation can there be for scientists, politicians and policy makers to leave aside the views of the people who know the most about the forests, the true experts in local ecology? They refuse to recognise that these people have vast expertise in this area. If you are taught that your language, expertise and opinion are of no value, what power do you have?’

When linguistic diversity is eroded, not only is vital knowledge lost but cultural cohesion vanishes too, weakening minority communities and laying them open to exploitation. Indigenous groups around the world have succumbed in similar ways, losing their heritage, sense of identity, and pride in the individuality of their culture. Their societies may become diluted and assimilate into the majority, break down with alcohol and substance abuse, or, in the worst cases, vanish off the face of the earth. ‘If you lose your language, it is the worst form of subjugation,’ confirms Tiina Sanila, who struggles against this legacy today through music and politics. ‘Sometimes it feels as if we have already lost everything.’

There’s a tendency among many people – especially us majority language speakers – to downplay language extinction by claiming it’s an inevitable part of history. It’s described as survival of the fittest, a process of natural selection that simply can’t be stopped. It’s even innocently claimed that less languages will lead to greater human harmony, because everyone will understand one another better. I’d argue there’s nothing natural about government policies that discourage or forbid a language being spoken by children, or about the forced displacement of groups like the Skolt due to war. There’s nothing natural about the feelings of shame reported in the ‘lost generation.’ And the fate of so many indigenous societies has taught us that the erosion of culture leads not to harmony, but to exploitation.

Like the wholesale destruction of the planet’s biodiversity, language loss is not a natural phenomenon, but brought about by people. Overwhelmingly it’s a result of the colonial attitudes of nation states locked into destructive patterns of dominance and expansion (even if such policies have ended now, as they have officially in Finland, their corrosive legacy continues). But language loss on this vast scale is no more acceptable or ‘inevitable’ than the mass extinction of species. What’s needed is the will to stop it before it becomes too late.

In Finnish Lapland, I discover, this will exists. The Sámi communities I visit might provide a solution of sorts, or at least a starting point for hope. While the future of Skolt may indeed look bleak – with the legacy of displacement that put them at the bottom of the bottom of the pile – Inari Sámi seems to have remarkably bucked the global trend, slowly but surely reversing the losses of the past 100 years.

In 1997, at the point when Inari was practically moribund, with almost no new child speakers – the beginning of the end for any language – a local man called Matti Morottaja launched a pioneering ‘language nest’ programme, a last-ditch attempt at revitalisation when it appeared all was lost. The concept was simple: a kindergarten in which only Inari was spoken, immersing children in the language from a very early age. Initially there was scepticism from parents and authorities alike, but twelve years after the programme’s inception, the number of speakers is actually growing for the first time in decades. Many children are now growing up bilingual, familiar with both Finnish and Inari, and finding themselves in the strange position of sharing a language with their grandparents that their parents – the ‘lost generation’ – never learned to speak. Rather than coming to a dead end, Inari has skipped a generation. A small number of determined people have kick-started it back to life, and now it stands at least a fighting chance of survival.

‘It’s not an exaggeration to say the entire language and culture would have died if a handful of people, maybe only five or so, had had an accident in a minibus ten years ago,’ says Kaisu Nikula, an Inari woman who studied in Helsinki and Manchester, but moved back to the Sámi homeland to run the nearby Inarin Kultahovi Hotel, built on the banks of the river her family has fished for generations. ‘If I hadn’t returned here after completing university, I would never have learned Inari, my children would never have learned it. They would not have had anything left. My children would have been the end of the culture.’

The fact that the language has been revived, despite the near-fatal continuity breach, shows the extent to which the community recognised, albeit belatedly, that they stood to lose something inherently valuable. Matti Morottaja and others successfully tapped into this awareness, reminding people that their ancestors’ language deserved better than a slow fade into extinction. Crucially, though, the Inari have realised that it isn’t simply an ancestral tongue – something that must remain fossilised, locked in the distant past – but a living language that can adapt to describe the modern world. Perhaps the most optimistic sign is that Inari’s vocabulary is growing, as well as its number of speakers. New terms are being coined as the lexicon expands to envelop new technologies, ideas and objects; most recently a newly-discovered species of mushroom.

‘Language has to change, otherwise it dies,’ says Annika Pasanen, who is now fluent in Inari herself, and whose child attends the language nest, despite being non-Sámi. ‘If it’s kept in a museum, it cannot live.’

The revitalisation of the language in the young has been accompanied by a flowering of Inari literature and music, and the language is broadcast every day on Sámi Radio. Matti Morrotaja’s son Amoc has found success across Scandinavia as an Inari-language hiphop artist. There’s a sense of youth and vigour, a renewal of Inari identity, slowly but surely replacing embarrassment in indigenous culture with pride.

Pride is perhaps the essential factor in endangered languages’ survival. Not pride in tradition for tradition’s sake, but in the intricate systems of knowledge, the detailed environmental taxonomies, that have developed over millennia, and which K. David Harrison calls perhaps ‘the greatest accumulation of knowledge of the natural world humans possess.’ Strengthening minority tongues is crucial not only for preserving this knowledge, but for empowering the indigenous cultures that are, most often, the best custodians of the ecosystems we all depend on. In a globalised and connected world whose environment is increasingly threatened, the destruction of culture in one place or another – whether in the Arctic Circle, the Andes or the Amazon jungle – can no longer be seen as isolated, a hermetically-sealed event. As with the destruction of biodiversity, it affects us all.

The idea of sacred forests or groves – dedicated to certain gods or goddesses, and strictly off-limits to humans – may seem an anachronism in the modern world. In Britain we lost our sacred groves with the coming of the Romans, and Western culture as a whole has long since jettisoned the concept of worshipping the plants and trees on which its survival depends. Nature is viewed as a commodity to be valued and exploited, rather than a mysterious force inherently worthy of respect. Forest spirits and river gods now seem as quaint as hobgoblins, and whatever remnants of sacred sites have somehow survived until now seem mere islands of superstition in a rational, profit-driven world. It only appears a matter of time before they are swallowed up entirely.

But as I discover in India, a new thinking is emerging. Unlike the developed Western world, the subcontinent has managed to retain many thousands of groves, forests, rivers, lakes and mountains that are afforded special protection for religious or spiritual reasons. Despite the enormous cultural disruption caused by British rule, coupled with the wave of industrialisation that followed Independence, these have survived as a living tradition into the modern age.

As the country starts to feel the environmental strain of its economic boom, with a rapidly expanding population hungering for land and resources, ecologists recognise sound scientific reasons for preserving these human-free zones. Ancient as the tradition is, and as imbued with folklore and myth, it dovetails with some very modern concepts of conservation. This is something conservation groups are currently urging the Indian government – whose policies have led, in the past, to the erosion of many sacred grove systems – to acknowledge and understand.

In the leafy, ultra-eco-friendly environs of New Delhi’s India Habitat Centre, I meet ecologist Yogesh Gokhale from The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a sustainable development not-for-profit directed by Dr. RK Pachauri from the IPCC. A gentle, unassuming man with a neat goatee beard and an air of calm, Yogesh describes himself as an ‘unorthodox Hindu’ who believes traditions are important to understanding the functioning of social institutions. As we sip tea in his glass-walled office, he explains to me how in the future these existing sites might be used to limit environmental degradation.

‘Biologically, sacred groves are the remnants of what was once widespread. A large number of these areas harbour species that are unique, that have been exterminated elsewhere. Authorities are beginning to recognise their importance to the local environment, and to human populations.’

Yogesh’s research has identified a number of ways in which sacred groves provide an ‘ecosystem service’ that benefits the communities around them. This includes watershed conservation, provision of natural firebreaks, and the long-term preservation of wildlife that might otherwise be pushed to the brink by human expansion or unregulated hunting. They also act as ‘emergency stores’ for food and fuel in the event of resource scarcity, thus forming an effective protection against natural disasters.

‘There are various options of conservation. The thing that we are saying is, don’t neglect faith as an option. I’m not romanticising tribal life, but there is certainly a system in place which effectively protects the land.’ With TERI, Yogesh is working to compile studies of sacred groves across the length and breadth of the subcontinent in order to formalise their protection, and to integrate these traditional systems with Indian government policy.

Officially, India is a signatory to the Convention on Biological Diversity, ratified at the Earth Summit in 1992. This convention identified India as one of 17 ‘megadiverse’ countries, composed of woodlands, grasslands, wetlands, deserts and mountain ecosystems, and recognised, for the first time, the preservation of natural diversity as ‘a common concern of humankind.’ Targets were set for the year 2010 to expand existing protected areas, and achieve a ‘significant reduction’ in the rate of biodiversity loss.

‘If we are to achieve our 2010 targets, we need to recognise these traditional practices,’ says Yogesh. ‘Systems of sacred grove conservation have proved themselves to be a very successful way of preserving the environment.’

‘If you go into the root of faith, then you will understand the link between faith and conservation,’ adds documentary-maker Rishu Nigam, director of Reviving Faith, which tells the story of sacred groves in the southern states of Karnataka and Maharashtra. Together they explain how environmental lore has long been embedded in the cultures of forest-dependent communities.

‘If certain species are regarded as sacred, this has definite advantages for the surrounding ecosystem,’ says Yogesh. ‘In some areas the wood of the oak is not used for fuel or construction. Oak is a very important species for retaining soil moisture, and provides fodder for animals at times when other trees in the area are leafless. Similarly, fig trees are a keystone species that satisfies needs for food and fuel in critical periods. They knew that cutting these trees would have a bad impact on the region, so they forbade this practice, and it became tradition.’

‘By linking certain trees to faith, our ancestors ensured these trees were protected,’ adds Rishu. ‘Some forests we went to for the film, we were not allowed to enter. The people believe this is where the gods live, so they shouldn’t be harmed. The belief in some places is so strong that even the villagers themselves have never been inside.’ Communities obey these conventions out of a sense of self-discipline, but also from fear of arousing the deity’s displeasure, believed to result in environmental disaster and subsequent suffering for humans. There are no punishments, as such, administered to individuals who damage sacred sites, so the system relies on the community’s belief that the wrathful deity will punish offenders. Part of TERI’s plan involves advocacy work to provide legal status to these informal institutions, using the law to strengthen existing taboos.

There are many examples of how this system of spiritual protection works in practice, to ensure the long-term sustainability of natural resources. There are the sacred pools located in the Dharamshala district of Himachal Pradesh, where fishing is strictly prohibited for 100 metres up and down river, providing a ‘refugium’ in which fish stocks can regenerate. Similarly, sacred groves in Maharashtra provide a sanctuary for barking deer, which can be hunted outside the groves and are reportedly more plentiful than in surrounding regions. In the desert state of Rajasthan, sacred groves, known locally as orans, are maintained as safety reserves for crucial fodder and timber. The groves of the northern Himalayan states help prevent soil erosion and landslides, stabilising the mountain landscape.

Outsiders may view the elaborate taboos that surround sacred sites as nonsensical – that’s been the opinion of interlopers from British colonial advisers to the Indian Forest Service, though hopefully this attitude is changing – but beneath the language of spirits and gods lie sound ecological practices, which organisations such as TERI are urging the government today to take very seriously. What was once seen as pure superstition is increasingly being acknowledged by science; these taboos are not mumbo-jumbo but elaborate systems of regulation, thousands of years of environmental wisdom encoded into religion.

I ask Yogesh which came first: the recognition of nature’s importance, or the worship of it. It’s an unknowable chicken-or-egg question, but Yogesh believes the former more likely. The taboos, he points out, are so specifically tailored to the preservation of natural resources, and society has always seen the need to restrict human access to certain ecologically-important areas. As societies have evolved, this practice has passed through different phases: from sacred sites to hunting preserves to modern wildlife sanctuaries. ‘The sacred sites are characteristic of hunter-gatherer and horticultural, largely tribal societies; the hunting preserves are characteristic of agrarian states; and wildlife sanctuaries or national parks are characteristic of industrial nations,’ he notes in his paper Sacred Woods, Grasslands and Waterbodies as Self-Organised Systems of Conservation in India. These havens may be known by different names, and may vary in their dimensions, but the basic function – resource protection – has remained the same.

But although India still retains a great many of its sacred sites, the subcontinent is far from immune from the destructive trends of globalisation, and the powerful market forces which have eroded spiritual beliefs in other parts of the world. British rule was responsible for beginning a process of centralisation, in which local tribes and communities lost their traditional rights of forest management, and this was continued after 1947 by an Indian government bent on industrialisation. Centralised power, inflexible and insensitive to local needs, often proves to be bad for the environment. Many thousands of sacred groves have been felled by logging companies, and as communications have improved, the diverse cultures which protected them have inevitably been diluted.

Religion has also taken its toll. ‘Christianity played a major role in destroying faith in conservation practices,’ confirms Yogesh. Converted tribes, especially in the north-eastern states, have ceased to believe in the old nature spirits, and so abandoned the protection of their forests. ‘Christianity prescribes faith in a supreme god who is everywhere,’ Yogesh writes in Sacred Woods… ‘As a corollary the god does not reside in any particular locale, and cannot be associated with any particular patch of forest, or spring, or tree. In effect, religions like Christianity and Islam desacralize nature and eliminate the rationale for respecting a sacred site.’ But Hinduism, too, is to blame: as India began to think of itself as a nation for the very first time, a more centralised form of religion came to take the place of local beliefs, and the animistic spirits of the forest were duly incorporated into the mainstream pantheon.

‘The more formal Hinduism tends to emphasise the worship of idols and temples over trees and forests. Hindu priests therefore often encourage the liquidation of a sacred forest to be replaced by a temple to the presiding deity. Indeed the priests may do so on behalf of timber contractors, assuring the local people that they would perform appropriate rites to placate the deities.’

And yet, in the face of these threats, TERI has documented numerous examples of tribal and forest-dependent communities successfully resisting outside pressures. Sacred groves are being defended through education and community action, as the long-term benefits of sustainability are recognised over short-term economic gain. In certain parts of India they are even experiencing something of a revival. In areas that have witnessed first-hand the destruction wrought by commercial logging – soil erosion, frequent flooding and depletion of valuable wildlife – there are cases of forests being newly dedicated to an appropriate deity, as locals realise this is a tactic to give them greater protection. Sacred groves are emerging in places where they didn’t exist before.

Yogesh gives an example from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. After becoming frustrated with the local landowners’ powerlessness to protect the woodlands, ‘villagers decided to hand over the forests to local goddess Kokilamata who is supposed to be the goddess of justice. They prepared a set of rules for protecting the forest and offered it to goddess. Then in a ritualistic fashion they also marked the boundaries of [the] forest… People were allowed to cut twigs of trees, collect firewood and deadwood. Nobody was allowed to cut any live plant; any violation would supposedly attract punishment from the goddess. The process was started around 1982 from the village Jakhani in Almora district and has spread to more than 25 villages around… people are getting tangible benefits from this protection in terms of their requirements of forest produce.’

‘Where the dos and don’ts of modern forest management are not working, people are returning to faith. Often it proves to be much more effective as a means of preservation. Taboos are a cultural phenomenon, while rules and regulations are government institutions. But in the end, they amount to the same thing,’ concludes Yogesh.

In tandem with this spiritual revival, the Indian state is at last beginning to recognise the effectiveness of traditional systems in preserving the environment. After decades of disempowerment, tribal and forest-dwelling communities are being returned to their customary roles as guardians of local ecosystems, given back the responsibilities they lost through the centralising process started by the British. The Joint Forest Management Program, which began in 1990, effectively returned a duty of care to local forest communities, giving them power to manage and maintain their forests as they see fit. This was extended in 2002 by the Wildlife Protection Amendment Act, which allowed for the creation of ‘community reserves’ that would be guaranteed protection against outside encroachment.

This legislation represents a powerful shift in government thinking. It’s effectively a devolution of powers, and echoes contemporary trends in the West towards localisation. Communities are being involved in the future of their environment, rather than being alienated from it. It’s a long-overdue recognition of the wisdom inherent in indigenous cultures, a concept that previous governments were incapable of grasping.

It’s clichéd and perhaps naïve to claim that India is a ‘spiritual society,’ possessing an innate respect for the environment. Consumer culture is rampant, after all, urban sprawl is devouring green spaces, and if you travel on any Indian bus you’ll see enough plastic hurled out of the windows to fill a landfill site. But even in mainstream society it’s possible to see enduring customs – the worship of cows, monkeys, trees, rivers and other natural entities – which indicate a reverence for nature embedded in the cultural psyche. Undoubtedly something similar existed in the ancient cultures of the West, before our connection to nature was severed and our sacred groves swept away.

Yogesh’s work with TERI suggests that now more than ever before, society needs a new notion of the sacred. Far from being an antiquated concept – a throwback to a vanished age – the revival of our ancient reverence for nature may prove essential for our future survival. Science must build on spirituality to make our environment sacred once again – not for the benefit of spirits and gods, but to secure a future for ourselves.

I went to the pet shop looking for a puppy, but the only pet they had in stock was an old thoughtupine. It was a fairly shabby kind of pet shop. There were food pellets all over the floor, and the doors of the cages were hanging open.

‘Do you have any puppies?’ I asked the owner, who was standing by an empty fish tank with his flies undone.

‘No, I’ve only got that thoughtupine,’ he said.

‘What happened to all the other pets?’

‘They weren’t selling, so I let them out. I tried to let the thoughtupine out too, but it couldn’t make its mind up.’

‘What kind of pet is a thoughtupine?’ I asked, looking at the creature in its cage. It was covered in dust, and looking very thoughtful.

‘It’s a bit like a porcupine, but it thinks a lot. You can have it at a discount price, then I can close this place down.’

I carried the thoughtupine home in a bag, and put it on the table. It was the size of a loaf of bread, and covered in brownish quills.

I looked at it, and it looked at me. It had a worried, furrowed expression.

‘What kind of food do thoughtupines eat?’ I’d forgotten to ask the pet shop man. I laid a selection out on the table: a lettuce leaf, a piece of cheese, a banana, a packet of peanuts and some hard-boiled eggs. The thoughtupine thought about that for a while. It took a step forward, and sniffed at each in turn. It clearly couldn’t decide.

‘I’ll go out of the room, so you don’t feel pressured,’ I said, closing the door behind me. I came back in half an hour, and the thoughtupine hadn’t moved. I noticed a tiny nibble had been taken out of each of the foods on the table. The thoughtupine was frowning intently at the hard-boiled eggs.

‘Just have them,’ I suggested, taking away all the other choices. The thoughtupine pondered long and hard. It took another twenty minutes. Finally, however, it ate one of the eggs. I put it to bed in a cardboard box and turned in for the night.

The next day, I opened the kitchen door so it could roam around the garden. I had a nice lawn with a fence around it, so I knew it would be safe. The thoughtupine couldn’t make its mind up, however. It spent most of the morning standing in the doorway with only its snout exposed to the sunlight. ‘Do you want to go in or go out?’ I demanded. ‘Try the lawn, it’s lovely out there.’ But the thoughtupine just stared straight ahead. It appeared to be chewing the inside of its cheek. Occasionally a vein pulsed in its furry forehead.

By the afternoon, I was thoroughly frustrated. The thoughtupine didn’t do anything. I had to carry it from room to room because it couldn’t decide which one it preferred. The simplest choices confounded it. It even had to weigh up the pros and cons of urination.

I returned it to its box in the kitchen, and went back to the pet shop.

The pet shop man had boarded up the windows, and was busy renovating. He’d taken all the cages out, and was turning the place into an upmarket café boutique.

‘What’s the point of a thoughtupine?’ I asked. ‘Why won’t it do anything?’

‘It explains all about that in the leaflet,’ he said. His flies were still undone.

‘Leaflet? You didn’t give me a leaflet.’

‘Oh. I suppose the hamsters ripped them up. You can’t bring it back here, you know. No refunds. This isn’t a pet shop anymore.’

‘Just tell me what it said in the leaflet.’

‘Well, a thoughtupine does all your thinking for you. You know how trees absorb carbon dioxide, and turn it into oxygen? A thoughtupine absorbs your thoughts, and uses them for its own devices. And you know how trees grow leaves, and branches, and twiggy protuberances, and wrinkled bark? Well, a thoughtupine grows bristles. That’s why it’s covered in all those little quills.’

‘And what does it eat?’

‘It eats your thoughts,’ said the man, looking at me as if I was very slow. ‘All the useless ones, that you don’t need. The ones that keep you up at night. The ones that go round and round in circles. Very useful creatures, thoughtupines. I don’t really know why they’re not more popular. But everyone wants chinchillas and shit these days.’

I returned home as quickly as I could. I was happy and excited. The pet shop man’s words had made a deep impression, and I saw the thoughtupine in a whole new light. It just so happened I had lots of thoughts, useless thoughts that I didn’t need, thoughts that kept me up at night, thoughts that went round and round in circles and prevented me – so I imagined – from fulfilling my true potential as a human being. The thoughtupine was just the pet for me, better than a puppy. I took it out of its cardboard box and carried it to my bedroom.

‘You’ll sleep here now,’ I said, constructing it a comfortable nest in the drawer of my bedside table. ‘You can feast on my useless thoughts all night long. Gorge yourself on them.’

The thoughtupine just looked at me with a troubled expression.

And so every night, I’d fall asleep with the thoughtupine beside me. It always took it a long time to decide whether to go to sleep or not, but when it did, I’d lie in the dark and listen to its rasping breath. It comforted me, to know it was there. And from the depths of my worried brain, I’d dredge up the thoughts that had plagued me that day, and project them into the blackness of the room. Financial troubles, job dissatisfaction, perennial loneliness, the lack of a career, the lack of direction, the creeping of age, the fear of wasting my life through indecision, and all the other little worries that linked the big ones into a fine web, so intricately woven together I couldn’t see the daylight through the mesh: all of this was night-time fodder for my lovely thoughtupine.

I imagined I woke up a little lighter each morning.

But the thoughtupine started growing.

One day, after a night like any other, I noticed it was definitely bigger. Its sides were uncomfortably bulging over the sides of the drawer.

A week or so after, it filled the drawer completely. I was forced to find it alternative sleeping arrangements in a nest of blankets on the floor.

Soon it was no longer the size of a loaf of bread. It was the size of a small coffee table. I had trouble hefting it upstairs at night, and the quills stuck into my chest when I tried to lift it.

Before long it was the size of my sofa. I know because that’s where it often sat, grinding its blunt yellow teeth through the long afternoons. I couldn’t get it up to my bedroom at night, so it slept in the living room. If I left my bedroom door open I could still hear its rasping breath, and I assumed it could still eat my thoughts. Its growth-rate certainly supported that theory.

Its breath grew raspier. Its quills grew longer. Its face got bloatier and broodier. Things started to get caught between its spines: clots of matted dust and hair, unidentifiable scraps. Its body got stuck half-in half-out of doorways, sometimes blocking access to a room for days on end.

When at last it had grown so large it filled up most of the living room, and the sound of its anxious sighs and grinding teeth prevented me from sleeping at night, I went back to visit the pet shop. The café boutique was in full swing, and where had once stood empty cages now sat fashionable-looking women, sipping frappuccinos and trying on jewellery. The pet shop man was wearing a suit. His flies were still undone.

‘How’s business?’ I asked.

‘Not so bad. Though I’m thinking of closing this place down and reopening as a hairdressing salon.’

‘About that thoughtupine you sold me…’

‘Oh, I was trying to get rid of it for years. I was grateful you took it off me. Now I can branch out a bit, you see.’

‘Is it meant to keep getting bigger? I can’t seem to make it stop.’

‘That’s easy. Just put it on a diet, like you would with any other pet. You just need to stop thinking so much. It’s not good for you, you know. Don’t worry, soon you’ll run out of useless thoughts, and both of you will be a lot better off. Here, have a coffee on the house.’

‘Thanks…’

‘You’re very welcome. I owe you a debt of gratitude.’ He had already started ushering out the ladies, stacking the chairs up on the tables, and outside the window I could see workmen unloading barbers’ chairs and mirrors from a van.

After that coffee, I went back home. The thoughtupine’s face was squashed up against the window, gazing at the outside world with deep perplexity.

Since then, following the pet shop man’s advice, I have made a concerted effort to stop thinking so many useless thoughts.

All I can think about now is the thoughtupine.

I was there when they hauled the first body out, crossing the bridge on my way to work. The police boat was moored to a buoy with three seagulls on it. The gulls were watching the policemen at work, doubled over in their greasy black cagoules, and pretty soon a few dozen spectators had gathered beside me on the bridge, watching with the gulls.

They kept getting the body half out of the water, then fumbling it and flopping it back in. One of them had got hold of the arm, it was jammed in his armpit like a baguette, and his other hand was buried in the folds of the dead man’s trousers. The policemen were getting pretty annoyed. They kept heaving and hauling, and it kept slipping back. It was like a tug of war with the river. The river didn’t give in.

Eventually, though, they broke the river’s hold. The body leapt suddenly out of the water as if it had been shoved from below, and all the policemen landed together in a heap on the deck of the boat. The gulls flapped their wings and screamed, but they didn’t take off. They were hard to satisfy as an audience. Like the rest of us, they secretly wanted something else to happen.

The body was out of the water alright, heaped on the gunwale like a soggy carpet, with only the left hand and left foot still trailing down into the current. When the policemen tugged on these, it became apparent they were sticking on something. Further exertions revealed a strange thing. The left hand and foot were attached, or fused, to the right hand and foot of another body.

They hauled the second one out with less effort. It seemed to come easier that time. This one was a woman, her dark hair as tangled as hair plucked from a plughole. Her left hand and foot were attached, in turn, to the right hand and foot of a third body.

The gulls were really watching now. So were us spectators. The policemen got the three bodies up, grunting and cursing over the water, but the left hand and foot of the third was attached to the right hand and foot of a fourth, and it became obvious that things were going to go on like this.

It was a human paper chain being dragged from the dirty river. Some people took pictures, but mostly they were silent. Nothing like this had ever happened before in our town.

I stayed on the bridge for about forty minutes, counting body after body. The policemen were really exhausted now. Their boat sat low in the water. When they got each new body up onto the gunwale you could tell they hoped they might have finally reached the end of the chain, but always another right hand bobbed up, another right foot. They started taking cigarette breaks, staring gloomily at the water. The seagulls watched, and preened themselves. Some of the spectators moved on.

I went to work, put in half a day, and came back to the bridge at lunchtime. They were still pulling bodies out, but new policemen had come to relieve the first lot. They’d got a flat-bottomed barge from somewhere, and already it was half full. There were men, women, children, old people, black ones, white ones, all strung together. There was something relaxing about the scene. It was one of those hazy, slightly luminous days.

Next morning they had to get a second barge. They brought in one of those sand-dredging boats from further down the river. Police divers bobbed in the water like seals, the sun glancing off their shiny caps. They kept swimming down to take a look, probably climbing down the chain like an upside-down rope ladder, and occasionally one of them came to the surface and shouted out to the policemen on the boat: ‘Still can’t see no end to it, nothing to do but keep pulling!’

The three gulls were still watching from the buoy. Or perhaps, like the policemen in the boat, they had been replaced by others.

And so it went on for a couple of days. We got used to it. ‘It’s a good thing they’re clearing that riverbed,’ people said in the place I worked. ‘They must have been down there for years.’

‘That’s probably why we got floods last summer.’

‘Must have blocked the drainage right up. Be a menace to shipping if you left it much longer. High time they got the job done, if you ask me.’

It seems strange now that no-one asked who the bodies actually belonged to. The police ran out of boats in the end, and strung the sodden human chain over to the river’s far bank and along the open ground by the rail tracks, utilising an empty warehouse to store them in. I suppose it was assumed they’d identify them there, so we wouldn’t have to worry too much about it. They cordoned off the riverbanks, but they couldn’t cordon off the bridge. People took to gathering there. Sometimes they packed sandwiches.

After some time, reports began to circulate about people disappearing. Someone at work said her mother had vanished, and someone else misplaced a teenage son. The corner shop at the end of my road failed to open for business one day, and when no junk mail arrived for a week I realised the postman had stopped coming round. Certain doubts and suspicions began to be aired. People said too much was being unravelled. They said that perhaps our river of life had turned into something else.

I wasn’t affected by these murmurs, until one morning crossing the bridge I saw the unmistakable sight of the face of one of my ex-girlfriends rising from the water. I’d tried phoning her a few days before – a matter of a small amount of money she owed me – but she’d never returned my call. I watched her body pull smoothly through the river, breaking the surface of the water like an otter, just another body in the spooling chain. Her left hand and foot were fused, I saw then, to the right hand and foot of the corner shop owner.

By that time the police had rigged up a kind of winch, powered by a small diesel generator, to minimise the need for human exertion. The mechanism needed to be monitored constantly, as sometimes limbs or hair would get snagged. I ducked the cordon and approached the man on duty, who was watching the chain with watery eyes.

‘That one there’s my ex-girlfriend,’ I said. ‘She was alive a week ago.’

The policeman merely blinked at me. It looked like he’d been awake for days.

‘Can you stop the engine?’ I asked as she came slipping up the bank towards me, following the slick mud track of the others. ‘I mean, she shouldn’t be there. I know her.’

‘I’m sorry, sir, that’s out of the question,’ he replied, looking sympathetic. ‘We haven’t got time to stop, I’m afraid. The divers say there are loads more down there. We’ve got to get to the end.’

‘But what if it doesn’t end?’ I asked. It spooked me. The thought hadn’t occurred until now.

‘Everything ends, sir,’ the policeman said. ‘Until then, I’m on overtime.’

By that point my ex-girlfriend had passed us by, and been reeled up to the warehouse. Through the open doors I could see a great spool of bodies revolving slowly, like a ball of wool being wound. I stayed on the bank with the policeman awhile, watching them slide past. I tried to spot other faces I knew. One guy I thought I might have been to school with, but I couldn’t remember his name.

I couldn’t sleep for a long time that night, and then I awoke in the cold before dawn to feel the bed moving beneath me.

Then I realised it wasn’t the bed. It was me, sliding over the mattress.

I managed to flip the light in passing, but it didn’t illuminate much. There was no-one else in the room with me, no ropes or anything like that. I grabbed onto the post at the end of the bed, and tried to resist the pull.

But a large part of me didn’t want to resist. I wanted to go back to sleep. Sleep in my mind became conflated with the tugging I felt on my limbs, toes and fingers, on my stomach and groin, on the hairs inside my nose. All of me was going the same way. I could feel the blood pressing up against one side of my body, the saliva in my mouth making one cheek bulge. It would have been easy to let myself go. I’d slide through the door like a wet rag and down the stairs past the doors of other flats, along the pavement, down the hill, through the damp grass of the park and downwards to the river. My right hand and foot felt the ache. They were lonely. They wanted something to hold. I thought about my ex-girlfriend down there, and about all the others. My body wavered in the cool air as the early light came up behind the blinds.

Eventually, the tugging stopped. It didn’t want me any more. I was deposited gently back down, and I felt that sensation you get when you push the palms of your hands together for a long time, until your muscles ache, and then let go so your arms float magically up and away from your body. A feeling of lightness and relief. I was very hungry.

I made myself some scrambled eggs, drank a cafetiere of coffee, and made my way down to the bridge. It was a cold, clear day.

A crowd had already gathered on the riverbank. The cordon had disappeared. People were blowing on their hands and stamping their feet to keep warm.
Everyone had the same slightly wild-eyed look, like horses spooked by a plastic bag. Their cheekbones stood out very clear in the light.

They were all standing very close to each other, the policemen mixed in with the rest. Many of those assembled there had woken to the same thing I had in the night, or else seen lovers or small children vanishing down the garden path. Some had had closer escapes than me: there were streaks of mud on their clothes and pyjamas, wet grass clippings in their hair. One man even had pond weed dried down one side of his head.

There weren’t very many policemen on duty, and the ones there looked ill at ease. Presumably some of them had ended up in the river too.

They were already letting the spool unwind. No-one had to give the order. All they had to do was switch the generator off, heave the chain in the opposite direction, and stand back to watch it unreel itself back into the greasy river.

We stood there for hours. I lost count of the bodies. They flowed past at increasing speed until the faces were just a blur, unrecognisable as people we lived and worked with.

They slipped back into the river soundlessly. I didn’t see the water level rise. When the last body slid under the surface – or the first, depending how you see it – the whole crowd lurched forward a step, as if it had briefly lost its balance at the window of a tall building.

The three seagulls launched themselves from the buoy and reeled around, screaming.

The next morning I went to the corner shop to buy a newspaper. The owner was restocking the fridge with milk. The floor had been mopped, and the counter wiped down. There was sleep in the owner’s eyes, but he nodded and smiled.

‘I haven’t seen you for a few days,’ he said. ‘You been on holiday?’

In the afternoon, at work, I called up my ex-girlfriend. She didn’t answer the phone that time either. I guess she was out doing something. The money didn’t bother me much. I left her a short message.

The moment I kicked the old man in the chest, I realised I had to make a choice. I’ve never done anything like it before, and I’d like to say I never will again. But for reasons I’m about to explain, I don’t have the luxury of making pacifistic statements about the future. Our enemy’s forces are gathered below, escape is an impossibility, and even now they are muttering together, planning a further assault on our position. As distasteful as violence is to me, I may well be forced to do worse than that, before this afternoon is through.

But what prospects do we have, she and I? You’d be forgiven for asking that question. We have no swords, we have no shields, we have no boiling oil. We don’t even have such a thing as a door to require a battering ram. A small pile of broken, slimy stones is all we have managed to collect so far, and when these missiles run out, we’ll have only our hands and feet.

I look down at them now: the last line of defence. At the foot that delivered the kick that got this siege started. We are standing side by side on the topmost step of the winding staircase – at the bottom of which they are scheming, preparing, daring themselves to ascend. I have leather hiking boots covered in great slabs of brown mud, but Lucy is wearing only a pair of sodden pink and gold trainers. You could that say our chance of resistance is slim. However, I will not say it.

To make matters worse, it’s pouring with rain. The rain actually appears to consist of two separate types, working together, a classic two-pronged assault. Half comes down in enormous drops, the size of slugs, that explode upon impact, while the air between these drops is filled with a ceaseless horizontal drizzle that feels like being flicked by a wet toothbrush. We are partially sheltered from the vertical assault by the remains of the lintel above, but the drizzle is impossible to escape. There is no part of my body now the water has not reached.

Strangely, we are not shivering. Lucy, I think, is too excited for her body to realise how cold it is, while mine is covered in a cosy adult layer of fat. We did, at one point, have an umbrella, but she jammed it between two stones outside as a makeshift flag, and seconds later the wind snatched it away.

Once upon a time in the place we now stand, there would have been a ceiling over our heads. I can see the holes in the wall high above from which the great beams once protruded, supporting a conical roof first of thatch, and later of blue slate. There would also have been an oak door reinforced with iron bands, rich tapestries hanging from the walls, and a blazing log fire. I know this from the artist’s impression in the guidebook that Lucy has in her pocket, if it hasn’t disintegrated by now. But all that protrudes from the curved walls these days are the remnants of long-abandoned nests; and all I see beyond these, squinting up, is a broken circle of sky.

Nevertheless, it’s the best we’ve got, and we’ll have to make do. The roof may be gone and the door long since rotted, the stones may be covered in a skein of green slime, but at least the walls are still intact; as impenetrable as they were when erected, seven hundred years ago. As Lucy informed me in the car, these walls are nine feet thick in some places, and have never been breached – not by siege engines, catapults or cannons – although the stronghold did fall at various times to various invaders throughout history. This puts us in a powerful position, despite our lack of armaments. The only way they can get into the tower is by advancing up that narrow, slippery staircase, which, as I’m sure you are aware, gives us the strategic advantage.

But what will they attempt to do, assuming our barrage of stones runs out and they get to the top of the stairs? As far as we know, there are five of them, though presumably they could summon more. The first of our worries is the police constable who arrived several minutes ago. A thickset man with a coarse, jowly face, wearing a sort of plastic cloak that makes him look at least twice his probable size. Then there’s the old man that I kicked. I suppose he might attempt some kind of violence, and I wouldn’t blame him if he did – not with the mud-tracks of my boot still imprinted on his chest. Of more concern are the two young men who joined him shortly afterwards: red-faced, humourless-looking boys who I take to be his sons. I doubt they get much action round here, and I’m sure they’re full of pent-up frustrations just boiling to be released.

Finally there’s the old man’s wife, and it’s her I look forward to meeting the least. From what I was able to glimpse through the arrow-slit as she strode across the field, she has exactly the sort of chapped, moral face that will give me a verbal battering against which I’ll have no defence. I can only imagine how she’ll react when she sees I’m not alone up here – that I have in my company a girl, a twelve year-old in pink and gold trainers, soaked-through, freezing, covered in filth, who is being encouraged to rain down projectiles onto strangers’ heads. The woman will suck in air through pursed lips, make outraged tutting and huffing sounds, lecture me about the disgraceful example I’m setting to a child. She will want the authorities involved. She will want her mother – my wife Felicity – contacted. And if she does that, I’ll hear no end of it. No end of it at all.

Once again, I’m about to suggest to Lucy that we call it a day. It’s time to open a dialogue, negotiate with the enemy below; I’ll explain that this wouldn’t be weakness or betrayal, but simply the most sensible option, under the circumstances. We’ll apologise and make our way back to the car, say it had been a big misunderstanding. I’ll tell her that even knights did this sometimes, that they had a special word for it: parlance.

But then I look down at Lucy’s face. She is in her element. Her skin is shining with rainwater, the battle-light burns in her eyes. My little stepdaughter looks electrified, poised on the step with a rock in her hands, gazing with fearsome concentration down into the dark stairwell. Gone is the cloying dullness on her face, the flatness in her voice when she speaks; gone is the maddening sulkiness that made me almost want to slap her. And when she beams up at me suddenly – beside herself with terror and excitement, trembling in the midst of her great adventure – I know that if I back down now, having allowed her to come this far, her disappointment in me will be crushing. Certain promises have been made – ridiculous, impossible promises, yes – but promises that nonetheless require a certain commitment. And then there’s the inescapable fact: right now, Lucy looks the happiest she’s been since Granddad Evans died.

And so I maintain my position beside her. This is the choice I have made. Together we will stand before our foes, resisting against all odds.

‘Luce,’ I say, ‘I just want you to know, while we’re waiting for something to happen, that I’ve had more fun with you today than I’ve had in…’

‘Shh!’ she hisses urgently. ‘Shut up, Frank , I’m trying to hear!’ Wide-eyed and open-mouthed she stares, straining to hear the sound of footsteps – the clank of armoured feet, of iron on stone – over the steady slap-slap-slapping of raindrops. Then she emits a piercing shriek. ‘They’re coming up!’ she screams. ‘The Picards, the Picards are coming!’

…

From the road, it didn’t look like much. I’d driven for almost four hours to get here, hedgerows scraping the sides of the car, gunning the engine through flooded dips in the road. Lucy sat in the passenger seat, eating raisins and reading out excerpts from the pile of brochures and guidebooks in her lap.

The fact she was sitting in the passenger seat was the first disobedience of the day, as my wife had specifically requested I belt her into the back of the car, where it was statistically very slightly safer. I’d agreed to this to keep Felicity happy, but we hadn’t been travelling five minutes before Lucy demanded to come and join me up front. I was excited at her excitement – thrilled, in fact, that at last she seemed keen, that her sullen, pouting lips were giving way to a smile – and so of course I let her switch seats, where she could watch the fields slip by and help me read the map.

This was a job she took seriously. She traced the route with her index finger, sketching the circuitry of the roads, scowling as she tried to pronounce the unfamiliar Welsh names. She had carefully marked our destination with a big red X, and her concentration mounted the closer we drew to this point. And in between telling me the names of the roads and the small towns and villages we passed, the ascending gradients of the hills and the location of nearby rivers and forests, she’d flip open one of the guidebooks I’d brought and recount some of the long and noble history of Treterfyn Tower.

The site had probably been occupied since Bronze Age times, but the first proper fortification, I learned, had been a motte and bailey castle circa 1100. This was improved about a hundred years later by a shell keep made of stone, with concentric stone walls to replace the original timber defences. The years 1330 to 1348 saw the construction of the great tower – made up of three stories above a basement or dungeon, surmounted by ramparts designed to give the castle’s garrison a clear line of fire over the parapets – the same tower that Lucy and I find ourselves defending at this moment. Later a courtyard and gateway were added, and in 1397 the remaining wooden palisade was replaced by a stone curtain wall, with circular towers on the corners.

After the early fifteenth century it seems the castle gradually became abandoned. The residential focus of the site was shifted to the newly-constructed court, reflecting a wider cultural transition from Medieval instability to relatively peaceful times, interrupted less frequently by violent struggles for power. The wooden floors and ceilings of the great tower rotted, the roof collapsed, the moat was filled in, and during the course of subsequent centuries the outer walls and parapets were cannibalised for stone. Time put paid to the castle’s defences more effectively than any invader, and little, apart from the great tower, now remains intact.

So when we finally reached the place, having splashed down the last muddy, half-flooded lane and pulled up against a barbed-wire fence and a gate with a sign that read Keep Dogs On Leash, I was afraid my stepdaughter would be disappointed. Behind a rolling curtain of rain, all we could see of Treterfyn Tower was a greyish cylinder of stone protruding from a boggy field, surrounded by broken, sunken walls that looked as if something had been chewing on them. It looked nothing at all like the crenulated fortress I imagined Lucy had envisaged; there was no drawbridge and no portcullis, no coats of arms, no fairytale spires, and certainly no colourful pennants fluttering from the battlements in welcome. It looked more like a cake that someone had left out in the rain. Hoping to forestall a return to the sulk I feared might follow this underwhelming sight, I turned to Lucy with encouraging words, some platitude along the lines of ‘Well, at least there’s still something left,’ only to discover the little girl was already out of the door.

The second and third disobediences of the day now followed in quick succession. Felicity had given me strict instructions not to let Lucy get wet in the rain, and provided me with a raincoat, wellies and umbrella. I managed to get the raincoat on, catching her up before she reached the field, but already she’d splashed through several puddles and I could see that her trainers were soaked, so decided it was too late for the wellies. I could keep them dry, I thought, for the journey home in the car. At this point, of course, I had no idea that events would take the turn that they did. I thought we’d spend ten minutes looking around, take a few trophy snaps, then head to the nearest village for pub lunch.

As I soon realised, I had underestimated the extent of Lucy’s enthusiasm. I should have got a hint of this from the way my stepdaughter scaled the gate, which counts as the third disobedience; Felicity had made me categorically promise to make sure the girl behaved herself and not get into any kind of trouble, any kind of trouble at all. Now she climbed the bars as if she was scaling the ladder of a siege engine; but not before she’d paused a moment to consider the Private Property on the gate.

‘Look what they’ve written.’

‘That’s OK. I guess that means some farmer owns the land. But I’m sure no-one’s going to mind, we’re only having a look.’

Lucy pondered this for a while. Her face was very grave. She looked from the sign to the crumbling ruin, and then she looked to me.

‘But it’s ours, isn’t it?’ she said, and there was no question in her voice. ‘They’ve got no right to put that there. Granddad Evans said it’s our castle.’

‘Exactly,’ I replied, matching her conviction. ‘Your granddad was right. Of course it’s our castle.’ And you may say I was ill-advised, considering our present situation, to encourage the fanciful belief that this slimy ruin could conceivably be her birthright. But this was the first time in months that Lucy had shown any interest at all in anything apart from watching DVDs and eating butterscotch ice-cream, and I can hardly describe my delight that it was me who had succeeded – where school councillors, family friends and, I’m sorry to say, my wife – had failed, failed utterly, to bring the little girl back to life. I present this fact in my defence against anyone who would question my role – against Felicity, against Felicity’s friends, against the self-righteous landowner’s wife who will shortly storm our bastion with her ham-faced sons in tow – and that’s the reason, you may as well know, I do not regret that kick.

‘Luce,’ I said with confidence, ‘the castle’s all yours – it’s there for the taking.’ And the next thing I knew she was over the gate, leaping with her pink and gold trainers into the waterlogged field. Like the loyal groom I am, I quickly followed after.

…

It didn’t take long to explore the place. There wasn’t much left to explore. We toured what remained of the outer walls, patting the stonework approvingly, and discovered what may have once been a kitchen, equipped with a great stone hearth. Then we circled the base of the tower until we found the entrance to the winding staircase. We huddled there out of the rain for a second – there were droppings and damp twists of wool, the sour smell of sheep – and this was when Lucy scrambled up the wall to jam her umbrella in a gap between two stones.

‘This is our flag,’ the girl announced, though the flag didn’t last long. And then together we climbed the stairs until we reached the second storey of the tower.

Again, there wasn’t much to see. Just the high, curved, dripping walls and the roofless circle of grey sky. Lucy walked around and around, running her right hand over the stones until her palm was covered in greenish muck, while I waited under what remained of the arch and smoked a damp cigarette. Neither of us spoke for several minutes, and I felt my confidence begin to waver. I worried again she would be disappointed at seeing how little remained of the fortress her granddad had embellished so elaborately in her imagination. It was then I realised how vital it was that my stepdaughter not experience that. If her excitement was allowed to fail now, all was lost. I’d spent days convincing Felicity to let me bring Lucy on this trip, patiently wearing her arguments down, explaining what it would mean to the girl, and now I’d finally achieved my aim I couldn’t allow that corrosive resentment to creep back into her life. But I didn’t know what else I could do. Knowing I had to say something, at least, I called Lucy over to where I was standing to tell her one of the only facts I remember about castles.

‘I bet you don’t know why spiral staircases go in a clockwise direction.’

‘Everyone knows that,’ she said dismissively. ‘It’s so when the enemies come up the stairs they have to attack with their left hands. It’s better to defend this way.’ But then she went silent for a moment, staring and frowning at the steps. Suddenly she grabbed my arm and cried: ‘This one goes the other way! Look, it’s anticlockwise!’

To my amazement, she was right. I hadn’t even noticed it. The staircase of Treterfyn Tower winds upwards in an anticlockwise direction, favouring the ascending party – or else a left-handed defender.

And this, more than anything else that day, was the turning point in Lucy’s mood. For having discovered this architectural quirk – completely unmentioned in any of the guidebooks – and demonstrated it by swinging her left arm down onto the helmet of an imaginary invader, she suddenly became very concentrated and still. A softness seemed to spread over her face, and a quiet, delighted smile travelled upwards from her lips until it reached her eyes.

‘Granddad Evans was left-handed,’ she said, still gazing at the stairs. ‘He used to write the other way. Don’t you see? It’s a clue. The stairs were built that way for us. For left-handed knights.’

Of course, I wasn’t about to point out that Lucy herself was right-handed. Actually, I found it very touching the way she drew the links. This chance fact might be enough, I thought, to beat the disappointment back. It was a lovely proof of point, something magical she’d discovered for herself; sufficient, perhaps, to turn this place from the mildewed heap of old stones it was into the fabulous, fairytale fortress her granddad had intended it to be.

And so, once again, I confirmed it for her; and again, I stand by my motives. ‘You’re right. I guess that just about proves it. This must be your castle.’

After a few more minutes in the tower, I was ready to call it a day. We were both soaked from the rain by this point, and I knew how much trouble I’d be in if Lucy caught a cold. But my stepdaughter had left the top of the staircase and scrambled into an alcove in the wall to peer through one of the arrow-slits. This is where archers would once have been stationed, giving them an unimpeded line of fire across the approaching fields.

‘Look!’ the girl hissed suddenly. ‘Just look – it’s a Picard.’

I joined her at the arrow-slit. A man with white hair and a green Berber jacket was making his way across the field. He was coming on at a sharp pace, hopping over culverts and drainage ditches, heading unmistakably for the tower.

‘I don’t think that’s a Picard,’ I said. ‘That’s just a man. A farmer, probably.’

‘It’s a Picard. Look at him! He must have spotted us. He’s coming this way, towards our castle – and he’s got a weapon.’

‘That’s not a weapon, that’s a walking stick. I’m sure he doesn’t mean us any harm.’

‘What does he want? He’s coming right for us.’

‘He probably just wants to say hello. Or perhaps he’s worried about the rain. We’re getting pretty wet up here, Luce, I think it might be time…’

But here I was interrupted by the man, who had halted a little distance away, planted his walking stick in the ground, and was staring up at the arrow-slit from behind which we were watching.

‘Hello?’ he called, squinting through the rain. ‘Hello? Who’s up there?’

‘Don’t say anything,’ Lucy hissed. ‘We mustn’t give ourselves away.’

‘Hello?’ the old man called again. ‘I can see you! I know you’re there!’

‘Shh!’ Lucy dug her nails in my arm with a force that slightly alarmed me. ‘Stay still – he can’t see us, he’s a liar.’

‘I’m sure he’ll go away in a minute,’ I said. I hoped that if we stayed quiet he’d soon get bored and head back for shelter, leaving us to make a surreptitious departure. He was getting soaked out there, after all. I wanted to avoid a confrontation.

‘I know someone’s up there – we watched you from the house,’ he insisted, pulling his stick from the soft ground and then plunging it back down. ‘I’m afraid this is private property. We run guided tours of the castle and grounds every year from April to September, but as it’s not the season now I’m going to have to ask you to come down.’

Lucy then did a surprising thing. She stuck her face through the arrow-slit, and before I could stop her she had yelled: ‘We’re not coming down! You can’t make us! It’s our castle!’

‘Luce!’ I hissed, pulling her back, ‘what are you doing? We’ve got to be quiet, remember?’

‘He’s trying to scare us, Frank ,’ she said. And then she lurched forward again to yell: ‘We’re never coming down! You dirty Picard!’

There was a slight pause from below. ‘What’s that?’ the man called back. ‘What was that you called me?’ And then he pulled up his walking stick again, and vanished from our field of vision.

This caused Lucy to squeal with fright. I could see she was genuinely scared. She wriggled out of my clutching arms, half fell from the alcove onto the wet floor, and then rushed in alarm to the top of the winding staircase.

‘He’s going to come up!’ she shrieked. ‘He’s going to try and take it away from us!’

I didn’t exactly mean to take up such a defensive position. I just stood so my body blocked the stairwell, my feet planted on the topmost step, to reassure my stepdaughter she was adequately defended. The old man, however, was obviously somewhat intimidated by my stance. His footsteps halted in the darkness below, and when my eyes had adjusted to the gloom I made out the shape of his wispy head as it peered around the bend.

‘Who is that?’ he demanded, his voice echoing tetchily around the stone shell of the stairwell. ‘What are you doing up here? I’ve told you, this is private land.’

‘We’re just having a look,’ I started to say, ‘don’t worry, we’ll be on our way…’
But Lucy chipped in again at this point, taking courage from her position behind me to shout through the gap between my legs: ‘Go away, Picard, we’re never coming down! Do you hear me? Never!’

‘What’s that you keep calling me?’ he demanded indignantly, ‘how dare you call me names, whoever you are…’

‘You’re a thieving Picard!’ she shrieked. I knew she was getting a little out of hand, but I couldn’t try to calm her down without potentially letting the old man advance further up the staircase.

‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to leave us alone,’ I explained as reasonably as I could. ‘We’ll be gone in a few minutes, don’t worry…’

‘We’re never coming down, you Picard! Leave us in peace!’

‘Why does the child keep saying that?’ Confusion had entered the echoing voice to mingle with its indignation. ‘My name isn’t Picard or anything of the sort. It’s Fitzherbert. Now for the last time, will you come down at once, and stop this ridiculous behaviour.’

It was then the man embarked on his unfortunate course of action, for which I hold him in large part responsible for the state of siege we find ourselves in now. Emboldened by his own self-righteousness, he began to advance a little too quickly up the winding staircase. His walking stick clacked on the stones as he came, his black bulk increased as he loomed towards us, but I think it was probably the sight of his purple alcoholic’s nose, topped by vindictive, watery blue eyeballs, popping unexpectedly out of the darkness like some sort of troll coming out of a cave, that tipped the balance of Lucy’s excitement into something approaching hysteria. She started to shriek at the top of her voice – ‘stop him, Frank, make him stop!’ – and this provoked the old buffoon into a tirade of furious insults of his own.

What I did next, I’d like to say, was partly a reaction to my stepdaughter’s panic, and partly irritation at the fool for bringing things to a head like this, rather than negotiating reasonably. But I’d be lying if I tried to pretend that other emotions weren’t mixed up as well – as they must have been for generations of defenders in the very position I was in now – of which one, I’m not proud to admit, was totally unexpected exhilaration. I simply stuck out my left hiking boot – more as a warning than anything else – until it was perpendicular with his chest, but the idiot didn’t stop.

‘Get back, Picard,’ were the words I uttered, as I extended my leg.

…

According to the guidebook in Lucy’s pocket – Life at Treterfyn: Court and Castle – the first record of the Picard family comes from the early fourteenth century, when a nobleman called Roger Picard, whose family had arrived in Wales with the Norman Conquest, established himself at Treterfyn and set about constructing the great tower. The previous owners of the site, who had built the original motte and bailey and maintained possession of their stronghold through the next several centuries of uprisings and wars, was a family by the name of Vaughan.

Neither this guidebook, nor any of the others, offers a clear explanation of how the ownership of Treterfyn passed from the Vaughan family to the Picards. Perhaps the castle was stripped from the Vaughans as punishment for their role in some rebellion, or for finding themselves on the losing side in one of the interminable feudal struggles that characterised this stage of the Middle Ages. Perhaps the reason is totally mundane, a question of inheritance or intermarriage; the Vaughans might simply have squandered their fortune and been forced to sell the place. Or perhaps – and this is Lucy’s view – it was seized by force.

But leaving aside the unknowable question of why the Vaughans left, or where they went, or how the Picards came to occupy Treterfyn and rule it for the next five centuries or so: what possible bearing does any of this have on us?

None, is the answer. None at all. We have no more claim on this ruined stone stump than we do on the dripping hills or trees with which this dismal valley is surrounded. But just you try telling Lucy that now, as she stands guard at the stairwell with a wet rock in her hands, waiting to brain the first pretender attempting to wrest the place from her. How did my misguided stepdaughter ever arrive at this conviction? And why am I standing at her side, having already committed a minor assault and now steeling myself to fend off a village policeman?

The answer to these questions, of course, lies with Granddad Evans; or, to bestow the full title which both he and Lucy preferred to use in their more solemn, ritualistic moods: Sir Granddad Vaughan-Evans, Earl of the Stolen Tower.

‘Many hundreds of years ago, the Vaughan family lived in an old stone tower in a valley in the middle of Wales…’

My father-in-law was never an earl. Let’s get that straight right away. In his life he had been many things – at various times a naval cadet, a sculptor, a carpenter, an antiques dealer, a gardener, a birdwatcher, an avid collector of militaria, and increasingly an eccentric – but he was certainly never an earl. There wasn’t a drop of aristocratic blood in his veins.

He was, however, devoted to Lucy, and she devoted him right back. I suppose I must admit I’d always been slightly jealous of their relationship. Lucy was six when I married Felicity, and the old man had been ensconced in their house for a good few years by then, giving him a solid head start on the road to her affections. Lucy was always a strange, shy girl, a difficult one to know. Her dad had left her before her first birthday, and both she and her mother, in their own private ways, had been through a lot of pain.

I’d been prepared for suspicion, resentment, even outright hostility, in establishing myself as a presence in Lucy’s life. Instead, I found myself confronted with an unnerving lack of interest. In the early days, my stepdaughter hardly seemed to notice me at all. She allowed me to take her on trips at weekends, and go for walks and play sports and other things her granddad couldn’t do, but Granddad Evans was the man in her life; that position was taken. She liked me, but she loved her granddad. That was the way it was. Of course I accepted this arrangement, and over the years we settled down into an amiable-enough friendship, even learning to love each other in the end. But there was always a nagging part of me that wished I could mean as much to her as he did. And not for Felicity’s sake either, but for my own.

‘They owned all the land for miles around, from the mountains to the sea. They had forests full of stags and wild boars, and rivers teeming with salmon. Their castle was stuffed with golden treasure and beautiful, shining, glittering things, and even though they were so rich and powerful, they were respected throughout the land because they were just and wise.’

‘And did they have an army of knights, Granddad?’

‘Yes, they had an army of knights.’

Felicity and my father-in-law, as I discovered quickly enough, had never seen eye to eye. Their personalities grated against one another. They were probably more similar than either would ever admit. He’d agreed to move into the house only after a lengthy nagging campaign – he’d suffered a fall at home, I think, and broken a couple of ribs – and now resented his loss of independence, and hated being looked after. Throughout his life he’d been proud of the fact that he didn’t owe anyone anything, so his perceived debt of gratitude oppressed him, and made him defensive. My wife, for her part, generally acted as if he’d invaded her home, rather than having succumbed to her cajoling. The house was split into two rough camps. His domain extended from the downstairs spare room to the conservatory, and he reigned unchallenged over the back garden.

‘There were soldiers in shining armour, keeping watch on the walls. They wore chain-mail coats and coverlets, studded gauntlets up to the elbow, and every man had a winter cloak trimmed with ermine. Do you remember what ermine is? That’s right, it’s a sort of a rodent. They had grooms to look after the horses. And falconers, for the falcons. And the falcons wore spurs, and coloured hoods. Do you know what a falcon looks like, Luce? Why don’t you make a drawing?’

My wife has never said this in so many words, but I know there was more to her father moving in than a couple of broken ribs. When Lucy’s dad had disappeared – he didn’t make contact until a year later, apparently living a new life in Canada – Felicity had mounted a determined campaign of erasing all traces of him from her life. She’d started with physical reminders – alterations and improvements he’d made to the house, walls he’d painted, floorboards he’d uncovered – and then worked her way through their shared social group, severing any connections that might be traced back to his memory, cancelling friends, deleting phone numbers, until she had arrived at the point where he simply no longer appeared to have existed.

She detailed this to me herself, shortly after I’d proposed, as a kind of warning, I believe. My wife knows how to protect herself. She’s an excellent survivor. I’d even say she can appear a rather ruthless woman at times, and this is undoubtedly one of the things that attracted me to her. What she managed to achieve in this case was beating her ex-partner at his own game. He may have been the one to disappear, but it was her who made him vanish altogether.
When, at last, the purge had run its course, the only remaining evidence of him was the child support money, the occasional letter, and, of course, Lucy.

I believe Granddad Evan’s arrival in the house was partly a concession to his age, and partly a final step in the nullification of Lucy’s dad’s existence. The spare room had formerly been the guy’s office; the conservatory had once housed his exercise bike and weights. And although they drove each other up the wall, bickering and sniping at each other constantly, Felicity needed another man to be there for her daughter. While she had gone determinedly about the process of stripping the layers from her life, scouring the stain of the great betrayer until no trace of it remained, her father had taken quietly to the task of keeping Lucy entertained.

He used to read to her every night, sometimes telling stories of his own invention, and sometimes myths and legends. Arabian Nights was an early favourite, and Grimm’s Fairy Tales. He taught her Greek and Norse mythology, and the Arthurian legends. After she became briefly obsessed with the myth of the Holy Grail, he let her dig up a strip of the garden for ‘archaeological finds.’ When Felicity became annoyed with the clutter of rocks, bits of clay pipe and smashed blue-patterned plates with which she adorned the shelves of her bedroom, they turned the dig into a muddy ditch proudly named ‘the Japanese Pond.’ Before the arthritis took over his hands he taught Lucy basic woodwork skills, and she provided enthusiastic assistance in his short-lived Spanish Armada model project, his more successful Seven Wonders birdhouses, and developing cruel and ingenious designs for mousetraps.

Lucy was particularly thrilled by the latter. She managed to produce at least one successful model. It was a pretty crude affair – the lethal part of the apparatus consisting of a breadboard with nails driven through it – but turned out to be an effective one, as we discovered one weekday morning on prising apart the sprung device to find its small victim flattened and skewered inside. This was when she was eight years old. She didn’t go to school that day. When, at last, we had stopped her crying, she made her granddad promise never to build another trap in his life. To everyone’s surprise, he swore. Given that he was a stubborn old man, every bit as unyielding as Felicity – a family trait, it’s increasingly clear, that Lucy has inherited from both – I think this is a good example of just how much he loved her.

‘In the summer, the Vaughans would go hunting bears and other monsters in the forests. And when the valley was threatened by men, they’d battle their enemies. There were many wars back then, and everyone wanted to steal the tower because it was such a nice place. And in the winter – they didn’t fight in winter – they wrapped themselves up and had banquets all day long.’

‘Did they eat the same things we do?’

‘They ate roasted boars, and little pigs, and lots of different kinds of birds. There was one very special dish – a sparrow stuffed inside a dove, which was stuffed inside a duck, and the duck was stuffed inside an owl, and the owl was stuffed inside a swan… And then they wrapped the whole thing in bacon and ate it with bread sauce.’

‘That sounds disgusting. I wouldn’t like that.’

‘They didn’t have that dish very often, only on special occasions. Like a resounding victory in battle, or on someone’s birthday. Minstrels would play lutes and lyres, they’d get the whole place blazing with candles. Sometimes, on the coldest days, the snow was so high it almost buried the tower. The winters were much colder then. So they’d have to poke holes in the snowdrifts with their lances, so they could see out of the windows.’

‘Is that true, Granddad? I don’t know if that’s true.’

‘Of course it’s true, girl. It’s your history.’

…

The obsession with Treterfyn Tower started two years before he died, when Lucy was about ten. Like many old men towards the end of their lives, Granddad Evans had developed a sudden interest in genealogy. None of us knew just how deep this would run. As he grew older and decidedly odder, the floodlight of the old man’s enthusiasm swung increasingly wildly from one spot to the next, which some took as a sign of his vitality, and some – notably Felicity – as a sign of encroaching senility. After announcing his intention to trace the Evans family line, he transformed the conservatory of the house – territory my wife had long since conceded to his clutter – into an archive of family history cobbled together from birth records, death records, marriage and divorce records, voter registration records, local and national censuses, diaries, letters, wills, deeds, tombstone rubbings and obituaries.

Felicity was having none of it, but I followed his progress for a while in an over-the-shoulder kind of way. My interest flagged early on, however, when the Evans lineage petered out around the middle of the nineteenth century. It also became sadly evident that no-one in the Evans family appeared to have done anything remotely interesting. We were therefore surprised, not to mention sceptical, when Granddad Evans announced one day that he’d traced his ancestors to some kind of Anglo-Welsh nobility by the name of Vaughan, and that they were linked by immutable ties to a turret somewhere in the middle of Wales.

Exactly how he’d reached this conclusion is anybody’s guess. As far as I could ever make out, it involved him boldly leaping a chronological gap of about five hundred years. He was always vague on the specifics, and became quite ratty if pressed. Much of his highly circumstantial evidence seemed to hinge on the appearance, two hundred years apart, of the names Vaughan and Evans in cemeteries in the Treterfyn locality.

‘Vaughan… Evaughn… Evans – you see that, don’t you, girl?’ This was the first time he explained it to Lucy. I was smoking in my designated spot, my freedom of movement having been curtailed as part of Felicity’s anti-smoking drive, and they were standing by the silver birch at the bottom of the garden. This was also the location of one of the more recognisable of his Seven Wonders of the World birdhouses: the Great Pyramid, painted bright yellow, with a hole in the middle of one of its sides to accommodate the blue tit family that annually took up residence inside. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon – mostly identifiable as such by the honeysuckle that drooped in profusion from the lattice of its elaborately decorated box – was situated just behind, nailed to an apple tree. This was my father-in-law’s Wonder Garden, the place where he and Lucy were to hold many of their increasingly fantastical conversations about Treterfyn.

‘Our family name changed with the times. Names do that, you see. They change shape as they get older, and sometimes they become unrecognisable. Like anything that gets used over many years.’ He rolled back his cardigan sleeve to reveal the sagging swallow tattoo he’d had done when he was in the navy, jabbing at it with one stubby finger. ‘But if you look at things carefully, you can make out their origins. You can see what they used to be, what they really, truly are.’

Initially, Lucy was less than impressed with her granddad’s adventures in genealogy. She demonstrated about as much interest in the etymology of the name ‘Evans’ as you might expect from a girl her age. But when it came to the castle itself, as the tale of the lost tower sunk in, she developed a curiosity that grew, with her granddad’s encouragement, into an abiding fascination.

He expanded on the story of Treterfyn whenever he got the chance. It was a fluid, shape-shifting story, full of inconsistencies, but inconsistencies didn’t matter to Lucy. My stepdaughter had always been inclined towards tales of romance and adventure – she’d never gone in for the girly stuff, demonstrating contempt of dolls from a very early age – so it shouldn’t be hard to understand the appeal of a mysterious lost castle to a rather lonely ten year-old with an active imagination.

‘When enemies invaded the valley, the Vaughans would gather all the peasants who lived in the villages round about, and keep them safe inside the castle walls. They’d have to bring all their animals with them – oxen, goats, chickens, pigs, even cats and dogs – otherwise the enemies would slaughter them and throw their bodies over the battlements. The enemies were cowards, you see. Only cowards would kill cats and dogs. So you can imagine the noise in the tower, with all those frightened animals bleating and snorting and howling all night long…’

‘But didn’t we fight the enemies, Granddad?’

‘Of course we fought them. They didn’t frighten us. Once we were sure the peasants were safe, and the animals were safe, the knights of Treterfyn would lower the drawbridge and charge out on their great warhorses, waving their swords and blowing war-trumpets, and the enemies would be so scared they’d jump in the river and drown.’

‘Because they had all that armour on…’

‘Exactly, my girl, exactly. The enemies were stupid. As stupid as they were cowardly. Most enemies are. And once they’d all drowned at the bottom of the river, the peasants could go back to work in the fields, and the knights could dance and get drunk on mead. And the cooks could prepare the stuffed bird banquet, and everyone would have a party.’

For two years I watched the fairytale take shape in Lucy’s mind. Her granddad tugged it and teased it, filled out its empty spaces, added a little bit here, a bit there, until it had captured her imagination as surely as if he had ridden up and planted a fluttering flag. The rain-sodden tower we stand in now may be nothing but an abject ruin, but Granddad Evans’ Treterfyn bristled with spires and crenulations, ringed by purple, snow-capped peaks, its turrets gleaming with bright spear-points and swooped around by eagles.

Lucy’s obsession with castles grew. While girls at her school were playing with makeup and gossiping about prepubescent boys, she was memorising chivalric codes and pouring over her granddad’s antiquated books on heraldry. This fixation crept into her artwork. For a period of about a year, my stepdaughter drew prodigiously. From the first pencil sketches of box-headed knights and horses that looked more like dogs, her illustrations soon spread to cover the walls and windows of the conservatory, which developed into a kind of shrine to the Vaughan family legend. Any surface not devoted to her pictures was covered with photocopied family trees and pages from old guidebooks. With the glass papered over, observed at night when the lamp was on, the conservatory took on a glow like a Chinese lantern.

At some point in his dubious research, Granddad Evans had come up with what he claimed to be the family coat of arms. It depicted three gold stars on a royal green field, a castle turret outlined in black, and the crest was supported by two standing lions, one red and one white. The lions both wore silver collars, and slightly appalled expressions.

‘What does it mean?’ asked Lucy at the kitchen table, as she carefully copied the design from the yellow-paged tome her granddad had ordered in.

‘The lion standing on the left symbolises the Vaughans of the past,’ he replied, without pausing for thought. I remember being pretty impressed at the fluidity of his lie. ‘And the lion on the right, he represents us Evanses now. The stars and the green field symbolise our land. And they’re holding the crest between them like that because it’s ours to share.’

Some weeks later, we were eating dinner when Lucy spoke up about this. She had been in one of her difficult moods, sitting in impenetrable silence with a white, angry look on her face. She suddenly looked up at her granddad and said, in a hurt and cheated tone, ‘Mum says that coat of arms isn’t ours. She says we don’t have one.’

There was a silence as Granddad Evans considered. He gazed at his food, glared at Felicity, and then gazed at his food again.

‘I meant it’s just a story, that’s all,’ said Felicity to Lucy. ‘It’s just a tale, like all these things. We don’t really have a coat of arms. It’s nothing to be upset about, is it?’

My father-in-law cleared his throat. He muttered something under his breath and clattered his fork on his plate, undid the button on his cuff and then did it up again. ‘I have done some research, you know,’ he said in an uncharacteristically petulant way. Lucy stared at him hopefully, but he didn’t look at her and carried on eating his meal. Nor did he make eye contact with Felicity, and was ill-tempered for the next couple of days.

I heard him together with Lucy later, under the birch tree. They were talking quietly, and he seemed to be trying to win her over. Shortly afterwards she ran back into the house and carried on cutting out the pieces for her cardboard castle model – one of those fiddly make-your-own kits that come complete with courtiers, vassals, ladies, knights and other characters – which was a sure sign she was in a good mood. The next day she pasted the Vaughan coat of arms onto her bedroom door.

…

‘So Treterfyn Tower was handed down, for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, from one generation to the next. Each heir added something new – a stronger wall, a deeper moat, higher battlements maybe. They built that place to last, you see. That’s why it’s still there now. It still stands exactly where it was when the first Vaughans settled, almost one thousand years ago. Imagine that. Just like it was. Like going back in time…’

The illusion was a harmless one, or at least that’s what I thought. As I’ve said before, I was even slightly jealous; nothing I ever said or did could come close to touching Lucy like this. I knew I would always play second fiddle to this fantasy. And initially even Felicity couldn’t complain about her daughter’s newfound interest in history. At least it was an academic diversion – it might even improve her marks at school, which were relentlessly average – a hobby that didn’t involve her getting muddy or messing around with hammers and nails. But the castle enthusiasm showed no sign of waning. Instead, Lucy took the whole thing more and more seriously. And as the wondrous emblem of Treterfyn loomed ever larger in her mind, relations between Granddad Evans and Felicity came under increasing strain.

‘Just make sure she knows the difference between what’s real and what’s not.’ I overheard them in the garden on a gloomy day; she was taking down the washing from the line, and he was making some repairs to his Colossus of Rhodes birdhouse, a hollow wooden statuette painted a dirty shade of gold, which I knew Felicity particularly disliked. ‘It’s fine, her being interested in all this medieval stuff, but she lets her imagination run away with her. You know what Lucy’s like. She takes things very literally.’

I didn’t hear her father’s response to this – he started tapping at something with a hammer – but a moment later Felicity raised her voice to expose that keen and brittle edge that appears when something really gets under her skin. ‘I’m saying,’ she said, ‘just think sometimes. Can you try that, Dad? Just think.’

‘He’s getting worse,’ she said to me, some time after that. ‘He’s doing it to irritate me. Have you heard them talking together? Sometimes I can’t understand a word they’re saying. He’s acting like a pig-headed child, feeding her with this nonsense. It’s obsessive. And the way he dresses now, he looks completely ridiculous.’

It’s true his appearance had grown more eccentric in the few years I’d known him. When I married Felicity he was clean-shaven and as a rule quite well attired, but had since taken to experimenting with different moustaches and beards. His face would be nicked and bloody in places, his hands having trembled with the razor. His favourite combination was a walrus moustache and a wispy goatee hanging off the chin, and for a while he cultivated a pair of baronial sideburns. He went around the house in trainers, corduroys and a cardigan, supplemented on colder days with a faded burgundy dressing-gown, tied at the middle with something that looked like a curtain cord. He was a tall old man, with a tall old man’s stoop, and a shiny yellowish scalp with a pair of thick-framed reading glasses pushed high up on his forehead.

For his seventy-eighth birthday, Lucy made him a crown. She asked me to buy her silver foil and a piece of red velvet. Pleased she was involving me in something – actually more delighted than I wanted to admit – I went further and bought some cheap plastic jewels, a length of copper wire for decoration and a can of gold spray-paint. I helped her spray it in the garden when her granddad was having a bath. ‘You’re encouraging her,’ said Felicity, but I told her that was ridiculous. The finishing touch was the Vaughan coat of arms, which Lucy painted minutely on a beer bottle lid, carefully copying the stars, the turret and the appalled-looking lions. Granddad Evans was pretty pleased. He wore it for a couple of days, and then – much to Felicity’s relief – hung it in his bedroom, and only took it down for special occasions.

It must have been around this time that he assumed the title. It began as Granddad Vaughan-Evans, and then he stuck a Sir in front, but it must have been Lucy who came up with the rest: Sir Granddad Vaughan-Evans, Earl of the Stolen Tower. It was part of their private language, the lexicon of chivalry. It only increased Felicity’s frustration. She regarded it as a deliberate attempt by her father to cut her out. She forbade castle talk at the dinner table, and even attempted to limit the amount of time Lucy spent with her granddad – setting up play-dates with reluctant school friends and trying to deflect her medieval fascination with other occupations – but Lucy only turned sulky and sour, refusing to cooperate with anything, and so this attempt ended in defeat.

‘She’ll grow out of it,’ I said. ‘It’s not like it’s doing her any harm.’

‘What do you know about kids?’ Felicity responded. ‘You never spend any time with her. She only wants to hang around with him. I know him, I know what he’s like. He thinks it’s only fun and games, but she takes things to heart. He’ll end up making her as delusional as he is.’

It was also around this time, I suppose, that Lucy developed her violent hatred of Picards.

…

She studied her enemies’ family tree. Granddad Evans had dug it out as part of his researches. She read through the guidebook histories of Treterfyn and found that the first of them, Roger Picard, cropped up in 1311.

‘They were all called Roger and John,’ she announced in a scornful voice. I was washing up with Felicity, and Granddad Evans was sitting in his chair by the window, fixing a broken mast on one of his model Spanish Armada galleons. ‘It goes Roger Picard, John Picard, Ralph Picard, Roger Picard, Roger Picard, John Picard, then John Picard again. I think that’s really stupid, Granddad. Why didn’t they invent some more names?’

‘Picards are stupid,’ the old man said. ‘It’s a well-known fact.’

‘Please don’t egg her on,’ said my wife. ‘Lucy, there’s no such thing as Picards.’

But those casual words were enough for Lucy. Felicity hit the roof when Lucy’s teacher told her that she refused to speak to any boy called John or Roger at school. She was partnered with a Ralph for a science project, and insulted him all the time.

‘I hate them,’ she said when questioned on this. ‘They’re cowardly and stupid. They’re stupid cowards. They stole our tower, and we’re not being friends. I don’t talk to Picards.’

It took her granddad to convince her that the names John and Roger weren’t limited to Picards – there was a John Vaughan on the family tree, and no doubt a Roger Vaughan too. This placated her somewhat, but she still had troubles at school. Her teachers reported stubbornness and reluctance to socialise. She didn’t spend time with other children, preferring to read on her own and draw pictures – her teachers were puzzled by her themes, which my wife found hard to explain – and her marks got worse. She grew angry and frustrated easily, and was occasionally involved in fights with other kids. Felicity began to talk of child counselling. I said she was overreacting. Given our current position, however – the rain is running freely down my back, and this defensive lump of rock is starting to really freeze my hands – perhaps it wouldn’t have been such a bad idea.

‘What did Picards look like, Granddad?’ She asked this question quite a lot.

‘Oh, you’d know one if you saw one. Have you ever seen one of those faces that just makes you feel uncomfortable? Something you can’t put your finger on. A sneaking, cunning, untrustworthy look. Gives you a creepy feeling inside. Chances are, that’s a Picard.’

‘Have you ever seen one of them?’

‘Once or twice, I believe I have. And if they weren’t Picards, well, they may as well have been.’

‘What kind of armour did they wear?’

‘Nasty, dirty, rusty armour. Covered in dried blood and grime…’

‘Blood from all the animals they killed?’

‘And dirt from sleeping in bogs and ditches. They didn’t have a castle of their own, you see. They were too stupid to know how to build one. And nobody wanted to share with them. That’s why they wanted ours…’

Through the alchemy of these tales, Picards mutated into the familial bogeymen. Lucy genuinely hated them. She came to use the word as an insult. ‘Don’t be such a Picard!’ she’d yell at friends of her own age in arguments – friends, sadly, who’d already learned to distance themselves from my stepdaughter, understanding that the things in her head weren’t quite the same as the things in theirs – ‘You’re acting like a total Picard! Get away from me!’

So pervasive was this curse in our house that I even heard my wife snap to Lucy on one occasion: ‘If you don’t stop playing the Picard, miss, you’re going to get what’s coming.’

And then there was that one incident that caused even Granddad Evans some discomfort. Someone mentioned Canada, without thinking of its connotation. Lucy suddenly gasped, then asked: ‘Granddad? Was my dad a Picard?’ The expression on her face was similar to the way she looks on the rare occasions when she successfully solves a tricky maths problem.

…

‘How did they get their hands on it?’ This was one of the last conversations I remember overhearing between Lucy and her granddad. It didn’t take place in the Wonder Garden. This was in the last couple of months, when he was mostly resting. He was in bed propped up on a bank of pillows, his spray-painted crown mounted on the bedpost. Lucy sat attentively with him, like a stone dog at the feet of a sculpted knight.

Granddad Evans did his serious face. He was looking much weaker then. He’d been getting dizzy of late, his heart had been hopping irregularly, and his skin had that onion-like, translucent quality that suddenly reminds you that a person will never be young again.

‘That’s one of history’s great mysteries,’ he said, scratching the side of his head. His nails made a rasping sound against his skin.

‘But if they were so stupid, and such cowards, and our knights were so brave and good… How did those Picards ever get in? Why didn’t we fight them?’

‘I don’t know how they did it,’ he said. ‘The Picards had all kinds of tricks up their sleeves. But you know, maybe that’s not so important. It’s better to think of the good times instead…’

‘Did they throw dead animals over the walls? Did they have catapults? Maybe they got invited to a banquet, and came in disguise with their faces all covered, and when they’d eaten they threw off their masks and stabbed the Vaughans with daggers. Or poisoned the food. They might have used cyanide. Or did they sneak over the walls in the night, or swim across the moat, or, or…? Granddad, how did it happen?’

For once, the old man wouldn’t say. ‘That’s one thing I don’t know, Luce. I just can’t imagine.’

…

He died just over six months ago, on a Thursday afternoon. Lucy was away on a school trip that Felicity had spent weeks convincing her to go on, three days in Cornwall canoeing and sailing. Perhaps it was a good thing she was away. I don’t know. Felicity went in with a cup of tea, but her father was asleep. She came back half an hour later, and he was sleeping still. She left again, and returned in an hour. This time, I guess, it was obvious. She called me in from the living room, where I was watching a nature documentary.

‘Dad’s dead,’ she said. I went in with her and looked. He was lying very peacefully in a watery band of afternoon sunlight, his arms tucked under the eiderdown, and his head turned to one side.

I left it to my wife, of course, to tell Lucy when she got home. I smoked three cigarettes in the garden and studied the Seven Wonders birdhouses, the paint of which had peeled in the rain, and a couple of which were rotting. I opened up the Great Pyramid. Inside were the remnants of a nest, abandoned by the blue tits in the autumn.

Lucy didn’t say much for a week. We tried to keep her busy. She was strangely compliant for a while, even keeping up with her homework after she’d had a few days off from school. I tried to ask her how she was feeling but the question sounded stupid, and she looked at me as though she didn’t know what I meant.

She didn’t cry at the funeral. My wife cried, however. I remember feeling ashamed of myself for being surprised to see Felicity’s tears, and then feeling ashamed again for being strangely pleased she was crying. I felt I was seeing a part of my wife that I had forgotten about. Of course she’d organised the service very capably, reading a short, simple speech in which she detailed her love for her father as if she was listing bullet-points, which may have sounded odd to some people but not to those who know her. I don’t mean to suggest it was false. Felicity never says anything she doesn’t mean.

When Sir Granddad Vaughan-Evans, Earl of the Stolen Tower, was buried, I suggested to Lucy she throw in the bottle cap, the one from the crown, with the turret and the lions. I thought this gesture might appeal to her. But she shook her head.

For the next few weeks, both Felicity and I waited for Lucy’s reaction. We waited for grief, confusion, rage. But they never came. The little girl sank into quietness, going about her own private business as she had before. She didn’t complain or kick up a fuss. She never mentioned her granddad. When I took her to put flowers on the grave she even seemed slightly distracted. She opted to go to bed early each night, and seemed to be sleeping longer. Even when we started the inevitable process of clearing, sorting through the conservatory and getting to grips with the books and papers he had stashed away in there, Lucy showed little interest. She came and gazed at us from the doorway as we filled cardboard boxes and bin bags, and when we tried to ask her opinion on what to keep and what to remove, she didn’t seem to register the question. She accepted some of her granddad’s possessions – wooden models he had made, his paisley tie, a book on heraldry – stored them neatly in her room, and then seemed to forget they were ever there.

Felicity tried to spend more time with her, but it didn’t go very well. Lucy adopted a glazed, sluggish manner that Felicity couldn’t force her way through. It was like something inside the little girl had frozen.

About a month after the death, she started acting more strangely. She took to spending hours in her room, refused to go out in the garden, and sometimes we found her staring at objects as if her eyes were locked in place, as if her brain had stuck. She watched the same DVDs over and over, without a flicker of expression. It seemed like her face was constantly furrowed, and her mouth developed an infuriating pout which Felicity was convinced she had deliberately adopted.

On my suggestion, we turned the conservatory into a play-room when we’d finished sorting through it. We tried to get Lucy to ask friends from school over, but she said the kids in her class were all idiots. So Lucy didn’t play much in there. I hung her granddad’s crown on the wall and kept the model cardboard castle on the table, complete with its retinue of courtiers and knights, but even these objects seemed to hold little interest for her now. I came into the room one day and found her flattening the turrets with her thumb, squashing down the crenulations in a bored, destructive way. ‘Why are you doing that, Luce?’

‘It’s only cardboard,’ she said.

Her manners grew steadily worse over the summer. She was uncooperative and sullen, resentful of offers of help or affection, and Felicity’s patience began to wear thin. She tried talking to her, distracting her, buying her treats and presents at the weekends, giving her attention, leaving her alone, but Lucy responded only with rudeness. Frustrated, my wife took to snapping at her – a sure sign she felt the situation was slipping beyond her control. This didn’t improve matters much. What made things worse was that Lucy refrained from arguing or reacting the way she used to, but instead fumed silently by herself at the table or alone in her bedroom, never allowing things to be brought to a head.

‘Why is she doing this to me?’ Felicity demanded one night, after Lucy had sulked away, accepting her mother’s goodnight kiss with barely-concealed antipathy.

‘It’s a bad patch,’ I suggested lamely. I didn’t know what to say.

‘She’s turning into a brat,’ said Felicity. ‘My daughter’s turning into a brat. I don’t know what else I can do.’

‘Leave her,’ I said. ‘She’s still upset. She’s working through things in her own way. She’ll come out eventually. She has to, in the end.’

Felicity gave me a scornful look. ‘That’s typical of you,’ she said.

Lucy’s conduct at school was poor. She did her homework sloppily, even the subjects she was good at – English, History, Art, Geography – and in lessons, according to her teachers, she was surly and sometimes disruptive. She made enemies in her class, and started fighting more. Mostly, though, she just didn’t pay attention. Her teachers said she was like a brick wall. They also said other kids had accused her of stealing their possessions.

Felicity rejected this out of hand. ‘She may be depressed, but she’s not a thief,’ she snapped angrily over the phone, hanging up on the teacher who’d made the call. But then things started to go missing at home, and we realised it was true. At first we didn’t put two and two together. Small, insignificant things disappeared – hairbrushes, loose coins, makeup, ornaments, the igniter for the gas stove – and reappearing in Lucy’s bedroom, in a drawer or on a shelf, or just lying on the floor. There wasn’t any pattern or reason behind it. When we tried questioning her, she evaded the question. We removed the objects patiently and put them back in their proper places, but sooner or later something else would go missing. Felicity got furious, then worried. She made Lucy see the school councillor, and presently, when that didn’t work, a private child psychiatrist recommended by the family doctor. These sessions didn’t go very well. Lucy refused to talk. The predictable conclusions came back – ‘classic attention-seeking behaviour,’ ‘a manifestation of post-traumatic stress’ – but we were stumped as to how to turn these pop-psychological insights into anything remotely helpful. As Felicity pointed out, she’d tried everything, every tactic to break Lucy’s blockade, but the little girl only retreated further and further away. My wife’s worry grew and grew until she was almost hysterical. And then the worry’s character changed, and she got furious again.

I took to spending more time away from the house, when I could. I was unemployed for a couple of months, which made things a whole lot worse. Felicity was constantly irritable, and I couldn’t do anything right. I’d always felt subservient to her, which was fine when she treated me well. But now she treated me less like her husband and more like another troublesome child – not wilful and difficult like her daughter, but ineffectual, unsupportive and a little bit thick. It didn’t help when I tried to give my opinions about what was going wrong with Lucy, not that I had much to suggest. She didn’t want to listen. She flew off the handle. It seemed like everything in the house was slowly breaking down.

Perhaps things would have gone on like this. Or perhaps they’d have sorted themselves out in the end, of their own volition. I don’t know. But I got the idea when I found the letter, up in Lucy’s bedroom.

She was at school, and I was rummaging through one of her bedside drawers, looking for a book I’d lost and thought she might have taken. The letter was folded up inside a box that had a picture of a knight on the lid. The box had once contained sweets, I think, and I remembered her granddad had given her this a few months before he died.

I read it because it looked unusual. Lucy didn’t have any other letters, not that I knew about. It was written on a sheet of red construction paper, and the thing that drew my attention first was the Vaughan family crest, imprinted in a spindly hand at the top of the paper.

I told you this letter’s for a lonely time, for when I’m not around. So you must be feeling lonely now. I’m sorry I’m not there.

Always be strong and brave, like the knights. Remember one day we’ll be together again, in the family castle. There will be snow falling outside, or sunshine, or whatever you want. We can roast boars on the big log fire (or stuffed swans if you prefer), and we’ll be warm in our ermine cloaks. I will wear my crown.

Remember, it’s always there if you need it. Its walls have never been breached.

Don’t let anyone boss you around, especially not those Picards.

With all my love, your Sir G. Vaughan-Evans, E.O.T.S.T.

I sat there thinking about it for a long time, sitting on Lucy’s bed. And then I folded it up again and put it back where I’d found it. I didn’t mention it to Felicity, because already it felt like an intrusion, and I didn’t trust my wife enough not to bring it up with Lucy. I’m grateful, though, that I stumbled upon it – present circumstances notwithstanding – because otherwise I’d never have had this idea. Which, by the way, I still believe was a good one.

At first, Felicity wouldn’t hear of it. She thought it would dredge stuff up. ‘That’s exactly what we don’t need now,’ she said, ‘it would be a big step back.’

‘I think it would help,’ I told my wife. For once I was determined not to back down, to stick to a conviction. This was the first time in months that I’d felt like I knew the right thing to do – I was sure of it, exhilarated by it – and on this occasion I refused to give ground.

‘It’ll only upset her all over again. She needs to move on, not go backwards. She needs to find something else.’

‘But she’s not moving on. You said so yourself, she’s getting worse and worse.’

‘But how would this possibly help her? Besides, you don’t even know where it is.’

‘I looked it up,’ I said, producing a print-out of the road directions. ‘It’s easy to find. It’s a real place, with real roads leading to it. You can look it up on the internet.’

‘Lucy’s got an obsessive personality. That’s what the last shrink said. Poor Dad fed her with these ideas, you saw how obsessed she got over that, because she was so fixated on him. But Dad’s dead. She has to get over that. What would be the point of indulging it again?’

‘It might just put a stop to it,’ I said. ‘Have you ever heard of closure?’

‘Oh, don’t use those bullshit expressions on me…’

‘You’re the one who’s paying for them, you might as well listen to what they’re saying. I think Lucy does need to put a lid on this. She resents the fact that her granddad’s gone, she’s angry with everything in the world, but can’t express it except for being sulky and spiteful. We’ve tried lecturing her, listening to her, trying to get her to cry or explain, but none of that’s going to work because she doesn’t see things that way. Don’t you see? These things aren’t real to her.’

‘But that Vaughan crap isn’t real! It’s a load of nonsense.’

‘Yes…’

‘And that castle, wherever it is, isn’t real. Not in the way she imagines. It won’t be anything like Dad made out. It’s got nothing to do with us. How do you think she’ll feel then, when she finds out her granddad lied?’

‘But that’s just it,’ I said, pleased at how reasonable my voice sounded in contrast to my wife’s, which was getting frayed. ‘That’s the whole point. She’ll see for herself. Not that he lied, but that it isn’t real any more. She’ll see that the castle used to exist, but now it’s gone. That things move on. She’ll see for herself, in an adult way, and that’ll be so much more effective than anything you or I could ever say.’

‘Don’t tell me what is and isn’t effective,’ Felicity retorted, getting snappy now, ‘don’t tell me how to handle my daughter.’

‘This is a way to show we understand what Granddad Evans meant to her. It’s a gesture, don’t you see? A way to show we’re on her side again.’

‘You’re just trying to score points. This isn’t a game, Frank.’

‘Don’t you see how alone she is?’ I demanded, trying to provoke her now. ‘She needs us to acknowledge her sadness, not sweep it under the carpet.’

‘Are you really telling me you think this will help?’

‘Have you got any better ideas?’

We argued back and forth for days. Felicity threw every barricade in my way, and I managed to carefully pick them apart, take down her defences. She changed her position in every argument, saying that Lucy would be upset, or traumatised, or bitter and resentful, and finally that she would be apathetic. But my wife couldn’t get away from the fact that nothing else was working. Relations between her and her daughter had all but broken down. They were barely on speaking terms – meals were conducted in unbearable silence, both of them punishing the other for something neither really understood – and I think in the end it was sheer desperation that led her to agree to my suggestion. Eventually, she gave in.

‘Just make sure she doesn’t get in any trouble.’ This was after the latest news from school: Lucy had pulled a boy’s hair so hard she actually tugged him off his feet. ‘Don’t let her get too overwrought. She’s in an unreasonable mood.’
‘Why don’t you come too?’ I asked.

But Felicity was firm on this. ‘I’ve had more than enough of fucking castles. I can’t think of anything worse. This is your idea, anyway. I’ve given you my views on it. You handle this yourself, for once.’

Actually, I was relieved by this. Felicity’s presence would not have helped. The two of them needed to be apart, if only for a day. And of course I had a slight other motive, which, while hardly dishonourable, was something I couldn’t explain to my wife, even if it should have been obvious. I wanted Lucy to like me again. I wanted the chance to bond. I felt I’d been doing alright at this, before the advent of Granddad Evans’ death, which had taken Lucy right back to square one, with myself and everyone else.

Lucy is important to me. I truly know that now.

‘Fine,’ I said, ‘we’ll go together. Just me and her. Trust me.’

‘Good luck, that’s all I can say.’ I don’t know if my wife meant good luck or not. ‘Just keep her out of trouble. Don’t let her emotions run away with her, okay?’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I can handle it. It’s only a day trip to Wales…’

The plan was announced the very next morning. I’d scheduled it for the following weekend.

‘Frank’s got something to tell you,’ said Felicity, over the breakfast table. Lucy waited with a blank face, listlessly stirring the milk in her bowl.

‘Luce,’ I said, ‘I’d like to take you on a little trip this weekend. How would you like to come with me to find Treterfyn Tower?’

At first her expression didn’t change. I was afraid there would be no reaction. But when she glanced up, there was such wild delight that for a second, I almost believed. I almost believed that we would.

…

‘Luce,’ I say, ‘I just want you to know, while we’re waiting for something to happen, that I’ve had more fun with you today than I’ve had in…’

‘Shh!’ she hisses urgently. ‘Shut up, Frank, I’m trying to hear!’ Wide-eyed and open-mouthed she stares, straining to hear the sound of footsteps – the clank of armoured feet, of iron on stone – over the steady slap-slap-slapping of raindrops.

And so the Vaughans maintained vigil on the ramparts, ready for trouble if it should come, never letting down their guard. Their standards fluttered in the breeze, their shiny weapons reflected the sun. Sometimes something stirred in the forest – bears, wolves or giant boars – sometimes bandits or ogres came marauding down from the hills. But the knights of Treterfyn Tower kept watch for one foe in particular…

‘They’re coming up!’ Lucy screams. ‘The Picards, the Picards are coming!’

They came with long ladders, ropes, grappling hooks. They tried to dig tunnels under the walls and fill them with explosives. They wheeled siege engines up to the ramparts, they assaulted the door with a battering ram, they fired flaming arrows and animal corpses until death rained down from the sky…

Heavy boots stumbling up the stairs, the huff-huff of the copper’s breath, the hissing of his plastic cloak as it zips along the walls.

But the knights of Treterfyn knew no fear. They stood tall in their glittering armour, squinting against the sun. They drew their swords. They levelled their lances. They notched their arrows. They drew back their bows. They readied their vats of boiling oil. And they let them come…

I take a breath, then lob my lump of brick down into the stairwell. We hear it bouncing and booming off the stone. There’s a pause. ‘Of all the nerve,’ comes the voice of the landowner’s wife, shot-through with scandal. ‘They’re throwing missiles at us!’

Lucy follows suit with her rock, pitching it into the void. The echoes clatter, there’s a hoot of indignation, and she emits a wicked giggle. My stepdaughter glances up at me, and there’s fire in her eyes.

‘Tom, Ralph, you keep behind me,’ the copper commands in a hoarse whisper. ‘You boys might need to back me up.’

‘Watch out for the man,’ the landowner whines, outraged and vindictive. ‘He kicked me, Mr Price. He actually kicked me. There’s no telling what he might do.’

‘You stay well back, Mr Fitzherbert. Don’t worry, we’ll handle them.’ And then he directs his attention upwards. His voice ricochets up the stone stairwell to where we stand waiting. ‘I’m giving you hooligans one last chance to stop this foolishness before someone gets hurt! You’re already in enough trouble up there! You can’t get away! Come down from that tower!’

Lucy and I look at one other. She hands me another piece of stone, fumbling it in her slime-covered hands, and then rearms herself.

Blood-curdling threats didn’t frighten them. Nor did horns or war-cries. The great stone tower belonged to the Vaughans, it always had done, and always would do. They knew this in their hearts and bones. They would give no quarter!

The rain falls on Treterfyn Tower. I draw back my boot.

‘This one’s for the Vaughans!’ Lucy cries.

And I cry: ‘Death to Picards!’

Italy, as every schoolchild knows, is a beautiful land of green and golden hills in which wheat wafts plentifully in the fields, and a day without olives is a day without sunshine. Tuscany, however, is a hateful, sagebrushy kind of place in which a day without a poke in the eye, administered by a squat Tuscan’s finger, brings only the certain knowledge that tomorrow they’ll stick their thumb is there as well.

Italians divide into three categories: beautiful men with silk shirts and cigarette holders, beautiful women with hourglass figures and glittering, olive-black eyes, and sturdy, trunk-legged matriarchs clutching armfuls of tagliatelle. Tuscans have only one category: short, mean-spirited, wine-drunk motherfucker. Both male and female Tuscans wear greasy, creaking leather breeches and grubby jerkins into which they stuff rancid butter, hunks of old sausage and unspeakable clots of blood and hair to sustain them during long arguments with their friends and family. They have heavy stubble, thick necks and enormously powerful arms and hands, which they use to enforce their vulgar will on whoever is unfortunate enough to get in their way.

In times past, Italians rode elegant horses with gleaming flanks and flaring nostrils. In recent years they have swapped their horses for enormous, shining motorcars which they polish daily with their luxuriant moustaches. But Tuscans ride neither horses nor cars. They ride pigs. And not nice friendly pink porkers either, but great bristly-backed hogs with flaking skin, horrid squinting eyes and truly evil tempers. These pigs live on a diet of eggshells and cats, and will take a chunk out of a child’s leg if they can get close enough. The pig’s violent hatred for his Tuscan is only matched by the Tuscan’s violent hatred for his pig. This mutual disdain forms a powerful bond, and Tuscan and pig are seldom parted, eating, sleeping and fighting together. If you’re ever unfortunate enough to witness two married Tuscans copulating, you will undoubtedly also be witness to the synchronised fucking of a pair of beastly hogs, right there in the same bed. It’s an awful sight.

Italians are noted for their love of music, from the hushed excitement of the opera to the midnight serenade, in which a doe-eyed, slender-limbed youth will sing enchanting arias as his beloved combs her raven hair in the light of the silver moon. Tuscans also have a form of serenade, but this involves drunkenly and furiously howling, swaggering round in their piss-soaked breeches, and offering to fight their beloved’s male relatives from the meanest, thorniest, horniest old granddad down to the greasiest little baby of the clan. Generally it’s impossible to distinguish the sound of a Tuscan singing from the whoops, howls, groans and gurgles of a traditional fist-and-knuckle street fight.

While Italians play guitars with great skill, Tuscans’ fingers are generally too thick to master the subtle fret-work of their neighbours. Instead they play bagpipes incessantly, delighting in producing the most dischordant, screeching cacophony possible, accompanied on important occasions by slapping their fat hands against their bellies.

When Tuscans go on holiday to other parts of Italy, they wander around the parks and piazzas blinking dimwittedly in the sunlight, mashed-up fistfuls of spaghetti trailing from their hands. They stuff their ears with mozzarella to block out the chirping of birds, the noise of cappuccino machines, and the arias sung by doe-eyed youths. They don’t like the food much and they miss their pigs, which are banned under general Italian law for reasons of hygiene, aesthetics and public decency. They become gloomy and despondent, leading Italians and foreigners to conclude Tuscans to be a thoughtful and poetic people, brooding melancholically on matters like beauty and art.

But don’t let this fool you. It doesn’t last long. As soon as they’re back over the border – snorting and snotting excitedly through the mouldering streets that they call home – having thumbed the mozzarella from their ears and trampled the souvenirs they bought, having joyously kicked and headbutted their pigs and received equally joyous bites in their thighs and buttocks in return, they’ll return immediately to their swaggering, foul-mouthed, spiteful, obnoxious and antagonistic ways. The bagpipes will howl, the babies will curse, the drunks will defecate uncontrollably, and all the animals apart from the pigs will creep shyly away to Italy, which, as every schoolchild knows, is a beautiful land of green and golden hills in which wheat wafts plentifully in the fields, and a day without olives is a day without sunshine.

Figure 1a: the dining hall. Located, it seems, in an abandoned subway tunnel, panelled incongruously in teak, mahogany and other unsustainable hardwoods. Insufficiently lit by dim, recessed lights that give the room an atmosphere of twilight. Walls dustily cluttered with half-completed objects, broken bits of statuary that appear familiar at first glance, and at second glance unrecognisable. Things that make you say to yourself, ‘I’ll have a closer look at that later,’ but, of course, you never do.

Figure 1b: the dining table. It stretches the full length of the hall, and appears to be constructed from railway sleepers, or planks from some old galleon. It must weigh many tonnes. Glancing beneath, you see it is supported by a forest of legs of many different shapes and sizes, cannibalised from tables, chairs, props, walking sticks. Laid out upon the bare expanse of wood are two rows of dusty glasses, two rows of earthenware bowls, and some wooden spoons.

Figure 1c: the diners. At first you assume there are scores of them, but later adjust your estimate to just a few dozen. Calculating numbers is surprisingly tricky, due to the insufficiency of light and the peculiar amorphousness of facial features. Various races are represented here, and there’s an equal ratio of women to men, but around this table they all appear generic. It’s not helped by the fact they keep changing position without you noticing them move. You turn away from the man to your left, a Slavic gentleman with impressive moustaches, and when you turn back it’s an old Asian lady with spectacles like the lenses from antique telescopes. But it’s hard to be sure. Your concentration keeps slipping. Perhaps this is still the same person, with a different facial expression.

Figure 2: the egg-timer (a). It stands at the furthest end of the table, about the height of a grandfather clock, a truly impressive object. A baroque monstrosity of piped and fluted metal, like something from the palace of the Tsars. The dirty golden sand hisses audibly from the top chamber to the bottom, and an ingenious pivoting mechanism allows the whole thing to be rotated when the bottom chamber is full. This task, you imagine, will be performed by the diners sitting on either side, who are watching the sand’s flow closely. But the top chamber isn’t empty yet.

Figure 3a: the soup tureen. It is wheeled in on a serving trolley, and lifted onto the table by three waiters. Its arrival elicits little excitement from the assembled diners, though you, a first-timer, are awed by its size. ‘Could fit a whole lot of soup in there,’ you scribble on the first page of your notebook. But the tureen, as far as you see, has yet to be filled.

Figure 3b: the ladle. It’s a big one.

Figure 4: the observer. This is you. You still can’t quite believe you’ve been chosen to attend the fabled annual Dinner of Loss, but here you sit, notebook on table, wooden spoon in hand. A poorly accredited freelance journalist with a vague interest in ‘disappearing things’ – you’ve written articles on language extinction, vanishing glaciers, memory loss – you received the invitation three days ago, and cancelled all previous engagements. You’ve come across mention of the Dinner of Loss in the course of your researches, of course, but were doubtful if the rumours were true. As far as you know, one lucky observer is invited to attend every year, but you can’t imagine how the organisers came to choose you.

You came here in an ordinary taxi, though half expecting to be blindfolded and spun around for disorientation. You entered through an ordinary door, following the instructions. You descended several flights of stairs, walked down a mothball-smelling corridor, entered the long dining hall, and found your place-name waiting.

You’ve been here about forty-five minutes. The dinner is due to begin.

Figure 5: the gong. It gongs. A silence settles around the table.

Figure 6: the first intonations. Delivered by one diner after another, passing around the table in turn, at a steady metronomic pace, in an anticlockwise direction. Running, as far as you can note, as follows:

‘The auroch. The Barbary lion. The Japanese wolf. The giant short-faced bear. The upland moa. The American bison. The broad-faced potoroo. The American lion. The elephant bird. The Caucasian wisent. The cave bear. The Nendo tube-nosed fruit bat. The Darling Downs hopping mouse. The dwarf elephant. The Syrian wild ass. The St. Lucy giant rice rat…’

You scribble as fast as your biro can go, but the separately-spoken intonations dissolve into a quiet cacophony of names, murmuring like a disturbed sea, with little rhyme or rhythm. They don’t appear to follow any order, whether categorical or chronological. Your writing degrades into improvised shorthand you’re not even sure you’ll be able to read.

‘The ground sloth. The pig-footed bandicoot. The Balearic shrew. The Ilin Island cloudrunner. The Arabian gazelle. The Schomburgk’s deer. The sea mink. The Javan tiger. The tarpan. The great auk. The Alaotra grebe. The Bermuda night heron. The laughing owl. The bluebuck. The quagga. The sharp-snouted day frog. The Sturdee’s pipistrelle. The turquoise-throated puffleg…’

At last the first intonations stop. Page after page of your notebook is covered in increasingly frenetic scrawls. You think perhaps an hour has passed, but since they removed your watch at the door you have no way of knowing. The only indicator of time is the giant egg-timer down the table, the snakey sand still hissing inside, though the top chamber still isn’t empty. Your writing hand throbs painfully, and you’re glad of the few minutes’ interregnum in which each diner finds their glass has been filled with wine at some point during the proceedings. Following the lead of the other diners, you raise your glass into the air, casting wobbling wine-shadows over the wood.

‘Lost animals,’ a voice concludes quietly. And as the glasses chime together, the trio of waiters re-enters the hall bearing a steaming vat.

Figure 7: loss soup (a). The waiters approach the soup tureen. You rise from your chair to get a better look, thrilled to be witness to the fabled soup itself, and a slight tut-tut of disapproval issues from the diners beside you. You disregard this. You’re a journalist. You can’t help but elicit disapproval at times. You lean across the table, on tiptoes, to get closer to the action.

Actually, there isn’t much to see. The waiters remove the tureen’s heavy lid and upend the steaming vat. You strain to get a good look at the soup as it sloppily cascades into the tureen, but all you can make out is a viscous gruel, thickened occasionally with matter you can’t from this distance identify, a greasy sludge of no definable colour. Although the vat is of no small proportions, you guess the soup that has been poured must cover only an inch or two at the base of the vast tureen. When the gush comes to an end the waiters shake the last drops out, replace the cumbersome china lid, bow to no-one in particular, and retire.

Figure 8: the second intonations. Before you are even resettled in your seat, the next round has begun.

‘Geeze. Nagumi. Kw’adza. Eyak. Esselen. Island Chumash. Hittite. Eel River Athabaskan. Lycian. Kalkatungic. Moabite. Coptic. Oti. Karipuna. Totoro. Ancient Nubian. Yahuna. Wasu. Old Prussian. Old Tatar. Modern Gutnish. Skepi Creole Dutch…’

You begin to feel a little light-headed. Your biro loses track. You are forced to resort to abbreviations you despair of ever deciphering. But still, you must attempt to keep pace with the murmuring litany of names, must try to record as many as you can, for they are fast disappearing.

The air itself seems to draw them in. They have no body, no substance. The sounds are like vapour, amorphous, removed from reality.

‘Akkala Sámi. Old Church Slavonic. Vandalic. Mahican. Minkin. Scythian. Cuman. Pictish. Karnic. Etruscan. Wagaya-Warluwaric. Edomite. Tangut. Ammonite. Ngurmbur. Minaean. Phoenician. Ugaritic. Basque-Icelandic pidgin…’

‘Lost languages,’ the soft voice says, dropping at last a tangible sound – if there can exist a thing – into a silence you hadn’t been made aware of. Glasses clink. You have missed the toast. You are still trying to scribble last names before the sounds go out of your head. But it’s no good, you can’t remember.

Figure 9: loss soup (b). Again, the waiters bring the vat, and you get to your feet to see the gruel slide like an oil slick into the tureen, billowing up clouds of steam. It gives a thin, faintly saline smell. The lid is replaced. The table settles down. The sand inside the egg-timer whispers to itself in the corner.

Figure 10: the third intonations.

‘The Fijian weinmannia. The Skottsberg’s wikstroemia. The Prony Bay xanthostemon. The Maui ruta tree. The root-spine palm. The Franklin tree. The Cuban erythroxylum. The fuzzyflower cyrtandra. The Szaferi birch. The Cuban holly. The Hastings County neomacounia. The Yunnan malva. The toromiro. The Mason River myrtle…’

‘Lost plants and trees,’ says the voice, and you have the sensation of a door softly closed, a latch slipping down inside. Again, you weren’t aware the litany had ended. Your biro moves across the table, overshooting its mark. It occurs to you that much time has gone. You were lost in the murmuration, and when you skip back over the pages you find that your notebook is almost full. Hurriedly you fumble in your journalist’s pouch in search of a replacement. Glasses clink mildly around the table. You have missed the toast again. The waiters bring the vat.

Figure 11: loss soup (c). The giant tureen still echoes emptily as the soup crashes into the china depths. It looks as if an ocean could slide in there. The oily smell rises unpleasantly, saturating the air around. The smell makes you uncomfortable. It’s better to breathe through your mouth.

Figure 12: the fourth intonations.

‘The arctops. The sycosarus. The gorgonops. The broomisaurus. The eoarctops. The cephalicustriodus. The dinogorgon. The leontocephalus. The inostrancevia. The pravoslaveria. The viatkogorgon. The aelurognathus tigriceps.’

‘Gorgonopsians,’ says the voice. You don’t even know what this word means. You check the egg-timer timidly, shaking the cramp from your pen-clawed hand, but the sand is still flowing down, a never-ending stream.

Figure 13: loss soup (d). Another greyish slurry emits from the vat, frothing as it hits the walls. You notice some of the diners’ mouths are shielded with rags and handkerchiefs. The stink is becoming immense.

Figure 14: the fifth intonations.

‘The Belgae. The Karankawa. The Anasazi. The Kochapampa. The Tangipahoa. The Thraco-Cimmerians. The Huma. The Taino. The Khazars. The Kipchaks. The Sassanids. The Esnshonalanga. The Olmecs. The Hittites. The Picts. The Etruscans. The Fir Chera. The Tasmanian Aborigines. The Anaja. The Copts. The Arawaks. The Sumerians. The Cathaginians. The Calusa. The Boii. The Conmaicne Mara. The Cahokia. The Aquitani. The Vindelici. The Brigantes. The Maya. The Dál gCais. The Ui Liathain. The Hibernians. The Kushans. The Araparaba. The Macedons. The Amalekites. The Wiimbaio. The Toltecs. The Atakapas. The Zunghars. The Harappans. The Mughals. The Magadhas. The Moabites. The Pandyans. The Nazcans. The Timurids. The Seljuks. The Huari. The Chachapoya…’

You find yourself filled with a sense of despair. There appears no meaning behind these names. There is nothing to clutch onto here, they scarcely seem worth the breath they’re spoken with. You halt your hopeless scribbling – already you have skipped dozens, scores, perhaps hundreds have not been committed to paper, you will never recall them now – and scan instead the line of faces seated around the dining table, pointlessly and passionlessly intoning. They have no features, no identifying markings. They have reverted to a monotype. Ethnically, sexually and culturally dilute. It’s as if every race in the world has been boiled down to its component paste and stirred together into a beige-coloured blandness.

In increasing journalistic desperation, you search for something, anything. Some clue as to who these people are, or more importantly, why they care. But do they care? Why are they here? You try to remember what you have heard in the past about the Dinner of Loss, but find even this has slipped away. What is this roll call supposed to be for? What are you meant to be observing?

You close your notebook, and then your eyes. You’d like to close your nose as well, but the reek of the soup is all-pervading, it’s already inside your skin.

Figure 15a: the egg-timer (b). The silence is more general than before, and it takes you a while to understand why. The sand. The sand has finally stopped hissing. You open your eyes, and see that the diners have turned their heads to the far end of the hall, where, sure enough, the top chamber stands empty, and the bottom chamber is full.

Figure 15b: the egg-timer (c). More servants appear, and commence an operation that involves a set of tiny keys, which they use to loosen the brackets that holds it together. You realise the entire egg-timer unscrews, to divide the top from the bottom chamber. The empty top chamber is leant against the wall, while it takes six men to carry the bottom, staggering towards the dining table with the great sand-filled glass bell.

Somehow they lift it onto the table, and then clamber up on the table themselves, dragging it over to the soup tureen. Amid much grunting and strenuous groans, the sand is poured into the soup, every last grain shaken out of the chamber. Then the concoction is thoroughly stirred with the oversized ladle.

The pungency of the odour mounts. The diners are gagging politely. You pull your sweater over your face and try not to breathe it in.

Finally the servants do the rounds, ladling soup into each wooden bowl.

‘Ladies and gentleman, loss soup,’ says the voice, with infinite sadness.

Figure 16: loss soup (e). You stare in some horror at what lies before you. It reeks of bilges, dishwater. An oily film slides on its surface, and when you poke it with the spoon you disturb partially suspended bands of sallow browns and greys. Occasionally a translucent lump of matter rises to the surface, slowly revolves, and then sinks back into the anonymous slop. The sand forms a silt at the bottom of the bowl, something like Turkish coffee.

You cannot remember what you expected, but surely it was something more than this. Perhaps you imagined them swimming down there – shades of the Kipchaks, the wisents, the grebes, the canopies of long-extinct trees, intimations of dead Aboriginal tongues, the auroch and the Neanderthal, the melted glaciers, Homo floresiensis, ghosts of megafauna – but you find yourself confronted instead with a sewer-stinking broth. There’s not even any wine left to wash the stuff down. Is this perhaps some awful joke?

You look around. The diners are eating, ferrying the soup from their bowls to their mouths with mute determination. The liquid dribbles from their loose lips, splashing back into the bowls. Apart from the pitter-patter of soup drops, the only sound around the table is the steady champing of teeth against sand. Throat muscles clench and gulp. They are actually swallowing the stuff.

As unlikely as it seems, you find yourself suddenly hungry. You feel as if you haven’t eaten for weeks. You’ve lost track of how long you’ve been in this place. Your stomach aches with emptiness, a hunger of bottomless proportions. Steeling your nerves, you take a spoonful and bring it towards your mouth. But something tells you that will only make it worse. You just can’t do it. An enormous sadness grips you. Your spoon tips and the soup splashes onto the open page of your notebook, soaking through the paper and blotting the words.

You put the notebook back in its pouch and weakly rise to your feet.

‘I’d like… I’d like to add my own,’ you say, holding up your empty glass. Hollow eyes swivel, but no-one speaks. ‘My contribution… Such as it is. I lost my father. I mean, we don’t speak. We don’t know who each other are anymore. And long before that, I lost a toy that wouldn’t have meant much to anyone, but for me it was the only thing that seemed at all important. I left it under a tree in some woods. I used to think about it getting rained on. And… and I lost many friends. One in particular. I guess he decided he didn’t see the value in our friendship anymore. I lost contact with all my old girlfriends, and even the ones I stayed in touch with, I’ve lost them forever too. And I lost a love that needn’t have been lost. I could have kept it alive but I chose not to. And… I’ve forgotten certain smells and ideas. What the light was like at this or that moment, things I thought I could never forget… Someone’s face, someone else’s name… Who I was before…’

The words trail off. You’ve lost yourself now. Something tugs dully at the back of your mind, and for a moment you almost know what it is, but then it disappears like everything else, and you sit back in your seat.

The diners stare at you gloomily. Their jaws continue working up and down. The only sound is the sound of champing sand.

Finally you bring the soup to your lips. It doesn’t taste of anything at all.

I worked for six months in a psychiatric hospital. My job was to process the appeals that sectioned patients (or ‘clients,’ as they’re called) made against the terms of their detention under the Mental Health Act. This involved reading through their files, a fascinating and disturbing insight into how paranoia manifests itself in mentally unbalanced people.

I won’t mention the hospital’s name – and I won’t divulge any private details – or the paranoid fears of the people inside would almost be vindicated. Even though I was working as a temp, on minimum wage and completely untrained, I was given full access to highly sensitive patient information – names, addresses, medical history, medication, and criminal convictions including sex offences and paedophilia – with absolutely no safeguards in place to prevent misuse. I could have copied information to a memory stick, pasted it into an email or calmly photocopied what I wanted directly from the patient’s files. I’m sure if those patients were aware of this they’d feel their insecurities somewhat justified.

In reading through my first case histories, one of the things that immediately struck me was the extent to which their paranoid delusions conformed to apparent stereotypes of insanity. Many patients – a high proportion suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, often compounded by drug abuse – really did believe they were being monitored by unseen forces, that their lives were being manipulated by malevolent forces over which they had no control.

The other thing I began to notice was that many of their paranoid beliefs seemed to correlate with their cultural background. Thus, an old Afro-Caribbean woman believed she was cursed by a voodoo witchdoctor. A Christian from Africa believed that Satan was controlling his mind, another believed he was being watched by angels, and a middle-aged hippie, a classic freak burn-out, really was convinced his conversations were secretly being recorded by the CIA.

I suppose it makes sense that paranoid types latch onto the mental bogey-men with which they are most familiar. Just as the fears of medieval Christians might naturally translate into witches and demons, so modern sufferers project their latent insecurities onto whatever cultural equivalent is to hand. Voodoo, angels and MI5 might seem wildly diverse delusions, but they are symbols of exactly the same thing: the fear of an omnipotent force that’s inexplicably out to get you. They are also a manifestation of people’s seemingly unquenchable desire to feel themselves at the centre of something bigger and more important than them, to know that someone, even if ill-intentioned, is keeping a watchful eye. Strangely, paranoia becomes a reassurance that their lives really matter.

Last year the newspapers were full of a so-called ‘schizophrenia epidemic’ raging around the country. There was at least one high-profile case of a paranoid schizophrenic discharged from a secure psychiatric ward who stabbed a stranger to death in the street. The media howled about skunk and crack cocaine, drugs which do obviously make things much worse for anyone prone to mental illness, but failed to really open the issue up to serious debate. In the end it was widely acknowledged that the ‘surge’ in paranoid schizophrenia was probably the result of misdiagnosis, but not before sufferers had been demonised, facing predictable tabloid calls of “lock the loonies up.”

A small number of highly-publicised cases led to the Mental Health Bill 2006, which provided for the detention of mentally ill people before they had actually committed a crime – a kind of mental health pre-emptive strike. This was condemned by civil rights groups, as well as doctors and social workers, and the bill was thrown out by the Lords. It was passed the next year as a series of amendments to the Mental Health Act 1983, and although its measures were less draconian, the new legislation was perceived by many as a criminalisation of the mentally ill, cementing the growing public opinion that society needs protection from the mad.

Of course, violent people are a threat, and paranoid schizophrenics sometimes do turn violent. Many of the people detained in that hospital had committed serious assaults, striking out in anger and fear at people they believed were out to get them. On one occasion, I found myself having to restrain a female patient – again, completely untrained for this – who attacked the lawyer who was meant to be helping her. But compared to normal violent crime (I suppose we must accept violence as normal), offences committed by the mentally ill are proportionally very small. Treating frightened and vulnerable people as if they are dangerous criminals can only increase their isolation and sense of persecution, making them much less likely to come to the authorities for help.

And I can’t help thinking there’s something in the air that’s making things a lot, lot worse for anyone with latent paranoid tendencies. Every few weeks I get a letter through my door informing me that TV Licensing ‘enforcement officers’ are closing in on my neighbourhood, monitoring my house with equipment that can detect TV signals. These letters assure me I can’t hide, it’s only a matter of time. (‘Enfield is in our database. Evaders will pay,’ threaten the billboards, depicting an arial view of a suburb that looks like a giant circuit-board.) Then there are the adverts about benefit fraud showing unsuspecting law-breakers framed in a grainy telephoto lens – ‘We’re closing in’ – which encourage members of the public to rat on their friends and neighbours. An increasingly coercive and bullying tone is being set by the authorities, deliberately spreading suspicion and mistrust. Daily we are tracked by our card transactions, our internet browsing, our mobile phone signals, while the government constantly seeks more power to allow this information to be used for unspecified and euphemistic ‘security reasons.’

And then, of course, there’s the CCTV cameras. Britain boasts more of these per head of population than any other country in the world. It isn’t paranoia anymore. We are literally the most watched people on the planet. This seems to be reflected in the cultural climate of reality TV shows and the media’s obsession with celebrity, which encourages (and normalises) the around-the-clock surveillance of otherwise completely ordinary people. Having never suffered from paranoia myself, I can’t say for sure how this affects mental health, but it doesn’t take a genius to guess it isn’t helping.

It’s always been in every government’s interest to maintain a level of quiet paranoia among the people it seeks to control, whether this is done by God’s all-seeing eye or the cameras on our streets. In this sense, the current surveillance culture is nothing new or unusual. Mentally unbalanced (or acutely sensitive) members of every society have always feared they’re being watched. The crucial difference now, of course, is that they really are.

There’s nothing at all unusual-looking about the school at Sevettijärvi. It may be half buried in snow, the lights of the classrooms blazing into the darkness of kaamos, or polar night, but that’s normal for remote Finnish Lapland at this time of year. Inside, it’s modern and well-equipped, and the students – though there are not many – look and act like any other group of kids.

You wouldn’t know to look at them, but these children stand in the front line of a struggle to save a language, and possibly a culture, from extinction. They are the youngest speakers of Skolt, one of the three minority languages spoken by Finland’s indigenous Sámi. Listed as ‘critically endangered’ in the UNESCO Red Book on Endangered Languages, Skolt Sámi is spoken by just 300 people, most in their old age.

‘When I was at this school, there were 100 students,’ says teacher Seija Sivertsen. ‘Now there are 11.’

The precipitous decline of Skolt mirrors the plight of minority languages across the world from Manx to Eyak, the Alaskan tongue whose last speaker passed away in 2008. Of course, languages have always gone extinct, just as biological species have. History is littered with the names of vanished tongues, from Carib to Etruscan. But languages now face an extinction crisis at a rate never witnessed before, a mass die-off surpassing even the decimation of the planet’s biodiversity. The UN estimates that one language disappears every fortnight, and that half the languages spoken today will vanish within the next century.

Luisa Maffi of Terralingua identifies two basic phenomena that lead to the erosion of linguistic diversity: long-term demographic trends (the spread of a dominant language and culture) and specific historical upheavals like war. The Skolt Sámi have been victims of both. Uprooted from their homeland in Russia and resettled in Finland during World War Two, they became a minority within a minority, practicing different customs and religion, suffering discrimination even more than other Sámi groups.

‘Not only the Finnish people, but the Northern Sámi and Inari Sámi always teased the Skolt at school,’ says Tiina Sanila, an activist and singer in a Skolt metal band. ‘They don’t want to be involved with the other Sámi now. If you see that your culture is not respected, that it’s ‘un-modern’ and disliked, it undermines the community’s self-confidence.’

Tiina is fighting this legacy today through music and through politics, struggling to make Skolt relevant to a younger generation. ‘If you lose your language, it is the worst form of subjugation. Sometimes it feels as if we have already lost everything.’

Unless something dramatic happens soon, Skolt Sámi – and its repository of traditional lore linking the displaced community back to its long-lost homeland – looks set to join the 50% of languages predicted to vanish by the end of the coming century.

…

An hour’s drive south on the Arctic Highway, following the vast frozen lake Inarijärvi, lies the tiny village of Inari. Again, it doesn’t look like much – a scattering of wooden cabins huddled under snow – but this is the centre of the Inari Sámi, who have subsisted here for thousands of years on fishing and limited reindeer herding. The Inari also suffered during and after the war. The dominant Finnish population viewed their culture as primitive and backward, and the speaking of indigenous languages was heavily discouraged in the young. An entire generation grew up feeling ashamed of its heritage – echoing the experience of indigenous people from Australia to the Americas – and parents ceased teaching the language to their children.

The Sámi call this the ‘lost generation,’ and speak of a traumatic loss of identity that imperilled the language’s chances for survival. Like Skolt, Inari is critically endangered, hovering at around 300 speakers. But while Skolt’s decline appears irreversible, Inari Sámi has in recent years remarkably bucked the trend. Through a pioneering ‘language nest’ programme launched by a handful of committed activists, the language is seemingly pulling itself back – child by child and speaker by speaker – from the brink.

Trudging through deep powder snow on a visit to the Sámi Radio offices – which broadcasts in all three Sámi tongues – I meet language activist Annika Pasanen, a Finn who’s been part of the Inari community for the past 20 years. Annika’s work involves the revitalisation of Finno-Ugric languages from Inari Sámi to Russia’s Karelian, minority cultures under similar pressure to assimilate and forget their heritage.

‘You have been told that you must be civilised, your language and culture is not important, it’s taboo, so you teach your children the dominant language,’ says Annika. ‘A kind of trauma has been caused. People feel ashamed of what they are. The language nest helps heal this trauma.’

The concept of the language nest is simple: a kindergarten in which only Inari Sámi is spoken, normalising children to their ancestors’ tongue from a very early age. It was launched in 1997 by a man called Matti Morottaja, who is spoken of with awe in these parts for his vision in revitalising the language when it appeared all was lost. Despite initial scepticism, a gradual growth in child speakers – the determining factor in a language’s survival – has kick-started Inari culture and effectively bridged the gulf that formed during the ‘lost generation.’

As with many indigenous tongues, the Sámi languages have evolved as vehicles for the transmission of highly specialised forms of knowledge, particularly in regards to the local ecosystem. In an environment as extreme as the Arctic Circle, this knowledge is particularly crucial. Sámi languages have 30 words for snow, and hundreds of words specific to the intricacies of reindeer herding, describing the animals’ age, size, colour, shapes of antlers, and even how they walk. If minority languages disappear, vital knowledge goes with them. But as Inari Sámi demonstrates, it isn’t enough for languages to remain fossilised, locked in the past. Amazingly, Inari is actually growing now; new words are constantly being coined as the lexicon expands to envelop new ideas and technologies, and even a recently-discovered species of mushroom.

‘Language has to change, otherwise it dies,’ says Annika. ‘Some older people think we must keep Sámi preserved as it is. It’s very important these attitudes do not dominate. If it’s kept in a museum, it cannot live.’

…

The proof that language death can be halted is good news for minorities worldwide, and the Sámi have forged contacts with indigenous groups in many other countries and continents. At Sevettijärvi school I notice the children are wearing green stone pendants, which turn out to be gifts from their headmistress from a recent trip to New Zealand, where she was researching language revitalisation amongst the Maori. Their presence in this land of snow and ice shows how different cultures can pool hard-won knowledge and experience to help them resist the great language die-off. As Tiina Sanila makes clear, once cultures lose their language they lose their confidence and self-respect, severely weakening their chances for survival in an increasingly globalised and homogenised world.

But the implications of language death reach far beyond isolated cultures, affecting even us majority-language speakers to whom the threat seems so remote it feels entirely abstract. Linguist K. David Harrison notes that if indigenous languages vanish, ‘so will important, long-cultivated knowledge that has guided human-environment interaction for millennia. We stand to lose the accumulated wisdom and observations of generations of people about the natural world … The sobering fact that both animal species and human languages are going extinct in tandem portends an impending loss of human knowledge on a scale not seen before.’

‘Without language, there are not memories,’ is one of the last things Annika says as I make my journey back through the snow. As humanity seemingly sleepwalks towards a future stripped of diversity – linguistic, cultural and biological – we will need all the memories and knowledge we collectively possess.

All of Jack’s girlfriends have something in common, though none have realised it yet. Actually, they have two things in common. First, they are all cyclists. Jack is also a cyclist. That isn’t unusual. It’s almost expected. Cyclists will naturally cleave to one another, craving the warm reassurance of flesh as a counterweight to those lonely, whirring wheels, that too-perfect point of balance. Also, cyclists go to cyclist parties, where they meet and make bike-talk and fuck.

But Jack doesn’t meet his girlfriends at parties, though he does attend them, sometimes. Jack despises the cyclists who meet their girlfriends at parties. Perhaps despise is the wrong word. Jack doesn’t really despise other people. More, he looks down on them. For reasons both tactical and aesthetic, he spends a lot of his free time on the balcony of his seventh-floor flat, overlooking the towpath of Regent’s Canal. He is used to looking down on people.

Jack has had a lot of girlfriends, certainly by pedestrian standards, but never more than one at the same time. Whatever else Jack might be, he is not adulterous. Adultery doesn’t come easily to cyclists. Cyclists do things in ones. It’s different for pedestrians, strolling along at lovers’ pace, hand in hand or over shoulder, bound to their walking partner. It’s possible to walk while embracing. It’s possible to kiss-walk. It’s even possible to walk and have sex, though not particularly pleasant. But cycling is a singular activity, even when you are in love. Even when free-wheeling side by side – down a slow hill say, when the leaves are falling – the tips of your handlebars almost touching, spokes whirring the same tune, you will still be cycling alone.

Flirting is a different matter. Cyclists flirt well. Jack’s dad liked to quote from cyclologist Howard Rhineshaft’s seminal study In and Outs of the Cyclo-Sexual Revolution: ‘The acts of cycling and flirting are virtually indistinguishable. Cycling is flirting in essence, in and of itself.’ The words impressed Jack from an early age, and in subsequent years he discovered their truth. Weaving in and out of parked cars, playing hard to get and doubling back, sketching invisible lines in the air that tangle around one another in a knot that tightens and tightens towards its own centre, drawing two spheres together. Cycling is the purest form of flirting, purer – or so Jack likes to think – than the mating rituals of birds or Argentinian tango. Ordinary, non-cycling people could no more hope to understand this than a mole could hope to understand the sensation of flight.

Jack flirts on bikes, but for him this comes later. For Jack, the flirting comes after the event.

Cyclists have an inexorable quality. Physicists have remarked on this. They are like water slipping through pebbles, filtering through solid surfaces, always seeking the path of least resistance.

It is amongst this amorphous tribe that Jack goes looking for love.

Doubtless it will happen at one night’s party: two girls searching for unused glasses, pausing to comment on the Marmite-covered helmet or the bike pump stuck in the pineapple. They gently collide with one another at the sink. Take the usual ways into conversation. A prior connection, a mutual recognition, or perhaps something triggered innately that sets off the siren of shared experience, that uncanny cyclesense.

‘Who do you know here?’

‘I’m here with my boyfriend. He’s over there, that’s him. He’s the one wearing the fluorescent top hat.’

‘Oh, you’re going out with Jack?’

‘How do you know Jack?’

‘We were together a couple of months. I haven’t seen him in a year.’

‘You did? You’re not Caren, are you?’

‘No, I’m Jenny. He never mentioned me? Well, it wasn’t a very big thing.’

‘We haven’t been together long either. So, how did you meet him?’

‘It’s a pretty funny story. Not your usual introduction.’ Jenny pauses and smiles, thinking back. One of those tales she is used to telling. A requested favourite amongst her friends, even if events ended badly. ‘I was cycling down along Regent’s Canal, going under all those low bridges. Suddenly I just saw this guy come veering the opposite way towards me. We were both going a little too fast. We swerved the same way at the same time. I couldn’t get out of his way…’

‘That’s… weird…’ The girl narrows her eyes. Suspecting a lie. A joke, a put-up. But the other girl, not noticing, rinsing out a smeared wine glass filled with chunks of fruit and fag ends, innocently talks on.

‘…and we weren’t hurt bad, we didn’t really crash crash, but I had a scraped-up elbow, a bit of grit stuck in there. He was really nice. He apologised, though it wasn’t entirely his fault. You know, sometimes you’re just not looking. Anyway, he lived nearby, so he invited me back. To get cleaned up. Does he still have that flat, actually, up on the seventh floor…?’

‘Um… yeah. But… this sounds really weird…’

And from here, slow disbelief will unfold as the second girl stumblingly echoes the first. But it can’t be… It must be coincidence, surely. Ridiculous, mad to imagine that… They will stare at each other in dawning comprehension – ‘But… Jack’s so good on his bike. It doesn’t seem right, two smash-ups the same as…’ – the incredulous widening of eyes that have seen a thousand roads rolling towards them, ticker-taping concrete miles. Fume-stinging, road-hardened, cyclists’ eyes, searching for explanation. ‘A scraped-up elbow… a bit of grit stuck in there…’ Both girls now rolling up their skin-tight sleeves to reveal – like something from a horror film – the healed-over scar on the forearm or elbow, the almost identical markings…

And if Jack saw this, would he try to stop it? Would he try to break in? Would he leave the room? Or would he just stand there and watch events unravel, that inscrutable smile playing on his lips, his upper face lit by the fluorescent glow of the ridiculous top hat perched on his head, like a boy with buttercups under his chin?

Only Jack knows that.

In any event, it hasn’t happened yet. It may one day, but not now.

‘Women know cyclists are good in bed. Good cyclists make good lovers. Same goes with cooking. Women go for cooks. If you can cook and you can cycle, you’ll have no trouble in that direction.’ Jack’s dad told him this when he was fifteen. Some years after the birds and bees talk, the tactical advice began. ‘It’s about speed, smoothness, control. The same qualities count in both things. Rhineshaft drew the comparison first in Cyclo-Sexual Revolution. And there’s risk in both too. You learn to love that risk. But you have to have smoothness and control. Remember the perfect line.’

‘I know, Dad. The perfect line.’ Fifteen year-old Jack, taking off his cycle helmet. No girlfriends as yet, can hardly cook a boiled egg, but already with a decade of cycling experience under his reflective belt. Frustrated by his father, but in thrall to him still. ‘You never shut up about the perfect line.’

‘It’s important, Jack. Say you’re travelling at speed, rounding a corner, going down Druid’s Hill. The perfect line is the optimum point achieved between speed and bearing. It’s maths, but you could never calculate it. You know it when you feel it. When you hit the perfect line, you’re existing in the moment. It’s a pure state of being. The perfect line extends to all things: making love, even cooking, if you like. But cycling is where you feel it most. A state of absolute balance.’

Jack’s dad had started him cycling young. He saw it as the next stage up from walking. He tutored him in every aspect of cycling philosophy, tuning and honing his son’s abilities with the same dedication in which he tightened his spokes. And when Jack once lost the perfect line and went over the handlebars down the road, landing on the back of his head, staggering shocked and hurt back home, it was his father who patched him back up, sponging the blood from his matted hair, teaching him to be strong once again in the world.

You could say his dad was somehow responsible for Jack’s singular approach to relationships. Something his old man didn’t teach him, however, was how to meet girls in the first place. This lesson, Jack had to improvise for himself.

Sometimes they last for a couple of months. Sometimes, only one night. The longest relationship Jack’s ever had was just under three months, but this was less to do with love and more to do with his bike being stolen, putting a halt to his towpath prowling until he had built a new one. (Jack only rides the machines he builds. To travel on a pre-made, shop-bought bike would be like using chat-up lines looked up on the internet.) Jack’s restlessness, his itchy, selfish streak, must correspond to some fundamental boredom deep inside his being. But it dovetails also with the cyclist’s instinct, the impulse to jump a glaring red light, to take shortcuts down steps and over pavements, to cut across taxis with seconds to spare – the insatiable urge to pedal on, carving up the hills.

He sees them coming from a distance, far along the towpath. Advantages of the canal include an uninterrupted line of view and limited space to manoeuvre. He uses his seventh-floor balcony to accustom himself with the regular commuters, getting to know their comings and goings, familiarising with their cycling styles, their legs, the colours of their helmets.

He doesn’t believe in accidents. Not after the first time. It happened almost two years ago, the night he learned how to break through. Bleak Jack was pacing it down Hackney Road, going nowhere in particular, thinking violent and gloomy thoughts, as he had a tendency to do. Jack was a miserable bastard back then. All he did was fantasise and complain. That night he was obsessing over the lines: not the perfect line his father had taught him, but the binding lines of his supposed independence, which hemmed his ambition and imagination on all sides. He was brooding on the white lines on the road that separated that stream of traffic from this, the yellow lines skimming beneath his front tyre, the cyclists squeezed into their narrow line – a flashing neon circus parade – between the cars and the kerbside. The cyclist’s loneliness stung his eyes. Everyone tracked into parallel lines that ran alongside one another without crossing. An incessant current of lives skimming past, always missing the connection.

He made a sharp turn down a left-hand street, and she was coming the other way. All he saw was a blur of girl, mounted on top of a royal green racer, heading so unmistakably for him they might as well have crashed already. He didn’t react. He just squeezed up his face. He caught the shocked intake of her breath as she swung her front wheel and missed him by inches. His body felt an impact that never occurred. And a second later she was gone again, whipped into the traffic on the main road, and he was halfway down the street, still travelling at speed.

Once, teenage aged, he’d been on a train and witnessed a reassuring thing. Just as the train pulled away from the station, a woman had yawned on the platform. A few seconds later, the man beside him, sitting by the window, also yawned, and Jack had witnessed that same yawn passed down the carriage from one seat to the next, propelled away from its originator into far country fields. Perhaps it would even reach the next city, and conquer that in turn. It gave him the sense that strangers were connected. An early notion that there might exist ways to hop the usual strictures.

And that’s when it occurred to him, as he pedalled on through the East London night, still heading nowhere in particular but carrying a startling new idea. The simplicity of it terrified him. That’s all it would take. All that was needed to cross the parallels. The merest shift of his right arm’s weight, the slightest redirection of the bike’s front wheel, and two lives that could have been apart forever would come together for a while.

It was something he’d always known, but never dared phrase so simply. Bicycles cut through the barriers. Bicycles are an arrow into the heart.
His dad had explained things like this, but the language was always obscure. Murky quotations from James P. Valdek’s renowned Probability Studies in Bicycle Physics, another of his favourite books. Some of the things that Jack knows were things he had to learn for himself, and some come from his dad. His dad crammed him with so much bullshit that sometimes he can’t remember whose knowledge is whose.

Aged seventeen, Jack and his friend Saul took two weeks off from their summer jobs to ride four hundred miles down to Cornwall. They slept on beaches, smoked cigarettes in fields, and engaged in some minor but satisfying acts of vandalism. They rode down steep country roads and over farmland, forded rivers and penetrated forests, rode their bikes drunk, naked, and, experimentally, blindfolded. Jack was experiencing freedom from his father, yet at the same time following in his tracks, obeying the call of the open road and the poetry of the whirring wheels to which his father had dedicated his life. And when he came home, his bike loose and rattling, his father was patiently waiting. They embraced each other briefly, drank a cup of tea, and together began the process of light repairs.

Jack’s flat, up on the seventh floor of a 1970s ex-council block, looks much as you might imagine. Cannibalised frames, spare wheels, brake cables, inner tubes, tyres hanging from nails in the wall, encrusted cans of WD40 and vulcanising solution. But there are green plants here too, watered faithfully every two days, stacks of books, CDs, old videos, bits of furniture he’s picked up on the street or dragged home out of skips. His tiny kitchen is well stocked with food, garlic and dried chillies hanging by the window, fresh herbs, spices, assorted cooking oils, a shelf lined with opened bottles of spirits. There is always a saucepan of soup on the stove. French onion is one of his specials.
Jack’s bed, surprisingly, is small: a single mattress on a squeaky frame, the sort of bed a child would have. His girlfriends complain about the bed, but Jack has become attached to it. His bicycle and his bed are the two essential wheels of his life, and Jack, like many cyclists, is superstitious of change. In a small wicker bowl beside the bed are some condoms and a puncture repair kit. There is no decoration on the bedroom walls apart from a hanging tatami mat and a couple of framed paintings of horses he found outside a pub.

The bathroom is even smaller than the kitchen. Here, alongside a selection of toothbrushes of all different colours – toothbrushes he could probably match, if he wanted, to the mouth of one girl or another, just as he could match discarded clothes to departed bodies – he keeps the selection of Band Aids, gauze, cotton wool swabs and bottles of TCP necessary for patching up, after the event.

He doesn’t enjoy this part, however. Don’t go thinking Jack’s some kind of pervert who gets off on seeing girls scraped up. Whatever else Jack might be, he is not an injury fetishist. He does all he can to minimise damage, both to the crashee and to himself, and – not that he’s paid for this – he is a professional. It’s a calculated and controlled collision, executed with skill. And is it really much different, he asks himself, to feeding someone booze or amphetamines, half a pill here, a line of coke there, a dab of MDMA on the gums, in the hope of jumping those degrees of inhibition that way? Intoxication does more lasting damage than a minor collision on bicycles. A grazed elbow or bruise on the shin heals quicker than killing your brain cells in job-lots of several million at a time.

Only rarely has any collision resulted in either party unsaddled. Most often, the front wheels glance off one another, bringing them together in a mesh of parts, a tightened knot of handlebars and limbs. Ideally the girl will grab his arms to steady herself as she totters. And the way Jack swings it, this is his talent, is to make it appear as if the fault had been entirely equal.

‘Are you okay..?

‘Shit, that was close…

‘Are you hurt? You’ve got a scrape on your arm…

‘You can’t see people coming round that stretch…

‘Was that spoke loose like that before?’

The natural reaction is shock, then relief. Jack forestalls anger through apology, which leads the crashee to apologise with equal insistence. They will laugh, because that’s what you do after shock, and the exhilaration of the accident will induce a slight euphoria. They will disentangle their bicycles, an act of surprising intimacy, and drag the machines to the side of the towpath to let other cyclists pass.

‘You’re bleeding there. You need a plaster on that…

‘That wheel needs resetting. I could do that in two minutes…

‘Look, do you live far away? Because that’s my flat, you can see it from here…

‘My name’s Jack, by the way…’

And he will point to the tower block over the canal, the seventh-floor balcony. If you look hard you can see the grubby flag, the old wheel wired to the railing.

But Jack must possess some species of magic. For once he’s got the girl up there, cleared the clutter off the flimsy table and set out a pot of tea and first aid kit, he doesn’t have to do anything else. He doesn’t need to sleaze or seduce, there is no shock and awe to his methods. He doesn’t say very much at all. The risk has been taken, the danger point is passed. From this point, Jack becomes quite shy.

‘Um, are you hungry? There’s some soup on the stove. Might be good for shock…

‘It’s French onion. I make a lot of soup. This one’s pretty good.’

And so together they’ll spoon soup and sip tea, and chew energy bars for dessert. He’ll deftly fix whatever damage was done, both to her and to her bike. She’ll say she needs to go, but will seem curiously unhurried. The light will change outside the window. She’ll glance over his cluttered shelves of books, and find several titles she knows. They might have a glass from the half-empty bottle of wine on top of the fridge. Before long they’ll be laughing together, delighting in an odd experience shared. They’ll converse in the secret language of cyclists, a tongue as alien to pedestrians as their preferred style of outfit. And sooner or later, she’ll brush up against him. This is the way it goes.

Of course, he’s tried meeting girls the other way. The normal way, as if it’s ever normal to assume intimacy with a total stranger in the hope she’ll come home and have sex with you. He’s tried at the parties, the pubs and the clubs. He’s struck up conversations at private views, exhibitions of awful political art at squats and social centres. But it doesn’t carry the same exhilaration. Those girls look right through him. Out there, in the pedestrian world, Jack is a non-entity. He may as well be one foot tall. No-one notices his qualities. When he speaks his words are eaten by static, lost in background noise. No-one can quite remember his face. But in the cycling world, it’s different. He hits the perfect line.

He’s dabbing at a girl’s sore arm with TCP-dipped cotton wool. He’s stretching out a limb of his own for reciprocal first aid. His wry apologies, tempered by that smile, embody the shyness and the arrogance only cyclists can combine in such perfect proportions that sometimes you don’t know if you’re making love to a twelve-speed Raleigh or a person. He’s tuning the brakes, wrenching a bolt, resetting the wheel that was knocked off-kilter. And those dimples either side of his mouth act as a further incentive, somehow, to prolong his smile, to make him laugh, to peel back the secret of his sense of humour, which, like much of what Jack’s about, is particularly hard to fathom. In the cycling world, Jack is someone else. He transforms.

Jack is a believer in secret powers. Force fields, rubbery and resistant, that surround our daily lives, silently repelling potential connections that might become detached from their tracks and wander onto our own. But Jack has discovered how to break the lines. A way to make trains jump tracks. The only force strong enough to propel him from his own life into somebody else’s.
That’s the only way Jack can do it. The only way he knows how.

But Jack’s been having dreams of late. It’s been happening for some months. He’ll be asleep, entangled with the latest crashee – the bedroom floor littered with reflective garments, Lycra, bike clips, clip-on lights and other accoutrements discarded in passion – when suddenly he’ll shock awake with that same vision in his head: the terror, the red streak.

It comes so fast it tears open the air. Always from just outside the periphery, the vulnerable blind spot. At first it’s a sense, then a sound, then a fear. A feeling of the absolute loss of control.

He’s always known it, he knows he has. But he can’t think back to when it started. It’s something way back there out of sight, in the clutter of the years. It makes him uneasy. He doesn’t want links. Not links like this, that he can’t see. Jack verges on the anal, at times. He likes his cut-off lines to be neat. But of course, it doesn’t really work like that. There are no neat cut-off lines from family.

His mum came to visit six months ago last, down on the National Express. She looked out of place at his kitchen table, running her eyes around the walls which contained no things she knew, nothing to relate to the Jack she remembers, the little Jack with the bad haircut. He’d brought few things with him when he left. Most of his old stuff’s still back at her place, stacked in cardboard boxes somewhere and labelled with marker pen. He doesn’t have any need for it now. He’s got all he wants right here.

‘Why do you need all these bikes?’ she asked. It wasn’t a great conversation topic, but presumably the only visual stimulus at hand. ‘It looks like a bike repair shop in here. Isn’t one enough?’

‘I’ve only got one I actually use,’ he explained, as he’d explained before. ‘The rest is all spare parts. I fix them up for other people, too. There’s a co-op in London Fields.’

He almost expected her to say it, then; jokingly, of course. ‘You’re almost as bad as your father.’ But of course, she didn’t.

‘Have you heard from him, then?’ she said instead. The effect was pretty much the same, despite her casual tone. She was distractedly reading a leaflet that one of his girlfriends had left behind, something about how to make a wind-turbine out of an old washing machine.

‘A bit,’ Jack said, lying. ‘Just touching base. I think he’s doing okay.’
‘Who on earth has time for things like this?’ she said, regarding the leaflet blankly.

‘There’s a lot of people like that round here.’ Jack waited for a little while, hoping she’d say something else, but she didn’t. ‘So what about you? Have you heard from him?’ He found the words a strain.

‘Of course I hear from him. A little distantly.’ Jack wasn’t quite sure what that meant.

He has an older brother, too. He doesn’t see much of him either. Alex lives in Shepard’s Bush with his long-term girlfriend, Roe, who he says he met at the gym. Jack distrusts people who go to gyms. Cyclists generally do. Alex never comes to East London, and Jack rarely goes West. There’s nothing for him over there. The last time he saw him they met centrally, in a pub that Alex was drinking at with some of his work friends. His friends all wore sweaters over their shirts, and rolled back their sleeves after three pints. Jack hung his helmet on the back of his chair and sipped despondently at an ale that tasted like it was made of wood. They were all talking about the developments for the 2012 Olympics.

‘You live over that way, don’t you?’ one of his brother’s friends asked him. ‘How are property prices going up?’

‘I don’t really know. I rent,’ said Jack.

‘When they finish the Underground links, everything’s going through the roof.’

‘I don’t go underground,’ said Jack, trying not to lay too much scorn on the word. ‘I don’t really use public transport.’

‘My brother never gets off his bike,’ said Alex condescendingly. ‘It’s all Dad’s fault. You should have seen the two of them together. The Lycra Boys, that’s what my mates called them. It’s all they ever went on about.’ But he didn’t take that topic too far, because it was uncomfortable. Instead, they all started talking about the times that cyclists had gone through red lights, or not stopped at zebra crossings, or almost run them down on pavements – it was like listening to a bunch of goats bleating – and Jack simply switched off.

One of the worst days of Jack’s life occurred when he was about thirteen, when him, his dad, his mum and his brother went cycling in Leigh Woods. It was one of those patching-up excursions, an embarrassingly obvious attempt to get them all doing something together, something to make everything seem okay. They all had their own bikes, of course, his father had seen to that, but his mum and Alex kept theirs in the shed, next to the lawn-mower. It was clear to Jack even then how the family was sliced neatly down the middle, like a lump of cheese. Him and his dad rode on ahead, side by side at cruising speed, following the little painted markers that told them which identical paths to take, while Alex lingered back with his mum, who was scared of going fast.
It was humiliating to watch her. Jack felt guilty for thinking this, but he couldn’t help it. She was hesitant, clumsy, ridiculous-looking, with her helmet perched too high on her head, wobbling when she hit a bump. It made him feel dislike for his father for putting her on show like this. So they left her and Alex behind, escaping down their own open roads, going in silence, as they always did, because they didn’t need to talk.

After a while, Alex caught them up. He had a ponytail in those days, tied back with a rubber band, that Jack said made him look like a girl. Sometimes, even now, when Jack sees a ponytail, he thinks about that day.

‘Mum says you two have to slow down,’ said Alex. He managed to give the words ‘you two’ a patronising emphasis, like a bossy teacher talking to a couple of children. ‘Don’t keep leaving her behind like that. You may be the big cycling experts, but we’re meant to be doing this together.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ muttered his dad. ‘Can’t we just do what we bloody want for a change?’

‘Come on, Dad, it’s not fair,’ said Alex.

Something happened then to his dad. It was like his whole body tightened.

‘Come on, come on then, let’s go back!’ he shouted, swinging his bike around. ‘You heard what she said. For Christ’s sake!’

He rode back down the track very fast, and Jack and Alex followed him. The way he pedalled reminded Jack of the way his mother beat eggs when she was angry about something. The drab brown woods flew by on either side, and Jack concentrated glumly on keeping his front wheel ahead of his brother’s, just slightly, so it wouldn’t look like he was trying. He could see the wheel-tracks in the mud that showed where they had passed before, weaving in and out of one another.

Neither him nor Alex saw it happen. Their dad went round the corner, fast, and then there was a yelp and a kind of tearing sound, and when they rounded the corner themselves they saw their dad had skidded to a halt, and their mum was lying beside her bike in the wet leaves at the side of the track.

‘You bastard!’ was the first thing she said. Jack had never heard her say this word before.

‘Sorry,’ said his dad, but he sounded furious. ‘I thought you were further back.’

Alex helped her up, and then straightened up her bike, but she threw it back down into the leaves. Her legs and her back were covered in mud, and there was thick mud all over her hands from where they’d slid across the ground. She stared at her hands in disgust, and then looked at her husband.

‘You’re a bastard,’ she said again.

‘It was an accident, all right? It was a fucking accident!’

‘Dad, shut up,’ said Alex. Jack waited. He didn’t know what was going to happen.

‘I said it was a fucking accident! You’re ridiculous. You know I didn’t see you.’ His hands were working at the handlebars, clenching and unclenching the brakes over and over again.

Jack looked at his dad, and then at his mum. As usual on his weekends off, his dad was dressed in black. Black leggings and a black fleece jacket, black rubber shoes, black bike cap. The only non-black thing was his hair, auburn, like Jack’s own.

His mum was trying to wipe the mud off her hands, and then suddenly she started crying. The crying was awful because she couldn’t wipe the tears away without getting mud all over her face. So she just stood there, tears running down, holding her hands in front of her like she didn’t know what to do with them. Alex stared uncertainly, and then reached out in a clumsy way and tried to take hold of her arm.

His dad let out a terrible sound, a sort of exasperated rasp. He flung his hands up in the air, and then suddenly, without explanation, he swung his bike around again and took off down the track.

Jack didn’t want to do it, but he had to. It’s like these things are written in code. This code has surrounded him all his life, and even then he was aware that he couldn’t deviate from it. He turned away from his mum. Her face was red and puffed from the cycling, and her nose was running. It was the most pathetic sight he’d ever seen, and he hated himself for finding it pathetic. Without saying anything, he climbed on his bike and pedalled after his father.

That ride is the thing he remembers most clearly. He remembers it clearer than anything else he can remember for years after. He rode in a silent, reckless fury, hating everything he was, thinking that if he crashed himself, if he hit that stone just right, if he turned a cartwheel in the road and broke a leg, or a shoulder, or his neck, then everything would be okay. His dad would be alright again. His mum wouldn’t cry so embarrassingly. He pictured them sitting at his hospital bed, with their hands locked together. So he swerved his tyres in the mud, hit the brakes, slalomed wildly, trying to throw himself off balance, to lose the perfect line.

But Jack didn’t crash. He couldn’t crash. He was just too good.

‘Why do you have so many toothbrushes?’ asked his mum, coming out of the tiny bathroom, back into the tiny kitchen.

‘I like to keep my teeth clean,’ said Jack.

He served her French onion soup. He even did croutons specially.

It jars him, waking up in the night. It interferes with his focus. He wishes at times he was an alcoholic, to have the satisfaction of knocking back a midnight slug of whiskey on the balcony, looking out over the darkened canal and the lights glimmering dirtily in the water. Occasionally there come the flashing lights of late-night cyclists, a flowing, disembodied pulse, like schools of those phosphorescent fish, passing with no sound. He would like to stand there and get drunk and watch, waiting for sleep, or the dawn. But he’s never gone in for alcohol much. Mostly he keeps it in the flat because his girlfriends like it. So when he wakes in this red sweat, in lieu of a satisfying swig, he goes to make some repairs to his bike, tinkering, fine-tuning. It concentrates him, quiets him down. Forces him to focus. Sometimes a crashee will come looking, wiping sleep out of her eyes. Frowning into the bright lights of the room.

‘What are you doing? You’re working on your bike? Now? It’s half past four.’

‘Woke up. I couldn’t sleep.’

‘Are you worried about something?’ Draped in his thin dressing gown, or a waterproof poncho or something like that, her bare legs strangely flat in the light, a sticking plaster on her knee.

‘No, it’s nothing. I woke up, that’s all. Don’t worry. I’ll have a cigarette, be back to bed in a minute.’

Sometimes Jack wishes he could just tell them. It would be nice to tell. A relief to get it off his chest, for once. To explain, to reveal something. Not necessarily about that nightmare, that red plunging fear. About other things. Himself. His dad. Anything. It wouldn’t matter. But how can he tell a word of truth now, when everything he does is a lie? It would involve an unravelling. Tugging himself like a ball of wool. There’d be nothing left.

So he performs his punctilious chores, tightening every point. Doing the rounds with the wrench and the Allen key. Lefty-loosey, righty-tighty, a nursery rhyme more deeply imbedded than fee-fi-fo-fum, Jack and Jill go up the hill… Each affirmative turn brings things closer together, shores up the fixings. It makes his mechanism stronger, faster, better in its function. Speed, smoothness and control. Back on the perfect line.

And besides, how could he bare his soul? He hardly even knows the girl. He gets confused between her and the last one, or was it the one before? She won’t be around for much longer. Maybe another week, maybe less. The exhilaration has died already. The itch is back under his skin. The urge to jump the glaring red light. To weave through standing traffic. So many other connections are slipping past, he cannot keep pace, he has to keep moving. How, in this velocity, can he allow himself to rest?

Sometimes, in these sleepless hours, Jack feels bad.

He sees Saul sometimes, his old friend from home, with whom he took that freedom ride to Cornwall one hot summer. Saul moved to London before Jack did, and works for some kind of gardening agency that has contracts with the extremely rich in Pimlico and Chelsea. He says it’s the easiest job in the world, all he has to do is turn up and pick a few leaves off perfect lawns, as the clients are too rich to do it themselves. Saul lives above a pub in New Cross and hangs out with people who go to art colleges, people who spend their time making music that doesn’t sound like music. Jack still gets on with him pretty well, but sees less of him than before. He can’t really handle his friends. A few years ago they went to lots of parties, semi-secret warehouse parties in the East, but Jack got bored of it and Saul didn’t. It’s nothing drastic. It’s just that their interests have diverged. Also, Saul doesn’t cycle anymore. He’s a pedestrian, like the rest. Jack knows that shouldn’t matter.

When his mobile rings one night, Jack realises he’s been sitting on a chair thinking nothing for fifteen minutes. Just gazing at the cover of a book he doesn’t remember picking up. Rick G. Smith’s Bike Physionomics. More bullshit of his dad’s. He stands up and puts it back on the shelf as he answers the call. He’d almost like to hurl it somewhere, but, despite the cycle-clutter, Jack likes to keep his flat in some order. He needs to know where things are.

‘Hi Saul.’

‘Hey, Jacko. What’s going on?’

‘I’ve been sitting on a chair, not doing anything.’

‘Sounds great. What else is going on?’

‘Um, Mum came down to visit. Last week. Cooked her a nice meal.’

‘How’s your mum?’

‘She’s doing pretty well. I didn’t really ask her.’

Music is playing in the background on Saul’s end of the line. It’s something Jack recognises, but he can’t hook onto it.

‘What about your brother? He alright?’

‘Fine, probably.’

‘Your brother’s a prick.’

‘Yeah, I know. It’s a family trait.’

There’s a gap now, in which, if he wanted, Saul might ask about Jack’s dad, to complete the family set. But he doesn’t. Last time he did, Jack only said, ‘yeah, not much to report.’ And since then they’ve left it at that.

‘Got anyone new on the go?’ asks Saul. Jack walks out to the balcony, wedges the phone between his shoulder and his ear, and starts to roll a cigarette.

‘Um, yeah. There’s a girl called Lottie, I’ve been sleeping with her a few weeks.’

Actually, this isn’t even true. Lottie happened months ago. There have been others since then. The last one was a couple of weeks back. He can’t think of any of their names.

‘Lottie? What kind of name is that?’

‘There are lots of people like that round here.’

‘What happened to that Becca chick? She was hot. You should have stayed with her.’

‘I get bored,’ says Jack. He doesn’t like these conversations. He’s never really liked talking about girls. Sometimes Saul will ask where he meets them, and he’ll have to think up some dull lie.

‘And that French girl was hot. But not the one before. That one was skinny in all the wrong places.’

Jack grunts. He can’t even think who Saul means.

‘So then, how’s this Lottie girl?’

‘Are you just calling me to ask how everybody is? Are you doing some kind of survey?’

‘Alright, alright. I haven’t seen you for a while. I just wondered how you’re doing.’

‘I’m having these dreams,’ says Jack after a second. He didn’t really mean to say that. There’s a breeze blowing along the canal, channelled up between the walls of the buildings, and most of his rolling tobacco has fallen off the paper.

‘Oh, right. What kind of dreams?’

‘Red dreams. Um, I can’t really explain them. Everything goes… kind of red.’

‘Great. Red dreams. So what else is going on?’

Jack rolls the paper into a ball and flicks it off the balcony. He brushes tobacco shreds off his hands. He’s getting sick of smoking anyway.

Saul invites him to a get-together at the weekend, and Jack says he’ll think about it. Both of them know this means he won’t go. It will be full of Saul’s art college friends and their ridiculous haircuts. And he knows what is meant by ‘get-together.’ It just means everyone will be getting stoned rather than getting drunk. After they’ve finished talking, Jack goes back to the bookshelf and pulls out Bike Physionomics again, wondering if he’d been holding it for any reason. He flicks through the pages for a while. It’s all utter nonsense. He puts it back, goes through to the kitchen and starts boiling the kettle for coffee. He grinds coffee beans in his electric grinder. Lacking anything else to think about, he turns his mind to this new potential he’s been keeping his eye on recently: a newcomer, from what he can tell, on the Regent’s Canal towpath. She wears gold leggings and black felt boots. She wears a green sleeveless windcheater jacket and fingerless gloves on her hands. She doesn’t wear a helmet. This always intrigues him. A girl who doesn’t wear a helmet is a girl who will fuck without a condom.

How does Jack come to think these things? Jack certainly doesn’t know. There are times when he wishes he didn’t. That his mind didn’t teem like this. That all this nonsense didn’t rise with such recurrence in his brain, like the plastic bottles and polystyrene trash that slops in the water of the canal, driven up against the heavy black gates of the locks.

It was good to hear Saul’s voice. Jack tells himself this. Saul has been a steady friend, his only steady one. Perhaps he should go to that get-together after all, do his best to be nice. But he finds it so hard to talk to these people. He doesn’t understand their interests. And they simply don’t pay attention to him. Their mouths go up and down.

Saul was there right through it all, when everything went wrong. It was the year after that summer, when they were both eighteen. Both of them doing A-levels. Having no luck with girls. Jack tried to spend as much time as possible away from home, anywhere else. Thinking back on that time now, which he tries hard not to do, it was like the whole house was throbbing with tension, the walls actually moving in and out. It was like a headache that never went away. The problem wasn’t the arguments, although the arguments were a problem. In fact, he wished they would argue more, because at least with arguments there’s a presumption something can somehow be resolved, that there must exist some sort of conclusion, no matter how deep it’s buried. But it turned out there was no buried conclusion. There was nothing for them to argue about. There was simply something wrong with Dad.

His mum moved out for a little while. Then she moved back in again, and his dad moved out for a little while. And then they saw some kind of councillor and tried moving back in together again, and this time was the worst of all, with the sobbing that sounded like kittens at night and his dad going off on those midnight bike-rides, midnight bike-rides without lights, and returning in the middle of the next morning covered in dirt, his eyes pink, bits of twigs hanging off his clothes, able to offer no explanation for his actions. And then Alex moved out, because he couldn’t stand it, and he actually offered for Jack to come too and share the rented room he’d found, but Jack knew he couldn’t leave, because his dad needed help. The problem was, there was no help to give. His dad was running on a different track. Jack could find no way to cross those lines. No way to break through.

‘It’s a relief,’ said Alex, after Dad had finally been taken away. Or rather, after he’d gone away, voluntarily, following professional advice. No howling at a padded door. No men in white coats running over the fields. He’d just gone off in a hospital van, with a bag of his overnight things. ‘He’ll get help now. It’s better this way.’ They were all sitting at the kitchen table, Jack, his brother and his mum. His mum had a strange, bird-like stare. Her tea had gone cold long ago.

‘We all knew he was taking it too far. It was a fixation,’ said Alex. ‘The bikes. Everything. It was an obsession. It should be reassuring to hear a doctor spell it out, someone who knows what they’re talking about. Mum? Jack? This is the best thing.’

‘Fuck off,’ said Jack in a measured voice.

‘It’s something we’ve got to talk about…’

‘Fuck off. Fuck off. Fuck off.’

Now Jack hasn’t seen his old man in two years. It might as well be twenty. He’s written to him at the new address, and received answers both from his father and from a pleasant-sounding guy called Michael, who seems to be mainly in charge down there. He imagines Michael as a big, cosy man with blond hair and a woolly jumper. His letters are bouncy and upbeat, full of positive, reassuring words and not overloaded with jargon. Dad’s letters, when they come, are mostly about bikes, the only thing they could ever talk about. Not that he seems to ride often anymore. He doesn’t seem to get out much at all, though Michael says he goes round the grounds sometimes on an old mountain bike. Jack imagines he’s not too discontent. Keeping busy, in his way. Certainly doing better than he was. Perhaps he’s found a balance. In his last letter he even said he working on some kind of book, a history of cycling and war. Michael encouraged him in this, and said they could even try publishing it. He included an extract in one of his letters:

‘There’s a clear evolution from the helmets of knights to the cycle helmets of today, via the tin hats of World War One. An ancestor of mine rode with the 3rd Infantry Lowriders that broke the German line at Ypres. They had fortified tyres to repel barbed wire, and were experts at sharp-shooting with one hand and steering with the other…

‘The Japanese used cycle cavalry during World War Two. General Kojo’s 6th Army conquered much of South East Asia with extensive networks of cycle-paths, and when defeat became certain they were known to sever their brake cables and rush towards enemy positions with no possibility of stopping…’

And all that stuff was interesting, sure. At least he wasn’t just staring at the walls. But over the last twelve months or so, the letters have grown less and less frequent. Jack was trying to write on a regular basis – his mum tells him Alex sends a postcard every fortnight, something light and not too serious, and she telephones herself, of course – but somehow he couldn’t keep it up. He found himself growing reluctant. The weeks went by. He missed one reply, then he missed another. His dad came to mirror his infrequency. Eventually, the letters stopped. It was almost a relief. And now it seems too hard to go back to it, Jack can’t summon himself. His dad’s problems are too far away. Once he’d lived in East London past a certain point, in that flat above Regent’s Canal, everything else began to feel distant, indistinct, unreal. Embarrassing, somehow. He doesn’t want to think about it. He is past the saturation point of guilt. To start again would mean a whole new Jack, an empty vessel in which to pour new guilts, new binds, new urgencies, drop by bitter drop.

But why is he having these red dreams now? Why, when he never did before? It’s making him lose his concentration. He can’t think straight these days. One night, recently, he opened his eyes and saw nothing but red in the room. The blackness of the night had turned to neon, thrumming and buzzing in the air. Another time, he woke up sitting bolt upright, clasping his cock with both his hands. There was sweat running down his back. The sheet was so wet he thought he’d spilt a glass of water. He had been woken by a swooping sound, like a train pushing the air before it as it rushes through a tunnel. He listened, in the gaping silence of the room, as the sound pulled rapidly away from him, sucked into its own vacuum. He closed his eyes and breathed hard through his nose. The girl beside him never stirred.

In the cold light of day, of course, sensations like this are subdued. Jack’s a habitual early riser, crashee or no crashee. There is good coffee from the deli on Broadway, eggs to be eaten, things to do. He concentrates on his pursuits. Everyone needs a hobby.

It isn’t true, necessarily, that girls aren’t beautiful when they’re not on bikes. But bicycles make girls beautiful. This is a verifiable fact, universally accepted by anyone who’s ever studied the subject. According to Susan Jarv’s Bike Stats, researchers have shown impartial volunteers two photographs of the same girl, one on a bike and one off a bike, and in 92.6% of cases…

Pedestrian girls. Jack just doesn’t get it. There is something patently ridiculous about them, their bodies going up and down, first one foot and then the next, clumping along mechanically, like those nodding donkeys in American oilfields. Cycle-girls exist in another element. The perfect balance between speed and bearing. Cutting across the hard edges of the world, guiding their fates between their thighs. And the thrill of taking a corner fast, leaning into the air just so, into the centrifugal wind… to Jack it’s like the moment in sex when time disappears, your body is tuned to the only note that counts. The un-oiled chain rattling through its gears, clattering dryly over the cogs, is as profoundly uncomfortable to him as the failure of natural lubrication. And the flat front tyre, when the bare wheel knocks on every irregularity in the road, has long felt to poor, tormented Jack like that bump against the pubic bone when the angle isn’t quite right. He can’t help these parallels. He can only see things through his eyes, the eyes his father gave him.

‘Every cyclist is a natural rebel. Cycling is a revolutionary act.’ The lines clutter up his brain. Does any of this make any sense? Who wrote that nonsense? Karlov or Seagram, he can’t remember which. It was in one of several volumes he’d received on his sixteenth birthday, along with his first pro cycling shoes and a new Japanese speedometer. ‘Every female cyclist is a born feminist. The act of cycling, by its very nature, is a gesture of defiance.’

Jack is beside the towpath now, waiting on the turn-off from the road. It’s half past five. He’s waiting for five forty. He’s decided to do it today, now, before something in him goes cold. His mind turns up all kinds of things in these last minutes, before the event. These unreal anticipatory times, when everything is still possible. ‘A gesture of defiance.’ Great. But defiance against what, exactly? What is there to rebel against now?

He’s not been observing her for long, the girl with the gold leggings. Last week was the first time he saw her. She’s clearly only just woven this route into the fabric of her days. She must have started some new job, somewhere in the East. She travels from East to West every evening, coming around that bend, on average, at five forty by Jack’s watch, emerging at a smart pace from beneath the dripping archway of the bridge. Normally Jack waits longer than this. A couple of weeks, at least. He’ll try to get a sense of technique from each potential’s cycling style, so that when he makes his move he’ll be assured of success. But this time, he feels more hurried than usual. Anxious this one might slip away before he gets a chance. There’s something particularly fleeting about her, or does he feel somehow fleeting himself? He’s scared about missing the connection.

There’s evident pleasure in the way she rides. She does it with ease and assurance. He’s watched the way she rounds that bend: most people slow down on the corner, wary of oncoming traffic, but this girl, she speeds up, leaning into the curve, her eyes flattened against the wind, her unprotected hair flying behind. Her wide sleeves trilling in the air like a ray. It’s like her whole body is smiling. Her enjoyment makes him want to grin, makes him want to share her slipstream. ‘A seasoned rider can infer, from the way a girl handles a bike, the way she takes her other pleasures. A true cyclist is a true sensualist.’ Shut up, shut up. It never goes away, this ridiculous monologue. But nevertheless, it’s true, and he knows it. He only has to see the way she takes that curve to know she’ll be wild in bed.

Jack waits at the top of the little slope that leads down to the towpath. He checks his watch and levels his gaze. The regular commuters go by. He knows them by the colours of their helmets and bikes, like identifying jockeys. He regards the rubbish strewn down the path, the fume-withered blackberry bushes. On the grass verge an old lady is patiently waiting for her dog to finish sniffing a bottle of Dragon Stout. The canal is flat and very brown, the consistency of gravy. A couple of moorhens slide over its surface, making noises like party toys.

Jack doesn’t feel much at all. He never does, in these times. Not excitement, and certainly not fear. Only calculation and control.

If anything feels different this time, somewhere deep in his synapses, his manner doesn’t show it.

And everything goes to plan, at first. Almost perfectly on schedule, the girl with gold leggings speeds out of the tunnel. Takes the curve beautifully, levels out for the straight. One hundred metres along the towpath, Jack glides down the slope. Lets his weight sink down on the right-hand pedal. Smoothly picks up pace. He keeps just left of centre on the track, leaving room for readjustment. The girl with gold leggings is approaching fast. Her wheels weave between the iron bollards in the concrete, a spontaneous display of playfulness that suggests all manner of foreplay. Jack empties his mind. She is heading right for him. He holds his course. Centres his front tyre. Now he has his position just right. They are like two particles shooting towards one another inside a Large Hadron Collider. All that remains is a shift of weight, the slightest tip to the right hand side, and in that moment their lives will combine. They will come together…

And then, everything goes red.

It swoops up behind him, a hurricane wind, gobbling up his slipstream. The sight of the girl speeding into convergence – five seconds away, four seconds, three seconds, two – is engulfed by that same plunging fear, the absolute loss of control. There are no seconds left. It seems to happen slowly, in neatly sequential segments. Perhaps this is the way time stops. Like riffling the pages of a flip-book and finding your thumb has stuck. His feet are in the air. He has left his bike. A jangling, reverberating clash like two supermarket trolleys. He sees the girl’s face track past, the pink inside her mouth. Then the gravel-grey road swings up to meet him, he’s on the ground and actually aware of sliding along on his chest and legs. It seems to take a long time. He feels the impacts of water and grit on the skin of his arms and face.

Nothing, then. Fee-fi-fo-fum. The red swoops off along the track, under the low bridge. Jack clears his eyes. He needs to stop. Fuck the perfect line.

‘Are… you… are you okay?’ A felt boot has appeared by his head, like something being lowered from the sky.

‘Can you hear me? Are you… shit, what a mess.’ A pair of gold leggings bent at the knee, a face blurred beneath unprotected hair.

Jack wonders if his skull might be cracked. And if it is, would it matter? Lefty-loosey, righty-tighty. Jack and Jill go up the hill…

To fetch what, exactly?

‘Hello? At least tell me you’re still breathing.’

He’s lying on his chest in the middle of the towpath, one leg somehow folded beneath the other, the front wheel of his bicycle still spinning. The texture of the path, up close, looks like the surface of a planet.

‘Yeah…’

‘Can you get up? Is your leg okay?’

‘Um, I think,’ he says.

She helps him to his feet, supporting his arm, and it doesn’t feel so bad. But then the various centres of pain start making themselves known to him, like lights blinking back on after a shutdown. His leg, for a start. And his chest feels crushed, he can’t get the air in. His hands are hot, his palms are on fire. By contrast, the girl doesn’t seem to have a scratch. She regards him for a few hard seconds with pigeon-flecked grey eyes.

‘What the fuck were you doing? You went right into me.’

‘I’m sorry. It wasn’t. I mean, I didn’t…’

‘You hit me head-on. In the middle of the path. Don’t you know how to fucking ride a bike?’

‘Course I know… I’ve been my whole life.’ But he can’t get all the words.
‘I mean, fucking Christ. What were you thinking?’

‘I’m sorry, I said sorry, okay? I can’t… what more do you want me to say?’

‘Alright. Fucking shocked me, that’s all. Christ, what a wipe-out. You’re not hurt bad? Nothing broken?’

‘No. I don’t think… Ow. Oh, shit.’ Jack looks at his hands, getting hotter by the second. He can see the shocked blood bulging up. His palms look like they’ve been sandpapered. And his leg, his leg really stings. It makes him hop from one foot to the other, a ridiculous little hornpipe of pain which, he knows, is fast undermining any chances he might still have…

Chances for what? He can’t think straight. Can’t see past the pain’s ridiculousness. Jack doesn’t like to appear ridiculous. Cyclists seldom do.
‘You should get that looked at,’ the girl is saying, gazing down at something.

‘What?’

‘That leg.’

Jack looks down. His left trouser leg is torn, hanging like a limp triangular flag. And above the knee, a patch of skin has simply disappeared. He feels the breeze on his tongue as he stares. The flesh underneath looks like a strawberry, even down to the little white dots.

The girl eyes it disapprovingly. She has taken a packet of Drum from her pocket, and is digging around for a filter. ‘That’s a pretty nasty scrape,’ she says.

‘Had worse,’ grunts Jack, trying not to flinch. But he hasn’t had worse, not really. His initiative is shot. There are suddenly tears in his eyes.

‘You need to get something on that quick. It’s going to sting to buggery. Do you want to go to A&E?’

‘No, I’m fine. Actually, I live… I live pretty close. Just up there…’

But her eyes don’t follow the direction of his finger. She carries on regarding him, tongue poised on the licky-strip of her cigarette paper. He wipes away the tears with the backs of his hands, trying not to smear blood on his face.

‘What’s your name?’ she demands.

‘Jack. Jack Peeterhoff. Ow, Jesus, my leg really hurts.’

‘You look familiar. Have we met before?’

‘No. Maybe. I don’t think so.’

She finishes rolling and sticks it in her mouth while she fumbles in her pockets for a lighter. Three grazed knuckles on her right hand. Not entirely unscathed. And her fingers are trembling, he sees that now. ‘At a party somewhere? Never mind. Fuck, I need a smoke. Do you want one? Might be good for you. I guess I’d better roll for you, you’ll get blood on the paper.’

They sit on a wooden bench by the canal, their bicycles dragged up behind. Jack picks bits of gravel from his palms and tries not to look at his leg. He feels sick. His hands are weak. The pain has subsided a degree, numbed by the coldness of the air. It’ll heal up okay, if he keeps it clean. He has everything he needs back home, Band Aids, gauze, cotton wool swabs, TCP, everything necessary for patching up. After the event.

Disinfectant is such a sad, lonely smell.

Suddenly, without any warning, Jack misses his dad.

It’s like the time he got drunk with Saul, at a party somewhere beyond Mile End, and actually left his brand-new hybrid, the one he’d spent almost five months building, U-locked to some railings by a dual carriageway. He came back full of dread the next morning and found they’d taken everything apart from the front wheel. Sometimes they’ll take the wheels and leave the frame, but these people had taken the frame and left the wheel. He stood there with the cars going by. Knowing the loss was no-one’s fault but his own. Remembering all the time he’d put in. Thinking it would take him hours to walk home, because he couldn’t face going on a bus. It feels like that feeling now.

Oh, shut up, he tells himself. He’s so tired of it all.

‘So what’s wrong with you, Jack, if you don’t mind me asking?’ The girl isn’t looking at him. He watches the cigarette held in the fingers sticking out of the fingerless gloves. ‘Got things on your mind?’

‘No, not really. Why do you say that?’

‘I saw your face, right before you went into me. You weren’t even looking. Like you’d forgotten you were even on a bike. Are you high? What’s wrong with you?’

‘I just… lost concentration, that’s all. Just for a little moment.’

‘You could kill yourself. Or somebody else. You know, you should take more care of yourself.’

‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ he says. He didn’t really mean to say that. He’s got the image of Michael in his mind, that blond, cosy man in the woolly jumper. Or maybe he isn’t blond at all. Maybe he’s skinny and wears a t-shirt. The telephone number of Michael’s office is printed on the letters he sent. Those letters are kept with his dad’s, paper-clipped together. But where did he put them? They’re in a pink plastic folder. On the shelf somewhere, next to his books. Along with Bike Physionomics and all that other bullshit. But he’s glad he remembers that. He needs to know where things are.

‘What’s on your mind, then? Girl trouble?’

‘Bike trouble,’ says Jack, and this makes her laugh. At the sound of her laugh, something opens up. Or at least, it almost does. He glances sidelong, hoping to catch her. But actually, it doesn’t matter. She isn’t looking at him.

‘You seem like a pretty confused guy, Jack. There’s something about you that’s all wound up. Relax, okay? Take care of yourself.’ She is standing now. ‘You’ll be alright. Go home and get yourself cleaned up. Might want to look that bike over, too. And take a fucking cycling proficiency test.’

‘Thanks,’ says Jack.

‘Right. I’m off. Maybe see you sometime.’

He watches her go, the girl with gold leggings, with a sudden lack of interest. What he feels is relief, a strange sense for Jack. She glides away tentatively at first, testing her bike to feel its responses, and then slowly easing into speed, regaining her old assurance. Her form shrinks until it passes under the low bridge. She doesn’t look back. There are no sounds on the canal.

…

Further reading

Jarv, Susan, Bike Stats, Wharton Howlett, 2006
Karlov, Claus, Cycling and Syndicalism, Redlit Press, 1973
Peeterhoff, Alan, Charge of the Bike Brigade: a History of Cycling and War, Alma Books, 2009
Rhineshaft, Howard, Ins and Outs of the Cyclo-Sexual Revolution, Dalston Publishing, 1979
Roman, Bertie & Appleby, Norman, The Cyclopaedia Brittanica, Swann House, 2003
Smith, Rick G., Bike Physionomics, Hamminton, 1983
Valdek, James P., Probability Studies in Bicycle Physics, East Anglia Press, 1955

In the green mountains of Indian Kashmir, just a few miles from the Pakistan border, is a glacier called Kolahoi. It lies at the top of the valley it has gouged for thousands of years into the earth, a valley rippled and scarred by ice and cluttered with boulder fields. The story carved into this landscape tells us the icy tongue of Kolahoi once reached for many miles; even within living memory, according to local inhabitants, it stretched about half a mile further down the valley.

But today, little of that remains. Over the course of the past few decades the glacier has steadily retreated, like a snail pulling its head back into its shell. And now, it can retreat no further. There’s only the last slope of ice, backed up against the rock of the mountain behind.

I’m standing halfway up Kolahoi, having completed an exhausting scramble over loose, unsteady moraine, the debris of rock unceremoniously dumped by the melting ice. The glacier has a wrinkled, rotten look, reminiscent of congealed fat. It is not white, but mottled and blotched with dirty browns and greys. I’m accompanied by Dr. Ghulam Jeelani from the University of Kashmir, an energetic, cheerful geo-hydrologist, who explains to me exactly what it is we’re seeing.

‘There should be two parts to a glacier. Accumulation and ablation.’ Accumulation is the built-up snow that packs down into rock-hard ice, while ablation is the opposite, the area of melting. It’s the equilibrium between these two zones that keeps the glacier stable. ‘But here, the whole accumulation period has converted into ablation. I think if this present trend continues, in ten years there will be no Kolahoi glacier.’

According to one definition, the name Kashmir originates from ‘a land desiccated from water,’ recalling the legend of how the valley was reclaimed from a vast primordial lake that long ago covered the earth. This is a fitting creation myth for the valley that many call Paradise. Its system of lakes and serene waterways irrigates luminously green rice paddies and orchards of apples and apricots, abundant fields of wheat and prized saffron. There are elegant gardens, and floating markets selling vegetables of outlandish size. The contrast between this land of plenty and the neighbouring Himalayan region of Ladakh – a virtual moonscape of barren mountains and high-altitude desert – could not be starker.

This, of course, is one of the reasons the region has been so bitterly contested, controlled by Afghans, Mughals, Sikhs, and more recently split in two by India and Pakistan. Tens of thousands have died in the conflict, and today the disputed border is one of the most heavily-militarised regions on the planet. During the few weeks I spend in Kashmir, violence erupts once again. A dispute over a small patch of land leads to strikes, riots and renewed conflict between the valley’s Muslims and Hindus, unravelling a decade of tentative progress towards the peace that Kashmiri people crave.

But in the clamour of communal unrest, Kolahoi’s story goes unheard. Ultimately, this green ‘Paradise’ – like the rest of the world, in fact – faces a threat far more profound than militancy or terrorism. The natural beauty and fecundity depend entirely on water; and the water supply largely depends on glaciers such as Kolahoi, which are melting at an unprecedented rate.

‘The first effect of global warming is on water,’ explains Dr. Jeelani. From our vantage point we can see the glacial river bursting forth below, milky with ice sediment, rushing down into the valley where it will form the Lidder River and eventually merge with the mighty Jhelum, Kashmir’s main waterway. ‘Kolahoi is the only permanent source of water for the valley. After the snows melt in May or June, that water source is exhausted. What is left? The glaciers only. If Kolahoi permanently disappears, there will be no surface water in late summer. Even the groundwater will be affected. This could go from being a water-rich area to an area of water stress.’

To anyone who’s seen the lushness of Kashmir, this is staggering to comprehend. It seems impossible that such natural beauty could simply wither away. But this is a threat every bit as real as the ongoing conflict in the region, and until recently it’s been overlooked – or ignored – by the authorities. Incredibly, despite the crucial importance of the glacier to the valley’s ecosystems, its visible decline has never been formally studied until now.

‘The problem in the Himalayas is that no data has been collected,’ says Professor Syed Iqbal Hasnain from The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the sustainable development foundation coordinating this expedition. ‘There is a dearth of information in India, and in South Asia in general. We have to establish a scientific link.’ In Kolahoi’s case, that dearth of information is particularly pronounced. The Lidder Valley is a favourite infiltration route for militants sneaking over the border from Pakistan, and until recently it simply hasn’t been safe enough to establish scientific monitoring here. It’s a reminder of how human conflict and environmental disaster often go hand in hand, or at least feed off one another, to mutual detriment.

Glacial science is a complicated business, highly dependent on local variants, and at this point TERI can’t say for sure why glaciers like Kolahoi are disappearing so fast. Likely culprits include rising temperatures, increasing local carbon emissions, deforestation, decreasing snowfall, and possibly Asian Brown Cloud (ABC), the polluted smog that drifts as far as the Southern Himalayas in the summer. But whatever the toxic blend of causes, Kolahoi’s melting clearly fits a general pattern of glacial retreat observable from Pakistan to China. Satellite images tell us that Himalayan glaciers are melting at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world. These glaciers contain the largest store of fresh water outside the polar ice-caps, feeding the mighty Asian rivers – including the Indus, the Brahmaputra and the holy Ganges itself – that have allowed civilisation to flourish, and on which up to two billion people depend.

Professor Hasnain will return in some months to build a weather station here, recording Kolahoi’s mass balance and hydrology, plus possible effects of ABC, along with several discharge stations to measure river flow. TERI’s ultimate plan is to create an index of benchmark glaciers that spans the Himalayas from east to west, part of a long-overdue attempt to monitor the rate of glacial decline right across the range.

This will certainly add to the sum of human knowledge, increasing our understanding of the causes behind a looming environmental and humanitarian catastrophe. Sadly, though, it’s too late for Kolahoi. Kolahoi can’t be saved. Looking at the doomed glacier now, its grubby slopes trickling with water, I try to imagine how this valley will look when all the ice has gone. In ten, twenty, fifty years from now – certainly, it seems, within my lifetime – the rock will be bare, the water diminished. The densely-forested valley below, and the fields and waterways beyond, may no longer resemble the green Paradise over which men have clashed for so long.

‘This glacier is gone,’ says Dr. Jeelani, simply and without drama. We take one last look and then start our descent, turning our backs on Kolahoi, a once-beautiful vastness of ice that now resembles a slab of meat going bad in the sun.

Even to my untrained eye, the glacier does not look healthy. It does not have the indomitable aspect I imagined such a vast swathe of ice would possess. Kolahoi glacier looks tired, slumped. It is not white, but mottled and blotched with dirty browns and greys. The wrinkled crevasses further up its incline lend the appearance of coagulated fat. It looks like something rotten. And it is.

The Jawahar Institute of Mountaineering, who are providing logistical support for this expedition, says that in 1985 the glacier’s snout stretched at least half a mile further down the valley. They should know: they used to train ice-climbers here. As we approach, I am shown even more recent evidence of the glacier’s retreat: a dark grey tidemark on the valley’s lower slopes, on which trees and grass have not yet rooted. The rocks haven’t had time to settle; the slopes are a loose, unstable moraine, trickling with water, prone to landslides. We must cross this tricky terrain in order to reach the west side of the glacier.

This is a slow, treacherous route, which makes for exhausting progress. Professor Syed Iqbal Hasnain is a stout, white-haired gentleman in late middle age. “You have to have a passion for this work,” he says as we clamber over rubble and across fast-flowing streams of snowmelt, assisted on the more difficult stretches by accompanying local guides. Professor Hasnain’s passion is clear: Chairman of the Government of Sikkim’s Glacier and Climate Commission, and Senior Fellow at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), New Delhi, he has come to Kashmir to establish Kolahoi’s usefulness as a site of scientific study. He’s accompanied by Dr. Ghulam Jeelani, a geohydrologist from the University of Kashmir, and Dr. Lawrence Gunderson, an environmental historian and professor at the University of Jackson, Tennessee.

TERI’s plan is to create an index of three benchmark glaciers that span the Himalayas from east to west – the others being East Rathong in Sikkim and Chhota Shigri in Himachal Pradesh – as part of a long-overdue attempt to monitor the rate of glacial decline right across the range. The project is funded by the Governments of Iceland and Norway, the German Development Agency (GTZ), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the University of California, San Diego.

“The problem in the Himalayas is that this data has not been collected,” says Professor Hasnain, pointing out the contrast with countries like Switzerland, which has recorded glacial changes meticulously for over a hundred years. “There is a dearth of information in India. We have no time-series on temperature, humidity, rainfall, greenhouse gases or ABC [Atmospheric Brown Cloud, the industrial/agricultural smog that blankets much of South Asia and could be a factor in raising temperatures]. Various models suggest that heat is being generated by this, but we have to establish a scientific link.”

If conditions on Kolahoi are suitable, the Professor will return with a team in October to set up an automatic weather station here – recording the glacier’s mass balance and hydrology, plus possible effects of ABC – along with several discharge stations to monitor river-flow. The scientific process is slow: it will then take a minimum of five years to collect and correlate enough data, which can then be compared with global models and perhaps used to predict future trends.

But for now we have a more immediate concern: actually getting up there. We progress by trial and error, slipping and stumbling, sometimes being forced to retrace our steps. The reason the going is so tough is simply because this is unknown terrain. Despite Kolahoi’s crucial importance to the entire Kashmir Valley, no formal study has yet been conducted on the glacier’s state of health. This is, scientifically speaking, virgin territory.

Glaciers are, almost by definition, remote and hard to access. But in the case of Kolahoi, its isolation is due as much to politics as geography. Kashmir is still disputed land, and until very recently it hasn’t been safe enough to establish regular monitoring here. The Line of Control – the de facto border that separates Indian from Pakistani-controlled Kashmir – is only a few miles away, and these densely forested valleys and mountains are a favourite infiltration route for militants and foreign jihadis sneaking over the border. The pretty valley of Lidderwat, where we set up camp the first night surrounded by the soothing sound of cowbells, was the site of a kidnapping in 1995 in which a Norwegian tourist was decapitated. As the cowbells would suggest, the region is more peaceful now – given the number of troops in the valley, a better word might be ‘pacified’ – and Kashmir as a whole is safer than it has been for the past twenty years. But tensions are never far from the surface and violence can still erupt very quickly; the political landscape is as unstable as the rocks beneath our feet.

We wind our way painstakingly upwards, until at around 15,000 feet we have reached the point at which rock meets ice. Led by the energetic Dr. Jeelani, a few of us climb the final stretch until we have gained a vantage point. The glacier looks like a dirty, wrinkled rug, dropping steeply from a higher shelf to subside at a forty-five degree angle down to the valley floor. Far below bursts forth the glacial river, the colour of chocolate milk. The scale is almost too huge to take in. It takes the ever-cheerful and talkative Dr. Jeelani to explain what we’re looking at.

“There should be two parts to a glacier: an accumulation area and an ablation area.” The accumulation area is created by the build-up of the annual snows, which then pack down into rock-hard ice. The ablation area is the opposite: the giant melting zone that feeds the rivers. It’s the equilibrium between these two zones that keeps the glacier healthy. But here, there is no accumulation; the glacier’s balance has tipped.

Dr. Jeelani makes a sweeping gesture which takes in half the mountain. “This glacier is gone,” he says matter-of-factly. “The whole accumulation period has converted into ablation.” And then he adds, so undramatically that I almost miss it: “I think if this present trend continues, in ten years there will be no Kolahoi glacier.”

In anticipation of crossing the ice to collect accumulation samples, we climbed here equipped with rope and harnesses, ice-boots lined with metal spikes. It’s obvious now that such a venture would be not just risky but pointless. As Dr. Jeelani has pointed out, there’s no accumulation to collect. And ablation zones are notoriously unstable: we see dark, dripping caverns where the ice has slipped away, fault-lines indicating crevasses that could be a hundred feet deep. Moreover, after a minor slip, we realise the shingle we’re standing on is not, as we’d supposed, part of the mountain, but merely a thin gravelly carpet over a precipitous slide of dark ice. “You see, it even seems hollow inside,” Dr. Jeelani warns. Just then we hear an ominous creak; a few small rocks clatter down the slope. “Come,” he says quickly, motioning us down, “this area is not safe.”

Back at base camp, we huddle together in Professor Hasnain’s small tent to study the photographs. “I’m disappointed with this glacier,” says the Professor, echoing my own first impression. “Scientifically speaking, this glacier might be useless.” If, on tomorrow’s expedition, we still see no sign of accumulated snow, TERI will have to find another benchmark glacier to complete its index.

Dinner is provided by our guides, who, in the middle of the wilderness, have managed to whip up a Kashmiri feast of dhal, rice, vegetables and chapattis. As night closes in, we warm ourselves with a kangri – a small clay pot of smouldering embers, worn inside the clothes – a hookah pipe and a glass of fresh, warmed sheep’s milk. There is no sound of cowbells tonight, only the sound of the wind in the valley and the roar of the glacial river.

Early next morning, Dr. Jeelani leads a small team up the other side of the valley. He wants to see if we can get higher, to give us a view of the glacier from another angle. This, we discover, is the easier path, winding upwards through greenery and the shade of chennar trees. The slopes are spotted with wildflowers and outcrops of rhododendron. We’re even able to stop several times to drink salty Kashmiri chai at the grass-roofed, stone-walled huts of Gujjar herdsmen who graze goats and water buffalo on the higher slopes. These clusters of inhabitation – occupied only in the summer months, before the valley sinks under snow – are totally invisible from below, and only our guides seemed to know of their existence. This points, again, to the general lack of information on the region. The valley exists in a kind of limbo, hermetically sealed from the rest of India by decades of drawn-out conflict, resulting in a huge communication gap between local and national authorities.

The Gujjars’ hospitality is a good sign for future expeditions, as regular monitoring would not be possible without the support and involvement of local people. Moreover, a few hundred feet up we discover an open meadow on which a helicopter could be landed, cutting the journey time to the glacier from days to a matter of minutes. Whether these findings will be useful or not depends, of course, on what’s visible from above.

When, at last, we emerge at the top, Dr. Jeelani is encouraged. Much greater expanses of the glacier are revealed, saddled around Kolahoi peak and descending the other side. Although it is still overwhelmingly ablation, there are small accumulation areas tucked into the higher defiles, clinging on in patches of permanent shadow. The glacier’s prospects are still grim, but it looks more hopeful from a scientific point of view. These accumulation areas, though few and far between, can provide a reference point against which Kolahoi’s decline can be measured, analysed and eventually understood.

Until the data is in, of course, no scientist can say for sure what’s causing Kolahoi to melt, or how long it realistically has left. But it’s clearly part of a wider pattern: a microcosm of what’s happening right across the range, a region that stretches from Pakistan to China. Remote sensing tells us that the glaciers of the Himalayas are melting at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world. The Himalayas contain the largest reserves of fresh water outside the polar ice-caps, feeding seven great Asian rivers and regulating water supplies for half a billion people. The humanitarian threat is twofold: an initial massive increase in floods as water is released much more quickly than before, followed by unprecedented droughts as the great rivers run dry.

“The first effect of global warming is on water,” Dr. Jeelani explains as we descend towards the gushing river, milky with sediment from the melting ice. “And Kolahoi is the only permanent source of water for Kashmir. After the snow melts in May or June, that water source is exhausted. What is left? The glacier only. If Kolahoi is not here, if it permanently disappears, there will be no surface water in late summer – even the groundwater will be affected. In a few years, this could go from being a water-rich area to an area of water stress.”

Having seen the lushness of the valley, I find this hard to comprehend. Kashmir is famed for its beauty and fertility; the first thing any Kashmiri will tell you is that this is “Paradise on Earth.” With its cool and shaded Moghul Gardens, lakes and flower-laden shikara boats, its orchards of apples and apricots and abundance of rice and saffron, it’s a stark contrast from neighbouring Ladakh: a virtual moonscape of barren mountains and high-altitude desert. This, of course, is one of the reasons the valley has been so bitterly fought over. But all this beauty depends on water, and the water depends on Kolahoi. It seems painfully clear this “Paradise” might not last much longer.

But why, I ask, if the threat is so serious, is the government not paying more attention? “We are doing this on our own,” shrugs the Professor, “the government are hardly bothered.” “It has not truly affected people yet,” Dr. Jeelani adds. “Only for a couple of years, there have been some problems. When it starts affecting millions of people, then the government might take notice.”

By then, he does not need to add, it will be far too late.

Down below, our camp is cleared, the ponies packed for the journey home. We’re leaving Kolahoi for now, descending to softer, greener country and irrigated fields. Before we depart, I try to imagine how this valley looked just a decade ago, when the rocks that litter the ground at my feet were still suspended in ice. Ten years before that, the glacier’s snout reached even further down the valley. And if, by chance, I return in ten more years – perhaps through a valley whose rivers are dry, its gardens and orchards wilted – then the ice will be gone altogether, leaving only rock.

After a hard climb up the eastern flank of the Kolahoi glacier, Ghulam Jeelani, a geo-hydrologist from the University of Kashmir, catches his breath. This is the Kashmir valley’s only year-round source of water. But it is melting at an alarming rate. The glacier is a dirty brown colour, wrinkled with crevasses. It looks more like an enormous mudslide than a frozen reservoir of fresh water. Mr Jeelani says that the glacier is in “ablation”—shrinking through melting. If present trends, which are blamed on climate change, continue, he concludes with a shrug, “In ten years there will be no Kolahoi glacier.”

This threatens the livelihoods of millions, and the Kashmir valley’s reputation as one of the world’s most beautiful places, made ugly only by decades of human conflict. The region, disputed by India and Pakistan, is riven by a bloody insurgency. The reopening this week of lorry trade across the “line of control” dividing Indian- and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir was a rare moment of optimism. It followed months of anti-Indian protests that have reinvigorated the valley’s secessionists.

The political tensions in Kashmir help explain why no one seems to have paid the alarming shrinkage of the Kolahoi glacier much attention, until now. According to villagers in nearby Aru, in 1985 the glacier’s snout stretched half a mile (800 metres) further down the valley. The traces are still there: a dark tidemark on the valley’s lower slopes, where trees and plants have not yet rooted. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of reliable scientific data on the region. Kolahoi lies just a few miles from the line of control. These densely forested mountains and valleys are an infiltration route for fighters sneaking over from Pakistan. Until recently it had not been safe to establish regular monitoring.

But Kolahoi’s melting has profound implications for the valley. The glacier feeds the Jhelum river, which drains into the glorious Dal lake in Srinagar, and makes the valley so fertile. With its abundant rice, wheat and corn, its prized apple orchards and fields of saffron, the valley is a stark contrast to neighbouring Ladakh, a moonscape of barren mountains and high-altitude desert.

This, of course, is one reason the valley has been so bitterly contested. But its natural fecundity depends on water, and the water supply depends on glaciers such as Kolahoi. After the snow melts in May and June, the glaciers are the only source of water. If they disappear, says Mr Jeelani, Kashmir, long a water-rich area, could become one of “water stress”.

Syed Hasnain, of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the Delhi-based development think-tank that arranged this expedition, accuses the government of being less interested in environmental problems than in playing politics with Pakistan. But unless both governments set politics aside, an environmental disaster looms. TERI plans to include Kolahoi in an index of benchmark glaciers that span the Himalayas, part of an overdue attempt to monitor the rate of glacial decline in the range. That decline threatens, all too soon, to visit another sort of curse on a valley famously likened to paradise.

It takes three days to reach the Amarnath cave, following the well-worn route that winds from the tiny village of Chandanwari deep into the mountains of Indian Kashmir. Pilgrims come from every part of the subcontinent to undertake this Himalayan trek, walking in sandals or barefoot to worship the sacred Shiva-lingam, a stalagmite of ice that forms annually at the back of the cave – mysteriously swelling to a height of six feet before shrinking back into nothing. Hindus see this phallic growth as a manifestation of Lord Shiva, the god of creation and destruction, who chose the isolated cave to reveal the secret of eternity.

But now it seems this eternity – the miraculous regenerative process that has attracted the pilgrims for centuries – is threatened by the very people who come to worship it. For several years, the Shiva-lingam has melted unseasonally early. The pilgrims may explain this through their god’s will – ‘If Lord Shiva wants to stay with us, he stays. If not, he vanishes,’ says one man – but there is also a very simple physical explanation. It has become too warm in the cave. A combination of sheer body-heat – in recent years, pilgrim numbers have grown to nearly 500,000 – and a steadily-warming atmosphere is causing the ice to melt.

This isolated example of melting reflects a wider trend, just as the damage such numbers do to the delicate mountain ecosystem reflects the impact human populations are having around the globe. The snowcaps and glaciers of Kashmir, and Himalayan glaciers as a whole, are melting at the fastest rate in the world.

The route to the holy cave bears traces of previous human passage, from the stone shelters left by the Indian Army, whose job it is to safeguard the path, to the graffiti the soldiers scrawl on rocks to ease their monotonous watch. The plastic waste that litters the slopes is not cleared away when the pilgrims have gone, but left to be frozen in the ice, buried under rockslides and mud, until it forms a kind of sediment and becomes part of the landscape itself. At night the pilgrims sleep in guarded camps, bleak outposts of tents and prefabricated huts looming out of clouds and mist, and the sewage produced by these concentrations leaks down the slopes into streams and rivers, polluting the water system.

The increasing pollution is one of the reasons the government granted 100 acres of land to build better facilities this year – provoking furious protests from the valley’s Muslim majority, who saw it as a Hindu attempt to establish ownership of the region. The grant was revoked, which, in turn, led to violent protests from Hindu groups. The resulting strikes, riots and police shootings have exploded a decade of relative stability, reigniting bitter conflict in the valley. And as the communal uproar increases, the pollution continues unabated, and the Shiva-lingam melts. It’s a perfect example of how human conflict can distract from the much greater threat: the desecration of the environment on which we all, whether Muslim or Hindu, depend for our survival.

But what drives aged and infirm pilgrims to struggle, through drizzling rain and freezing wind, to a god that might already have disappeared? Why do they brave the threat of militant attacks, the overpowering army presence, and sleeping conditions that appear more like a refugee camp than a religious festival? Often the pilgrims are silent and withdrawn, their numbed feet slipping on frozen rocks, struggling through a bleak wilderness that only serves to emphasise their smallness. But occasionally, when the clouds open up to reveal the breathtaking beauty of the mountains, the sunlight briefly illuminating the startling hems of robes and saris, it’s possible to glimpse, for a moment, what keeps them trudging on. The sense of wonderment at what lies ahead – a natural phenomenon worshipped as a god – far outweighs their physical suffering.

In spite of the rubbish littering the slopes, the pilgrimage to Amarnath is a recognition of our original instinct to worship mountains, glaciers and rivers, an inherent awe of the natural forces that control and shape our lives. The melting stalagmite of ice should serve as a symbol of what we stand to lose, a sense of wonderment in danger of slipping away.

“How Can We Give It Away?”
The Amarnath Land Dispute and the Environment

One hundred acres – less than half a kilometre squared – is not a lot of land by any standards. Yet in the troubled valley of Kashmir, it’s enough to spark off furious protests in which dozens have been killed, unravelling a decade of relative stability in only a few weeks.

Initially the problem was described as an environmental dispute. A diminutive patch of forest land was granted by the local government to the Sri Amarnathji Shrine Board, for the purpose of erecting temporary facilities for the Hindu pilgrims who flock every year to an important shrine in the holy Amarnath cave. In recent years the number of pilgrims has swelled to nearly 500,000, posing an increasing threat to the ecology of the mountains. The problem made international news a couple of years ago, when the sheer body-heat of pilgrims caused Amarnath’s sacred Shiva-lingam – the natural stalagmite of ice which is worshipped as a manifestation of Shiva – to completely melt away.

The proposed land grant, however, sparked furious protests from Kashmir’s Muslims, who saw it as an attempt to establish a permanent Hindu presence in the region. In response to waves of opposition, the government revoked the deal; only prompting the state’s Hindus to take to the streets themselves in protest at the government’s backing down.

The situation is now deadlocked, and has been used by extremists of both sides for their own ideological agendas. What started as an environmental dispute has rapidly escalated into full-blown religious and communal conflict. It’s a reminder of the extent to which religion is politicised here; and of the Kashmiri population’s deep suspicion of Indian designs upon its land.

But following the pilgrims to Amarnath, it’s clear there is a problem. The route is littered with mounds of plastic waste, and the rivers are banked with human excrement. Portaloos are provided at the campsites, but when they fill up they’re simply emptied down the hillside. At first it seems unbelievable that pilgrims could so wantonly pollute a place they regard as sacred. But, as one local man points out: “They don’t regard all Kashmir as sacred. Only the holy cave.”

“It’s a fact that recently the number of pilgrims has increased,” explains Professor Syed Iqbal Husnain, Chairman of the Government of Sikkim’s Glacier and Climate Commission, who is in the area studying melting glaciers. “There is the heat generated by bodies. There are diesel generators, and even helicopter rides to the cave now – that heats the atmosphere more. It is not only a problem for the Shiva-lingam, but glaciers in the valley will be adversely affected. That is the main water resource for the region. The livelihood of the people is connected to that water.”

While the local Muslim population has traditionally benefited from the influx of pilgrims, providing food, accommodation and ponies, it’s clear that many increasingly resent this lack of concern for nature. Immediately underneath the holy cave I speak to Malik Bashir, a local man making a living selling prasad – religious offerings – to the pilgrims who pass his stall. “The pilgrimage is a good thing for us, it means a lot of money. But they throw rubbish, they shit in the water. The plastic is not cleared away, but left to be frozen in the ice. And the dirty water that is going down, we are drinking that. Every year, it causes illness in the villages.”

“They destroy the nature, coming here,” confirms a neighbouring stall-owner. “The problem is a lack of education. The people are environmentally illiterate, and the government does nothing.”

But the land grant was – officially – an attempt by Jammu & Kashmir’s government to improve this very situation. The area was earmarked for the construction of temporary toilets and improved sanitation to stop the flow of effluence into the rivers. The irony is that the same Kashmiris who complain of the threat to the environment passionately oppose the construction of facilities that might help to actually reduce it.

What of the need to improve sanitation?, I ask Malik. Wouldn’t granting this small amount of land ease the strain on the environment?

“The Indians want to take over our land,” he replies, shaking his head. “This land is part of our Kashmir. How can we give it away?”

–

“We Carry Them On Our Shoulders”
The Amarnath Land Dispute and the Army

14,000 feet up in the Himalayas of Kashmir, watching lines of saffron-clad pilgrims wind their way along a mountain track against a backdrop of snow-covered peaks, the violence elsewhere in the state seems a world away. Prodigiously bearded holy men, old women in sandals or bare feet, even a one-legged man making determined progress on crutches; this arduous three-day mountain trek could belong to another age. But looking more closely at the scene, I see sandbagged machinegun posts covering the slopes, and the camouflage fatigues of soldiers stationed at regular intervals along the path.

Two months ago, Kashmir exploded. After a decade of relative peace and stability, widespread religious and communal conflict has once again erupted throughout the state. A curfew is in place in the valley – the first state-wide restriction to be imposed in years – and tens of thousands of extra troops have been deployed in what is already one of the most heavily militarised regions in the world. The pilgrimage has been targeted by militants before – thirty-two sadhus, or holy men, were murdered in 2000 at the base camp of Pahalgam – and with tensions running high this year, the army is taking no chances. At times it seems as if the soldiers are as much a feature of the pilgrimage as the pilgrims themselves.

Every year between June and August up to 500,000 Hindus visit this predominantly Muslim region to worship the sacred Shiva-lingam, a naturally-formed stalagmite of ice that appears in the holy Amarnath cave. But the pilgrimage is not, in itself, the cause of the uproar in the valley. The furore is over a patch of land measuring just one hundred acres.

On May 26th the local government granted this land to the Sri Amarnathji Shrine Board, the Hindu group that maintains the holy shrine. With the ever-increasing number of pilgrims, this area was to be set aside for temporary toilets and facilities to reduce the pollution that inevitably results from such a huge influx of people. In the eyes of Kashmir’s Muslims, however, the deal was nothing but a Hindu land grab, and thousands took to the streets in angry protest. Taken aback by the scale of opposition, the government revoked the deal; only prompting furious counter-protests from the state’s Hindu population.

From here, things only got worse. Dozens died when the police opened fire on protestors in Srinagar – the state’s summer capital – and meanwhile Hindus in Jammu – the state’s winter capital – blocked the only road between the cities, sparking fears of an “economic blockade” aimed at starving the Muslims into submission.

The troops deployed on the route to Amarnath have a markedly different attitude to the troops I’ve encountered elsewhere in Kashmir. In stark contrast to the soldiers in the valley – where they are seen as an occupying army rather than protectors of a holy shrine – they are friendly and courteous, sharing the pilgrims’ food and drink and enthusiastically joining in the cries of “jai Shiva shankar!” and “bom bom bhole!” that echo up and down the barren slopes. Like the pilgrims themselves, they come from every corner of India – Orissa, Bihar, Rajastan, even Kerala and Tamil Nadu – and, like the pilgrims, most are Hindu.

A gentle old sadhu named Bir Singh Chowdri explains, in halting English, how grateful he is for the army’s presence: “With army here, Hindus feel safe. The soldiers are God,” he says.

Mr. Chowdri’s opinion couldn’t be further from the views of most Kashmiri Muslims, who live their lives year round in the shadow of the gun. An estimated half a million troops are deployed, and since the separatist insurgency erupted in 1989 the army has been responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians, plus hundreds of cases of rape and countless ‘disappearances.’

This militarisation of a population has meant entire an entire generation growing up under military occupation, daily putting up with curfews, checkpoints and the constant threat of arrest. On the road from Jammu to Srinagar, on the first leg of our trip to Amarnath, we glimpse some of these everyday frustrations when the local bus we’re travelling on is pulled over no fewer than six times. Each time the soldiers make us wait for up to forty-five minutes before allowing us to proceed. Once we are told the road ahead is blocked by an angry mob. Then we are told there has been a landslide; another time, a suicide protest. The journey, incidentally, reveals evidence of none of these things; our fellow passengers say it’s more likely the road was cleared to make way for a troop convoy.

As well as these problems on the road, we witness some of the frequent strikes that shut down commercial life in the valley, halting taxi and bus services and choking basic food supplies. The Muslim strikes in Srinagar and around are a response to the Hindu strikes in Jammu, the state’s twin capitals currently locked in a bizarre tit-for-tat struggle. The land dispute – like many disputes here – has opened up much deeper grievances, and the “economic blockade” of the road has only added to Kashmir’s profound feeling of isolation; the belief that Indian people are against them.

But despite this politically-charged religious conflict, what we discover on the Amarnath pilgrimage is also a rare example of tolerance. This is something media coverage has tended to overlook. According to tradition, after all, it was a Muslim shepherd who discovered the holy cave in the first place, and for centuries local Muslims have provided food, accommodation and ponies for visiting Hindus from every part of the subcontinent. Amarnath also links them in other, often surprising, ways. While Hindus enthusiastically point out the shapes of the natural rock formations around the holy cave – the elephant-headed shape of Ganesha, the rock that resembles Shiva’s sacred bull, and the form of the great serpent Sheshnag winding up the opposite cliff-face – at least one Muslim explains to me that, if I look at the rock very carefully, it’s also possible to make out the Arabic word for ‘Allah.’

I talk to Reyaz Ahmed, a local Kashmiri who runs a stall selling prasad– religious offerings – for pilgrims to take to the shrine. He looks as if he’s in his early twenties, which would make him part of the generation that has known military occupation for their entire lives. “We have nothing against the Hindus coming here, we provide them every assistance. Here you see Hindus and Muslims working together, as brothers.”

He points to a group of dandy-wallahs – the men hired to carry particularly old or infirm pilgrims to the cave on an improvised dandy, or sedan chair – and adds, with only a hint of tongue-in-cheek: “You see, we even carry them on our shoulders.”

I remember this man by the road in Rishikesh. The man with teeth like a mouthful of matchsticks. A thicket of spines bristles from his mouth; his lips drool open to the chin. He looks like one of those deep-sea angler fish, except that he has no phosphorescent light, just a collection of rags, batteries, machine parts and cannibalised radios, twisted wires and engine fragments spread at the side of the road. He is some kind of collector of parts; as proof of this inexplicable trade his hair, skin and fingernails are black with worked-in grease. Only the yellowing quills of his teeth protrude through flapping purple lips. Squatting in his machine-part shrine, he looks like the goddess Kali. People make offerings in the same way: a bent nail, a broken padlock, tossed on the blackened pile. All the ugliness of India is here, and all its little gods. Also, he seems to be constantly smiling. Or maybe it’s just the fact that his mouth doesn’t close.

You leave a country the moment you step through the airport’s sliding doors. You begin the process of forgetting as soon as the air-conditioning cools the sweat on your skin. As my plane taxis across the tarmac, I left India long ago. But as it lifts its nose from the ground – and later, somewhere over Iran – somehow, I think of him.

1. According to an ancient custom, the pedestrian streets of this city are arranged in the following way: at regular intervals along the road one slab from the pavement is removed, and the hole allowed to fill up with filthy, stinking brown water. These holes are so spaced that unobservant pedestrians – such as tourists, blind and habitually arrogant people – will plunge almost knee-deep into the slop not only once but twice, three times or – hopefully – every twelve or fifteen feet of their journey to lunch appointments and important business functions.
2. In cafes and bars along the length of Ojala, etiquette requires that instead of placing their cigarette butts in ashtrays, customers should flick them directly onto the gleaming, freshly-mopped floor. This is not a token of arrogance, or to provide extra work for the bored Equadorian cleaning lady, but to suggest in the customer´s mind a sense of the cyclical nature of things – dirty, clean, and then dirty again – as well as the impermanence of human deeds and actions. This provides for a philosophical frame of mind, and superior drinking conversations.
3. When children attack a cafeteria, they begin at the far end and then fight their way back towards the entrance. In this manner the attack group can cause maximum distress and disruption – screaming, kicking, biting, overturning tables and flinging chairs at the legs of pursuers – as coffee drinkers, diners, waiters, cooks and cleaning staff become involved. The smallest child, who is also the most violent, keeps in his clenched, sweaty fist a spoon or fork snatched from the wreckage of a table on the way to hurl at the head of the oldest waiter – who is also the most indignant – in a parting shot as the attack group regains the freedom of the open streets.

‘Hello, sir,’ says the man. ‘Welcome to my hotel.’

A meek, expectant, ghoulish face, the eyes bulging out through the lids.

‘Can I carry your bags up these stairs, sir? Let me take a hold of those things.’

You are following him towards an enormous staircase. He walks in a buzzardy, hopping sort of way, stooped forward with the weight of the bags. You pause to look back at the fountain. It is making an uneasy dribbling sound.

‘We only turn it on at certain times, sir,’ he says. ‘Otherwise it humidifies the room. It makes everything moist and attracts very tiny flies.’

He is standing at the foot of the stairs, looking upwards. Your eyes follow the line of the banister, curving away gracefully up and up, on and on. The topmost the steps are indistinct, with a thin sea mist descending. You notice fingerprints on the polished rail.

‘Or would you rather ride in the elevator?’ he suggests.

The doors close. You are encased in a mirrored sarcophagus. His finger hovers over a panel of little button lights.

He asks: ‘Would you like to go up or would you like to go down?’

You wonder if this is some sort of a joke.

It appears you are going down.

You are walking down a long, narrow corridor. He is dragging your bags on the floor behind him. Doors slide past on the left and on the right. Occasionally you pass paintings, little framed openings onto mountains or the sea.

Perhaps you should try to calculate how many hours you have spent walking down corridors such as this.

He stops and rests the bags. Under the light of the fancy lamp above the door, which is shaped like a koi carp, you can see two grooved lines that run vertically from the middles of his eyebrows to his forehead, disappearing under the bell-boy hat. You can’t imagine what expressions this man could possibly have pulled to get wrinkles there, in those places.

He is smiling like a grocery assistant.

‘Welcome to your room,’ he says. ‘Here’s your door. It doesn’t have a number on it.’

Inside there are a bed and some other things.

His voice echoes in the en-suite bathroom. ‘I’m putting your bags down here, sir.’ There is the sound of running water. He comes out wiping his hands on the inside of his jacket.

You are sitting experimentally on the edge of the bed. You have examined the furnishings. There is a bedside table with a drawer in it, and half of you is looking forward to the man leaving so you can have a look at what’s in the drawer, while the other half knows that there will be nothing at all in there.

There never is, in those drawers.

‘Look at the wallpaper, sir,’ he suggests.

It is covered in a pattern of tiny flowers.

You lie back on the bed with your shoes sticking over the end.

Suddenly you imagine that the man is tugging at your shoes, trying to get them off, and this makes you sit up again quickly. You have been mistaken: he is over on the far side of the room, inspecting a wall socket. He has stopped smiling now and seems rather grave.

‘Would you like a biscuit, sir? You’ll find one underneath your pillow,’ he informs.

After an appropriate time has elapsed he adds, by way of explaining things: ‘I put them there to hide them from the maids.’

You move your toes. Your shoes feel loose.

Looking down, you realise that both sets of laces have been untied.

He is watching you now with an expression of dismay.

Beside the bed is a heavy brown plastic radio. You turn it on and move the dial back and forwards. Nothing but a sea of static in both directions.

‘Do you like music, sir?’ He is moving imperceptibly, you sense this much at least, but it’s impossible to tell whether he is coming towards you or going away. ‘We are installing a musical system inside our elevator, soon. The sound will come from speakers hidden in the ceiling. Imagine that, sir, going up or down to any floor you like, listening to music all the way.’

Your eyes keep wandering from him to the floral wallpaper, from the floral wallpaper back to him. A single fly is going round and round in circles on the ceiling.

Suddenly he is right in front of you, pulling off his gloves. You slide sideways off the bed and leap away.

You go over to the window but he is there, too. He is holding out one pale hand and looking at you with damp, begging eyeballs.

‘Tip, sir?’ he asks, on the verge of tears.

You give him all the money you can find.

Once he has shut the door behind him you double-knot your laces and check underneath the pillow for the biscuit.

It isn’t there. Not even crumbs.

Then you look in the drawer of the bedside table. There is nothing there either, except a book containing the inviolable word of god.

Nothing but disappointment in those drawers.

In the en-suite bathroom, splashing your face with cold water, you notice that your bags have been placed, side by side, in the bathtub.

BERN

The International Committee of Cartographers (ICC) voted unanimously yesterday to reclassify the European continent as a ‘peninsula.’

The sudden decision sent shock-waves through the western world, and prompted angry condemnations from the heads-of-state of 23 European countries. President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland described the committee as “a mob of insane little mapmakers,” while Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi denounced the ICC as “terrorists.”

“The job of cartographers is to map the world, not change it,” said a spokesman from the government of Denmark, “borders are altered by properly elected governments, not intellectuals at the ICC. These people have no mandate to do what they are doing. And clearly they have not thought hard about the consequences of this ridiculous statement.”

But despite the wave of hostility the ICC has provoked, experts say the decision is “absolutely legal” and will be very hard to challenge in the courts. Guillermo Bosé, a professor of Cartography Law at the University of Barcelona, said yesterday “the International Committee of Cartographers is the only organisation of its kind. There simply exists no other body that can oppose its decisions.” The ICC was founded in Bern in 1663 to mediate between two map-making guilds, and is now the accepted authority on all cartographic debates. It last made headlines in 1926, when a move to grant ‘subcontinent’ status to Greenland was defeated by only two votes.

Traditionally, the easternmost boundary of Europe is marked by Russia’s Ural mountains. But the committee has declared that a continent is defined by coastline alone, and not by mountain ranges. “Mountains are totally irrelevant,” said a spokeswoman yesterday. “A continent is a large mass of land separated from other large masses of land by a body of water. You only have to look at a map to see that Europe and Asia are not separate masses of land, they are both part of the same land-mass. They even share the same tectonic plate. They are, therefore, the same continent.” In response to the furious reaction from European governments, ICC chairman Claus Hoegger protested, “it is ridiculous to suggest we are somehow ‘demoting’ Europe from being a continent, for it has never been one. We are simply pointing out the obvious.” The committee says that in future, Europe should be referred to as a “peninsula of Asia.”

While the reclassification has come as a shock to the European public, it has been a subject of debate within the ICC for over three decades. Europe’s continental status was first questioned in 1973 by professor Jals Knolsum’s article False Continent, which appeared in leading geological journals. Although initially derided, Knolsum’s ideas gained popularity among academics and came to exert a considerable influence on some committee members, driving a wedge between more conservative cartographers and increasingly vocal ‘peninsularists.’ Until Tuesday’s announcement, however, few in the cartographic world imagined that the reclassification movement would achieve such spectacular success.

“It’s a crushing blow,” admitted a former ICC secretary yesterday. “Over the last ten years, the committee has seen position after position filled by ambitious peninsularists, and this is the result. I never thought it would come to this. They have written an entire continent off the map.”

But what, in immediate terms, does this mean for Europe’s approximate 700,000,000 inhabitants? “For a start, I think we will witness intense identity shock,’” says Gawyn Glayn, professor of Territorial Psychology at the University of Cardiff, “what has happened is really a form of geographical castration. Over the past century Europe has lost almost all its colonial extensions and much of its ‘world power’ status. It has gone from being a continent at the centre of the world – in early maps, at the centre of the universe – to a small and rather doubtful spit of land surrounded by five much larger continents. And now it is told it is not even a homogeneous landmass. I believe the effect will be cultural trauma, completely shattering Europe’s confidence in itself as an entity … it will become a kind of geographical eunuch.”

Certainly the ‘trauma’ has already made itself felt in the world economy, with the Euro plummeting five points while Asian markets soar. There have been angry demonstrations in major European cities, most notably Paris, where around 100,000 protesters marched on President Jacques Chirac’s residence bearing placards proclaiming “we will never be a peninsular.” A similar demonstration in London ended in Hyde Park with the unfurling of a 100-metre banner that read “together, we are a continent.”

The EU is unavailable for comment.

OSAKA

The scientific community expressed concern yesterday after Japanese microbiologist Dr. Nakashima Miharu announced the creation of an ‘Army of Mould.’

Dr. Miharu told the Japanese media that the construction of the army has taken him almost fifteen years, with the majority of work conducted in his private laboratory in a residential district of Osaka. Using little more than Petri dishes, mould strains and a specially-developed ‘damp solution,’ he claims to have created the first-ever “intelligent mould,” capable of low-level military operations. But the revelations have been condemned by government health officials, his former colleagues, and even his family, as well as causing panic in Osaka after local authorities warned of possible “spore-seepage” into the neighbourhood.

“I would like to announce, to the world and to mankind, that I have created an Army of Mould,” said Dr. Miharu in yesterday’s sensational address. “By combining divisions of ascomycota and zygosporangia mould strains and subjecting these hybrids to years of intensive reproduction, cultivation, organisation and training, I have constructed mould-based organisms capable of tactical manoeuvres, defence against aggression, and attack.

“These moulds are grouped into loose regiments, and can operate both individually and as a cohesive whole. This ‘damp solution’ allows them to group on any terrain they please. They carry fungal muskets that release a pilobolus-based discharge of mycotoxin and aflatoxin, and, in good conditions, they can move about two kilometres an hour. Each soldier is around fifteen centimetres tall.”
Dr. Miharu then astounded journalists by pouring a small amount of solution over the desk in front of him, and applauding as crude mould soldiers formed and began moving back and forward over its surface.

“I believe there is something wrong with him,” said a tearful Ayumi Miharu, his wife of twenty-five years, an hour after the press conference. “I rarely see him any more, he has neglected his children. He never told us what he is doing in there, his family has been falling apart, and now we find out that all this time he has been building an army made of mould. It’s just grotesque.”

“Miharu san is a friend of mine, and a respected authority on mould research and development,” said Dr. Komatsu Watanabe, who studied under Dr. Miharu at Kyoto University in the 1970s. “But if what he claims is true, that he has created such an army, then I can only condemn him for reckless behaviour and unethical practices.”

Dr. Martin Hauser, an expert from the Imperial Mycology Foundation, said today: “There can be no doubt of Miharu’s genius, but we have to seriously question his sanity. He may think he can control this mould, but there have already been reports of spore contamination in several areas, which suggests that the army may already be spreading from its base.

“The use of pilobolus [the fungal strain used in the 'muskets'] is particularly worrying, as pilobolus spreads itself by explosively launching spores into the atmosphere through pressurised squirts of cytoplasm. He claims that all his ‘soldiers’ are armed with fungal mechanisms capable of shooting mould-based toxins, which, although admittedly clever, poses great risks for surrounding populations. This, I suppose, is the point.”

In all the furore surrounding the announcement, two things still remain unclear. The first is exactly how the project was funded, as Dr. Miharu is thought to have little personal income and “absolutely no backing” from government institutions, leading to speculation that he may have received help from military organisations or private interests. The other mystery is what – having spent so long creating this army – he intends to do with it. So far, he has given little indication.

“This is the culmination of a lifetime’s work and fascination,” was all he said yesterday, “the realization of mould’s true potential. I am proud to have played a part in the essential evolution of mould, the implications of which are vast, and awe-inspiring.”

When questioned on the Army of Mould’s attack capabilities, he replied: “In its present state, it is probably large and well-organised enough to destroy a herd of cows. However, these are early days.”

The Japanese government has so far tried to downplay the significance of the matter, referring to it as a “health concern” to be dealt with by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. But officials are reportedly preparing to investigate claims that the build-up of a mould-based offensive force may breach Japan’s commitment to peace, as enshrined in Article 9 of the country’s constitution.

Three major religions were at loggerheads yesterday after Jewish scholars announced their intention to sue Christianity and Islam for plagiarism.

Religious leaders were reportedly “dumbfounded” when the delegation, which calls itself the True Children of Abraham, won critical backing in the dispute from the World Intellectual Property Association (WIPA), a multi-governmental forum. The case is scheduled for a preliminary hearing tomorrow in a magistrate’s court in Geneva, and, if this is successful, could be taken to the World Trade Organisation. The scholars are seeking damages potentially amounting to billions of dollars.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are known as the ‘Abrahamic religions’ because of the role that Abraham plays in their beliefs and scriptures. The Old Testament refers to Abraham as the father of the Israelites, while Muslims regard him as an important prophet and, through his son Ishmael, the father of the Arabs. But the True Children of Abraham claim that Judaism – which pre-dates Christianity by 1,300 years, and Islam by 1,900 – has been “plundered” by the subsequent religions, and deserves reparation for “millennia of intellectual robbery.”

“Quite simply, it’s outright theft,” said group spokesman Ariel Halevi yesterday. “The central tenets of the Judaic faith were long ago plagiarised by Christians and Muslims – our belief system stolen, copied, and passed off as someone else’s. Not only did they plunder the patriarchs Abraham and Moses from our scriptures, but the very idea of the One True God. What we are demanding is recognition of this, and rightful repayment.”

“This isn’t about religion, but a question of intellectual property rights,” added Dr. Moshe Goldberg, chairman of the group. “If the author of a book steals the ideas, or the characters, or the plot from a previous work, he is rightly prosecuted for copyright infringement, which is theft. Why should the same rules not apply to the Old Testament and the Koran, which borrowed liberally from the Torah? Why should they be allowed to get away with plagiarising faith?”

Christian and Muslim leaders at first denounced the case, with priests, reverends and imams coming together to label it “utterly ridiculous.” But alarm has been growing in certain quarters after the WIPA’s decision to support the claim, lending legal weight to what at first appeared to be a question of theology.

“What we have are two different types of radical ideologist – the radicals of Orthodox religion and the radicals of the intellectual property movement – joining forces to achieve an end that will further both their causes,” says Gerhard Foerster from the Casey Foundation, an intellectual property watchdog. “The True Children of Abraham wish to discredit the holy scriptures of rival religions, while certain unscrupulous members of the WIPA see this as an opportunity to take the intellectual property movement to its furthest extreme.

“Since the success of the 1994 TRIPs agreement [Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights], which covers everything from artistic copyright to the patenting of drugs and plant varieties, organisations such as the WIPA have been attempting to expand the definition of intellectual property ever further. Their position is an ideological one – they want to see how far this theory can be taken.”

It is still not clear what a court ruling on behalf of the True Children of Abraham might mean for Christian and Muslim denominations. The case is unique not only because of the religious aspect, but because the disputed scriptures were written up to 2,000 years ago. According to WIPA lawyers, the age of the documents is irrelevant because the ideas within them are “broadcast every day, in churches and mosques the world over, in a clear and continuing breach of intellectual property ownership.”

“Our demands are not unreasonable,” Dr. Moshe Goldberg told reporters. “We are not asking Christians to stop producing Bibles, or Muslims to stop making Korans. We are simply suing for justified financial reparation under existing anti-plagiarism laws, and asking that Jews be officially credited as the original creators of these beliefs.”

He went on to suggest a possible compromise involving a legal disclaimer – to be printed at the start of Bibles and Korans, and read out before sermons – such as “the following ideas are reprinted and reproduced with the kind permission of Judaism.”

Legal observers have commented that a successful ruling for the True Children of Abraham may inspire other religious groups to seek similar reparation. Already, a delegation of Buddhists has submitted a complaint to Hindu authorities in India, demanding “the return of our Buddha.” This refers to the figure of Gautama Buddha, who, after his death in 483 BC, was quickly assimilated into the Hindu pantheon, which claimed him as the ninth incarnation of Vishnu.

Like most, if not all, of these Turkish supermarkets, this one is family-run. The dad is a happy-looking old guy with a grey moustache, assisted at all times in the shop by either a son or a daughter. During the time I’ve been shopping in here, I’ve got to know them all. The eldest son has a sensitive face, but is often a little moody. He wears a leather jacket and a silver necklace, and has his hair slicked back in the style of a Bollywood heartthrob. The youngest son also wears a leather jacket. He has round glasses and a rather fetching early Beatles-era pudding-bowl haircut. He is generally extremely jolly, and serves customers with a certain amount of flair.

And then there is the daughter. She’s probably in her early twenties, and in terms of personality has always seemed the exact halfway point between her two brothers. Sometimes she is really friendly, and sometimes she is really grumpy. The other interesting thing about her is that sometimes she is wearing an Islamic headscarf, and sometimes she is not.

This has puzzled me for a while now. At first I thought that perhaps she took her headscarf off when her dad wasn’t in the shop, but soon realised that this wasn’t the case because her dad is always in the shop – normally leaning against the shelf where they stock spicy plantain chips. Then I thought that perhaps the wearing of the headscarf related to significant religious days – but seeing that the split was 50/50, this also seemed unlikely. In the end I just decided that she wore the headscarf when she felt like it, which seemed like a pretty cool and relaxed way to be religious.

As the months went by, however, I came to notice something else. An identifiable pattern began to emerge in my observations. There appeared to be a direct correlation between the girl’s moods and the headscarf. When she had the headscarf on, she was friendly. When she didn’t have the headscarf on, she was grumpy. Fascinating! I thought to myself. The amateur cultural anthropologist in me immediately went to work, and I came up with the following possibilities:

1) When the girl has the headscarf on her head, she feels safe in the knowledge that men look at her less, and thus feels more comfortable, relaxed and confident.

2) When she wears the headscarf she knows she is being a better, more dutiful Muslim – keeping her father and brothers happy – and this leads to a feeling of contentment.

3) Conversely, when she doesn’t have the headscarf on, she feels guilty (or provocative) and this makes her sour and ill-tempered.

4) She has extremely greasy hair or nits, and when she’s forgotten to put the headscarf on she is worried that customers will spot this.

Whatever the complex socio-religious or anthropological reasons behind the phenomenon, there was no doubt about the central premise: the headscarf seemed to make her happy, while the lack of it made her grumpy. As I browsed the aisles of the supermarket for red kidney beans or Fufu flour, peeking at my sociological subject from around a sticky baklava display, I pondered this discovery at length. Fascinating… Yes, fascinating. A fitting subject, perhaps, for a PhD – or at least something in The Guardian. An in-depth study of the correlation between religion and happiness. Does religious belief cause peace of mind? Does it lead to a sense of fellowship with others? Or is it, perhaps, a purely cultural effect – a sense of belonging, of inclusiveness, acceptance by a wider community? Surely this goes right to the heart of the Islamic experience in Western Europe? This girl is poised between two paradigms – between two entirely separate states of being!

This morning, however, I went into the supermarket after an absence of a couple of weeks, and discovered something that scuppered all my fine theories. There, behind the counter, was the girl with the headscarf on, being her nice friendly self. And there, by the spicy plantain chip shelf, was the girl without the headscarf on, a characteristically grumpy expression on her face. “Good morning,” chirped the headscarf girl, “we haven’t seen you in a while!”

Twin sisters, goddamn it. One happens to be friendly, one happens to be grumpy; one happens to be religious and one happens not to be. Let that be a warning against indulging in slapdash socio-cultural bullshitting. There goes my PhD. Get a job, etc.

In Hayao Miyazaki’s environmental fable Princess Mononoke, the antlered, baboon-faced Forest Spirit walks serenely on dappled water. The ambitious industrialist Lady Eboshi levels her long rifle. “Now watch closely, everyone,” she tells the awed soldiers around her, “I’m going to show you how to kill a god.” She hits the spirit with her first bullet, and later shoots its head off its body.

A particular news story struck me last summer that, bizarrely, recalled the scene above. It was the tale of a similar assault on divinity, a god dispatched at mortal hands: “An ice stalagmite that forms in a Himalayan cave and is worshipped as a Hindu god has melted completely for the second year. The phallus-shaped stalagmite in the remote Amarnath cave in Indian Kashmir disappeared on Sunday, disappointing Hindu pilgrims who see it as a form of Lord Shiva, the god of destruction and regeneration. Scientists say the melting is a result of increased temperatures due to climate change and to the heat generated by increasing numbers of pilgrims flocking to the site.” (Reuters, July 2007)

The stalagmite is regarded as a Shiva-lingam; a powerful phallic symbol representative of male generative energy. According to Vaman Shivram Apte’s Sanskrit dictionary, alternative meanings of a lingam can include: “The image of a god. A symptom or mark of disease. A means of proof, a proof, evidence. The effect or product which evolves from a primary cause.”

Or, in the words of Swami Sivananda, “a symbol which points to an inference. When you see a big flood in a river, you infer that there had been heavy rains the previous day. When you see smoke, you infer that there is fire.”

This was the first time I’d seen climate change manifested like this: not only as the destruction of ecological systems, but also of human faith. The sudden disappearance of a natural formation which hundreds of millions of people believe to be an embodiment of god – the cave is where Lord Shiva is meant to have related the secret of eternity – is a startling and powerful cipher. The story seems to offer some clues to how global warming might impact on us – not just physically, but spiritually – how rising temperatures and changing weather patterns might alter the most ancient of beliefs.

This lingam represents, remember, a “symptom”, a “mark of disease”. In the same way the melting of Arctic icebergs and the sudden collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf can be taken as physical confirmation of a theory, the melting of this column of ice is “a means of proof, a proof, evidence”. Just as we can trace environmental problems across the world back to the root cause of climate change, from the flooding of islands in the South Pacific to the creeping deserts of Africa, we should have the intelligence to perceive this symbol as “the effect or product which evolves from a primary cause”.

The Amarnath legend says that Shiva chose the cave because of its remoteness from the world. He wanted to reveal the secrets of eternity to his consort, Parvati, in a place of perfect isolation, far from mortal concerns. The idea that the gods could once take refuge in mountains, and remain there undiscovered and unobserved, now seems as hopeless and naïve as imagining that wilderness will always be wild – or, for that matter, as assuming we can continue to exploit the world’s resources and burn fossil fuels indefinitely. As the breaking up of the icebergs shows, nothing is permanent any more. Lord Shiva’s cave is no longer remote, and nowhere is invulnerable to change. As illustrated by a melting god, the urgent reality of climate change steals away our pleasant illusions of timelessness – the eternity Shiva tried to protect.

From the earliest times, people have equated gods with mountains. The high, snow-covered places of the world, seemingly brushing against the heavens, represented an idea of the immortal that is now in danger of disappearing. Along with ice stalagmites in isolated caves, glaciers, icecaps and ice-shelves are melting at unprecedented rates around the globe. The destruction of these ‘abodes of the gods’ – which must have been as sacrosanct and inviolable as the moon once was – is evident from the shrinking icecap of Mount Kilamanjaro to the retreat of China’s sacred Mingyong Glacier, the peak above which is considered to be the incarnation of the Tibetan god Kang Karpo. Even India’s holy River Ganges – a deity central to the Hindu religion – could dry up for much of the year if the glaciers which water it continue to decline at present rates.

In June 2005 the Wall Street Journal’s Antonio Regalado reported on the Qolqepunku Glacier in Peru, a site of veneration from before the time of the Incas. Pilgrims come here to worship the apu, the mountain god who controls the weather. In recent years, however, the ice-cutting practice that was once central to the pilgrimage has been banned due to the alarming rate of the glacier’s retreat: “Although few on this remote mountaintop are aware of it, the demise of this Andean ice-cutting ritual is likely to be the result of global warming. A study by the Peruvian government in 1997 found that the country’s glaciers had shrunk by more than 20% over thirty years …Within forty years, they may all be gone. The cosmological implications of the missing snow are clear to people here. According to local myth, when the snow disappears from the tops of the mountains, it will herald the end of the world.

When I was eighteen I lived for some months in the foothills of the Himalayas, not far from where the Amarnath cave is found. I knew the mountains only as a distant view, range upon range of snow-covered peaks piling-up until they vanished amongst the clouds. The impression that remained with me was of seeming impenetrability, the comforting thought of the permanence of things – the way I once thought about icecaps, rainforests – that such places were unchanging.

I’m not a follower of any religion, and my purpose here is not to argue for the existence of a god. But the existence of wilderness in the world, of places above and beyond human reach, is a source of deep joy to me, something that brings relief and peace: perhaps the closest I will get to approaching an idea of the eternal. When I think that these places will not last forever – that they may even vanish within my lifetime – I feel a pain not unlike, I imagine, the pain of losing god.

This, I believe, is the message implicit in Amarnath’s melting Shiva-lingam. It indicates the enormity of all we stand to lose, warning us not only of the wider degradation of our ecosystems, but also – just as devastatingly – the collapse of our wonderment. If we continue to allow the ‘abodes of the gods’ to be conquered and exploited, we will do ourselves irreparable damage as a species. In order to truly address the underlying causes of climate change, we must regain not only a due respect for Nature, but an appropriate sense of awe.

Our first gods were Nature gods, and there was good reason for that. Humanity recognised that the natural forces which controlled and shaped our world also controlled and shaped us. It makes sense to venerate glaciers and mountains, forests and rivers, because – as peer-reviewed scientists now strive to make clear – these are the things on which our continued survival as a species depends. If we kill our ‘gods,’ we kill ourselves.

This is also the final message of Princess Mononoke. When Lady Eboshi kills the Forest Spirit, it is an attempt to gain dominion over Nature, to expel the gods from the forested hills and achieve what she sees as human destiny. Eboshi wants the spirit’s head because it is rumoured to bring immortality, yet ‘deicide’ brings only disaster – the decapitated spirit of Nature is transformed into a god of death who threatens to annihilate the world until the humans realise the only way out: to give the vengeful god its head back.

I queued behind a mother and son, who was buying a chocolate bar. The boy was about six years old. He stared at the beer and wine in my basket, then michievously caught my eye. He looked from me to the alcohol, from the alcohol to me.

Then he whispered very quietly, as if it was the naughtiest thing: “you drink!”

By way of response I smiled and put my finger to my lips, as if drinking on a Wednesday night was one of those funny little adult secrets that he would come to appreciate in time.

The mother and son left the supermarket. As they walked away from the till, the little boy tugged at his mother’s sleeve and imparted in a secretive hiss: “mummy, that man drinks!”

I only just heard the mother’s response as she passed through the automatic doors. “He’s a tramp,” she said matter-of-factly, as if it was a simple truth. Any other comments on my general appearence were thankfully obscured at this point by the roar of a passing bus.

“You must tell me what happened to the cow,” she says for a second time.

They are leaning side by side at the railing, their bodies gently touching. She gazes straight ahead down the hill, towards the dark, waxy bushes.

“I don’t know what happened to the cow,” he answers.

It is one of those bright, windy afternoons. The sunlight gleams in discarded cans and the shiny foil of crisp packets. A shadow bounces quickly towards them across the glowing grass.

“I’m sorry, but you must,” she says, “if you’re serious.”

The shadow reaches the base of the hill and rapidly ascends. A second of darkness falls over them, then passes on its way. He is watching the side of her face as this happens. It changes the colour of her skin from yellow to grey.

They are standing directly under the path of the cable cars, one of which brought them half an hour ago to this park on the outskirts of the city. The cable itself makes a swishing sound in the air above them. They can see the cars strung out like pearls at regular intervals between the pylons, and every sixty seconds or so one glides overhead.

The attraction has seen better days. Thick grease covers the mechanisms, and the windows of the cars are streaked with grime. The cars are painted red or blue, and few of them – only one in every ten, they have counted this – contain passengers.

They find the fact that the empty cars still run strangely reassuring. As if passengers are not really the point; as if, perhaps, there is some other reason.

“Alright. I’ll tell you what happened,” he says, frowning thoughtfully down the hill, across the park, towards the city. “If you’re sure you want to know. Are you really sure?”

“Yes,” she says. “Of course I want to know.” She puts another olive in her mouth, works the stone with her tongue and teeth, then spits it neatly out over the railing.

He had intended to ask her in the cable car; that had been his plan. The trip took only fifteen minutes, gliding down past the palace and cathedral, over the railway and the dried-up river, across an eight-lane motorway and finally over trees and foliage as they crossed the scrubby parkland to this hill. They ate their picnic in mid-air, facing one another from opposite seats, drinking cava from the bottle and spitting olive stones out of the window. There was a speaker set in the ceiling, delivering a crackly commentary of which she occasionally translated a phrase, but mostly they ignored this voice and concentrated on what would happen if the cable snapped at this point or that, plummeting their car towards the ground.

“The worst would be above the motorway,” he said. “Even if we survived the fall, we’d be hit by about twenty trucks.”

“Unless we actually fell on a truck,” she said, “and then it could carry us along to wherever we wanted to go.”

“What about here, over these roofs?” he asked as their car swung over the rooftops of high-rise apartment buildings. They could see the occasional face glancing up, washing flapping brightly on a line.

“That would be ok. We’d just have to move in. Call it an act of god.”

When they passed above the park, they stuck their heads out of the window and tried to spot the prostitutes and flashers reputed to be lurking down there. It was like going on a safari. They didn’t see any, though.

“They must be hiding.”

“Or fucking.”

I’ll ask her now, he told himself clearly as they pulled their heads back into the car. But at this moment she tugged him towards her and kissed him on the mouth. Her hand was around the back of his head, and he tasted the salt of the olives on her lips, the cava-drunkenness of her tongue. He told himself to separate gently, grip her shoulders, and say it. But instead, he slipped one hand inside her shirt. The machinery of the cable car whirred, squealing as it travelled. He thought: shit, I’ve missed it again. It was too late now.

And then they came jerkily into the hangar on top of the little hill. Slow-spinning wheels reeled them in, and a carnie with a cigarette stub bouncing from his bottom lip eased their car to a standstill and opened the door.

They alighted from the car with their half-finished bottle and wandered out into the sunlight. The park was peaceful, slightly scruffy, bisected by chalky paths which criss-crossed one another in the greenery, traversed by joggers. They shared an orange and finished the cava, leaning lazily on the railing that ran around the hilltop.

There wasn’t anything to do. Soon they would head to the city again. Tonight they would sleep in a hotel, and tomorrow they would each fly home.

All the sound disappeared from the scene. The cable cars could have started running backwards. And in the dreamy silence and stillness that accompanied this waiting, he arranged the words in the order intended, and asked her to marry him.

She didn’t say anything at first. She didn’t appear to react in any way. She continued gazing down the hill, holding his left hand in her right, for the length of time it took for three red and blue cars to pass overhead.

“You have to tell me something first,” she said, as the fourth approached. “There’s something that I have to know. Truly, this is important.”

“Of course,” he said, “I’ll tell you anything. What do you want to know?”

“First, I need to tell you a story.” Another shadow passed over her face, like a thought flashing in and out. Her lips were slightly smiling, he saw, but she still didn’t look at him.

“When I was a little girl, about six or seven, I went to the beach with my family. I’ve no idea what beach it was, but it’s still very clear. A long, wide sandy beach with yellow and brown cliffs. My two little brothers were there, and my dad. Not my mum, she wasn’t around much then. I think we were staying in a holiday place, or it could have been a daytrip, I’m not sure. Anyway, we were on the beach, and I wandered off a little way on my own.

“I was holding this green plastic spade that I used to smack jellyfish. That was my favourite thing, on the beach, to smack jellyfish with a spade. So perhaps I was looking for jellyfish then, or perhaps I was just exploring. Whatever the reason, I went off alone and found myself standing at the foot of the cliffs.

“Dad had lectured me about rockslides, about children being buried in mud, so the cliffs seemed very dangerous and exciting. I walked as quietly as I could, knowing that if I coughed or sneezed an avalanche would come. I wanted to find some dinosaur bones – I imagined them poking out of the clay, the way they look in natural history museums – but I was too afraid to stick my spade in the cliff for fear of it all coming down.

“And then I looked directly up, and there, on the very edge of the cliff – huge, silhouetted against the sky – was this cow.”

“What kind of cow?” he interrupted.

“What do you mean what kind of cow? I don’t know what kind of cow.”

“I mean, what did it look like?”

“I don’t know. I’ve told you, it was in silhouette.”

“But do you think it was black and white, or brown?” he asked. “Did it have horns? I’m trying to get an accurate picture of it.”

“Black and white, then,” she said. “With horns.”

“Are you sure, or are you just saying that?”

“You’re not allowed to question me,” she said firmly. “This is my story. I was only six or seven, but I remember it all very clearly. Just listen. I said this is important.” She waited for another car to pass before she carried on. He knew she wasn’t annoyed with him. He got the feeling that she was measuring something.

“There, on the very edge of the cliff – this cow,” she continued. “It was eating the grass right on the edge, just pulling these clumps up with its teeth. It was munching so loudly I could hear it, and whenever it took another mouthful I saw little stones and bits of earth cascading down the cliff to where I stood. Each time it tugged up another clump, more stones and earth would come tumbling down. It seemed oblivious to the fact that it was so close to the edge.

“I stood there, completely frozen with fear. This is my first memory of what it feels like to be scared. I knew exactly what was going to happen – I don’t think I’ve ever known anything so surely again in my life. I knew, beyond the slightest doubt, that it was going to fall.”

She took an olive from the jar and placed it in her mouth. He waited, watching the cable cars bobbing and swaying like comedy boats, their shadows slipping beneath them like manta rays.

“I wanted someone to come to the rescue, to stop it from happening. But I think I realised even then that there was no-one who could. Perhaps this was also the first time in my life I realised that some things can’t be helped, that they will happen no matter how scared you are. I knew this cow was going to fall, that I would have to watch it take place, and there wasn’t anything that anyone could do. I couldn’t even scream, I was so frightened. All I could do was watch.

“The next time the cow reached down for a mouthful, a chunk of the cliff underneath its hooves snapped away, like a piece of cake. Both its front legs slipped over the edge, and its body slid downwards, ever so slowly, until it was hanging almost vertically above me. It started mooing and rolling its eyes. At least, I think it did. Sometimes I think I might have added this later, the way your memory does. But I know that everything else was clear, that it happened exactly this way.

“It seemed to take an impossibly long time. It was desperately trying to right itself, but soil and rocks were crumbling away and cascading down around it. Ever so slowly, it began to tip. Cows must be the heaviest creatures. It didn’t stand a chance.

“And then it fell, just as I had foreseen. It turned a full somersault in the air, hit the rock wall with its rump, bounced off – this was the most horrible thing – hit the wall again, and started rolling. The cliff wasn’t sheer, but it was very steep, and the cow just rolled and bounced off the rocks, heading straight towards me.

“I started running. I have no idea how I found my legs, but I did. I ran all the way back to where my dad and my little brothers were, screaming at the top of my voice: ‘Help, a cow’s falling off the cliff, a cow’s falling off the cliff!’ Dad told me several years later that he’d never seen anyone in his life as terrified as this before. It really freaked him out.”

She spat the olive stone from her mouth. It sailed a good few metres through the air and pinged off a broken wine bottle. He noticed that tight smile on her lips that indicated concentration.

“After he’d calmed me down to the point where I was no longer hysterical,” she continued, “I persuaded Dad to come with me to the cliff. He left my little brothers with friends, and I led the way. I didn’t want to go back to that spot – this was the last thing I wanted in the world – but I knew I had to show him what had happened. I remember how sick with fear I felt as we crossed the beach. I thought I was going to vomit at times. My biggest terror was that we’d find the cow alive, all smashed up and bleeding on the rocks, and that Dad would have to get a big stone and put it out of its misery. This was a phrase I’d heard from adults – ‘put it out of its misery’ – and ever since then, the word ‘misery’ has had this special connotation for me, as if it applied specifically to cows at the bottom of cliffs.

“Eventually we reached the place where I’d seen it happen. I was really shivering and shaking by then. Dad was trying to keep me calm, talking on and on. The top of the cliff was all broken away, just like I remembered. But,” and here she turned to look at him, as if she wanted to observe his reaction, “but – there was no cow.”

“No cow?” he repeated, not knowing what to say.

“There was no cow, no cow at all. No sign that a cow had ever existed. I looked far and wide for it, dragging Dad around by the arm, even though there was absolutely nothing behind which a cow could be concealed. There was only rocks and mud, occasional bits of driftwood. The top of the cliff was broken away, like I said. There was even a slide mark. But there was definitely no cow. It didn’t make any sense.

“Dad became more and more concerned. He explained it again and again. ‘There’s no cow here. You can see there’s no cow. And a cow wouldn’t just fall over a cliff, they’re animals, they know what they’re doing.’ But I refused to believe in no cow. I had seen it. It had happened. I didn’t want to leave the spot, and eventually he had to pick me up and carry me back to the car. I threw a tantrum in the car-park, and cried all the way home. I didn’t talk to Dad for two whole days.

“He said that I had imagined it. Imagined the whole thing. Perhaps I had seen a cow on the cliff, and then seen a rock or something fall, and got the two things mixed up in my mind. That was the only explanation, he said. Cows don’t simply disappear. I knew it made sense, the things he was saying, but still, I remembered what I saw. I remembered it as clearly as I remembered what I had eaten for breakfast that morning – as clearly as I remembered when Mum left. And the fact that my father wouldn’t believe me felt like the deepest, most hurtful betrayal I had ever known in all my life.

“Of course, I didn’t stay angry forever. I hated him for a couple of weeks, but things returned to normal over time. We found it easier not to talk about it, the incident of the cow. I believed what I believed, and he believed what he believed, and as long as we didn’t bring it up our relationship was fine. Only once, years and years later, when I was seventeen, did the subject come up again. And then it really did some damage. I’d been bunking off school, and had failed a few tests, and he found out I hadn’t been telling him the truth. We had a terrible argument, one of the worst I’ve ever had, and in the middle of this he shouted: ‘You’re a liar! You’ve always been a liar! Just like you lied about that cow!’ And I felt like I was right back on that beach, six or seven years old, underneath those muddy yellow cliffs.

“Shortly after that, I left home,” she said.

They stood in silence for some time. The cable cars came and went as before. There was something soothing about their monotony, a kind of reassurance. Once there came a shout from overhead, and both of them glanced up to see a child waving from one of the cars, heading back towards the city. Automatically, they waved back. The motion seemed to break her thoughts, and she continued talking.

“I know I saw it fall. I know. But I’ve never been able to understand where it could have gone. Three men have proposed to me in my life, and I turned each of them down. You are the fourth, the fourth man to ask. I love you – you know that – I really do. I can’t think of anyone else in the world who I’d ever want to marry. But I asked each of these other men to tell me this before I’d give them an answer, and I have to ask you to do the same. You must tell me what happened to the cow.”

“What happened to the cow?” he repeated.

“Yes. What happened to the cow. The first man who proposed to me couldn’t provide any explanation. The second didn’t take me seriously, and turned it into a stupid joke. And the third, well, the third one tried, but failed to convince me. He claimed it had just recovered quickly, and limped away before I could return.

“Now we both know the cliff was too high for that, and the beach was covered in sharp rocks. What a pathetic suggestion that was. I know you can do better. You must tell me what happened to the cow.”

“I don’t know what happened to the cow.”

“I’m sorry, but you must, if you’re serious.”

“Alright. I’ll tell you what happened, if you’re sure you want to know. Are you really sure?”

“Yes,” she says. “Of course I want to know.”

…

He considers this matter carefully now. He watches the receding cable car, the one with the waving child inside, until it is just a dot on a string, and then follows the path of its trajectory along the threaded pylons to the city. From here, it is just about possible to make out the palace and cathedral, both of which they had visited the previous day. The palace was bursting with crimson and gold, black marble, satin, jewel-rimmed mirrors, to a point where the luxury became hideous, pressing down with a sickening insistence. She said it made her feel as if her eyes had eaten too much ice-cream. The cathedral was similarly layered in gold, but its echoing ceilings and stone-slabbed floors possessed an altogether different type of weight. The cathedral felt like the palace’s shadow – but a shadow that was somehow more solid than its object. Like the shadows of the cable cars seemed real in a way the cars were not; the movement of the cars was mechanical, but the shadows were alive.

He knows he has all the time in the world, that a thousand cars can come and go before he gives his answer. He imagines them passing through his fingers like beads on a rosary. It helps him think.

What could have happened to the cow? Where could it possibly have gone? He puts these questions to himself as unambiguously as he can. We’ve already established, he tells himself, that the cliff was too high for it to survive. If it had landed directly below, the life would have been smashed out of it. Therefore – assuming the cow did fall – either something intervened to stop it landing on those sharp rocks, or something intervened immediately after, removing its body from the scene.

Did the cow really fall off the cliff? He has to get this out of the way before going on.

Yes, it did. She saw it. There’s no question.

So, we know there was an intervention immediately before or immediately after the cow hit the rocks.

But what kind of intervention could halt a falling cow? As she had pointed out herself, cows must be the heaviest creatures. It would take a pretty powerful force to arrest the cow’s plunge in mid-air, and then transport it far away enough that it couldn’t be found.

How about a gust of mighty wind? he asks himself.

This seems fairly plausible at first. One of those powerful coastal blasts that can reach speeds of up to ninety miles per hour, strong enough to lift a cow and carry it several hundred feet to dump it out at sea, beyond the surf-line. The cliffs would probably channel such a blast, adding to its intensity. Although, realistically, he thinks, it would have to have been a small hurricane, and her story made no mention of stormy weather. Perhaps a localised typhoon that hurled the cow high into the air, and then dissipated quickly? But he knows that a typhoon, however localised it was, would surely have done the beach more lasting damage.

Not a gust of mighty wind. No, that can’t have been it.

Perhaps a freak wave from the sea? One of those surges that have no explanation, boiling suddenly up the beach to the base of the cliff to snatch the cow away. It could have come and gone in seconds, receding as suddenly as it appeared, unnoticed by the fortunate holidaymakers, who, of course, were distracted by the little girl’s hysterics. The cow would have floated out like a buoy. If a riptide had taken it, it might have ended up in the middle of the Atlantic.

That’s a possibility, he thinks. I’ll keep that one in mind.

He warns himself not to jump to conclusions. Wind and waves are too obvious, too easily discounted. There has to be another explanation that he’s not thinking of.

A flock of seagulls, for example.

There exist numerous stories about attacks such as this – although, admittedly, usually involving small dogs. But surely a large enough flock of gulls, with proper organisational skills, could have plucked the cow from the air as it fell and transported it back to some cave they knew about? Working together, as a team, merciless raptors such as these might of capable of such things. They are descended from dinosaurs, after all.

But how many birds, approximately, would it take to lift a cow? This is a question that has to be posed. At a rough guess, without calculations, he would estimate one thousand.

One thousand seagulls, working as a team. If this was the case – if they’d learned to organise – then surely they wouldn’t have stopped with the cow. They’d have gone on to target even greater prizes. Bungalows, fishing boats, ice-cream vans. You couldn’t keep a thing like that secret from the world.

A more direct explanation, then. It has to be something simple. Perhaps the cow fell into a patch of sinking sand, and vanished that way. Beaches are notorious for this. The wet sand closed over its nostrils, over its frightened, rolling eyes, a couple of bubbles rose up, and it was gone. A horrible way to die.

But then, was it only luck that prevented her from going the same way? She said that she had searched far and wide, dragging her daddy around by the arm, combing and re-combing the area for any possible clue. Surely, in the process, she would have crossed that spot. The more he thinks about sinking sand, the more it seems unlikely.

What, then? Surely the answer is there. He turns his head to watch her for a moment, calmly regarding the view. She is chewing the inside of her cheek. He knows she wants him to get this right.

Spontaneous combustion? No, that’s juvenile. Perhaps some rare atmospheric condition that causes vaporisation. Something present in the environment, a chemical reaction. Flint, that’s it! Those cliffs contain flint! As the cow hit the rocks below, its horn struck an exposed piece of flint, and the spark ignited the methane in its body – everyone knows cows are full of methane – causing an explosion powerful enough to destroy it utterly!

Or, more simply, an unexploded shell, half-buried in the sand. These still surface from time to time. A bomb-blast big enough to scatter the pieces? Crabs probably feasted on the bits for weeks.

But then, if there was an explosion – any sort of loud noise whatsoever – why did no-one on the beach hear it? He can think of no explanation for this, no explanation at all.

Extracting his left hand from her right, he takes a step away from her, leaving her leaning on the railing. Thoughtfully he paces the top of the hill, hands clasped behind his back, frowning at the ground. His shoes kick up cigarette butts, woodchips. Tiny pieces of broken glass glitter in the sun.

…

“I don’t know what happened to the cow,” he tells her, a long time later.

The sun is much lower in the sky. The pylons through which the cables run cast elongated shadows. On evenings like this, sounds seem to carry further – they can hear kids yelling on a distant football pitch, the dull roar of the eight-lane motorway.

The expression on her face doesn’t alter, but her body does. Her shoulders, in particular, seem to shrink. Her arms appear to grow longer.

“I don’t know what happened to the cow,” he says again, more firmly. “There isn’t any way to be sure of a thing like that.”

“We should be heading back to town,” she says with a vague, gentle gesture. “It’ll get dark soon. The cars will stop running.” She still has that concentrated smile on her face. Her eyes have narrowed into a squint, although there is no bright light.

“Wait a minute, I’m not finished. I need to tell you something. If the cars stop, we’ll walk.”

“And risk those flashers catching us?”

“If they do, we’ll fight our way out.” He takes her hand again.

He leads her to the little play-park over the crest of the hill. It’s empty, its swings and slides deserted, and they sit facing one another on the see-saw, their feet wedged against the ground. One seat of the see-saw is shaped like a lion, and the other is shaped like a dolphin. The lion is red and the dolphin is blue. He sits upon the lion.

“I had a strange dream on the plane coming over. It wasn’t a dream exactly. I’d been looking at the clouds going by below, and the earth going by below the clouds, and I must have fallen asleep with my eyes open. When you’re that high in the air there doesn’t seem to be much difference between dreaming and waking. I guess it was about half past five in the morning. I couldn’t believe it was so bright out there.

“I was watching the shadows of the clouds as they moved across the land. And then – I don’t know what it was, the speed the plane was travelling, maybe – the shadows seemed to catch up with the clouds and then to overtake them. Everything kind of slipped out of place, as if some sequence had been lost. The earth appeared to be rolling backwards, as if it had not quite managed to reach the top of a long hill.

“It became very hard to tell if it was the shadows that were following the clouds, or the clouds that were being pulled along by the shadows. The shadows looked so purposeful, sneaking along down there. I felt they might be dragging us somewhere, skipping over the fields like that with a bunch of strings held in their teeth, and the strings connected to my hands, my arms, which were stretched out in the sky like the wings of a plane. I could feel the air rushing past my ears. The sensation probably lasted much less than a second, I don’t know. I woke up then.

“The thing was, I didn’t know if I had. For a couple of moments I had no idea if I’d just woken up, or just fallen asleep. There didn’t seem any way to tell which event had followed which – in what order the two states had come. I felt that if I’d got it wrong, if sleeping and waking had swapped places, I’d always be out of synchronisation, and would never have any way of knowing. It was like slipping into, I don’t know, a kind of shadow life. As if my life had become its own shadow, and the real life continued somewhere without me. Or like I’d been looking in the mirror too long, and changed places with my reflection.

“And then I remembered what I was there for. That I was coming to meet you. That’s how I realised I was awake, and then everything clicked back into its right place.”

He slackens his knees so his end of the see-saw tips downwards with his weight. Slowly and smoothly she rises above him, feet dangling above the ground. They regard one another from this new perspective before he extends his legs again, and the see-saw tilts back the other way.

“When we met, by the palace, on Saturday – my intention was to ask you then. I was going to do it straight away. And then on the balcony of our room, the first night we were there. And also on the rowing boat out on the lake, and in just about every bar we’ve drunk in. But mostly, I wanted to do it at the palace. Before anything else.”

“When you were almost two hours late,” she says, with a look of amusement.

“I wasn’t late. I disappeared. This is the thing I need to tell you.”

“Yes, before the flashers come.”

This time it’s her that bends at the knees, so the lion-shaped end of the see-saw rises and the dolphin-shaped end goes down. His feet do not quite hang in the air, because he is taller than her. The tips of his shoes maintain the lightest contact with the ground.

“My plane got in about seven o’clock. I took the metro straight to the centre of town. It was too early to feel hungry, but I found a café off the plaza and stayed there for as long as it took to drink a small coffee incredibly slowly, and when I came out I still had three hours to wait. I wandered up to the palace and found the place we were going to meet, but then I felt like I needed to walk. If I’d have tried to sit and wait I think I’d have chewed the inside of my face off.

“I followed the streets for a couple of hours. There was something cartoonish about everything, none of the colours looked real. All the cars stopping and going with the lights, the flashing green crosses of the pharmacies. I guess I was still spaced out from the journey. That unreal feeling you get from not sleeping, and suddenly finding yourself in another country. And sometimes I’d stop and look at something and get dizzy with anticipation. I found it incredible to believe that this was actually going to happen, that we were really going to meet. I had to keep reminding myself that you were also arriving here, that the street I was standing on connected, somehow – if you turned left and right in the right sequence – to the exact point where you were walking now. That somewhere in this city you were making your way towards me –both of us heading directly to this single point in time.

“I arrived back at the palace a few minutes before midday. Earlier the square had been almost empty, but now there were thousands of people milling around. That accordion player with the hat was playing the same tune over and over. A big crowd of tourists was around the fountain, and I walked round it a couple of times trying to see if you were there.

“It was your green scarf I spotted first. Once I’d recognised one thing, the rest of you sort of filled in around it. It startled me, you suddenly being there. You looked so much like yourself that I almost didn’t recognise you. I think I expected to see you so much that it came as a shock when I did. You were sitting not far away, looking in the opposite direction.

“I waited for you to turn around and see me. I knew you would sense that I was there, if I watched you long enough. But you didn’t turn your head. You were looking at something else.”

“I was watching the accordion player. He looked like a murderer.”

“For a moment, I thought I might have the wrong person. I kept expecting you to turn, but no matter how long I stared at you, you didn’t seem to feel a thing. People were elbowing past on all sides, I was getting in everyone’s way. I was like a stick stuck in a stream, the current rising up around it, trying to pull it along. That’s how I felt, standing there.

“I couldn’t understand why you didn’t look around. I was about to give up, go over and put my hand on your shoulder. But then, this thought appeared in my head. I have no idea where it came from: ‘You could just walk away now, and she’d never know you were there.’

“And then, out of nowhere, I was gripped by fear. I suddenly didn’t want you to turn around. I had an overwhelming desire to conceal myself behind other people – to prevent myself being seen. And so I walked away.”

“I see,” she says.

The air is blowing cooler now. The swings move with the evening breeze, and occasionally the roundabout creaks, as if it is about to attempt a rotation. They are no longer under the cable-cars here – and there are no clouds in the sky – so the shadows that slide off her face and arms are cast by a stand of skinny pines beyond the green and purple fence that marks the play-park’s boundary.

The pines move with a slow, baffled motion, swaying against one other. Their trunks are almost grey with dust, and here and there a plastic bag has snagged in the sharp branches. He watches them out of the corner of his eye; this way they don’t quite look like trees at all.

“At first I thought I’d just walk around the palace, take a moment to collect myself, then approach the fountain from the other side, the direction you were looking in. And then I thought I’d just go down the street a little way. But as I was still thinking these things I found I had reached the end of the street, taken a left turn, taken a right, and was walking in the opposite direction. I kept putting one foot in front of the other, thinking: ‘I’ll turn around up here, as soon as I get to the corner.’ But I didn’t turn around. I kept going.

“I walked for maybe fifteen minutes. The distance wasn’t so far. I found a quiet café-bar, sat at a table near the back, and ordered a spinach omelette and a salad.

“I stayed there all that time, not thinking. The food was pretty good. I ate my meal with a couple of glasses of beer. I sat for a long time afterwards concentrating on the old film posters on the walls, trying to read a newspaper. And then I still felt a little bit hungry, so I ordered a crème brulee.

“That crème brulee was really something special. You’d appreciate it. I’ll take you there. My favourite part about a crème brulee is cracking the caramelised sugar on top – it makes a sound like stepping on a pane of glass. Did you know they have to use a miniature blowtorch to get it like that?”

“That’s what I’ve heard,” she says.

“The barman seemed amused by me. He was an old guy with watery eyes and an amazingly long upper lip, like a camel or a horse. When I paid up, all he did was narrow his eyes so the wrinkles spread around the tops of his cheeks and nose. He gave me a little book of matches with the name of the café on it. I forget it now. I left it in our room.

“And then I had a go on the fruit machine. I lost about ten euros.”

Now there is only the sound of the pines. The trunks bump without rhythm. Neither looks at the other; her eyes are focused on his knees, and he is studying the peeling blue paint of the wooden dolphin face.

“What were you thinking?” she asks, still not looking, in a careful, curious way.

“I wasn’t thinking about anything. Not anything at all. I could have stayed at that table all day, never turned on my phone, gone home the next morning, never seen you again. How easy it would have been to carry on sitting there, without being awake – and then to go on to live like this, forever. I forgot my life was real. That’s how it is when you disappear.”

“Why did you come back?”

“I guess I woke up. Or realised I was awake all the time. Just like it happened on the plane. Because you’re the only thing that’s real.”

“You were almost two hours late. I could have left, you know.”

“I know.”

“You told me you got lost.”

“I did. Have you ever had a feeling you’ve entered into another life? Another life that isn’t yours – although it may closely resemble yours – and you don’t know how you got there, or how anything could possibly be different? Like something has been substituted without you knowing it. Perhaps, when you leave your house one day, some people sneak in and replace everything, clothes, books, lampshades, wallpaper, every single object you own, with a replica that’s identical in every way – right down to the crumbs on the kitchen table, the crack in your favourite plate. So when you get back, everything is the same – and yet, you get this feeling.”

“Yes,” she says. “I felt that too.”

“I know how we can avoid it now.”

“Fine. But what happened to the cow?” She slips abruptly from the see-saw so the lion-side hits the ground with a thump. She reaches out and takes his hand, tugs his arm until he rises. “I’m not letting you off like this. You can’t just say you don’t know what happened. What bullshit. That isn’t good enough.”

It fell out of your life and into mine. This is what he considers saying, as they leave the play-park and the pines and start walking quickly back towards the hangar from where the cable cars leave. It wasn’t there for very long – it falls too fast for that.

“It was devoured by butterflies,” is what he says instead. The shadows are merging with each other, but the cars are still strung out in the sky. “Those flesh-eating ones, with the black and white wings. A plague of them blew in from the sea. They kept it suspended in midair and stripped it to the bone in seconds. You’re lucky they went for the cow and not you. It’s a painful, ticklish way to go.”

“And what about the bones?” she asks thoughtfully as they hand their ripped-off ticket stubs over, and the next empty car bumps into the hangar where they stand, waiting.

“They devoured those too. They work that fast. Powdered them into a fine dust that drifted away with the wind.”

The carnie with the cigarette slows the car and holds it steady. He opens the door with a weary gesture, motions with his thumb.

The slow-spinning wheel revolves on its hub. The greasy cable whines above their heads, straining to pull them into the air.

“Yes,” she says, climbing inside. “That sounds possible.”

And on the journey back to the city, swaying across the dimming park where flashers lurk in their dozens below, they will not speak about what’s next. For now it’s enough to sit back and watch, through the smeared plastic pane, the palace and cathedral ahead of them grow gradually larger and more distinct. About halfway over, they will start laughing about something else altogether. So they’ll never glance back at this point to see what is plunging through the air behind them: the heaviest of all possible shapes in freefall through the sky, the buildings, towards the singularity of its shadow. They may feel a displacement of the air – even, in distant days, a cold wind – but they will never feel the soft impact of its landing.

We didn’t stop clubbing the afanc with our paddles until we were sure its back was broken. On this point Reverend Williams had been most specific. “Don’t stop clubbing the afanc, boys, until you are sure its back is broken,” he’d said. “Merely battering the bugger will not suffice. You must cleave its spine.”

He was sitting on a pony at the top of the first slope, where the track wound up into the mountain. He was wearing a black hat stiff with frost; his spectacles were steamed. His left hand held a small black book, in which his right hand diligently recorded which men were on their way up to the lake, and which men were on their way down.

We quickly climbed the rocky slope that ran upwards to the first great peak, beyond which the black lake lay. The land below was black and white, with no smudge of colour in between. The rock of the mountain stuck here and there through the drifted snow in a way that resembled porpoises breaking through a wave.

“Don’t forget the head!” the Reverend called, his voice unsteady in the wind. Already we were high enough above him to make him appear just a black spot in the snow.

There were eleven men from my village altogether. Most of us had played together as children. The anticipation made us children again, tripping each other on the narrow track, flinging echoes off the mountain walls. We teased fat Rhys, who had a face like a trout, that he might be mistaken for the afanc himself and get clubbed in its place. Our spirits were high with the Reverend’s whiskey and the sense of being part of something bigger than ourselves.

But it was a steep, tricky climb to the lake, and soon enough the quietness overtook us. Before we were halfway to the top, a light snow began to fall. We started to ache in our fingers and thumbs. The cold made us shrink inside our bodies; turned us to men once again.

Word of the afanc’s capture had spread far. It had reached our village the previous night, and everyone knew that Reverend Williams of Beddgelert was requesting the help of every able-bodied man in the land. Bells had clanged between villages; summonses had gone out. They had even lit the old beacon on the cliff-top at Aberdaren, and now men from as far away as Ynys Enlli had come to lend a hand in the clubbing.

I’d have liked to have been there when the afanc was caught. I think I’d have preferred the beginning to the end. It must have been a powerful sight to see it bellowing on the shore, water spurting from its nose, lashing out with its fearsome tail. Chains had been fastened around its body, attached to teams of oxen. It was said that these oxen strained so hard in dragging the afanc from the lake that one of them popped an eye. It was also said that a chain had snapped, the creature had lurched and maliciously rolled over, and a father and son had had the lives crushed out of them.

I’d also have liked to have seen the maiden: the beautiful virgin they’d stationed there to lure the afanc to shore. If I closed my eyes I could picture her, all alone at the water’s edge. Her dark eyes nervously watching the lake, pretty face flushed with cold. Icicles sparkling in her hair, frost on her perfect lips. It was said that the beast couldn’t help itself: it had dragged its foul body from the murky depths, and laid its hideous head in the maiden’s lap.

It was also said that the maiden had offered to kiss the man who finished it off, the one who delivered that last decisive blow. This was in all of our minds as we climbed; even fat Rhys, with the face like a trout. We gripped the wooden paddles the Reverend had provided, swung them to feel their weight. The paddles felt serious and smooth in our hands. Anything was possible that morning.

Ascending the final uphill stretch, we came upon a party of fifteen men coming in the opposite direction. They had purple faces and small, resentful eyes, squinting like sulky children. They appeared exhausted from their work; their hands were clawed with cold. They demanded cigarettes, which we gave. Few of them looked at us directly.

“Have you come from the lake?” asked Aled excitedly. None of them spoke, but one man nodded.

“And how does it go?” Aled asked again.

“A hard job,” said this man.

“But it’s not finished yet?”

“It’s not finished yet.”

“And what’s the creature doing? Fighting back?”

“Taking it,” the man replied. There was a pause in which no-one else spoke. And then they spat their cigarette butts into the snow, and resumed their path down the mountain.

We heard the noise before we saw. At first we didn’t know what it was. Echoing from somewhere just over the last rise – beyond which, we knew, the black lake lay in the shadow of the mountain’s peak – a steady whap-whap, whap-whap, whap-whap that sounded like slush dripping off a roof, or an audience clapping along to music.

“That must be the sound of the beast’s great tail, slapping on the water,” I heard Aled say. But it wasn’t, as we soon found out. It was the sound of the paddles.

There must have been twenty or thirty men actively clubbing away down there, with many more gathered round, awaiting their turn. The afanc lay in the middle of them all, tethered to the rock by heavy chains. The paddles were going up and down, rebounding off the afanc’s flesh, rising and falling mechanically and without passion. The oxen huddled off to one side, dolefully swinging their horns.

The way I heard it related later, the afanc was the length of a barn and as high as an elephant. This wasn’t quite true, but it was still big; longer than a cottage or small orchard. At first it just looked like an enormous seal, but then we saw the fur around the chops, the sullen, doggy features. It had a fish’s tail and fins, while its front appendages appeared to be something between paws and flippers. Its wrinkled muzzle was fastened with rope, and a few blunt teeth protruded grimly. We got up close to look into its eyes; they were open, with an oily sheen. There was no expression in them.

We also passed the two bodies nearby: the father and son who’d been crushed when they first hauled it out. The bodies were laid on wooden boards with their feet pointing towards the lake and their heads towards the mountain. I could see the father’s likeness in the smooth face of the boy, and already a little snow had settled on it.

“Where are you boys from?” A short, stubbled man with a brown bowler hat had approached us.

“Near Llanystumdwy,” I told him. He noted this down, and the number in our group, in a small black book like the one the Reverend had been keeping.

“You see what to do. It’s still not dead. We’ve been keeping this up since yesterday evening. We take it in shifts, two dozen at a time. Some of these boys could do with a rest. Go ahead.”

So we hefted our paddles and set to work. The clubbers wordlessly shifted aside to let us into the circle. I glanced at Aled, Ellis and Rhys and then raised my paddle high in the air, bringing it down hard on the gleaming flank. It bounced straight back, almost leaping out of my hand.

“You got to watch for the bounce,” said the man next to me without breaking his rhythm. “One fellow smashed his nose.” Whap-whap, whap-whap, whap-whap, whap-whap. He let out a hiss with each impact, like steam escaping from a kettle.

I got the hang of his technique, following his fluid swings. It was easy enough to fall into the rhythm, to learn which part of the handle to grip, how high to raise the paddle before bringing it down.

At first, I found it enjoyable. It was like slapping a jelly. The afanc’s body was thick blubber, like the whale I saw once washed up on Black Rock Sands. The paddles rebounded off the rubbery hide, sending wobbles up my arms and into my shoulders. The regular smacks made the monster’s flesh shimmer like the skin of a rice pudding.

“Where’s the maiden?” I asked the man beside me, glancing at the crowd. They were watching dully, mostly standing, eating scones and drinking beer. Not a beautiful virgin in sight. All I could see was men.

“The maiden went home some time ago,” the man beside me replied. He swung and hissed, swung and hissed. “She didn’t want to see.”

And so we settled into it. First the men on the left side swung, then the men on the right. Whap-whap, whap-whap, whap-whap, whap-whap. The rhythm helped us keep it together. I learned to anticipate the bounce, letting the paddle rise and fall like a pendulum, following its own momentum. The snow fell faster, then slackened off. Shadows moved across the empty lake. The wet slaps echoed off jagged rock walls that had been hacked for slate a hundred years before.

I was disappointed about the maiden, but focused on the job at hand. I was determined to keep pace with the others, to ensure my blows landed clean and hard, that my movements were as regular as a machine. I had never taken part before in a great work such as this. I was proud to be here with the boys from my village, with Aled, Ellis, Owain, Dai – even fat Rhys, with the face like a trout – the best men I had ever known.

We clubbed steadily for the best part of an hour, and then took a break to rest our arms. My muscles ached initially, but little by little the ache burned away to leave a pleasant warmth, a numbness. The feeling was like after chopping up logs for a fire. We had each brought a bag packed by our mother, with bread, ham and apples. I shared my food with a couple of men who were standing a little way back from the lake, at a spot where we could see right down the mountain to the fields and even – if it had been a clear day – to the sea.

“Reverend Williams thinks the afanc came from there,” I said to the man beside me. “It got stranded up here when the waters went down. That was thousands of years ago, he says.”

“Well it shouldn’t be here now.” The man took another slice of ham, folded it into his mouth.

We returned to work, and clubbed all the way through the morning and early afternoon. The steady whap-whap, whap-whap went on. The afanc’s thick flesh began to soften and bruise. The paddles gave us splinters. I saw that the ground around our feet was covered in a layer of tiny black spines that must have once bristled from the hide; now all these spines had been snapped off, and the body was as smooth as a slug’s.

The next time I took my rest, I walked around to the front of the afanc to examine its quivering face. I could see no change in its expression. Its eyes were spotted with oily blotches; it was hard to tell if it could still see. I held the palm of my hand near one nostril but could feel no breath. Fur hung off its muzzle like wet moss, half torn away. A rope of saliva, or slime of some kind, attached its bottom lip to the ground.

“Keep it up, boys,” called the stubbled man in the bowler hat through a cloud of pipe smoke. “Eventually we’ll soften the muscle, loosen it down to the bone.” He was still standing there with his black book, though new arrivals were fewer now. There were still about forty men gathered round; always twenty active paddles.

“We must break that back by nightfall, boys,” he shouted again a little later, when the sun was lower in the sky. The afanc’s skin had turned a different colour, become blotched and darkened in places. My arms were swinging mindlessly, pounding a soft, shining dent in the flank. The motion had become so familiar to me that it felt strange when I stopped.

We kept it up through the long afternoon and into the first shades of evening. The land grew dim; shadows gathered and spread from the folds of the mountain. Snow began to fall again. Despite the warmth of exercise, we had to pull on extra layers, scarves and thick woollen jumpers that had been donated from the nearest village. The bitter wind whistled through the holes anyway. There weren’t enough gloves to go round.

Sometimes the rhythm of the paddles would change. I could almost close my eyes. It went from whap-whap, whap-whap, whap-whap into triples like a steam train picking up speed: whap-whap-whap, whap-whap-whap, whap-whap-whap, whap-whap-whap and then whappity-whappity-whappity-whappity until we lost the rhythm entirely and the sound became a cacophony, like stones clattering together, like applause. Sometimes it seemed I heard the impact before my paddle actually struck – the way soldiers say it is when you get hit by a bullet – and sometimes it seemed the sound was delayed, an echo in a well. But it didn’t matter now whose impacts were whose, whose swings connected with which blows. We were working as one paddle now, a machine that didn’t know how to stop. I couldn’t feel my arms anymore. My hands felt a long way from my body, moving up and own of their own accord. They barely corresponded with any other part of me.

I could feel by the way the paddle connected that the pounded blubber in front of me had changed in consistency; I was making headway now. All the bounce had gone out of the flesh, its tightness had been broken. The paddle no longer jumped back when it hit, but splatted wetly into soft mush, even sinking in a little. The light brown pulp reminded me of rotten pears; of the orchard at home, last summer’s pear jam. I had spoilt the skin and was breaking through fat, smashing the muscle to slop. I wanted to work further changes, batter and batter and batter this flesh until it became something else. There was bone down there. I could feel it knocking. My efforts redoubled, the paddle swung faster, pain stabbed into my shoulders and neck but somehow didn’t reach my brain; everything seemed small and far away. The snowflakes spiralled so fast they made me dizzy.

It took me some time to realise that someone was trying to get my attention, and more for my paddle to slow down enough to stop. A voice was addressing me from behind; a hand was on my shoulder. I glanced round from the mess of pulp to see my friends Owain, Ellis, Rhys and Dai, their features as screwed and purple-looking as the men we’d met descending the mountain all those hours ago. Rhys had his trout face turned to the ground, and one of his arms was cradled in a sling.

“Dafydd, stop, just stop a second. Dafydd. Dafydd. Hold.”

“Rhys can’t use his hand anymore. He can’t carry on. We’re going back.”

Rhys lifted his right hand apologetically, supporting it with his left. It was grossly swollen from the wrist to the thumb, luridly purple and shining. His arm was trembling.

“I can’t move my fingers,” he mumbled at me, staring at his feet. There were tears welling in his small eyes. He moaned a little, and I couldn’t help thinking that if the beautiful maiden was here she’d have probably never have laid eyes on a man who looked quite so pathetic.

“We’re going back, Dafydd. Are you coming or staying?”

“I’m down to the bone,” I said. “I can feel it. We can finish it now.”

“We’re going back. There’s been enough of this.”

“We’re there, we’re almost at the end.”

“No, Dafydd. There’s been enough.”

“All of you are going back?” I asked, feeling the anger in me.

“Aled says he’ll stay, if you won’t come.”

I looked at my own hands, torn and blistered, rubbed raw in patches. There were splinters worked deeply under the skin that I wouldn’t get rid of for weeks. My hands were crabbed in the shape of the handle; it hurt when I straightened my fingers.

“I’ll stay,” I said. “I’m not leaving now.”

They left their paddles in the growing pile beside the two dead bodies. I watched them retreating down the track, growing smaller in the darkness. Fat Rhys shambled in the middle with Owain’s hand on his arm. I waited until they were out of sight, motioned Aled to step up beside me, and fell back into rhythm.

There were only a dozen of us left. Darkness moved up the mountain, seeping with the blackness of the lake. Before the night fully fell and the land around us was swallowed completely, the man in the brown bowler hat organised the lighting of torches, which encircled the afanc to cast sliding shadows across its ruined body. The flames lit the snowflakes from beneath and turned them into nests of sparks. The faces of the remaining men looked like flickering masks. The wide world shrunk to this bubble of light, outside which nothing else mattered.

I concentrated on the bone. After these hours of working soft flesh it felt good to connect with a solid thing, though the impacts jarred my arms. My elbows and wrists absorbed the shocks. The blood in my veins seemed to ache. The sounds of the neighbouring paddles told me that others had also hit bone; they had changed from whap-whap, whap-whap to a hollow thock-thock, thock-thock, thock-thock like axes against a tree. The clubbers were huffing with exertion now, urging each other on. We could feel that we were near the end, and all of us wanted to be the one there first.

“This is the buried treasure, boys! This is what we’ve been digging for!” The man in the brown bowler hat was holding his paddle like a flag. He had hopped up on top of the afanc’s back, slipping around in the skinless mush, thudding time with the heel of his boot.

“Here’s the last nut to crack! Come on, come on!” he shouted later when the beat was a frenzy, thock-thock, thock-thock, thock-thock, thock-thock, like one of those drums the Irish use, and the afanc’s body was bouncing from the blows. But we had stopped listening to him long ago. Our ears were tuned for one sound, one sound only.

And then it came: the unmistakable craaack. We felt it in our bones as well. And at once the paddles stopped.

It was Aled who’d swung the breaking blow. He had been working next to me. His paddle had stuck right there in the spine, wedged between two vertebrae. One by one, we went over to look. The vertebrae were as big as fists. The paddle had been jammed so hard he had trouble pulling it out.

While Aled tugged back and forth, trying to get his paddle back, I walked round to see the afanc’s face. It looked bloated in the light of the flames; its eyes were the texture of poached eggs. I bent close to its muzzle and heard a noise like air escaping through a pipe, a bubbling moan that continued as Aled grunted and shoved at the spine, and then the body shivered and was silent.

“That’s it, boys,” concluded the man in the brown bowler hat in the quietness that came next. “The job is done. Like the Reverend said.”

Later, I knew I would be disappointed. I knew I would feel it so keenly that I’d clench my fists and bite my tongue and still it wouldn’t help. I had been so close, it had nearly been me; perhaps just a few more blows. But Aled, Aled had got there first. Even without the maiden here, offering herself freely to him, my stomach would turn with resentment. My oldest friend. Back in the village I’d have to endure him relating this story again and again, while women crowded around, admiring him. It would make me tug the hair from my scalp; the afanc was wasted now.

But I didn’t feel that yet. I didn’t feel a thing. A wall of exhaustion hemmed me on all sides. We stood quietly. Aled sighed. One man coughed, wiped his hands on his trousers. Another let fall his paddle. The man in the brown bowler hat looked as if he was about to speak again, but then he turned away to fill his pipe.

Some remained standing, some sat down. The only thing to sit on was the afanc. The tenderised flesh sunk downwards with my weight. I wedged my feet at an angle with the ground and leaned back with my arms folded across my chest, allowing my eyes to close. There was pain in my forearms; my wrists; my neck; but the pain was so distant I felt it might almost belong to someone else. The fat supported the back of my head like the cushions in a chapel support the knees. It sounded strange to hear no blows, like when a clock has stopped.

It was warm and it was numb at the same time. Snowflakes settled on my face and didn’t melt, and I thought of the two bodies lying on planks who cared even less than I did. It was the most comfortable bed I’d ever known. Like a mattress I imagined rich people slept on. One day, I thought, I would sleep on a mattress such as this.

I thought of the beautiful maiden beside me, how her arms would feel. I imagined taking her cold hand in mine, our fingers sticky with the afanc’s mush. I wiped a fleck of gore from her hair. My muscles hurt because she’d fallen asleep and was lying on my body. Our skin was stuck together in certain places.

And then, beneath our backs, the mattress moved. All of us felt it: it passed the length of the afanc’s body from head to tail. The slow bulging-out of something deep inside, like a trapped air bubble or a thought. As undeniable as that crack. Like something trying to shift itself from one place to another.

None of us spoke. None cursed or even sighed. But one by one we got back to our feet, kicked the snow from our boots, stretched our arms, picked up our paddles where we’d let them drop – and continued clubbing.

—

This story was adapted for the stage by Caroline Hunt, and performed at the Tobacco Factory Theatre, Bristol, in 2008. Below are some pictures from the production.

The riverbank glistens with black mud. A rotten tamarind detaches itself and plops from its branch, spreading ripples. We follow the path of its descent into the silted depths of the brown river.

Here the sluggish current flows over two enormous bodies. A cloud of churned-up sediment parts to reveal two sets of yellow eyes, two sets of bubbling nostrils, one white belly. A scaled foot fumbles on a scaled back, fingering the crevasses for purchase. One body heaves on top of the other, and commences the slow motions.

The famous zoologist floats nearby, maintaining position behind a knot of twisted mangrove roots. He wears rubber diving gear over his trademark khaki suit. His breathing causes the oxygen tubes to slowly expand and contract, rising and plunging in synchronisation with that other rhythm. We cannot hear, but the sound is added later: a muffled sloshing, a deep-throated gargle, the dull roar of submersion in water.

These monstrous predators belie their reputation with a surprising display of tenderness. The male clamps lightly on the female’s neck, tickling her with his incisors. She responds by blowing streams of bubbles gently around her partner’s snout…

Through the oily plastic screen of the famous zoologist’s diving mask, his calm blue eyes regard the scene with an expression of deep understanding. His blue eyes, like his khaki suit, are instantly recognisable to an audience of millions. The screen of the mask is steaming up; we are losing sight of them. We cannot see his lower face due to the necessary breathing apparatus, but his mouth is smiling.

…

The sun breaks over a flat black sea that will never grow warm. Lumps of ice as big as buildings drift between us and the horizon. On a beach of smooth grey stones, a thousand miles from anywhere, it appears as if the rocks are moving, dragging themselves clumsily from the sea.

Our vision sharpens. They are not rocks. Now we can see the wetly-blinking eyes, the slowly-flapping flippers. Away from their natural element, there is something ungainly, even obscene, in their movements. A powerful heft and one flops into place, slipping and sliding for position in a heaving pile of blubbery flanks that shine like slate in the frozen light, huffing through their nose-flaps.

The famous zoologist views the proceedings through the lens of a thermal imaging camera. He watches the bodies flood with colour as heat spreads from the contact points, creeping from sea-frozen black to blue, to green, purple, expanding into red, finally blooming with orange and yellow, simmering spots of white.

He hangs suspended in a harness above, the fluctuating height of which he controls by a system of pulleys. His hands are protected by thick mittens, and his trademark khaki suit is trimmed with fur. His eye pressed firmly to the eye-piece, he allows himself to slowly descend towards the mass of bodies. There is no sound. It will be added later. The shifting colours expand and merge until they fill his vision.

Highly sociable by nature, these extraordinary mammals gather in large numbers to breed. At the height of the breeding season, a beach such as this may play host to several thousand mating couples. A common display of affection between partners involves the rhythmic rubbing together of flippers…

The famous zoologist continues his slow zoom into pure colour. In the coagulating oranges and yellows is revealed a map of intimacy. Upon his face on its downwards slide is an expression of extraordinary benevolence.

…

Deep, now. Fathoms down. The blackness an impenetrable wall, enormous pressure crushing on all sides. No sound or sunlight reaches these depths; and yet, there is still light.

Stars emerge in the density, twinkling like fireflies. Striking points of iridescence pulsing from below. As we strive to make sense of these shapes, a succession of incredible luminous orbs rises into our field of vision.

These hot air balloons of the deep reproduce in great clusters. The males release a milky cloud containing millions of photovoltaic seeds, which the females gather in receptive sacs as they commence their slow drift upwards. The bioluminescent bacteria that glow inside their tentacles probably signal sexual receptivity…

The famous zoologist crouches motionless, encased in a pressurised submersible. Rubber feeding tubes protrude from the sleeves of his trademark khaki suit. The submersible’s powerful headlamps pierce the gloom, sweeping slowly from left to right, while rotor blades propel the craft ever deeper. From behind a reinforced porthole looms his gentle, ageing face; his mouth hangs open ever so slightly as he marvels at the wonders of the deep.

Pulsating colours drift before him. When he closes his eyes, they do not disappear. Descending through the milky cloud, translucent bodies clench and bloom … rising and plunging, slipping and sliding … the slow-heaving mass of glistening flanks, the rubbing together of flippers … the famous zoologist peers through sediment, undetected by the self-absorbed reptiles who are by now oblivious to everything around them, fucking the way their ancestors intended.

And so, another astonishing reproductive act reaches its conclusion. There remain many marvels of intercourse that have never yet been recorded…

“David,” murmurs his wife, “I need to sleep.”

Once, having been drunk for a week with his crew aboard the Queen Anne’s Revenge, it’s related that the legendary pirate Blackbeard filled the ship’s hold with pots of brimstone, stockaded himself and his men inside, and set the pots aflame. “Come!” he had cried when this inspiration struck – a slurred debate being waged on deck about the torments they might face in Hell – “let us make a hell of our own, and try how long we can bear it!” The hold quickly filled with dense, noxious smoke and the men heaved and retched amid the fumes. Before long they threw the hatches open and burst, gagging, into the light. But Blackbeard stood tall. His face clenched like a fist. Perspiration bucketed from beneath his tricorn hat. The heat made his ears shrivel and blacken like strips of bacon. When, finally, he emerged from below – sulphur steaming off his fine clothes, eponymous beard frizzled – he berated his crew for their cowardice with the eloquent words of contempt: “Damn ye, ye yellow-bellied sapsuckers! I’m a better man than all ye milksops put together!”

It’s also told that, in the Gulf of Mexico, he paid homage to the notorious Aztec technique of executing captured conquistadors by pouring molten gold down their thoats. His captives were three haughty, hook-nosed Spaniards, plantation owners on Hispaniola, whose eyes widened in amazement and terror as the famed buccaneer stoked up a furnace, tossing in the doubloons he had discovered hidden in sacks of sugar. The gold softened, sliding into liquid form like butter in a pan. Into this murderous golden soup Blackbeard dipped a galley ladle, extending it in offering to the first Spaniard’s gibbering lips. The poor man wet himself in fear while the crewmen howled with laughter. But instead of forcing the gold down his gullet, Blackbeard spat the following words: “Ye pap-faced whelp of the Vatican whore – I’ll teach ye to wet yeself on my ship! I’ll show ye how real men pass water!” And then, to the Spaniards’ redoubled amazement – and even greater terror – he gulped the molten metal down himself. Having smacked his lips, and wiped his mouth, he pulled down his grubby red breeches, revealing his formidable cock before pissing a fountain of liquid gold all over his captives’ shoes.

“Or was it: I’ll teach ye to dirty my boat, ye Cadiz galley-scum? No, not that. Ye mollycoddled fondler of boys? No, it wasn’t that neither.” He ponders this now, old Blackbeard, tugging thoughtfully at a kinked strand of hair which is grey now, namesake no longer. “Ye gaylord? Ye shit-heart? Ye milk-mouthed suckler of the Virgin Mary’s tit? Ah, it’s been too long. I’ve cursed so many…”

He sits with his slippered feet on a chair, drinking lemonade through a straw. He wears his ancient captain’s coat which drapes his thin body like an army blanket, faded tassles of gold brocade hanging from the shoulders. He wears tracksuit bottoms and a knitted white scarf that wraps several times around his neck. On his head sits an orange baseball cap.

Blackbeard’s ears are full of holes from rings that have long since been lost. If he were to stand against the sky and tug his ears outwards from his head – in order, say, to frighten a child – you’d see spots of daylight shining through. His skin has a taughtened, blasted aspect, the legacy of a lifetime’s exposure to salt spray and sun. His body is covered in washed-out tattoos, and a thin scar runs all the way around his sagging, chicken-flesh neck.

The old buccaneer’s scraggy grey beard trails down past his waist. If he ever decided to stop wearing clothes, it might become matted with his pubic hair. In places the beard is plaited and pig-tailed, or dreadlocked with neglect. But in other places – around his mouth – the hair is fastidiously combed.

In recent weeks, he has been discovering unexpected items in his beard. Often there are leaves and twigs after he comes back from a walk, but also broken bits of shell and twists of orange string, polystyrene packaging noodles and ring-pulls from Coca-Cola cans. These findings vaguely worry him. He cannot account for them.

It is well documented in the annals of piracy that before Blackbeard went into battle he would light candlesticks in his beard – some say flaming wicks of hemp – to strike fear into his enemies. To a superstitious, God-fearing sailor, press-ganged from the tavern of some West Country town, the sight of this smouldering apparition leering through the powder smoke was often enough to convince them to surrender without discharging a shot. What is not so commonly known is that, in his wilder moments, Blackbeard would stuff his mouth with fireworks and spew out magnesium flares. In one fight, he dipped his entire head in pitch and set fire to his face, charging aboard a Royal Navy flagship with no fewer than eleven swords of different shapes and sizes. It is reported that, in this notable attack, one officer was so petrified that he committed suicide.

Blackbeard is eating cauliflower cheese and looking out of the window. “Can ye bring me the sauce?” he calls over his shoulder, getting cheese on the tips of his moustache. His daughter Jess puts the ketchup on the table, rests her hand briefly on his shoulder. She brushes some specks of dirt from the epaulettes, wondering how he manages to get his shoulders dirty.

“How’s the food?” she asks.

“Thank ye, just the way I like it.”

“I’m going to the gallery now,” she says, picking a set of keys from the fruit bowl, her mobile phone from the table. “You’ll be ok this afternoon?”

“Aye, just fine,” says Blackbeard, squinting at his daughter. Jess’s soft brown skin gives a warm, spreading glow, diffusing like the light from a lantern. By contrast her dark hair seems to draw the light back in. Her lips are the colour of pecan nuts. She is wearing faded jeans and a muslin blouse, a necklace of caori shells. She is even more beautiful than her mother was. But he cannot think about that.

She starts to tell him about the week ahead, preparing for the exhibition. The tourist season is approaching, and the gallery has agreed to display some of her work in the window. She has a studio in the old boatshed that stands behind the house, and here she carves figurines from sea-sculpted driftwood, using the wood’s natural warp and flow to fashion animals, contorted human forms. Her father brings her wood from the beach, if ever he happens to remember.

“What are you smiling at?” she asks, seeing he has not listened.

“Ah … it’s nothing, Jessy,” he says.

But Blackbeard is thinking back to another meal. His eyes are not seeing the table. He is back there, drunk beneath the swishing palms, the dark waves lapping at the edges of the reef. There are wild pigs crackling over the fire, swordfish baked sweetly in banana leaves, rum out of green coconuts. He feasts in a chaotic circle of thirty drunken men – white men, black men, yellow men, men who have lost all nationality – slurping conch soup from a turtle shell, tearing pork off a glistening bone. He is shooting pistol shots at the moon, leaping barefoot over flames. One pirate reenacts the battle with a monkey, shrieking in falsetto as the monkey beats him with a spoon. A fat buccaneer with bejeweled teeth sets fire to a captured Royal Navy ensign, and Blackbeard applauds as the flag goes up, roars out a mock national anthem.

“Dad? I’m off.”

“Alright then, Jessy.”

“I’ll be back sometime after eight.” She pauses. “What are you laughing about?”
“Ah, just thinking o’ some old joke. Before ye were born,” he says.

He is lying on his back on the cold sand, two crewmen pouring rum into his mouth. He is making a speech with no trousers on. Dancing a waltz with a shin bone. Sipping French wine from the polished skull of the Admiralty’s bitch, Lieutenant Maynard!

…

Blackbeard progresses to the harbour now, descending a street that has been re-cobbled recently with EU money. He passes pubs with fishing nets arranged in their windows, framed displays of different examples of knot. He follows a row of trinket shops that sell souvenirs from the sea – shell earrings, seahorses, shark’s tooth pendants – as well as plastic pistols and cutlasses, Jolly Roger flags, felt tricorn hats. At a shop called Maritime Days he stops to study the hats through the glass.

“Is that one mine? Did it look like that? I never had one of those.” His mind remembers ostrich feathers, gold coins stitched along the brim. A voodoo medallion that hung from a chain to swing before his eyes – or was that some other captain? He’s not entirely sure.

“So many nice things I had, then…”

In the window near the novelty hats is a selection of false moustaches and beards. The grandest, a luxuriant nest of silky, black synthetic hair, bears the label: ‘Blackbeard’s Beard!’ The old man stares, aghast for a moment, then puts his fingers to his facial hair and tugs it doubtfully. It does not come away in his hand.

“That’s something, anyway. At least there’s that.” He wanders on, confused.

In the Paper Moon Tea Rooms, down by the quay, he meets his old friend and shipmate Cut Hands Jim. Cut Hands is eating toast and marmalade, topping up his pot of Darjeeling with gin. Blackbeard takes a seat at his table, studies the red and white checkered cloth.

“Good day, young Edward,” says Cut Hands with his mouth full. It is not known why, but he has always called Blackbeard by his Christian name, Edward Teach.

“Hello, Cut Hands.”

“Do ye want some toast?”

“No thank ye, Cut Hands. I’m not hungry.”

The two friends sit in silence for a while. The waitress, an observant Polish girl, brings Blackbeard his usual lemon and ginger tea with a small pot of honey on the side. He pours the honey carefully, watching it slide off the tip of the spoon, then stirs the tea into a little whirlpool and breathes deeply through his large nose.

“Liquid gold,” he murmurs. “Ye Cadiz galley-scum…”

“What’s that, Edward?”

“Those were the days.”

“Aye,” nods Cut Hands vaguely. “Those were indeed the days.” Blackbeard smiles wordlessly, cradling his cup close to his face so the steam curls up around his chin.

Cut Hands has a wooden leg. Every so often, with a sense of satisfaction, Blackbeard leans back and has a peek under the table to remind himself. A hardwood peg with a rubber tip, notched where he has banged it into things.

Cut Hands also has a shiny bald head, peeling a little from the sun. He wears a yellow and green striped shirt and a pair of corduroy trousers. On the back of his left hand, resting on the table, can be seen a faint blue smudge which was once the outline of a heart transfixed by a spear.

Blackbeard watches Cut Hands’s hand and sees it holding fast on the helm. The sleeve rolled back, the muscled forearm glistening with spray. He hears the fluttering of a flag, the creak of oily ropes.

“Mild today,” says Cut Hands, tweaking at the curtain. A band of watery sunlight slides across the table.

“Pressure could drop awful sudden, though,” suggests Blackbeard hopefully. “Ye know how them squalls blow in…”

“No. Be mild all week, I think.” Cut Hands slurps his tea.

As attested by contemporary observers – whether victims of his piracy or allies who sailed with him – the standard that flew above Blackbeard’s ships depicted a horned skeleton, holding an eggtimer in one hand and using the other to jab a spear towards a red heart with three drops of blood falling from it. Blackbeard is said to have designed it himself, after rejecting submissions from his crew which included, among other things, a mermaid with enormous breasts and a flaming sheepskull for a face, a hanged man kicking an angel in the balls, and an octopus strangling a bishop. The flag was first hoisted on the Adventure before her notorious attack on the Scarborough, a British thirty-gun man-of-war, the audacity of which propelled Blackbeard into transatlantic fame.

The meaning of the flag is clear: that time is quickly running out for whoever is unfortunate enough to behold it – that the skeleton must be appeased, or blood will shortly follow. And yet, to pirate enthusiasts accustomed to grinning Jolly Roger flags, the image may appear oddly bathetic. The skeleton’s rickety legs and protruding hip bones make it look as if it suffers from a degenerative bone disease. And the expression on its skull face is not the expected devilish glee, but a kind of mournful uncertainty, as if no quantity of blood will console its sense of sadness.

“But it struck black terror into their hearts. Did it not, Cut Hands?”

“Whose hearts, Edward?”

“Ye know whose hearts! Ye know true well.” Blackbeard covers his mouth with his hand, as if he is about to sneeze. A chortling sound issues from between his fingers. “Do ye remember the Charlestone Blockade?”

“Course I do, Ed. Everyone remembers.”

“How them dolled-up gumbo-suckers grovelled, down on their knees? Snivelling like babies! We ransomed an entire town, penned ‘em in their poxy harbour for a fortnight. Hah! Or was it a month?” Respectable townsmen, reduced to tears. Rich merchants tossing their rings into a hat. They forced the provincial governor to dress up as a maid and serve drinks on the bridge of the Revenge.

“I think it was a week. Far as I can recall.” Cut Hands rubs his head, causing folds of skin to ripple from his eyebrows to his crown. “How’s ye’re girl?” he asks after a pause. “I heard she’s got some kind o’ show…”

But Blackbeard’s eyes are like coins. He sees magistrates in powdered wigs, admirals who once had commanded fleets, French aristocrats in satin and ridiculous pomades. And that cretinous, cowardly wretch Lieutenant Maynard – dancing a pretty jig across the deck while the cutlass strokes sang past his ears!

According to reliable reports, one of Blackbeard’s favourite terror tactics involved hurling burning rats aboard the ships of his opponents. He would dip them in buckets of pitch by their tails, then sprinkle them with gunpowder. A fine sight, to see them trailing sparks as they soared in flaming arcs across the sky towards the delicate rigging of an unsuspecting sloop. They used to hold contests, prizes for good aim. He once hit a cabin-boy smack in the eye.

“Like comets, they were… fiery angels o’ death. No-one else did it like we did, Cut Hands. No-one else even came close.”

Not with the same bright bubbling joy, the same vicious happiness. The feeling comes back to him in starts, rising through his chest and face, heating him, making him dizzy. Had anyone else ever known these things? Had anyone truly lived? It was not unknown for the fearsome marauder to swing into battle naked from a rope, his oiled body covered in barnacles, limpets, an octopus wrapped around his crotch. Or dive below the keel of a Royal Navy gunship and tear the hull open with his teeth. While celebrating one especially lucrative raid he reportedly drank three whole barrels of rum, and married thirteen different women in one night.

That was before Jess’s mother, of course. But he cannot think about that.

“And ye remember the time, I think it were St. Kitts, when we fired ye from a cannon?” Blackbeard’s face balls up with mirth. Blackbeard’s shoulders tremble. “Ye tore a hole through the topsail o’ a Dutchy merchantman, and then ye slew twenty sailors with an axe. By the time the Adventure caught ye up, ye were already mopping the decks!”

“I don’t think so, Ed. No, I never did that.”

“Come now, ye must remember. That’s how ye lost ye’re hair, after all.”

“I just went bald. Like other men.”

“Ye’re leg, then! That’s how ye lost ye’re leg!”

“Edward,” says Cut Hands kindly.

The waitress comes to remove some plates from the table next to theirs. There is nobody else in the Paper Moon Tea Rooms. She smiles at the two old men, understanding little of what they say. She knows the bald one smuggles gin into his tea, but as long as the owner isn’t around she chooses not to object.

“He steered us safe through a hurricane, once,” Blackbeard mumbles, half to her and half to himself, motioning with his teaspoon. “He was the best helmsman on the Adventure. The best man in my fleet…”

And now he is thinking of that sandy inlet, the coastal waters of North Carolina. The place that was to be known as Teach’s Hole.

Fighting side by side on the HMS Ranger, slicing and gouging through the pistol smoke, Maynard’s men having ambushed from the hold.

Laughing as he deflects bullets with his sword. Breaking two sailors’ necks with his knee. Neatly lopping off a leg to wield as a weapon.

The intervening years have swallowed so much. Things have drifted from view, become lost. Blackbeard struggles to maintain his hold, clinging against the entropic trends, but somehow little things get swept away. History, for example, has neglected to remember how he sang as he took on ten assailants at a time, pulled a face so fiendish that a midshipman died of shock. The official record only informs that he was tricked into attacking, out-manouevered and out-gunned at Okracoke Island – that he’d been drinking heavily in his cabin the night before, and attempted to board the hostile vessel with only a handful of men – that he was shot five times, and stabbed more than twenty. But the records do not document how the cutlass blades simply glanced off his bones, or how he retched the bullets into his mouth and spat them right back at the cowards who had fired them, plugging the holes in his perforated stomach with corks from brandy bottles…

Rising from the ocean like a vengeful Poseidon with seawater sluicing from his eyebrows and moustache, catching that miserable Maynard by the ankle to drag him down, into the deepening blue…

“He wasn’t no match for me, Cut Hands. Not for the King o’ Pirates! That shit-heart… bilge-scum… Admiralty whore…” The epithets descend into mutters which lose themselves in his beard.

“But Lieutenant Maynard cut ye’re head off, Ed,” says Cut Hands quietly. “Chopped it off and hung it from the bowsprit, he did. They gave him a hundred pounds.”

Blackbeard is silent. He sits without moving. Down into the deepening blue…

“And that was the end o’ the Golden Age. The end o’ the innocent days.” Cut Hands shifts his walking stick, shuffles his feet beneath the table. He is wearing a pair of frayed rope sandals from a beachwear store on the high street.

Blackbeard chews the inside of his lip. Closes his tired eyes. The inside of his head is the colour of waves sloshing back on themselves against a quay, a pale bottle-green interspersed with fine bubbles. He finds himself thinking of oranges, driftwood. An eggtimer and three drops of blood. The ring-pulls from Coca-Cola cans. He cannot account for these things.

“But don’t ye recall what happened then, Ed?” Cut Hands sees the tears welling up, and cannot stand to see that. “Don’t ye remember what ye did next? Those Navy dogs tossed ye’re body overboard – and ye’re headless corpse, it swam two times around the good ship Adventure!”

“Seven! Seven times, it was!” cries Blackbeard happily.

“Aye, seven. It was seven times,” says Cut Hands, taking his last bite of toast. “That shitted them up a treat.”

Blackbeard is walking along the beach, following the tideline westwards. The sand is a sloppy mirror at his feet. The salty wind makes his eyeballs sting. He finds it hard to see.

From habit, he scans the brackish waste that the water has ploughed into decomposing rows. The piled seaweed is almost black, hopping with tiny flies. Kicking his way through the stinking wrack he uncovers a child’s plastic shoe, tangles of orange nylon rope, part of a broken crate from a Spanish trawler. He fills his pockets with this and that, collects colourful bottle-caps. Tugs out a sea-smoothed lump of driftwood that looks a bit like a monkey, or a child, and carries it for a while.

“I’ll take this back for Jessy,” he says. But later he puts it on a rock and wanders on, forgetting.

On his way home he stops at Maritime Days, glimpsing the pretty ship-in-a-bottle in the window. Counting out the loose coins in his pocket, he doesn’t have quite enough for it, but the shop assistant knows the old sailor and lets him owe a pound or two. At the top of the hill he regards it admiringly – the matchstick mast, the rigging made of thread – turning it around in his thick fingers.

The ocean heaves. The storm is at hand. Blackbeard holds fast on the helm, laughing into the wind and the rain, steadily driving his good ship westwards, into the hurricane.

It’s also, I can’t help but notice, well-travelled. Blackberries from Bulgaria; limes from Brazil; green beans and mangetout fresh from Kenya; pea aubergines, lemongrass and galangal air-freighted from Thailand every Wednesday. At first I didn’t think much about this, the miraculous way all this stuff appeared, sealed in polystyrene or simple wooden crates with the airline receipts still attached. It all seemed part of the ebb and flow of London, the amazing way the metropolis has of continually renewing itself. But this morning as I was standing by a display of juicy red cherry-vine tomatoes – flown in from Sicily hours before – I overheard a customer chirp: “oh, lovely, tomatoes are in season!”

I found myself on the point of snapping: “of course they’re not in season! It’s November! This is England, don’t you know anything?”

But my irritation vanished at once. For who am I to say which season it is? Judging by the bounty we have displayed here, it’s nothing-and-everything season. The very function of the stall at which I work is to deny the concept of seasons entirely, to make people forget all about our history of gloomy, root-vegetable-eating winters, to present the urbanised paying public with the world in a salad bowl.

In our globalised, consumerised, oil-lucky age, it’s whatever season you want it to be. It’s always cherry-vine tomato season. It’s always mangetout season, always avocado season, always purple-sprouting-broccoli-from-Israel season. Who can blame anyone in the modern world for being a little confused?

And yet, it causes me to wonder how else – apart from general befuddlement – this epoch of plenty might be messing with the basic way we understand the world.

Almost every morning, as I walk beside the canal, I pass the man with the two rottweilers coming in the opposite direction. We pass each other wordlessly, but often our eyes meet. His face is surprisingly gentle for a man with two rottweilers. He is a tall black man with long, loose shoulders and athletic-looking arms. At the ends of these arms are the rottweilers, attached to him by thick silver chains.

At first, when I started walking this way, we didn’t make eye contact. It wasn’t that I was afraid of him, simply that it seemed wiser. But many mornings have gone by like this. He has not been threatening. The path beside the canal is narrow, and he is courteous enough to give passers-by a little space. He always steps towards the wall, and I step towards the water. There is an understanding to this. The rottweilers step the way he steps. They are obviously well trained.

The expression he wears is unassuming – strangely, almost shy. He has a small, precise black beard, and his face is the colour of a deer’s. He is always in a black hooded top emblazoned with heavy gold gothic script, which seems to direct his attention downwards, shutting it off from periphery. His eyes are trained on the ground as we approach, trailing along the cracked stones. But as we pass he glances up – our eyes sort of bump off one other – and then they immediately drop again, to the path or to the dogs. There is no friendliness in this look, but no hostility either. Nor is there curiosity, for he has nothing to be curious about. It’s as if he has nodded at me with his eyes. But we share no situation.

I wonder where he is taking the dogs. What does anyone need two rottweilers for? My first thought was that he was fighting them – he goes in the direction of the gas tower, the frightening gantry of which looms over abandoned warehouses with smashed-out windows in which grown men can be imagined baying for blood – but the dogs are never so much as scratched. They gleam with enthusiasm.

They are eager dogs, straining without pulling too hard, maintaining the appropriate tension between throat, arms and chain. They have glossy black necks and thick pads of muscle on their shoulders and hindquarters. They smile inanely, rasping the air, pink tongues swelling behind their white teeth. But they also have soft, intelligent black eyes, with an unusual expression of focus.

The rottweilers have started making eye contact too. Their glance is more direct, and they hold it for longer.

They have black leather collars studded with spikes. I think – like the gold and silver handgun on the front of their master’s jacket – their role must be mostly decorative.

To claim they are actually two rottweilers is slightly misleading. One is a rottweiler, fully-grown, and the other is only a pup. It is squatter, browner than the bigger dog, still unsure where its feet should be placed. But it has the same muscled flank and gleam, the same intensity of purpose.

I think they must be mother and son. It makes an odd little family scene.

I’d like to talk with the man, one of these mornings. I’d like to have a conversation with him, but I don’t know how to begin. What do you say to a man with two rottweilers? This isn’t a joke. I mean, really, what do you say?

On Christmas day – for some unknown reason – my granddad related a story he’d read about a little girl killed by a rottweiler at home. “Family pet. Ripped her to shreds,” he said matter-of-factly, the way he announces the weather. I look these dogs in the eye as we pass, and I can’t imagine that. But then, they look me in the eye as well, as they don’t know what I am thinking.

I have seen them away from the canal only once. We were waiting at the same bus-stop. The man’s hood was pulled down low against the rain, but of course I recognised the dogs. The bigger rottweiler was sitting at his feet, obediently still, like a statue of a griffin, staring in the direction that the bus was due to come. The pup was footing anxiously about, making small snorting noises and starting this way and that before being pulled up by its chain. Beside the man was a girl I took to be his girlfriend. She was wearing a grey jacket with a fake-fur-lined hood, and the two of them were standing in silence, not touching, not looking at one another.

After some time the girl produced a joint from inside her dripping jacket. She lit it and blew a sickly-sweet cloud of skunk into the inadequate bus shelter. Presently she offered it to the man, who accepted with a word in a very low voice that I couldn’t make out. He smoked patiently, eyes on the wet pavement, but his girlfriend became irritated. She was watching the pup, tugging and whining on its chain. She muttered something I couldn’t hear either, and then, in a kind of bored, vicious way, extended one shoe to the base of its spine and forced it downwards into a sitting position.

There was something very mean in the way it was done. Something small and spiteful. The man didn’t mind, or didn’t notice, persisting with his joint. But I couldn’t help turning to glance at her – the visual equivalent of a tut – and perhaps the movement was a little too sharp, for she also turned, and our eyes met.

She was a short, skinny girl, no more than five feet tall, yet her face was as hard as an old woman’s. The man’s face was soft in comparison – hers was all bone and stiffness. She had large, expressive eyes that I imagine might often appear mournful, but the message that beamed out of them now was one of such explicit challenge that I almost felt she had hit me. Immediately, I dropped my gaze. She carried on staring at me. I felt the challenge on the side of my face, daring my eyes to raise the question. The question of the man whose protection she was in, and the two rottweilers who protected him, and the things, combined, that all three were capable of.

It didn’t take long. She looked away, and afterwards the bus came. She kissed the man and stepped aboard, leaving him and his dogs standing in the rain with the gutter end of the joint. I saw him recede as the bus pulled away, his long arms straining outwards on their chains. I sat near the girl on the top deck of the bus, but we didn’t swap glances again.

How did it ever come about that I wanted to be 4862? I don’t know. It just happened. There was no warning.

Perhaps it started with a shove. Or maybe it was the gloves, how trusty and firm they appeared. Something about the way the raindrops held the streetlights, flashing and quivering like slow-falling sparks as they rolled down that glistening screen?

I’ll never know. It’s beyond me. I couldn’t have anticipated it.

Of course, I’ve been much criticised. Consensus meetings have been called specifically to denounce me. People have asked me to leave open forums. I’ve experienced scorn, bitterness. Hatred, even, but for the most part simply aghast incomprehension.

My former friends avoid me. People I trusted like brothers and sisters. No-one in my affinity group will have anything to do with me now.

But I don’t care. I’m past concern. I was 4862.

…

There were sixty of us blockading the road. We were trying to hold the car-park until actions had locked on to the railings. A detachment of uniforms hit our front line and piled in with truncheons. Several of us went down. The cops waded in, elbow-deep in bodies, pulling people out and flinging them back towards the vans. We responded by linking arms and sitting down, holding the people before us secure by wrapping our legs around them. Uniforms hesitated, aimed a few kicks, held back. A cheer went up. The road was taken.

I was wearing elbow pads and a cycle helmet covered in flowers. My features were masked by a yellow and black bandana.

Uniforms regrouped and attacked us again. A senior officer was yelling. But our Response Bloc drove in from the left and countered with shield techniques, pushing against the wall of cops and driving it back fifteen feet. Several of ours were successfully un-arrested. A woman was hit in the forehead with a truncheon. A policeman fell over, and had to be dragged away. Media moved in and the cops withdrew to a distance, retreating to behind the chain-link fence. Our chanting drowned out the scream of the sirens.

Action groups had locked on by then. They attached themselves to the railings with bike locks, their arms connected together inside plastic tubes. A group of girls in pink and silver fairy costumes scaled the fence for a banner drop. A samba band kicked off with the drums, and people at the back were dancing.

What the banner said, I don’t remember.

…

We’d reached the conference centre in small groups, evading surveillance by crawling through a bean field, and skirted police deployment with the ‘flower and fist’ dispersal tactic developed at former actions. As we approached the perimeter, things got heavier. Mounted officers blocked the main entrance so we had to make a diversion, cutting round the side of them just as uniforms on foot jogged in to kettle us against the wall. Once they almost had us hemmed, but the Response Bloc broke their lines from behind and allowed us to force our way through. We rejoined the other groups in the road, surging into the car-park. It was around that point the main march came in from the other side. About five hundred had managed to reach us. The police formed a line, then abandoned it. A helicopter chuddered low. The waving coloured flags looked like feathers flying.

Perhaps it was the reflection of the lights, glancing and dancing off that smooth black dome. Something to do with the form itself, the general geometry. Perhaps, like certain works of art, an intrinsic aesthetic appeal.

Or it might have been something else altogether, who knows?

It took them almost half an hour to get the riot squads deployed. By that time we had surrounded the centre and hung banners from the roof, splattered red paint on the walls, shut off all points of access. A total success in action terms, but we had to hold it for over twelve hours if we wanted to block delegates. The aim was to shut the whole place down, prevent the conference happening. The cameras were rolling, the world was watching. Adrenalin sang inside me.

My eyes were protected by a bulky orange ski-mask. I had lemons stuffed in my pockets in case of tear-gas grenades.

Exactly what the conference was about, I now forget.

…

We watched them hustling out of the vans, taking up position at the fence. The luminescent yellows of the uniforms retreated as a wall of armoured black took their place. Trooping into place like that, they looked like rows of determined beetles. Their preparations were greeted by chants of derision, trumpets, whistles, war-cries, hoots, the apocalyptic crescendo of the samba, which was met with the steady crunch-crunch of booted feet and the doom-doom-doom of clubs on riot shields.

The shields were transparent, reinforced plastic, portable windows from behind which thin eyes stared us down. A heft of arm in a padded black sleeve, the sausage thickness of gloved fingers. The aubergine smoothness of riot clubs, beating time. The sit-down readied itself like a clenching muscle. I felt legs and arms grip tight around my body to lock me in place. The cops crunched forward, we clung to one another. Over the clatter of rotor blades, a voice was hurled from a megaphone.

They halted six feet away from us. I was in the second line, expecting the first blows to fall. The helicopter’s floodlight swept over, making the colours bounce. We braced for the assault, but it didn’t come.

Three hours later, we were waiting still. The cops remained lined up like that, watching from behind their windows. Some order must have come through from above. Perhaps there were too many cameras. They had slapped a Section 44 on us, Section 50, the riot act. It would have been messy to pull us all out. The Response Bloc was ready with gas masks and who knew what else. They were probably trying to bore us out, or just waiting until someone got provoked. Whatever their method was, it started raining.

Seeing we had won some time, the crowd behind us began to unwrap plastic sheets and waterproofs. A tarpaulin was stretched for a canopy, strung tight between fences and lampposts. Chocolate and sandwiches were handed round. Someone boiled a paraffin stove, and we all passed tea. People rolled cigarettes for us. Whistles and drums kept up our morale, and there was chanting.

The chants were humorous and defiant, mocking the cops and comparing them unfavourably with fascists.

I remember the tunes alright, but not the words.

By that point we were well into the night. The stand-off was lit by the streetlights, the floodlights, the clattering helicopter. The rain drizzled down in glittering globs. It was the sort of rain that comes sideways, like being flicked in the face with a wet toothbrush. Soon I could feel it dripping through the holes in my cycle helmet. It seeped around the foam seal of my ski-mask. The warmth of my neighbours’ arms spread through. I leaned back against the soft bulk of whoever was behind me. We were soaked, but comfortable enough. As for the riot cops, who knows? They just stood there like enormous plastic toys.

Perhaps it was this sturdiness, this immovable quality. Perhaps the same can happen with a statue. Or perhaps it was some trick of the brain, staring at the patterns the rain made as it slithered down the shields.

I don’t know. I’ll never find out. It might not be important.

…

After the fifth rainy hour, things were very boring.

The cops remained exactly where they were, walling us in with their shields. We couldn’t move, and neither could they. Any movement on either of our parts would precipitate violence or withdrawal. The fact we were still blockading the road was victory of a sort, but the chants had died, the drums had lost enthusiasm and the sandwich supply had dwindled to broken crusts and fillings. We were sick of relighting soggy cigarettes. All we had to do was wait, and not react to whatever was attempted.

I watched the cops’ fists still wrapped around their clubs, the bulky rubber soles of their boots like tracks on mining machinery. I watched the way they supported their shields, though some had rested theirs on the ground to lean on with folded arms. I tried to work out the material their trousers might be made of. The fat, padded fingers of the gloves. The snooker-ball smoothness of the helmets. I watched their pale faces behind reflective visors, noses and mouths for the most part hidden, eyes that appeared bored and alert at the same time. Then I looked for insignia. There wasn’t much on display. One silver chevron on each shoulder and a four-digit ID code on the shiny front slope of the helmet.

That was when I saw 4862.

There wasn’t – not on the surface, at least – anything about 4862 that even remotely distinguished it from the others. I mean, everything about it was identical. It was the same black uniform, the same black boots, the same black gloves, the same shiny helmet, the same transparent shield, even the same pale dimly-glimpsed face through the same rain-streaming visor. Just those four numbers, 4862. That was the only variation.

But somehow it seemed different, 4862. For some reason, it pleased me immensely.
Enthusiasm made itself known around my body. It warmed me like tiger balm. I was aware that great interest was spreading throughout me, picking the muscles up underneath my skin and setting them down again in improved locations.

Standing to the left was 4357, and to the right 4816. Following the line of helmets down, I saw 4083, 4994 and 5501. I considered each of these for a while, trying to keep an open mind, but knew immediately they weren’t the same. There was just something about 4862 that I liked, that’s all there is to it. I can’t explain any more than that. Somehow, it had an effect upon me.

Perhaps I was tired or feverish. Perhaps my head had been knocked in the scuffles, or something.

I smiled behind the sodden fabric of my yellow and black bandana.

At times, on rare occasions, you know something to be true. It doesn’t matter who you are, or who you think you are. Neither does it matter what you believe that you believe. Left and right? Right and wrong? These things are relevant no more. Occasionally you just recognise something, and then all struggle ceases.

I wanted to be 4862. I don’t think that’s really so difficult to understand.

…

“Mind out,” I said to the people beside me. They looked surprised, but didn’t try to stop me. I unlinked my arms from theirs, unwrapped my legs from around their waists. Someone shouted something behind me, but I didn’t catch the words. I had cramp in one of my legs. It was hard to walk.

4357 and 4816 made threatening gestures as I approached police lines, hefting their shields and drawing back their clubs like insects recoiling to a threat. 4862 didn’t react. This encouraged me. I removed my ski goggles and peered in through the streaky visor. There was a chubby face in there. I motioned that I would like a word, in private.

4862 shrugged his shoulder pads. After reassuring 4357 and 4816, he stepped out of the line and motioned me to follow. Together we went off to the alley that ran alongside the conference centre. I was dimly aware of alarmed exclamations emitting from the crowd behind me. Someone was blowing a horn, or something like that.

“I’d like to be 4862 for a while,” I told him, out of sight of the spectators. The chubby face frowned deeply at first, but the features relaxed almost at once. He didn’t look particularly surprised by the request. He must have been a reasonable man. I imagine he couldn’t think of any reason to refuse me. So he rested his shield and club against the wall, and took off the uniform item by item. Fascinating, the way it all fitted together. First came off the belt, and then the tunic, then the boots. The trousers came last, with a padded vest that might have been bullet-proof. Underneath, he was wearing a sky blue tracksuit.

He was a pale, dumpy man, a bit older than I expected. I can’t really remember much about him.

He helped me put the uniform on, adjusting all the zips and straps, and showed me how to position the helmet correctly. Inside 4862, it felt inviting and protective. The thick material gripped me in all the right places, the gloves sat on my hands just right, and the boots felt so safe I imagined I could walk through molten lava without noticing the heat.

“There you go,” he said, with an encouraging smile. “Look – you’re 4862!” And he handed me the club and shield and slapped me on the back.

I’m not sure what happened to him after that. He must have gone off somewhere.

…

It was a wonderful feeling, walking back the way I’d come. I was beaming. It was a bit like the irrepressible delight of being inside a sleeping bag, a sleeping bag surrounded by a suit of armour. The rain ran smoothly off me, and the glaring lights didn’t bother my eyes. My boots crunched along, I swung my club, and my visor steamed up with barely-suppressed elation.

I took my place alongside 4357 and 4816. Their helmets swivelled slightly, but they didn’t examine me closely. I positioned myself the way that they were positioned, and regarded the protesters through my reinforced window.

I could see where I had been sitting. There was a dry patch on the road. Before long my former neighbours shuffled over to fill the gap. I noticed a pretty dreadlocked girl I hadn’t even seen before. She must have had her legs around my waist.

For a very brief second, I wanted to be back there. It had been comradely and warm, and there had been tea.

But I knew, right away, I was happier here. I was 4862.

The stalemate didn’t last long after that. There was growing agitation in the crowd. Legal observers were running to and fro, liaising with senior officers. Questions gave way to impatient demands, and people started hurling accusations. “Where have you taken him?” they cried. “Unlawful detention! Unlawful detention!” I saw the ripples spreading through the sodden mass of bodies, anger diffusing outwards from the centre. “What have you done with him? Bring him back!”

Most of this, I saw, was directed at me.

I felt 4357’s arm tense. I felt 4816’s arm tense. A signal, an electric pulse, passed along the line. Shields were clacking into place. Clubs bristled and stood vertical, like antennae being tuned. Something crackled inside my helmet. A voice was telling me something. I didn’t pay much attention to the words, and don’t remember them now. I was too busy watching the expressions of the crowd.

They looked outraged, fearful, mouths twisted open. The pretty dreadlocked girl was yelling at me. People were chanting something about police brutality, “the Disappeared.”

I didn’t really understand what the problem was.

More and more people at the edges were standing. The Response Bloc was gearing up, wrapping foam around their arms, pulling on gas masks. The crackling in my helmet increased. I decided not to pay it any heed. 4357 stepped forward. 4816 stepped forward. I remained standing where I was, content enough to observe.

Then I saw 4816 kind of flinch, and above the heads of the fitful crowd arced an empty beer bottle, slowly spinning in the air.

The bottle exploded directly on top of my helmet, scattering glass fragments.

It was brilliant. I didn’t feel a thing.

…

Then all manner of trouble kicked off. The front line of riot cops charged, swinging at people’s shins, and the Response Bloc bodily met the advance, driving forward with their shields. Part of the crowd simply caved like an empty bag. More bottles flew through the air along with stones, bricks and the wooden staves ripped from protest placards. The lines surged back and forwards and then melted away altogether in a heaving, struggling mess of bodies. The flashing of cameras strobe-lit every motion. I held my ground as best as I could, observing through my visor. Fists, shoulders, gas masks, helmets, cameras, shields, placards, wet hair flailing.
It was a bit like gazing through the door of a washing machine.

I didn’t hit anyone myself. I just prodded them a bit.

After several minutes of this, one of those natural lulls occurred. Both sides pulled away from one another to take stock and regroup. The screams of indignation faded. The sirens stopped their wail. Several lay injured on the ground, and a small tree was on fire.

A pall of smoke hung over the proceedings. The floodlights swooped and dazzled.

People were holding their hands in the air, screaming about fascists. I recognised faces from my affinity group.

In front of me, supported by friends, stood the pretty dreadlocked girl. A thin stream of blood ran down from her nose.

I stepped into the empty space that lay between the two sides. “Look, it’s me!” I said, but they couldn’t hear me. I propped my shield against my body, and pulled the helmet off.

At first no-one noticed, so I spoke again. This time, heads really turned.

“It’s me!” I repeated. “Look – I’m 4862! I’m 4862!”

There was absolute silence around me then, from police and protesters alike.

For a long time, no-one said a word. They stared and stared.

The problem is that Spain, unlike Britain, has very little recent history of immigration. Partly as a result of empire, and especially since the 1950s, Britain has been settled by waves of migrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Caribbean – and now from the Balkans and Eastern Europe – who have both absorbed and altered our habits, institutions, culture, cuisine and concept of national identity. Spain, on the other hand, hasn’t really had any large ‘foreign’ population since 1492, when the victorious Christians defeated the last descendants of the Moors, exiled the entire Jewish population, and ended eight hundred years of religious tolerance. The Reconquista was followed quickly by the Inquisition, to exterminate any other conceivable nonconformity the population might harbour. After Spain lost the wealth of its South American empire it sunk into isolation again, from which it only really emerged when Franco died.

Until the 1980s, people just didn’t migrate to Spain. It was a backwater, stifled and impoverished after a brutal civil war and decades of dictatorship. Like Ireland, it had always been a country that people emigrated from; when EU funding transformed the country’s economy it found, for the first time in its history, that people suddenly wanted to emigrate to it. Understandably, this came as a shock, just as the sudden plunge into global capitalism did. Like everything else, it’s going to take getting used to. People have never known anything remotely like it before.

Of course, there are exceptions, and this isn’t the whole story. All sorts of races and cultures have contributed to Spanish society, and, by and large, been accepted by it. The neighbourhood I live in has traditionally had a large Gypsy population. Despite the best efforts of the Inquisition, there is still a strong Moorish and Arabic influence to Spanish culture, especially in Andalusia. Flamenco, Spain’s most recognisably Spanish sound, is a rich mixture of Gypsy, Jewish and Islamic music forms. For the last twenty years or so Spain has hosted a large Chinese population, which has become part of the national landscape; Madrid is full of Chinese-owned groceries and cheap junk shops that have proved extremely popular.

But Spain still isn’t exactly multicultural, not in the way that Britain is. The majority of black immigrants are forced to make a living by selling pirate DVDs and fake designer handbags on the streets. It’s fairly rare to see black and white people simply hanging out together, as equals. People aren’t so accustomed to foreigners here; especially foreigners who look as physically different to them as Asians or sub-Saharan Africans. The phenomenon is far too recent, and too sudden, for many newcomers to be seen as normal people.

A great many of the children I teach – aged from nine to sixteen – are openly racist, with absolutely no concept of the political correctness that British society has imbued itself with. Although, when I say racist, I don’t mean racist consciously, in deliberate or ideological terms, just completely unaware that it might be offensive to mock people with different shaped faces and different coloured skin. Gypsies are criminals, Africans are drunks, African women are prostitutes, South Americans are drug-dealers and Chinese people are hilariously funny. One student recently asked me if I thought it was racist to write, in an exercise: ‘he is drunk because he is black.’ I replied: “the question isn’t whether it’s racist, but whether it’s true. Is it true that all black people are drunks?” Begrudgingly, he said no. So I told him: “then why don’t you write ‘he is drunk, and he is black?’” But I don’t think this logic impressed him.

There is, undeniably, still a strong xenophobic and right-wing element to Spanish politics. The Falangist party, from which Franco drew his ideology, still campaigns in elections (though not, it has to be said, with much success). There is fascist graffiti and swastikas – along with Communist and Anarchist scrawls – on the walls.

One of the weirdest and most disturbing experiences I’ve had was a visit to Franco’s tomb. It lies in ‘The Valley of the Fallen,’ supposedly a monument to the civil war dead of both sides, but in reality a triumphant exultation of its victors. A giant granite crucifix – supposedly the largest in the world – towers from the top of a mountain, inside which, tunneled into the rock, is Franco’s private mausoleum: a vast, echoing underground hall of grey and black marble, lit by candles, lined by statues of faceless, sword-bearing angels, in the floor of which the Generalissimo lies interred. It was particularly discomforting to see that, on top of his tombstone, someone had left a fresh bouquet of flowers.

Living under a dictatorship, in many ways, brings its own kind of innocence. The majority of people have steady jobs; there is less street crime; they are rarely exposed to ideas which may shock or disturb them; there is little or no immigration; society, more or less, stays the same. In fact, the main purpose of a dictatorship is to ensure that nothing changes. Whereas in a globalised, capitalist system, the face of society is prone to change rapidly, both for good and for bad.

One old man I talked to, a hotel owner in Segovia, told us quite openly that things were much better under ‘Paquito’ – an affectionate nickname for Franco. He said that when he used to live in Madrid it was a ‘paradise;’ now it had turned into ‘hell.’ Society used to be respectable, but democracy had corrupted it with drugs, gangs, prostitution and crime. At the time it was shocking, and strangely embarrassing, to listen to someone insisting that he preferred life under a fascist regime, because I’d like to believe – I know it’s naïve – that no-one does. The superiority of democracy has been hard-wired into my brain. But is it really any different from listening to any other old geezer talking about the good old days? That long-lost golden age when you could leave your door unlocked, and children had respect for their elders? Does the fact this golden age was a totalitarian regime make this man’s nostalgia less valid?

And it isn’t just the elderly who are worried about Spain changing, and neither is it just the right wing. Young people, and left-wingers, seem equally as concerned, though perhaps for slightly different reasons. The right is worried about the dilution of Spanish and Christian culture, the left about Spanish jobs going to immigrants and employers evading trade unions and the minimum wage, and young people are acutely aware of the housing shortage, which has caused recent protests and riots. The Spanish media is probably, on balance, more anti-immigration than the British press; the papers may not have the paranoid hysteria of The Sun or Daily Mail, but immigration is presented in mostly negative terms right across the board, even in the mainly left-leaning El Pais.

But if you leave a dictatorship to enter into a free-market system – into a union of countries to which the concept of open borders and migration of labour is integral – then immigration is surely unavoidable. You can’t have one and not the other. And you can’t enjoy the benefits of cheap labour – vital to Spain’s huge construction and agricultural industries – without accepting that those labourers might want to stay and bring up their families. I’ve heard many people complain that their country and culture are changing. There doesn’t seem to be any answer apart from: “Yes, they are, of course they’re changing. Europe is changing. The world is changing. These are the times we live in. You opted for change, and things have changed. What did you expect?”

And yet, part of me regrets this narrative, and the way it is being repeated all over the world. Of course I love the ideal of multiculturalism – cultures meeting, exchanging ideas, attempting to understand one another, and, in the process, becoming more tolerant and open – and this is one of the things I’ve come to appreciate about Britain, which, despite undeniable problems, has been able to peacefully absorb settlers from just about every country on the planet. But immigration alters a country. This cannot be denied. And, as with any alteration, there are good effects and bad effects associated with it. Along with the many positive benefits of cultural blending also comes a certain degree of homogenisation; local traditions, communities and languages becoming less strikingly individual, less distinct, more diluted – in short, less interesting. We mourn this fact when we see it in picturesque Third World countries – “what a shame these indigenous folk have started wearing Western clothes” – so why shouldn’t we mourn it when it happens in Europe, which is, after all, no less diverse and individuated?

Here in Spain, as in the rest of the world, supermarket culture is inevitably making inroads into local markets and communities. People are cutting their siestas shorter and being told they must work harder. Consumerism is spreading like an fever: I notice this particularly with the teenagers I teach, obsessed with the latest mobile phones. Small-scale industries are being driven out of business, unable to compete with global markets. As in Britain, housing prices have soared, making it impossible for young people to hope of one day owning property.

Of course, these things are not the fault of immigrants. They are the fault of a capitalist economy. But immigrants are the most visible evidence of that economy’s devastating power. They are living proof of the enormous change that Spain has undergone, proof that the country is not as it was, and never will be again. This is, perhaps, why Spanish society is so broadly hostile to them. Because they are a symbol of a world that is changing too quickly for most people to accept. And the blacker they are, the more foreign, or the poorer, or the more Islamic, then the more vivid – and more alarming – that symbol seems to become.

- K.C. Gillette

Ready-Egg

This product is a small flesh-coloured plastic container shaped like an egg. The contents of this plastic egg are six real eggs, pre-beaten, for people who lead busy and demanding lives.

Fruit Snacks

These can be bought at many motorway service stations. A Fruit Snack is a single piece of fruit packaged in plastic with the words”Fruit Snack” printed on it. An “Apple Fruit Snack” contains an apple. An “Orange Fruit Snack” contains an orange, and so on.

Fruit Slices

Fruit Slices are similar to Fruit Snacks, but the fruit is pre-sliced into convenient bite-sized pieces. This eliminates the risk of using one’s own knife.

Health and Safety Signs

Around the shallow duck pond in the park near my house have appeared numerous yellow and black plastic signs. Their purpose is to warn people of the dangers the pond might pose to their well-being. They read: “Caution: Water Hazard!”

Anthropomorphised Meat Industry Animal Friends

Adorable, frolicking chickens advertising fried chicken takeaways. Happy butcher-shop pigs in aprons waving strings of their own sausages. The cute animal mascots of the meat industry want you to eat them, and bear a delightful resemblance to human children.

The Naming of Rocks on Mars

When the 1997 Sojourner mission landed on the planet of Mars, rocks in the vicinity of the landing site were named after popular cartoon characters. One rock was christened Yogi Bear. Others were named Boo Boo and Goofy. Mars is 35 million miles away.

Horse Chestnut Trees in Norwich

Norwich City Council recently decided to cut down a row of 20 full-grown horse chestnut trees because of the risk they posed to pedestrians. This pre-emptive action was taken to prevent possible head injuries caused by falling conkers, and to stop passers-by slipping on the dangerous underfoot “mulch.”

The Stars and the Moon

Since 1979, star naming companies have been offering customers the chance to name their very own star. For just £25.95, loved ones can receive a personalised certificate, and a sky chart with their name printed next to the star of their choice. Since the early eighties, over 500,000 stars have been named in this way.
Alternatively, for a fee of only £19.95, consumers can purchase a 1 acre plot of land on the moon. The purchase comes with a certificate of proof, and co-ordinates to show exactly where the property is situated.

No-one in the family knew what Dai was until he fell off the ladder and died, that autumn ten years ago. There had been a lot of rain, and he was clearing mulch from the gutter, scooping it out with his big hands and flinging it into the garden. It seems he had some kind of stroke, and when he fell he cracked his head on the slab of blue slate that was propped beside the back door. It was either a stroke or a fit of some kind, I was never sure exactly, but for one reason or another they did a post-mortem at the hospital and that was when they noticed the elongated skull, the heavy, protuberant shape of the jaw, the flatness of the cranium. These features struck some bright spark as unusual. They referred the case to another pathologist, who turned out to be an amateur paleoanthropologist as well. One of those people who spends their time digging bones out of burial mounds. Large numbers of similar enthusiasts approached our family in the subsequent months, all of them wanting to have a look at Dai, and they put Cathy, my aunt, through much unnecessary stress with their requests for autopsies and questions about his diet. It was months before his remains were cremated, and even then we received an unpleasant, even offensive letter from the National Prehistorical Society who claimed we had done ‘a regrettable disservice to the cause of human understanding.’

‘But he was my husband,’ said Cathy. Her voice had the wounded, baffled tone that became very familiar to me in the difficult weeks and months that followed. ‘What else could I have done with him? Had him stuffed and put in a glass box?’

Dai’s ashes were scattered off the Rock of Gibraltar, where he and my aunt had first met, thirty years before. Their meeting was a popular story in the family, one of those stories that gets retold, evolving of its own accord. Cathy had been frightened by a gang of Barbary macaques, the sole remaining ape population in Europe, and Dai had come to her defense, driving them away with rocks. Later he said he’d been bitten in the hand, and that Cathy had bandaged him up using strips torn from her skirt, but she always denied that part had happened. But they both agreed they’d got talking after that, lingering up there until sunset, gazing towards Africa and realising they had fallen in love. Cathy told this story again before dropping Dai’s ashes into the wind, to be blown towards the distant smudge of Morocco and the far-away Rif Mountains. A photographer recorded the event and sold the pictures to a science magazine. We went to see the caves as well, not for the sake of a photo-shoot but because it seemed, strangely, appropriate at the time. Cathy didn’t like the caves much. The bafflement returned to her face as she stooped and glanced around. ‘But this has nothing to do with my Dai. He wouldn’t have liked it at all in here. He was too big, for a start. He’d have banged his head.’

She giggled, then, uncomfortably. It was an unfortunate choice of words. My mum put her arm round her sister, and we returned to the light of day.

I went off for a moment on my own, looking for the apes. They were pulling rubbish out of a bin, scattering it across the ground. When I approached, they hardly looked up. I threw a rock. They all stared then. One of them drew back his lips, and I was surprised at how big and animal-like his teeth were.

We never knew Dai’s side of the family. He didn’t seem to keep in touch with them. When I was a kid, I remember how he played with me, humming deep-toned nonsense songs and swinging me round the garden by my arms. He had heavy eyelids and a broad, furrowed, worried-looking face that changed its shape completely when he smiled. We teased him and joked about the width of his thumbs, which looked like they’d been flattened with a mallet. My dad said these were ‘murderer’s thumbs,’ enough to get him sent to Australia if he’d lived in Victorian times, when people believed in things like that. Dai was a big, soft, gentle man. I think he enjoyed playing with me because he and Cathy never had any kids. From the research I’ve done into this over the last several years, I’ve found that the matter of reproduction is still an issue of great contention, debated hotly in academic circles. There are those that claim that cross-breeding is possible, while another view holds that the psyiological gap is too wide to be spanned, like for example with domestic cats and lions. Another opinion goes that first-generation offspring might be produced, but these children would themselves be sterile. Cathy, of course, never hinted at the matter. I’d never dream of probing it now, not when she’s been through so much.

Something people often seem to assume is that Dai must have been abnormally hairy. I suppose this is predictable enough, but the question only makes me depressed. It serves only to demonstrate the ignorance that is still widespread, even in these enlightened days when so much has been made clear to us. Worse, I believe, this ignorance reveals the darker current of prejudice that reaches all the way back through the years to the earliest competitive genocides that took place on the shifting landmass we came to call Europe. It’s true Dai was a little on the hairy side, but no more so than some men I’ve seen diving off the high board in the pool, and he certainly didn’t resemble in the slightest the knuckle-dragging semi-ape that tabloid cartoonists imagined him to be, in the early days.

Dai always kept himself clean-shaven. He said that beards were for people hiding something. While he wasn’t exactly handsome, he had a kind face that people trusted, and carried himself with a dignity that made a positive impression on everyone he met. He was a landscape gardener, and when I was little I remember feeling envy at the sight of his strong hands at rest on the table, the brown, reliable, long-muscled arms, because I knew that when I grew up I’d never have arms as good as those. It turned out to be true. I don’t. I work at a desk in a research institution. I’d have no use for arms like that anyway.

Once, but thankfully only once, I’ve had someone asking me if my uncle could count or read. I didn’t even attempt to answer. It’s a good thing Cathy wasn’t there, or I don’t know what would have happened. Dai actually read a great deal. He preferred science-fiction, and after he died my mum had to sort through a vast collection of tattered paperbacks with covers showing crystal pyramids and double suns going down over alien worlds. He also read practical books about botany, descriptions of famous country houses, studied field guides to wild flowers. As far as I know, there was nothing subnormal about his mathematical skills. He could be a little inarticulate at times, and sometimes stumbled over words. He suffered from mild dyslexia, no worse than anyone else’s.

After the first twelve months or so the academics gradually stopped hassling us, and within a few years of his death we were hardly bothered at all. Occasionally a stray professor would turn up, or some science correspondent asking to do what they termed a ‘retrospective,’ but without exception my mum politely turned them away at the door. Of course, the declining interest in our family was due to the other ‘discoveries’ that started filtering through the press towards the end of the year. The first was a woman who died in brain surgery, and on investigating what had gone wrong they found that her brain was much bigger than normal – almost two hundred cubic centimetres more than the human average – although, as everyone now likes to be reminded, brain size has nothing to do with intelligence. They did a couple of autopsies and took a lot of measurements. Much was made of the supraorbital torus and particularly of the occipital bun, that distinctive bony protuberance that looks like a hardened hair knot (I remember that Dai used to joke with us he had a goose egg in his head). Finally they tested her DNA, which apparently proved it beyond any doubt, arousing unprecedented excitement which bordered, at times, on hysteria.

In many ways Dai was lucky they only ‘discovered’ him after he was dead, because the next, a young electrician from Sheffield, was only in his twenties and had his life pretty much ruined by the exposure. These findings were followed in swift succession by the captain of a P&O cruise ship and a Liberal Democrat politician. The politician bravely attempted to continue running his constituency in the face of a vitriolic smear campaign, but was voted out in the next local elections. The tabloids vented all the knee-jerk bile usually reserved for paedophiles and refugees on housing benefits, and we were glad that Dai had been spared similar headlines himself. They dubbed the Lib Dem ‘the Caveman in the Commons’ and he soon left politics altogether, citing personal reasons.

This, however, was only the start. Dozens more emerged in the following months. Many, becoming suspicious of themselves – obsessing over bits of their bodies which suddenly seemed to look rotund or elongated, their kneecaps too large, their collar bones too long, the lack of a decent protuberant chin – submitted themselves to voluntary tests in the mobile clinics that had been set up in hospitals and museums. The media drove everyone into fevers of self-doubt, and it seemed that barely a week went by without another ‘sensational find’: the latest school teacher, football player or minor TV celebrity to be tested, confirmed and re-categorised as a different species.

The frenzy lasted just over a year. It did have a nastier side. In one of the more shameful incidents, a teenager was driven to suicide, leading to weepy editorials along the lines of ‘she just couldn’t cope with the modern world,’ which neglected to mention she had coped well enough until hounded night and day by paparazzi. Estimates vary, but around three thousand cases of assault have been attributed to ‘Neanderphobia,’ which includes about seventeen stabbings and even, somewhere in Lincolnshire, an attempted lynching. The occurrence of these incidents followed a pattern which correlated clearly with developments in academic thinking. When a prominent professor, interviewed on the BBC, posited the theory that ‘un-sapien’ genes might be distantly linked to Northern Europeans with red hair and freckles, almost fifty red-haired freckled people reported being physically abused that same night; eleven of those in an organised attack on an Irish pub. Following the publication of now-discredited research into physiological profiles, a number of thickset, bow-legged people awoke to find the word ‘Neando’ spray-painted on their doors.

I feel I should say that these incidents were rare, and something the majority of people condemned. But they were only an extreme manifestation of what many secretly felt: a revulsion, and even a fear, of the sudden, unexplained reappearance of a species previously reckoned extinct for twenty-four thousand years.

Of course Neanderthals hadn’t ‘reappeared,’ because they had never gone away. It seems amazing now, when we know so much more, that up until Dai fell off that ladder it was universally believed they had vanished entirely from off the face of the earth. The species was considered an ‘evolutionary dead-end,’ the equivalent of the last of a family line who dies without leaving any heirs. According to the history books, many of which, shamefully, still haven’t been updated, they dominated Europe, and parts of Asia, for hundreds of thousands of years before the arrival of Homo sapiens from Africa. It was commonly assumed that we simply wiped them out, although another theory held that they couldn’t adapt to changes in the climate. Evidence existed of a few thousand years of uneasy coexistence, and then a rapid slide into extinction.

It was believed that the last Neanderthal group clung on in the far south of Spain for some time, living in the caves in the Rock of Gibraltar where we’d scattered my uncle’s ashes. They were envisaged as an isolated band, severed forever from the rest of their kind, staring uncomprehendingly down at a world overrun by superior creatures, smarter and more adaptable than them, with the ability to develop complex language and sophisticated tools. When this group perished, it was thought, the species went down with them. They left no material trace except in bones.

But now we know it didn’t happen like this. Neanderthals never became extinct, but simply adapted and learned to live among us.

They adopted our customs and technology – we probably adopted some of theirs as well, although this theory is unpopular with many – and integrated into human culture so well that, in time, they couldn’t even tell themselves apart.

This is what I try to remind people when, as still happens frequently, they ask me stupid questions about Dai. ‘Do you think he felt lonely and confused?’ they ask, or ‘was he sad?’ or even ‘was he friends with any others?’ – as if all Neanderthals know one another and meet up secretly at night to sing guttural songs and wave their clubs. To this I reply that I have no idea, it’s impossible to tell. My uncle could be melancholic at times, but neurological research suggests that Neanderthal brains might be spared the depression, anxiety and schizophrenia that increasingly affect our own species; Dai was probably happier than most of us, in the end. But everyone interprets it as a family tragedy, and treats the subject so delicately that at times it’s painful to watch. Neanderthal. Neanderthal. The word has become derogatory. I’ve witnessed the discomfort this causes when people talk to Cathy. ‘But what should we, uh, term him?’ they ask, contorted with political correctness.

‘Just term him Dai,’ she says desperately. They give her comforting looks.

‘She must be in denial, poor woman,’ I imagine they say later. ‘How would you feel, being told you’ve been sharing your bed with one of them for thirty years?’

‘And he always seemed like such a civilised man. I suppose it’s not his fault, really. It’s just the way that evolution happened.’

The fact that such ignorance persists today depresses but does not surprise me. Sometimes I find myself guilty of thoughtlessness too: romanticising or even mythologising them, the way supposedly enlightened Europeans did with the concept of the Noble Savage back two hundred years ago.

Sometimes I find myself guilty of forgetting just how normal Dai was.

I remember the work he did on the house, him and my dad side by side, stripping down walls or re-plastering ceilings, tearing up floorboards together. They got on very well as friends, much better than my dad did with Cathy. For a while they even tried going into business, fixing up old motorbikes, and the garden was full of machine parts half-concealed in the uncut grass for us kids to hurt ourselves on. They seemed to spend more time smoking than working, talking quietly about this and that. I used to enjoy watching Dai smoke because he did it with such great pleasure. The whole lower part of his face strained forward, the creases on his forehead smoothed, and his eyelids rolled down to cover his eyes until they almost met with the heavy bags either side of his lumpy nose. ‘Don’t do this,’ he said to me once, smiling at the smoke drifting upwards. ‘It’s nice enough at the time, but they say one day it’ll wipe you out.’

One of my uncle’s favourite things was explaining the plot of his current sci-fi book, which he did with an air of solemnity that awed me when I was young. His voice grew soft, his face serene, as if the sound of his own voice resonating inside him was putting him into a kind of trance. He’d sit me on the floor between his feet and recount tales of long-ago galaxies, alien gods that descended to Earth in marvellous ships of pure light and benevolent, telepathic beings called things like Th’un Xal and Avalaar. He also liked acid jazz and cards. His favourite game was called Egyptian Rat Screw, a game I sometimes try to remember the rules of, but I never can. I first beat him at it when I was thirteen. From then on he always said that I would be the brains of the family.

There isn’t much more to say about Dai, because nothing he did was particularly remarkable. This is what those investigators could never seem to understand; they were too busy fishing for anecdotes about him building stone tools or tearing small animals apart with his hands. He finished school with average grades, learnt a trade, got married, and settled down contentedly with his adopted family. He only went abroad three times in his life: twice to Spain – the first time he met Cathy and the second time for their honeymoon – and his third and final trip, somewhat oddly, was to Latvia, where he went to see a famous country garden he’d read about in one of a botanical magazines.

On the subject of foreign lands, however, I’m reminded of one other place he often talked about. Dai, for some unknown reason, had a lifelong fascination with the Arctic, enthusing for hours about wastes of permafrost and silences broken only by the sound of wind whipping over ice.

‘For months on end there’s only black and white,’ he’d explain in wondering tones. ‘The ice is white, the sky is white, the sea is black, and there’s no sun. I’d like to see that, just one time. There isn’t a sound, there isn’t a soul, for hundreds and hundreds of miles.’

‘If there’s one thing I’d like to see before I die,’ I remember him saying on another occasion, ‘it’s an adult polar bear.’

‘Well you’d better go to the zoo,’ replied Cathy. ‘That’s the only place you’ll see one of them.’

And Dai’s eyes wrinkled with his slow, sad smile and he said, ‘I suppose you’re right, love.’

My uncle’s first present to me was a white teddy-bear called Ice-bear. He’s in a box somewhere now, back in the old house. Ice-bear’s luxuriant fur has rubbed bald, and one of his eyes has fallen out. He used to be my constant companion. He was my earliest friend.

In hindsight, the hysteria didn’t last so long. In fact, it was over remarkably quickly, dying down within a couple of years. The media ran out of puns about cavemen. The story dropped from headline news into features in culture magazines. In many ways the initial paranoia was good, because it made us all aware of the dangers of ignorance, taught us not to jump to conclusions. Obviously prejudice still exists, and is visible if you look for it – consider the growth of cosmetic surgery designed to ‘sapienise’ the features of the face – but the witch-hunt many of us feared never came to pass. Reports of inter-species violence are now reassuringly rare; they seem to be the exception rather than part of any general pattern of hatred or intolerance. Perhaps humanity, after all, is not quite as inhuman as many of us were so fond of saying it was.

It’s difficult to tell in what ways we’ve been affected, together, as a culture. On the face of it everything is the same; little has changed in law or legislation, in our habits or the way we conduct our business. But underneath this lies the knowledge that once-homogonous mankind is composed of two entirely separate species. I read a lot of claptrap in journals about ‘psychological bisection’ and the ‘two humanities’ we now know share the earth. But, intellectualising aside, the basic fact cannot be denied. What was discovered in my uncle’s bones must have changed the way we see ourselves, forever.

I worry that ignorance will prevail, especially among the young. Yesterday I came across my daughter staring at herself in the mirror.

‘Is my nose unusually lumpy?’ she asked. ‘Do I have a projecting mid-face?’

‘What are you talking about, Jen?’

‘I’m scared that I’m a Neanderthal.’

‘What are you worried about that for?’

‘Katie in school called me one. She said I was a dead-end.’

‘Of course you’re not a Neanderthal, silly. But even if you were, would it matter?’

‘I don’t like them.’

‘Your uncle Dai was one. You never met him, but he was a lovely man.’

‘But I don’t want to be one. I can’t be one! They’re different from us, they’re not related!’

And this, I have to admit, is true. They’re not even our distant cousins. They just happen to look pretty much like us. That must be hard for children to understand.

I have dwelt on these matters constantly ever since we found out what Dai was. I now work at a research foundation that studies relations between our two peoples, and have set up an outreach group to help those finding it hard to cope with the shock and stigma of Neanderthal diagnosis. But all my learning and self-education has been useless in answering the deepest question – which no-one, not even Cathy, is in a position to shed any light on – the question I find most interesting of all.

Which is: did uncle Dai know?

When I ask myself this, posing it to no-one, expecting nothing back, most often – in lieu of an answer – I find my mind going back to the time my dad took the family down to Dartmoor. I was seven or eight years old, and can’t remember why we went or what we did when we got there, but I know I was there with my uncle and Ice-bear, and I remember the look on his face as he stared against the wind.

He gazed across the moorland for a long, long time, and the rain was beginning to sting my cheeks so I huddled close to his sheltering bulk as the rest of the family filed back down to the cars. I think we were standing on top of a tor, those monolithic granite cones that sprout strangely from the yellow, matted grass, and his strong hand reached down for mine and enclosed it protectively. I have an image of my uncle’s face, seen from below, just the jutting chin and nostrils, facing out across that bleakness – surely the only thing still left that resembles a wilderness in all England’s tame and tended countryside – and I saw that there were tears in his eyes. Perhaps they were only from the wind. But perhaps they came from somewhere else, which neither of us could ever understand.

The foreigners in our city are taller than we are. When not pacing the streets in the high heat of noon, sweating through their beards, they stand together in unusually stiff, upright postures, as if they are trying to see over the walls we have built to keep them out of our plots and gardens. Some people say they stand like this because they are a proud and dignified race of men; others say it is because they are nervous.

The foreigners in our city wear different clothes to us, and observe different customs. Despite the heat, they insist on their heavy hats and coverings, with the result that they always seem exhausted and angry. Yesterday afternoon I saw one, behind the trees on the bank of the canal, remove his cumbersome headgear for a moment to enjoy the cool, sweet breeze that blows in from the lake. He looked so fresh, so relieved, that I almost liked him. But when I saw him later, driving down prices in the market place, his hat was back on his head and he looked exactly like all the others. Some people say they wear these clothes because they are stubborn, and strict with themselves; others say it is because they are stupid.

The foreigners in our city are all men, and they have thick beards that have grown dusty and matted because they don’t wash often enough. They are all men because they travelled for many months to get here, and couldn’t bring their women to live with them. Perhaps this is why they are always so tense, and stare hungrily at girls from the corners of their eyes when they think no-one else is watching. Some people say it is dangerous, having young men like these in the midst of our city, without families to watch them, or wives. But there are so many more of us than there are of them.

The foreigners have not always been here. We remember a time before they came. They first arrived from the east in small, ragged groups, gathering in number outside the city walls, and no-one really understood what sort of people they were, or where they came from. And now they stroll our streets in twos and threes, and buy things in the markets to take back to their families, and occasionally attempt to learn our language. At night they return to their enclave just outside the city walls, although the wealthier have taken to renting rooms; and a few even sleep in houses they have bought, or been given. They make no secret of what they want, and we do not blame them for wanting. Some people say that they want too much. But we will always have more than they do.

The foreigners in our city protect themselves well; from us, and from each other. Their faces are like statues when they meet us, stern and unsmiling below their long noses, and yet they laugh amongst themselves like children. They live within our laws, but are scornful. They are not meant to carry weapons, but we know that they do, because occasionally trouble occurs. It doesn’t happen often. They do not want it. We do not want it; not now. Some people say we should stop them from coming. Others say we can learn something from them.

The foreigners in our city dislike our religion. This was one of the first things they told us. Some people say they want to change our beliefs, to replace our gods with theirs. But our gods will always be stronger.

Last month we held a large ceremony. Twenty thousand people were involved. Our priests worked from dawn until dusk, up to their elbows, until they were physically too tired to continue. Flutes and drums were heard for days. The temple steps were stained. There were flowers, and feasts, and chocolate, and the foreigners were invited to witness the spectacle, because we thought it was something they should see. They skulked behind walls and at the edges of the crowd, and refused to eat the food, or to dance. A few became intoxicated, and reacted badly. They were generally considered to have behaved very poorly, on such an important occasion. Some people say it was simply because they did not understand; other people say they were terrified.

The foreigners have brought foreign dogs with them, although they are not allowed to bring them in the city. Their dogs are bigger than ours, and covered in hair, and they are meant for a different purpose. Some people say that these dogs are being trained; we hear them snarling and roaring down there. The foreigners know we are afraid of them.

Sometimes I try to communicate with the foreigners, but we don’t understand each other’s languages. I try to ask them what they are doing, and why they have come so far from home, and whether they are happy in our city. They do not seem interested in questions. I look at their faces beneath all the hair, their sun-damaged skin and pale eyes. Our city is strong, and they are uneasy. We too are uneasy at times.

All is well. Our city is strong. We are waiting, and watching one another.

Fifty Solar Bears leap out of the flames. Each Bear is ten-foot tall, dressed in a reflective silver bear-suit and brandishing a magnesium sword.

The Bears form a circle and commence Solar Bear Fire Dance 1.

They sing:

We are the Solar Bears
We live inside the Sun
We are the Solar Bears
We make the Heavens burn!

An enormous brass gong descends from the ceiling and bursts into flames. One Bear begins beating it with his paws, which burst into flames when they touch it. Other Bears begin beating war-drums.

They sing:

We are the Solar Bears
We dance and sing and roar
We are the Solar Bears
We’re ready for the War!

The fires suddenly die down and the stage becomes dark. It is night. The Bears, lit by a soft orange light, assume sleeping positions.

(Softly) they sing:

We are the Solar Bears
But sometimes we must sleep
We are the Solar Bears
We hibernate in peace

A huge explosion of lava sends all the Bears cart-wheeling into the air. They roar and wave their paws in a terrifying manner. When they land back on the stage, they burst into flames and their magnesium swords ignite.

(Note: to protect them from the deafening noises, the audience may at this point need protective earphones)

The Bears march on the spot, waving their weapons above their heads and snarling at the audience. Tongues of fire curl around their teeth, which glow white hot. They form a phalanx and commence Solar Bear Fire Dance 2.

They sing:

We are the Solar Bears
It’s time for us to fight
We are the Solar Bears
We’ll set the World alight!

War! War! War! War! War!

With a blood-curdling roar the Solar Bear Army charges the audience. They leap off the stage and into the auditorium, lashing out with their magnesium swords, overturning entire aisles of seats and causing general mayhem.

(Note: the audience will be issued with riot shields and pepper-spray for self-defence, but these are highly unlikely to be enough to protect them from the fury of the Bears.)

Curtain.

I took a box of about a thousand downtown and found a busy street to hand them out on. There was a nice, steady flow of pedestrians, and I selected a location right in the middle of the pavement where they couldn’t very easily avoid me. I planned to charm them with my English accent. Every ten seconds or so, as instructed by my employers, I called out: “Five dollars off Build A Bear! Build A Bear, five dollars off!” I tried to look as non-threatening as I could, and smiled cheerfully at any children.

Pretty soon, I began to feel ridiculous. The sun was hot, the street was crowded, and I was deliberately getting in everybody’s way. I realized, also, that the majority of these pedestrians were businessmen going to important meetings and Orthodox Jews from the diamond-selling district. Clearly none of these people desired the building of a bear; and even had they done so, they all looked rich enough to buy one at the store without the five dollar discount I was offering. They had no reason whatsoever to take one of my flyers. I found this idea dispiriting.

Once my confidence was undermined, my motivation withered. I found myself simplifying my sales pitch to: “Five dollar bear discount! Five dollar bear discount!” And then, before long, I was saying in a quieter voice: “Five dollars off bears. Please.” And: “These flyers are free.”

Then a little fat man approached me shyly. He was the first one who had yet taken the slightest bit of notice in what I was doing.

“Excuse me,” he said, eyes darting, “I didn’t hear you clearly. Are those actually real bears you’re promoting?”

“Yes,” I replied at once, desperate to start shifting some stock, “there’s a five dollar discount on your very own real bear.”

“Good,” the little fat man said, “I like bears very much.” He took a flyer from my hand and hurried excitedly away.

My confidence returned. So this was the way to disseminate the things. “Real bears!” I started shouting, “five dollars off real bears!” A commuter grabbed a flyer in passing, and the man behind him noticed this and took one for himself. Before long they were flying from my hands. “Real bears for sale! Bears going cheap! Bears, bears, bears! Lovely bears!”

“What kind of bears?” yelled a delivery man as he dashed past me.

“Any bear you like!” I answered, stuffing a flyer into his courier bag, “we’ve got them all!”

“Have you got any polar bears?” inquired a security guard from the doorway of a nearby bank.

“Polar, black, grizzly, brown!” I cried, hurling a fistful of flyers into the air, where the city wind whipped them up towards the skyscrapers, “panda, spectacled, sun, we’ve got them all!”

“What’s a sun bear?” someone asked.

“The shortest member of the bear family, occasionally known as the dog bear because of its small stature!” I yelled.

“What about koalas?” shouted a rabbi, almost fighting his way through the crowd to get to me.

“Yes, koalas! Koalas too!”

“Then give me a flyer, quickly! Oh boy, I love koalas!” he cried, giggling with delight.

“Who doesn’t love koalas? Who doesn’t love bears?” I yelled triumphantly, clambering on top of a newspaper stand to get a better view of the crowd. There were probably about a hundred people gathered around me now, spilling off the pavement into the road and blocking a lane of traffic. The people at the back were climbing on top of each other to see what was going on. Before long, some of the younger office workers set up a chant.

“Bears, bears, bears!” they chanted, beating a rhythm on the pavement with their briefcases and umbrellas, “bears, bears, bears!”

“Bears, bears, bears!” I shrieked along with them, like some wild and furious god of war inciting his troops to mayhem, “bears, bears, bears!” The chanting grew louder and the crowd grew bigger as motorists abandoned their vehicles in the road. Shop-keepers pulled down the shutters of their shops, bankers came whirling through the spinning doors of banks; executives, street cleaners, bus drivers, politicians, all drawn unstoppably by the irresistible attractive force of discount bears. The crowd surely numbered a thousand by this time. And above this bubbling sea of elated faces, the brightly-coloured flyers whirled in their hundreds, swooping and flapping like a flock of ecstatic birds.

And just as the frenzy of the crowd reached its crescendo, I threw back my head and cried in a strong, kingly voice: “Lovers of bears, your moment has come! Now hurry to the Build Your Own Bear store, quickly! Bears, bears, bears, they shall be yours! The store is located on 46th Street and 5th Avenue!”

And with a mighty roar, the crowd turned as one, and charged southwards waving their flyers triumphantly before them.

Within a minute, the street was empty. The traffic began to move as it had before. I looked in my bag. There were three flyers left. I put them carefully in the bin, and set off home.

I imagined I had done rather well; that my employer would be pleased with me, hopefully rewarding my efforts with future flyer distribution work, and pay me well. Unfortunately, this was not the case. The next morning I received a phone call from the nice lady at the temping office, in which I was told that, due to something she termed ‘client complications,’ the Build Your Own Bear store had halted its promotion and there were no more flyer distribution jobs for the foreseeable future. She wished me luck with finding alternative employment, and even said at the end, “You take care now, sweetheart.”

…

You take care now, sweetheart. I put down the phone and repeated this several times. You take care now, sweetheart. What a lovely thing to say, I thought. This is truly a wonderful world.

Shortly after opening, despite extensive security precautions, fourteen customers were kidnapped by unknown assailants in the organic produce section. According to witnesses, the victims were herded at gunpoint into shopping trolleys and wheeled in the direction of the tinned goods aisles, an area notorious as a stronghold for insurgency. A retaliatory incursion by security forces resulted only in collateral damage and the destruction of the deli counter; three customers were shot while attempting to flee the advance, and one soldier hurt in friendly fire.

Around noon, the relative calm of late morning was shattered by firefights in the bread alley as troops battled militants for possession of the bakery area. An explosive device was detonated near the help-desk, killing at least two customer service representatives. And a suicide bomber martyred herself in the checkout queue, claiming an unknown number of victims. Panic set in as customers, laden with foodstuffs, attempted to evacuate the southern shop-floor.

I write these notes furtively, staying out of sight, from the shelter of the passport photo booth. Through a hole in the curtain I can see soldiers on guard around the sliding doors, smoking cigarettes and checking their weapons. Occasionally, from a nearby aisle, comes the clatter of machinegun fire or the crump of an exploding shell; the strip-lights flicker and a tin rolls off the shelf, but the soldiers don’t even turn their heads. Customers entering the store glance nervously around them as they scurry to the fruit and veg shelves; the fear is evident in the way they move, the stiffness of their limbs and stricken faces. They snatch items off the shelves haphazardly these days, hardly even checking the prices.

Yet soft muzak still issues from speakers in the ceiling, on the orders of the general manager. The scanners at the checkout still make their reassuring bleeps, and occasionally an announcement sounds over the explosions in tones so clear and calm that no-one is alarmed: “This is a customer call – will all customers please evacuate aisles twelve to fifteen, aisles twelve to fifteen, we apologise for any inconvenience. And don’t forget to take advantage of our great summer special offers! Please ask a staff colleague for details.” And the money still rings in the registers.

Early afternoon, in the post-lunchtime lull, seven dead customers were discovered in the poultry freezer, covered by a layer of frozen chickens. The hands of the corpses were tied with tape, and all but two had been decapitated. One head turned up later in a watermelon crate; the others have yet to be located.

Just before closing, as the customer curfew came into effect, the militants staged a series of attacks across six separate aisles, forcing troops back towards the pet foods. Security forces responded with heavy artillery, and claim to have killed between fifteen and twenty insurgents. As soldiers moved in to secure the area, I left my passport photo booth and followed advancing units to survey the damage, inconspicuous in the lime-green fleece of a customer service rep. The floor tiles were slippery with blood and household cleaning fluids. All I could make out in the rubble and smoke were shattered shelves and half-buried bodies; a mangled shopping trolley with a torn-off leg inside it; dozens of boxes of smashed free-range eggs.

The same things happen every day. It’s business as usual, as the manager says. All of it has ceased to surprise me. I scribble what notes I can on the backs of till receipts, and return to shelter quickly at the sound of sniper fire.

And later, with the strip-lights off, the soldiers will huddle in groups with their guns, illuminated only by the glow of the dairy fridges. Night-shift workers will creep out wordlessly to stack shelves in the aisles of no-man’s land, making everything normal for the next day of trading.

And from behind the flimsy curtain of my photo booth, I will watch as this day’s bodies are laid out in rows, to be counted and numbered and packed in cold storage. Family members will gather to grieve outside the sliding doors. And the dead will be identified by their loyalty cards.

It was a big ejaculating cock.

It started as an itching in her arm, the left, from the wrist to the joint of the elbow. One night she rubbed the tender skin through dinner, and carried on rubbing through her evening prayers before the beeswax candle and the Book of Common Trust, until her father informed her that every time she rubbed, an angel would flinch from the feel of her nails on its wings. When they found her still scratching the next morning, as the dusty sun climbed above the low, distant hills, her mother whipped the offending hand with the swat she had made out of old telephone wires the previous summer, to keep the tiny locusts off the walls; five strokes, one for each finger, and then a kiss for the angel’s forgiveness. But Bernadette returned to the itch every time her parents’ backs were turned, so that when her mother came to examine her forearm that night, as the yellow moon swung into its orbit and the yelps of pariah dogs carried from the town, she found that the skin was pink and raw and would not be left alone, no matter how many whips were prescribed.

In the unsteady light of the electric lantern, the mother prepared a salve from the Book of Powders to apply to her daughter’s arm. The lotion was cool and calmed the skin – Bernadette slept better than the night before and dreamed that Canker had grown a new set of teeth and hooves and was no longer becoming old – but in the morning her arm was inflamed again and after that the salve appeared to have lost its effect. Her mother set about mixing a stronger balm, but her father said she had probably licked it off during the night and they should waste no more ointments on a girl so intent on her own irritation. In the end they wrapped the arm in a damp cloth, fastening it with a complicated knot that only he knew how to untie, and set her back to work collecting rusted screws from the furrows turned up by Canker’s plough. Her mother left her with the idea that, whenever the itching recurred, she might scratch at the soil instead of her arm, because the soil was the earth and the earth, in the end, was the source of all pain; as a concession, if the itch became unbearable, she was permitted to rub it three times, no more, with the flat of her hand, provided this was followed by a conciliatory prayer to the Angel of Vigour for the discomfort that this might have caused.

So Bernadette worked for that day and the next and slept poorly the night in between, receiving little relief from her quota of rubs, and even less from the futile torture of soil, while beneath the cloth the itch grew steadily more insistent. The flattening heat of the sun bounced off the plains, colliding with stray glass and metal in the blinding flatlands, suspending the town’s exhaust fumes in the air to stifle the faintest breath of wind from the hills; and as if in reaction her skin burned and raged beneath its coverings until it was all the girl could do to hold from screaming. Keeping out of sight of the windows of the shack, she would alleviate the itch when it got too much with twigs and broken branches from the stick-trees; the pain brought tears to her eyes, and when she imagined the amplified pain of the angels and the cruel red scratch-marks she was putting on their wings, she decided that no amount of subsequent prayer could be enough to convince them of her apology. This threw her into a state of secret terror, remembering childhood stories from the Book of Lament and the torments of sinners in Hell; she became feverish and wild-eyed in the fields, shivering and sweating by turns throughout the day, conceiving fresh damnation every time her fingers sought the skin. It was late afternoon when her father realised she had disappeared from the fields behind the shack; he followed a trail of rusted screws until he found her crouched in the shadow of the disused oil pump with tears of desperation in her eyes and the useless cloth in tatters, compulsively and mindlessly scratching.

As evening closed over the land and the lights began blinking in the nearby town, Bernadette lay afraid in her bed reciting pleas to the Angel of Contrition while her parents peeled the remains of the cloth from her arm. Her father said nothing at the sight, just narrowed his eyes the way he did when dust was in the wind, while her mother went down her knees before the bed and folded her hands in prayer. For the skin up to Bernadette’s elbow had turned bright scarlet, and was punctuated by a pattern of whitish spots that was like no other rash the two had ever seen.

They let the girl sleep until late the next morning while they argued about what should be done. Seeking medical advice was out of the question, even if they could have afforded it, for the town was remote and had had no doctor since the previous one had been kidnapped by Povertists raiding from the hills three years ago. Her father, reluctant as he was to lose time in the fields, rode to the nearest store on his corroded motorbike and returned with a small bottle of anti-inflammatory pills, which he ground into powder and made her drink down with water at regular intervals, but, apart from making the girl violently sick several times, the medicine had no effect. When they examined the arm again before noon, they found that the spots had grown to the size of coins and increased in whiteness; the strange symmetry of their arrangement was enough to convince her mother of unheavenly influence, and she surrounded the bed with beeswax candles and kept up a vigil of prayer until nightfall, while Bernadette sunk into hot, fevered dreams that her bed was descending into Hell for her sins where the fallen angels danced in the flames with burning wings. By the morning, the girl had become convinced of her death and coughed out any food that was given her, lying limply on the cotton sheets while her mother bathed her arm with a cloth soaked in water that had been purified by the names of saints. This continued for several hours, until at last her father, in a fit of frustration, dragged her without warning from the bed and set about whipping her shoulders with the locust swat, calling her a malingerer and a shameless melodramatist who deserved whatever punishment the angels handed down. Her mother reacted by flinging the saintly water in her husband’s face and accusing him of trying to kill the girl, and throughout the furious argument that followed, Bernadette stood in the middle of the floor with a curious, detached expression, blinking her eyes and rubbing her shoulder with one hand. She waited for a lull in the shouting to tell her parents, quietly, that she was feeling much better now and didn’t think she was going to die after all; her arm, in fact, no longer itched one bit. They didn’t believe her until they looked closer in the light of the window, and saw the red already fading from the skin.

After this Bernadette recovered her strength quickly, and by the next afternoon she was back in the furrows collecting scrap-metal in her canvas bag. That night they gave thanks to the Angel of Vigour, and a week later her father left an offering of a full petrol tin at the Church of the Ascension for the miraculous lifting of the affliction. Her mother watched her carefully as she went about her daily tasks, wary that the itch might return, but after weeks had passed and the girl was still well the subject was barely mentioned again; the long hot days rolled by, the sun rose and fell in the burning sky, and the familiar monotony of scrubland life eased back into place as before. High summer was bearing down upon the town and dust storms were blowing on the plains; there were vague rumours of political disturbance, and of dog packs attacking cars on the highway to get at the water in the engines. Three months went by, and nothing changed; the only mark that the rash had left on Bernadette’s life was a series of little bumps running up her forearm where the spots had disappeared, tiny raised pinheads of hardened skin only visible to the touch – which her parents assumed would disappear too, in time, and gradually forgot about completely.

2

‘My thanks,’ said the wandering blind man addicted to kelph as he lowered the cup from his dry, cracked lips, ‘there is little I can give you in return, unless you would care to accept the services of my acquaintances who are standing behind me. I’m afraid they are introverts and extremely shy, but they have an excellent sense of smell and can locate anything that has been lost within the last three days. Perhaps you have mislaid some keys or loose tender? My acquaintances would be happy to find them.’ He smiled his thin smile and held it carefully in place while he waited for a response, but none came, and so he handed back the cup and picked himself up from the camp-chair on which he was sitting. The oil prospectors watched him expressionlessly from under their wide black hats, teeth clamped on their cigarillos; mistrustful of strangers, and doubly mistrustful of strangers with followers such as these, they already begrudged him the water he had drank and were glad to see him go. He stretched his legs, shouldered his bags and then extended his telescopic aluminium white stick to its full length, so that it cast a shadow across the scree. ‘May I trouble you, finally, to point me to the north?’ he asked when he was fully prepared. ‘The sun is too high to go by, you see, and these acquaintances of mine have no concept of direction.’ The prospectors exchanged a glance and then one of them stepped forward and guided the blind man wordlessly to the edge of the encampment, setting him off with a gentle shove towards the distant scrublands. They watched the procession in silence getting smaller and smaller in the vast, ruined landscape, and carried on watching until it was no more than a speck on the far horizon, heading slowly but determinedly south.

The blind man walked for the rest of the morning, breathing hard and whistling broken tunes to himself through his teeth. His small, round head was protected from the sun by a tangled mass of curly black hair, and he wore an ancient suit that had once been white and then stained by the dirt of years to a deep grey-brown, before the sun had bleached it back to almost white again. He walked at a steady pace, tapping his way through the rocks and stones that littered the dry terrain, occasionally stumbling on difficult ground but rarely altering his stride. Around noon he lay down in the shade of a thorn tree and slept for exactly two hours, his body realigning itself automatically to compensate for the movement of the sun in the sky; upon waking he ate what was left of the fried yam he had been given the day before, took a few gulps of water from the flask in his bag, and set off again in the same direction. His acquaintances trailed behind him unobtrusively, asking for nothing, following his footsteps as precisely as they could. Now and again they emitted soft moots and whistles for no reason he could fathom; as far as he could tell, they had been following him now for about ten years.

Towards evening, with aching legs, he crossed the path of a truck full of soldiers on their way to the hills to look for Povertists. They jumped to the ground and questioned him at length, to which he just nodded and smiled and shook his head; they searched his bag and emptied out the water from his flask and demanded to see his papers, which the commander then folded into an origami penis to the great hilarity of his men. Then they made him stand on one leg while they took it in turns to interrogate him, trying to confuse him with double-negatives; his acquaintances, hovering a little way off in apparent unconcern, they regarded with suspicion but otherwise ignored. Before long the commander had grown weary of the diversion, and after making some last obscene gestures with the telescopic stick they all got back into their truck and drove away, billowing a long cloud of dust behind them like a flag. The blind man waited until the sound of their engine had faded completely, then patiently repacked his bag and continued walking.

It wasn’t until after midnight, when the insects had stopped shrieking in the grasses and the hardened earth had at last given up its heat, that he found what he had been looking for since morning. His trailing acquaintances alerted him, as usual, by rushing suddenly ahead with that peculiar whistling noise that made his blood beat faster in his veins and happiness break inside his body; quickening his pace, not caring when he stumbled or banged against rocks, he followed their signalling whoops until he reached the gravely slope where they had assembled some distance on, clustered around a small outcrop of kelph-plants clinging to the meagre soil. Down on his knees he examined the plants one by one with his fingers, then took a penknife from his pocket and began sheering the tough, fist-like buds from the stalks, grinning to himself in the darkness; when he had cut enough he positioned himself comfortably on the ground, wrapped in a blanket unrolled from his bag, and placed the first of these buds in his mouth. Then he mumbled a brief word of thanks – whether to his acquaintances, the night or the plant itself it was impossible to tell – and started chewing.

He chewed for about half an hour, spitting out bits of husk and swallowing the dark, bitter juice, until he sensed the familiar nausea circling inside him. That was his signal that the kelph was taking hold; now all he had to do was concentrate his mind and wait. It didn’t take long. First came the sensation of stirring and resettling under his skin, as if his cells were rearranging themselves concentrically around a new point of focus inside him; there was a feeling of bulging within the tissue, his cheeks and eye-pouches swelling, as if his skin was testing its limits. This was coupled with a slowing down and jerkiness of movement, imperceptible at first and then palpable throughout his body down to the smallest muscle; simultaneously, the tiniest motions that he made became magnified to massive proportions, so that he imagined himself soaring hundreds of feet from the scrub like a great stone idol. He began rocking back and forth on his heels, giggling softly, and the sounds that came from his mouth became tangible in the air and tumbled down his frame like living roots; this was the primary stage of wonder, when the kelph made him feel as marvellous and new as a baby, and the limits of his blindness burned to nothing before the visceral delight of simply being.

This phase was followed quickly by something more complicated, anticipated by a return of creeping nausea and a slight buzzing sound around his hands. He retched and then swallowed, and the saliva in his mouth formed itself into a series of convoluted tubes which he attempted to navigate with the tip of his tongue, which had now become so huge it hardly seemed to fit inside his lips. His body then appeared to divide itself into interlocking portions, each part splitting off as a separate unit and yet remaining as a segment of the whole like a diagram of Polytheist gods; during this period he was completely immobilised, crouching in the dirt trying to order his breath through the various sections of what used to be his nose. In this disconnected state it was hard not to panic, not to let the demon in his flesh take hold and drive him mad with fear, but he had ridden this wave a thousand times and knew its ruses well; within minutes his body had started to come back to itself, and soon the demon had loosened its grip and his limbs could move freely once more. Gradually the sense of disjointedness wore off and was replaced with what he knew lay beyond; that lucid sensation of absolute cohesion – body and brain, skin and soul – in which his cells were gently drifting in an ocean of cream, and each movement that he made produced a little lap of pleasure that rippled out beyond him through the atoms of the air.

After an indefinable time of this he began to enter the last phase the kelph held in store, preceded by a smoothing in the face around the eyes; the sense of floating diminished and became replaced by something else, a different sort of calm he almost dared not distinguish. It started as a warmth that originated deep inside his head, and by degrees expanded outwards until it had reached the space behind his eyeballs. He felt it there and held his breath, keeping as still as he could, for it was sensitive to the slightest movement; and with infinite slowness it swelled and spread, pushing against the vacuum of sight that surrounded. A quivering sigh came from his lips; the hairs crept on the back of his neck. He focused on his blankness and let the warmth advance against it, until gradually he couldn’t tell where the blankness ended and the warmth began; and then the two things became one so the warmth was the blankness, and little by little it turned into colour, and the colour of the warmth he sensed was red. And he held it there, this sense of red, until the infinitesimal pixels of which the sense was composed began to dance before him; at which point, as always, his joy overwhelmed him so completely that the whole thing collapsed back into nothing – the redness caved, blankness rushed to fill the space, and the sense that had started to merge into sight became nothing but blindness again.

With a groan he rolled onto his side, tugging the blanket around his thin shoulders. In that instant the kelph had left his system, leaving him wracked and exhausted. The world was empty, everything ached; his skin felt sad and old. He tried to keep the red in mind but it was meaningless without the kelph, and he knew from experience that eating more would make him sick to the bone and bring about dizzy vomiting. Once again he had started as a baby and left as an old, old man; disgusted with himself and with existence, with sensation, with travelling and with his useless eyes, he curled into himself like a crab amongst the denuded stalks and waited for his consciousness to fail. He lay a long time on the stony ground, before his acquaintances, who had watched the whole thing from the bottom of the slope without the least concern, drifted up around him and commenced their quiet hum; they whistled and crooned like bottlenecks for no reason that he knew until his sickness eased away, and he could sleep.

The next morning he put the remainder of the kelph-buds in his bag and continued walking. He walked in the same direction as the day before and filled his mind with nothing, leaving a long trail of sweat behind him for his acquaintances to follow. He tapped his way forwards unthinkingly, not knowing where he was trying to go or what he was looking for; he walked without stopping for water or shade until his tangled hair was dripping and his skin was caked with many layers of dust. In the giddy afternoon, his brain pounding from the sun, the murmurs of his acquaintances alerted him to the presence of a town some distance off, which he avoided with a detour that took him over a series of dry, rutted fields; following the boundary of a line of stick-trees, stumbling on bits of metal that protruded occasionally from the earth, he kept going until his progress was arrested by a barbed-wire fence that snagged his arms, sticking in his jacket when he tried to tear free. The more he struggled the more he became entangled, until he was hopelessly snared in the barbs and too exhausted to fight any further; at which point he stood stock-still and listened, for he thought he had heard something moving close by. He turned his head as best he could towards the source of the noise and addressed whatever it was politely, smiling through the dirt upon his face. ‘Hello, can you please untangle me? I am just a poor blind man caught in a web, and would appreciate some assistance. I’m afraid I have little to offer in return, but my acquaintances standing behind me have an excellent sense of smell, and can locate anything that has been lost within the last three days…’

3

She had watched him approaching from a long way off, apprehensive of his wild appearance and the long pointed stick in his hand. Canker had a retch and she was rubbing down his neck with salt-solution in the furthest field when she saw him coming, a glitch on the horizon growing steadily in size; concealing herself behind the split rock that marked the boundary of the farmland, she watched his progress towards her with a mixture of alarm and fascination. By the time he was at the stick-trees she could make out the shapes of the strange followers drifting behind him, which were like nothing else she had ever seen; automatically she started a precautionary prayer to the Angel of Trepidation, but became distracted halfway through and forgot the words. It wasn’t until the stranger was much closer that she realised how old and tired he looked, and it wasn’t until he had hit the fence that she understood he was blind. Creeping out from behind her rock she approached him cautiously, taking care not to make a sound, but his followers sensed her at once and twisted their pale faces around like a row of satellite bowls, fixing her blankly in their gaze while their master ceased his futile struggle with the wire. When he spoke out loud she didn’t dare to move, hoping he would think himself mistaken, but his followers maintained their silent stare and he simply carried on talking. ‘If this is your land and I have wandered onto it by accident, I am sorry. Perhaps I have crossed a field of crops, or walked on some sacred site. I am just a blind man on a long, long walk, and seem to have become entangled. If you would be so kind as to help me free, I would be extremely grateful. Your fence is making holes in my skin.’ At which point, the girl forgot all the warnings her parents had ever told her about outcasts, wanderers, prophets, Povertists, atheists, hermits, vagrants, foreigners, false idolists, loons and madmen, and took a few steps shyly forwards.

When the stranger was free she brought him a cup of oily water from the nearest sinkhole, and watched as he gulped it greedily. In a timid voice she asked if the wire had hurt him, to which he replied that his hunger hurt him more; so she ran back to the shack where her mother was peeling hammer-fruits for the evening meal and stole a small loaf of bread from the shelf, something she had never done before. He ate half right away, stashed the rest in his pouch, and then followed it down with a small piece of kelph to take the edge off his exhaustion, settling himself on the ground while a gratified expression spread across his features. Motioning her closer, he reached up to her face and lightly passed his fingertips across it; the girl froze in shock but gradually relaxed as his gentleness became apparent, allowing him to trace the contours of her mouth and nose with the daintiness of an insect finding its way across the hairs on a human arm. When he had finished he told her she was very pretty, but carried a sadness that surprised him in someone so young; he thanked her for the water and the bread and for the sadness in her face, because sadness was so rare beneath this pitiless sun, which made most things so hard and cracked and dry. He asked her her name and she told him it was Bernadette. And then he got back to his feet, gripping her left arm for support as he rose.

The moment his palm touched the bare skin of her arm, something happened. It was as if a circuit had become completed, like the time her father reconnected the electricity in a dust storm by using his own body as a conductor. He let out a gasp of amazement, and his acquaintances gave a strange whistling sigh and clustered around as if magnetized, their nebulous bodies charged suddenly with interest. On his knees before the girl, he ran his palm up and down her forearm, tracing the pattern of tiny dots across her skin with a kind of fevered concentration; alarmed, she tried to back away, but he held her firmly by the wrist and wouldn’t let go. ‘Where?’ he demanded as soon as the words would come, ‘Where did you get these marks? How did they come to be upon your arm? Were you born this way, or did somebody put them there? Tell me!’ In a small voice Bernadette replied she had got them from a rash some months ago, at which he shook his head in wonder and went over them again with greater care, checking each spot with his fingertip individually as if he couldn’t believe his touch. Then, to the girl’s astonishment, he wiped away a tear from his sightless eyes and muffled a sob with his sleeve.

‘Beautiful,’ he whispered in a voice so soft it barely cleared his tongue, his acquaintances murmuring around him. ‘Bernadette, do you know what it says?’ But at that moment Canker gave a hacking cough from where he stood, still dripping with brine nearby, and a single bell-note clanged out across the scrublands from the shack. ‘What does that bell mean?’ the blind man demanded. Bernadette told him it meant she must go in for her evening meal, or her father would come looking for her. ‘And what happens after?’ he asked anxiously, his face now creased with worry. She replied that she must say her prayers in front of the beeswax candle and the Book of Common Trust, hobble Canker for the night and then sleep. The blind man thought hard for a moment, before releasing her wrist and touching her once, reverently, on the crown of the head. ‘Bernadette,’ he said softly, leaning close, ‘you must go in for your evening meal, and then you must say your prayers to your parents’ angels and go to bed, just like you said. But I will be waiting out here under the moon, and when they are asleep you must join me again, because those marks on your arm are more important than you can ever understand. Please, believe me.’

The girl took a step away, and asked shyly what he wanted to do with her. He replied: ‘I want to take you on a journey, away from all angels and barbed-wire fences. We must leave tonight, in secret.’ She took another step away, and asked if Canker could come, saying he was an old sick mule who would be sad and ill without her. He replied: ‘Then he must come. Now go, and trust me, and don’t say a word. When everything is quiet, I will be waiting here for you.’ Bernadette paused as if to ask something else and then suddenly turned and ran, not looking back. She ran so fast she didn’t leave even a footprint in the earth behind her.

So the blind man waited until the heat had dropped and the dust had settled on the land; he sat like a statue, biding his time, until he could feel the cold weight of the moon in the sky above him. He allowed his mind to wander, anticipation mounting as the hours slid by, while small nocturnal mammals crept out of their holes and stared at him with luminescent eyes. His acquaintances maintained a long vigil over the fields and saw the lights go off in the splinterwood shack; much later, as the moon began its descent through the arc of the starry sky, they picked up movement in the darkened doorway and started a low, excited hum. A small black blob disengaged itself from the larger blackness of the shack, taking shape as it approached with care along the line of stick-trees, and the blind man got stiffly to his feet and shouldered his travelling bag as Bernadette stepped up without a word, leading Canker by a length of rope. The girl seemed calm, untroubled by events, despite the bruise on her face where her mother had slapped her upon returning home, having discovered the missing loaf of bread; her father said the slap was retribution from the Angel of Gluttony, but when she told this to the blind man he only laughed, replying that she would have no further need of angels now, gluttons or otherwise. They made a swift departure then, walking fast to keep warm in the moonlight, and neither of them spoke again until they were deep into the scrublands, far from sound or sight; by the time dawn broke over the corrugated roofs of the town and Bernadette’s parents awoke to find her gone, they were already beyond the horizon.

4

They walked for nine days in steady procession, growing smaller and smaller as the landscape grew huger around them. Surviving on plant stems and the water from groundholes, leaf-protein in the day and fried roots at night, they journeyed further and further from the settled land of towns and roads and deeper into nowhere. The blind man told her they were heading for the hills, and Bernadette felt the need to know little more than that; she was contented enough with the sensation of movement, which up until now she had never known before. In the daytime it was too hot for unnecessary talk, so they travelled mostly in silence. The blind man led the way with his aluminium stick, and Bernadette came behind on Canker, riding him on the downslopes and pushing him when they came to the ups; the caravan was completed by the trailing acquaintances, cooing and whistling amongst themselves as if they could barely contain their interest. From time to time Bernadette would glance back to watch them, but could never work out their shapes, or what colour they were, or even how many of them were following; sometimes it was three, sometimes seven, sometimes five, their bodies fluctuating constantly so it was impossible to tell for sure a single thing about them. At night, wrapped in the blind man’s spare blanket, she would wake to find them gathered at her feet, whispering softly with the moonlight shining through them.

They left the last of the scrublands behind on the second day of travelling and entered the plains, where dust twisted lazily in the afternoon winds and heat walled away the horizon. They passed through a herd of bony cattle who groaned as if pained by the mere sight of people, and heard pariah dogs yowling in the distance as the daylight ebbed away. On the third day they found themselves approaching a graveyard of ancient machinery – car parts, broken engines and corroded fuel tanks heaped for miles – at which the blind man stopped dead, angled himself against the sun, and announced that they were going in completely the wrong direction. They were forced to take a two-day deviation north-west, where the plains rolled into open desert, and then level themselves back south by degrees until they were on route towards the hills. The desert was hard going, Canker’s split hooves clogging up with sand in the dunes and Bernadette fainting twice from the heat, but by the end of the sixth day they were on the plains once more, traversing a tundra of dry grasses interspersed with small black flowers, on which the mule fed greedily. On the seventh night they slept beneath the porch of a derelict tin hut, where the ground was covered in a layer of ashes and eggshells; the acquaintances located kelph growing some distance off, which the blind man harvested keenly, for they were approaching higher elevations now on which the plant would not be found. The next morning the little procession began its ascent into the hills, leaving the flatlands far behind. They climbed slowly, with many stops for breath, following a line of telephone poles that snaked across the foothills towards some distant city; and soon the air was cool and sharp, which reminded Bernadette of the electric fans around the altar in the Church of the Ascension, for that was the only other coolness she had known. In the thinning air she became confused, and daydreamed she was journeying to Heaven on the back of a penitent saint – the longsuffering mule bearing her onwards past strange-shaped boulders and carbuncular outcrops of rock – and on the ninth, final night, hearing the echo of explosions in a distant valley, she imagined the noises as the flapping of an angel’s tattered wings. The blind man explained it was only Povertists ambushing a military patrol, and none of their concern; he stroked her head, saying she need fear no angels here.

Thus Bernadette was brought from her parents’ meagre farmstead, where she had lived her whole life ringed by the same drab horizon, to these distant, bouldered hills so far from home. Not once in the course of the journey did she ask where the wandering blind man was taking her, or why; she accepted his authority just as she had accepted that of her parents, because, like her parents, she presumed him the heir to some great truth, which would become known to her only when the time was right. At the end of each day, curled up beneath the stars with aching limbs, she watched him with only the mildest curiosity as he went through the nightly rituals and rigours of kelph; sobbing, giggling, writhing and contorting as the extremities of the budded stalk passed through his wracked, elated body, while his acquaintances looked on and Canker hacked and sputtered in his sleep. In the exhausted final throes of the drug, he would crawl to where she lay and trace the pattern of the rash with the palm of his hand, expressions of rapture passing over his face as if it was illumined by the headlights of a truck – ‘Bernadette, Bernadette, do you know what it says? Do you know what it says, Bernadette?’ – before burying his face in his arms, overwhelmed, or simply breaking down to weep upon the ground. And Bernadette would just turn over quietly to sleep, and never asked him what it was that he could see.

On the morning of the tenth day, picking his way down a narrow pathway that led through a fissure in the hillside rock, he announced over his shoulder that they had reached their destination. His acquaintances rushed forwards expectantly, and even Canker quickened his shamble as the fissure opened onto a green, tended valley with a tiny white cabin clinging to the opposite slope, circled by dark-feathered birds that rose and fell on the dizzying thermals. The blind man paused for a moment, catching his breath before starting down. ‘Here,’ he said softly, ‘there lives a man who understands.’ And the dark birds screamed and swooped above the plunge, and the windows of the cabin bounced light in the bright morning sun.

5

The old incumbent poured himself another glass of wine, and leaned back in his white wicker chair. He took a hard-boiled raven’s egg from the bowl on the window-sill and cracked it delicately between his fingers, swallowing it whole so as not to disarrange his face through mastication. On the other side of the room, his servant wiped his brush and stepped back from the easel, squinting critically at his work before reaching forward to make a small alteration in the shading underneath the eyes. He was painting his master’s portrait, and nothing less than an absolute likeness would satisfy him. He had been painting this portrait every day for the last fifteen years.

‘Bring me another bowl of eggs, and triple my wine,’ said the old incumbent. The servant put down his brush mid-stroke, leaving his master’s right nostril unfinished, and did as he was ordered; then he continued from where he had left off, completing the nostril and lightening his pallet for the wider scallop of the nose. The paint underneath was still wet, as always, from the previous day, and the canvas was as thick as a plank of wood from the continual application of layers; five-thousand three-hundred and seventy to date, by the servant’s calculations, for he painted the portrait anew each day to cover what had gone the day before. A cross-section of the canvas, then, would reveal the entire history of his master’s countenance for a decade and a half; within those layers were recorded every conceivable mood and disposition, every change and adjustment, every crease, furrow, wrinkle, slump, shift and subsidence that the face underwent in its slow but inexorable transformation into death.

‘Open the window, so I can feel the air, and bring a glass of sugar-water,’ demanded the incumbent. The servant went dutifully about these tasks, and again returned to the picture. Today his master’s mood was good, and he took much pleasure in painting over the scowl that had darkened yesterday’s portrait. He worked quickly and diligently with precise, dabbing strokes of the brush, smoothing off the lips and giving texture to the thin grey beard that sprouted underneath them; he then reworked the cheekbones and the high, hooked nose, the authoritative sweep of the forehead, the tangled eyebrows, the few remaining wisps of hair on the liver-spotted dome, and last of all the sunken, purpled hollows of the eyes, which never changed. When all this was done and he was satisfied with the fresh depiction, he carefully cleaned his brushes and hung the canvas in the sun to dry, announcing the completion of another day’s work by tapping on an aluminium gong.

‘And my visage today, has it changed?’ asked the incumbent, stretching his arms and legs to ease the cramps. ‘Have I grown much older in the night? I had dreams that the moon grew teeth and bit my pillow as I slept. Has my skin turned yellow, am I uglier than yesterday? Can you see my bones yet through my skin?’ The servant gave no answer to any of this, but brought his master a bowl of nuts and his customary honey-pot, and left the old man to sweeten his taste while he rested on his cushion by the door. He closed his eyes and waited for the image of the face to dissipate from his thoughts, but every line and contour was so entrenched it sometimes took hours for his mind to clear. A grave and simple man, a great believer in ritual and the importance of acts of duty, he was proud of his work and would rather have eaten his own knuckles than neglect a single day’s painting, because he loved his master and was bound to record the minutiae of his flesh until the end; but nevertheless the obligation burdened him at times, and he felt the weight of his master’s age like a thousand bags of sand. He knew the old man’s face much better than he knew his own, and sometimes went for days without remembering what his own looked like, for this was a house without mirrors; his commission was a thankless one, for there was no-one but himself to see the product of his toil. His master had been blind for fourteen years.

‘Something is disturbing those birds,’ said the old incumbent sharply, angling his head towards the squawking of the ravens outside. ‘Povertists stealing the eggs again, or hiding ammunition in the cracks. Bring my portrait inside, I don’t want them spying on me anymore.’ Obediently the servant removed the canvas from its hook outside the cabin, replaced it on the easel, and then crossed over to the window with a long brass telescope. He scanned the valley to see the ravens wheeling fretfully in the air, then followed the steep, winding path that led to the house until he picked out the little procession that was making its way towards them; the wandering blind man followed by nine acquaintances, and behind them the exhausted Bernadette, hauling her mule by a length of rope. He communicated this to his master, who gave a contemptuous snort.

‘So he’s back again, is he, the fool? What does he want with me this time? The wandering kelph-head with his creeps, going round and round in circles, always sniffing for enlightenment. I thought he would have got himself interrogated long ago, or fallen down an oil-well or something. And you say he’s picked up a donkey, has he, and a strange little girl? I wonder what celestial delusions the lunatic’s got for me this time…’ Then suddenly he ceased his mutter and gave a hoot of laughter, tipping violently back in his chair. ‘Do you remember the last time he came, in the summer of the three-day dust storm? He thought he’d found a rat that could hold its breath forever, and it simply turned out to be dead. And the time before he came carrying an apricot with a battery stuck in it, which he told me was the proof that humans had overthrown god. A maniac! He gets worse by the season…’ He hooted and cackled into his beard, recounting other stories of the blind wanderer’s mysterious obsessions and fallacies, like the times he thought he’d found the meaning of existence in a handful of sand or a strangely-shaped stone, or when he’d walked due west for three days and nights in a craze of kelph and phetamine, trying to catch up with the sun. The servant, who harboured a natural antipathy to wandering strangers and the things that trailed behind them, smiled nonetheless, because he liked to see his master happy; and when the old man’s anecdotes had thinned, he asked what should be done when they arrived. The incumbent wiped a tear of amusement from one milky, sightless eye and recovered his breath from his exertions. He replied: ‘Let them in, if that’s what he wants. No-one else may visit here for years, and today I am bored of solitude. Let us see what he has to say.’

So when the little procession reached the door of the cabin, after climbing a long flight of balsawood stairs, they found it open, and the servant standing by to usher them in. The acquaintances increased in number and rushed to fill the space, crowding round the old incumbent’s portrait with a hum, and through this interested throng tapped the wandering blind man, adjusting his lapels and his thick entangled hair as if entering a church, or the courtroom of some important town. Bernadette stepped shyly after, gazing at the room, while the servant tethered Canker to the doorpost with a scowl.

The wanderer bowed down low, pressing his hands together before his face, and thanked his host abundantly for welcoming them in. He said he’d travelled many days to reach this place, and he had come because its dweller was a wise man, and a blind man, who might understand the wonder that he had to reveal. He spoke in a clear and sober voice – which didn’t forestall his listener from sniggering into his sleeve – explaining he had something of great consequence and beauty to present, which he had found on the left arm of a little girl by chance, or kelph, or purpose, and had borrowed her from her parents’ home to spread the marvellous sign to whoever could understand what it might mean. When he had finished there was quiet in the room, apart from the sound of Canker coughing phlegm outside the door. The two blind men faced each other in silence for a while, and then the old incumbent said: ‘Well then, Mister Wanderer, are you going to show me now?’

But the wandering blind man put his arm around the girl, and replied: ‘Not yet, my friend. Not right away. Bernadette is tired, and needs to rest.’

6

She lay in a fine mesh hammock suspended from the stoop, watching the motions of the ravens in the air. The servant brought her bread and groundnuts, mint tea and roasted hammer-fruit, and she saw the sun bloat and turn red above the hills as the daylight ebbed away, descending through the bruising sky as if it could no longer hold its own weight. Wrapped in a rug against the chill of the breeze, she dozed fitfully and dreamed of pathways and trails, stone statues in a desert of mountains made of sand, awaking in fear with her mouth full of prayers to the Angel of Petitions for guidance, although the blind man had told her repeatedly that there were no angels, and that prayers were better focused inside oneself than flung into an empty sky where no-one could receive them; the little girl choked on her amen and lay still, breathing deeply, wondering what would become of her and Canker now. She ran her fingers up and down her forearm, tracing that mysterious pattern that had caused all this to happen. Part of her wished that the bumps would just disappear, sink back into her skin like an archipelago into a sea, leaving her smooth and unremarkable once again; but she also dreamed of life and adoration stretching out before her, for she had become seduced by the wanderer’s fervour, and knew deep inside herself that she could never go back to the scrublands again where the very air she breathed was boredom, and heat lay like a curse on the land. Inside the cabin the blind men were talking, but she couldn’t make out their words. She stroked her arm and resolved to be patient, hoping that tonight they might make her secret known.

When the ravens had settled in their roosts, at last, and darkness was wrapped around the hills, the servant came for her with a halogen torch and motioned her to follow him inside. The cabin was empty of light, apart from a gentle phosphorescence given off by the acquaintances, who had grown again in number and were massed around the walls; by this quiet glow Bernadette saw three faces turned towards her. The first was the face of the wanderer, smiling from the corner of the room, and the second and third were those of the old incumbent, so frozen in tableau that she couldn’t tell which was the portrait and which was real. She looked from one to the other nervously, wondering what she was expected to do. ‘Step forward, Bernadette,’ said the wanderer gently, ‘don’t be afraid. He only wants to feel your arm, as I did.’ She took a step towards the nearest of the faces, pushing up her sleeve as if preparing to receive an injection, before she realised it was an easel she was approaching, and faltered in confusion. ‘Come now, Bernadette,’ said the real incumbent from the other side of the room, ‘show me this wondrous arm of yours. I am an old man, and cannot bear suspense.’ He was leaning forward in his chair, reaching out with his long, knuckled fingers, but his voice was dry with scepticism and his mouth was already arranged in a sneer. ‘Your itinerate friend assures me I will understand its meaning, and will weep for the beauty of life until I have run out of tears. I’ll tell you now, all of you, that I stepped out of the world and its griefs so long ago I can’t remember what weeping is.’ The girl felt the gentle pressure of the servant’s hand on her back, propelling her forwards, and heard the swelling murmur of the acquaintances as their expectation grew. ‘Don’t be worried, Bernadette, this won’t take long. I haven’t wept for thirty years, and will not do so now. And I give you my word, little girl, that when I find no miracle upon your skin I will release you from this charlatan’s parade, and my servant will see to it that you are swiftly returned to whatever dustbowl fleapit the old fool plucked you from. Now step this way, for I am tired of waiting. Come now.’ And Bernadette crossed the room towards his groping fingers, her bare arm extended before her.

The moment his hand made contact with the little dots, it tightened. The cynicism on his face dissolved with an immediacy that was startling to watch; his entire countenance weakened, as if all the props that held it upright had fallen away. A short burst of air escaped his lips, and the watching acquaintances gave a long, floating howl of excitement as his bony fingers, suddenly uncertain, fumbled their way up and down the arm from the elbow to the wrist, checking and rechecking the pattern with mounting intensity. Then he released his grip and sat back in his chair, strange expressions flicking across his face, before grabbing the arm back again as if he couldn’t quite believe it had been there. He frowned, and then he smiled; and then he frowned again, and smiled again, each emotion wiping its predecessor clean off the map of his face, and continued to do this as the frowns became shorter, and the smiles became longer, until eventually his muscle tissue gave up the struggle and left him grinning from lobe to lobe with giggles breaking out in fits and ruptures.

‘Well?’ whispered the blind wanderer, unable to bury his impatience any longer, ‘what do you think? What do you…?’ But his questions got no further, for the old incumbent suddenly threw back his head and let out the loudest hoot of laughter that anyone had ever heard, collapsing into helpless seizures of hilarity that rattled the walls of the cabin and made Bernadette fall backwards to the floor.

He laughed continuously for the next two hours, creasing in his chair with hilarity racking his body and tears trickling into his beard, while Bernadette stared in horror and his servant scurried panicked around the cabin fetching wine, water, ether, smelling salts, sleeping pills, poppy-seeds, depressants, anything that might stop his masters nerves. The wanderer, down on his knees before the chair, pleaded to know the reason for the laughter, begging the old man to reveal what it was he found so extraordinarily amusing, but the incumbent was deaf to everything but the sounds of his own hilarity, which seemed to drive him into fresh outbursts every time they broke from his body. Only once did he manage a word during this whole time, drawing a shuddering breath and announcing: ‘that’s the funniest thing I’ve ever read!’ After which he collapsed back into laughter once more, and didn’t stop until his exertions overwhelmed him completely and he dropped like a baby into sleep.

With the absence of laughter, there was absolute silence in the room. The servant fetched blankets for his master, glaring at Bernadette with a cold fury as if she had attempted the old man’s murder, and the wanderer gathered his acquaintances around him and led them and the girl to the stoop, where they set up camp for the night. He didn’t say a word about the evening’s events, but Bernadette could tell from his face – and from the acquaintances’ quietness – that he was profoundly troubled by what had taken place. Before she went to sleep he took her arm in his hands and studied it precisely, and she felt the fear in his fingers that something in the pattern might have changed; but he found nothing different, and wiped involuntary tears of sadness from his eyes like every time before. That night he neglected his kelph, sitting up til almost dawn on the top step of the balsawood staircase with his chin upon his fist, frowning deeply. The moon was bright in the valley, and he was spotted from the opposite hillside by a Povertist patrol who amused themselves for a while taking aim with their long-barrelled rifles, before growing bored and slipping away to plant bombs on the oil pipeline further south. Much later there were explosions in the distance, resounding through the valleys like a portent of things to come, but the blind man, lost in his concerns, heard nothing.

7

Early next morning, the wandering blind man was summoned before the old incumbent’s chair. The incumbent, dining heartily on a breakfast of raven’s eggs dipped in honey, made a short speech in which he formally thanked the wanderer for bringing the marvel of Bernadette’s left arm to his attention, and offered a generous sum of currency for its purchase. When the wanderer demanded to know what he wanted to do with it, the incumbent said he planned to set Bernadette to work around the house, assisting the servant in his duties, where she could expect decent treatment, and two nutritious meals a day, on the condition that she made her left arm available at any time of day or night for his entertainment. When the wanderer enquired the reason for the incumbent’s laughter the night before, the old man smiled – at which his servant gave a nervous start and reached for the ether again – before stating that he was not willing to discuss the intricacies of humour with anyone, least of all a man who wept instead of laughed. The wanderer protested that the reason for his weeping was the sadness of what was written, its pure and aching beauty, and that anyone who laughed at such a thing must clearly be mad, or else misunderstand its meaning. This angered the incumbent, who contended it was the wanderer who was guilty of mistranslation, not him, and told him he should take the money he was offered and go back to the desert to find something else to weep at. This set in motion a furious conflict about the true interpretation of the message on the arm, both blind men arguing their opposite cases and rubbishing that of their opponent, interrupting and shouting over one another with increasing vehemence until both had run out of stamina and words; at which point it became apparent that agreement was impossible on any level, and there could be no common ground between them. The incumbent changed tactics swiftly and reasoned that Bernadette should remain with him if only for the sake of her welfare, for a nomad’s wretched existence was no life for a little girl; the wanderer retorted that it was no business of his what lifestyle she chose to maintain, and, rising decisively, announced that he was sick of such ignorance, and that he and the girl would be departing the hills that very afternoon. At which the old incumbent chuckled, and rubbed his hands together deliciously, and said that he didn’t think the girl would agree to this; for earlier that morning, his servant had taken the precaution of imprisoning Canker in the reinforced tin shed behind the cabin, and that if Bernadette took so much as a step towards the flatlands he would sell the mule to the Povertists as horse-meat.

When the wanderer rejoined the little girl an hour later on the stoop, this stalemate had resulted in the reaching of an uneasy truce. After much negotiation, it had been agreed that the different interpretations of Bernadette’s left arm were irreconcilable, and that the phenomenon must thus be divided between them; the old incumbent was to have exclusive access to the reading of the arm during the day, and when the sun went down it would pass into the hands of the blind wanderer, who would have it for the night. Bernadette listened blankly as this was explained, giving no reaction except a look of alarm at the news of Canker’s internment, but he assured her that no harm would come to the mule provided she adhered to the settlement. ‘I am sorry, Bernadette, for bringing you to the house of this fool,’ he said softly, ‘but there is nothing we can do about it now. Sooner or later he will realise his mistake, and recognise the error of his laughter, and then he will release Canker and let us go. But until then, I’m afraid, we must let him laugh. Maybe his giggles will choke the old tyrant, and save anyone else the trouble.’
Bernadette said nothing, just picked at the bowl of food which the servant had placed, grudgingly, before her when she woke. The acquaintances – now grown so many they could scarcely be numbered anymore – drifted around the stoop in a steady anticlockwise swirl. And within the cabin, the servant sweated anxiously over that morning’s portrait, for the old incumbent had grown so excited he could hardly keep still in his chair.

Weeks passed, and a strange sense of routine settled over life in the valley. Bernadette would be woken early with a bowl of hot food by the servant, who would then lead her inside, with barely-concealed aversion, to the old incumbent’s place beside the window, where she would remain for the rest of the day. Her duties extended to little but holding out her arm when required to do so, after which she usually blocked her ears and settled down to wait while the old man hooted and cackled in his chair; his hysterics could last anywhere between a few minutes and an hour, depending on his mood. Initially, during the longer fits of laughter, she tried entertaining herself with little games and secret imaginings the way she used to back home on the farmstead; but the servant’s gaunt, censorious face was always watching from a door or window frame, and she gradually came to give up on the notion that she could live a life outside of his glaring disapproval, or free from the duty of her arm. Her only diversion in these periods was the rare opportunity of sneaking out to visit Canker in his shed, where she would whisper to him softly and push food scraps underneath the locked door, but the servant caught her once and communicated this to his master, who flew into a fear and ordered that she be fastened to his chair during the day by a slender ankle-chain. The chain was loose enough that it did not hurt her skin, but it restricted her movement entirely, and as time went by she despaired of seeing Canker again. As evening approached the servant would release her and lead her back out to the stoop, where the wanderer was waiting, and the arm routine would begin again; only with the acquaintances watching in place of the servant, and weeping instead of laughter. When the wanderer found out about the ankle-chain he was deeply worried, and responded in type by fastening the girl’s ankle himself with a length of rope, taking care to explain that he didn’t trust the old incumbent’s motives and feared she may be stolen away in the night if they didn’t take heed. So Bernadette moved back and forth from the rope to the chain, and became unaccustomed to freedom.

Tensions quickly built up in the valley. From time to time the two blind men would meet, exchanging angry volleys of words and insulting one another’s interpretations, cursing each other by every name they could think of before retreating back to their separate spheres. The servant would spit when he came upon the multiplied acquaintances, and they would react, on occasion, by clustering around him and emitting a high-pitched whine which gave him an ache between his eyes, the irritation of which he would take out on Bernadette whenever he could, by rousing her roughly or spoiling her food the next morning. Mostly, however, his master’s increasing veneration for the girl – or, at least, for her consecrated arm – prevented him from otherwise mistreating her, and he was forced to swallow his disdain and obey the old man’s orders as before. One day he was charged with sewing Bernadette a new dress from the faded silk curtain that hung across the window, for the incumbent had decided she had worn her rags too long; and as the weeks went by the garment was adorned with braids, threads, pleats, ribbons, sequins, mirrors, shiny bottle-caps and raven feathers, which the servant added begrudgingly according to his master’s instructions. The wanderer derided this crude opulence, demanding that Bernadette remove the dress before returning to the stoop and assume her old, humble clothing, for he said that while frivolous embellishment might be fitting for the laughing fools of the world, those who truly understood the meaning of the dots on her skin would require no further elaboration. As the dress grew steadily more ornate, he became more austere, until he requested that she didn’t plait her hair, and remove any bracelets from her wrists. Whatever one of the blind men attempted to achieve, the other would attempt to reverse, and this continued until the girl had simply given up trying to understand who or what she was supposed to be, and could barely tell the difference between weeping and laughter.

By the end of two months, Bernadette had become the axis around which their existences revolved. The separate routines of the incumbent and the wanderer led to the evolution of complicated rituals, by which the girl’s appearance before them was accompanied by various motions, genuflections, supplications and sacraments, rites of custom, figures of speech and the burning of ritual herbs. The wanderer, inevitably, incorporated kelph into his practices, giving Bernadette small crumbs to chew which transported her to states of delirious complacency in which time stood still and nothing mattered, not even her beloved Canker. The incumbent had the servant hit his aluminium gong whenever she crossed the threshold of the room, and the wanderer’s acquaintances sung eerie melodies around her head as she emerged beneath the moon; none of which appeared to affect the girl in any way at all, for after a while she seemed to stop noticing what was going on around her. In the increasingly rare moments when she thought about such things, she knew the meaning of the message on her arm was further from her now than ever before. The blind men guarded their mysteries with an obsessive jealousy, and, like custodians of the secrets of a holy shine, protected it from everyone, the idol and the infidel alike.

The servant, meanwhile, was having problems of his own. For a decade and a half he had depicted his master’s ageing face with absolute exactness, for he knew by heart the nuance of every mood and subtle temper the old man had ever undergone. But his master was changing now. Of course he had changed before, a thousand times – the servant could recall each shift of flesh and sprout of hair, each wrinkle, blemish and discolouration – but this was a change he could not understand, for it seemed to come from somewhere that was deeper than skin; and what he could not understand, he could not accurately paint. The old man’s face, distorted by incessant laughter until the eye-pouches swelled and the bulb of the nose distended, the lips stretched to a permanent grin and the skin took on a smooth, varnished sheen, grew further and further away from the servant’s comprehension, until the paintings smudged and the colours merged and the portrait became scarcely recognisable. He cursed Bernadette and grew bitter in his heart, for he loved his master and felt the pain of this estrangement like a stab in the spine; the old incumbent cared only for the arm now, and reacted to news of the canvas with disinterest. So the servant continued his work every day in mounting alienation and despair, and as his misery increased – for the first time in fifteen years – each painting turned out to look less like his master, and more like someone else entirely.

8

It wasn’t long before the local Povertists, patrolling from their hidden encampment deeper in the hills, became aware that something strange was happening in the valley. Spies were sent out to monitor the situation, returning to their detachments with reports of peculiar ceremonies, and a growing number of indefinable beings who seemed to be colonising every available space around the cabin, engaging in weird singing at night that frightened the birds away. Alarmed that this might be a new government trick, some ingenious kind of counter-insurgency tactic in the making – on previous attempts they had tried everything from poisoning the streams to attaching tiny explosives to the legs of bees – the commandante dispatched a unit of soldiers to sabotage, kidnap or otherwise eliminate anything that seemed suspicious. Closer reconnaissance from behind rocks and boulders convinced them that the acquaintances presented no immediate threat, but they took the precaution of setting dynamite around the base of the cabin and under the balsawood staircase, and an armed guard was maintained at all times of night and day at the entrance to the valley. As time went by and no hostile activity became apparent, the soldiers grew bolder, increasing the visibility of their presence by setting up sandbag bunkers and flying their red and brown flags, lounging in the sun during the day and shouting revolutionary slogans at night when they were drunk; until the morning came when three of them knocked on the door of the cabin demanding a people’s tax for defending the valley from all manner of reactionary oppression.

The servant led them wearily inside, announced them to the old incumbent, and continued with his futile efforts at painting. This morning’s portrait was worse than it had ever been before, and hot tears welled up in his eyes as he worked, slapping on the paint with escalating clumsiness and frustration. His master was just easing out of half an hour’s ritual laughter, with Bernadette at his feet in her ceremonial dress, gazing dully at the floorboards; the room was pungent with incense, scented candles, burning herbs and wild flowers, and the soldiers stared at the scene in amazement and shuffled in their stolen boots. When the incumbent was capable, at last, of dialogue, he addressed the Povertists in an authoritative voice: ‘Pilgrims, please remove your shoes and take a seat on my humble floor. I know you must have journeyed far, and your allegiance is most welcome. We have enemies in this valley – in fact, in this very house – and men with guns may soon be needed here. Sit down, have an egg. I thank you.’

One after the other, the soldiers helped themselves to the proffered bowl of honeyed eggs, then removed their boots and awkwardly sat down. The servant continued his work, oblivious, as his master launched into a passionate oration about the miraculous Arm of Joy and the glory it would bring into the world, holding it aloft above Bernadette’s head and calling out curses on the unbelievers who, at that very moment, were plotting to undo every good work he had made, and turn all laughter into sorrow. He lauded, he exalted, he wrung his hands and beat his chest and tugged on the wisps of his hair, and such was the fervour of his sermon that the Povertists were impressed despite themselves; they ate his sugared foods and gulped his wine, and the more they listened to his promises of happiness the less appealing a guerrilla’s life appeared, with its hardships and adversities and barren months of boredom. They stayed for many hours in the cabin, growing steadily more drunk and more convinced, and by the time they left – bowing before the little girl and kissing the old man’s hand – they had negotiated a sizeable fee for the daily protection of the Arm of Joy, plus commission for every convert that they made.

Now hearing of this new-found manifesto from their comrades, and of the generous free wine, another few soldiers set out that night to take a look for themselves. They found the cabin dark and silent, but followed the uncanny sound of singing around the side of the house to the stoop, where they came upon a great congregation of insubstantial beings gathered around a little girl dressed in rags, attached by one foot to the railing, and a weeping blind man with mad, knotted hair, wrapped in contortions on the floor. The multitude parted before them in a commotion of curious whoops and croons, and the blind man scrambled up from his ecstasies of grief and ran his delicate hands across their faces, speaking in a half-choked whisper: ‘So the word of the beauty has spread, at last, and you have come to see what it might mean. Sit down, my friends, and share a stalk of kelph, and I will explain to you that only I can read the message that is written on the Arm of Sorrow and only I can decipher its sadness, but that if you pledge to protect this girl I will channel you some portion of its meaning. For behind these walls lives a callous autocrat, who laughs at beauty, and schemes for its destruction. My acquaintances here have smelt the metal of your guns, and I need your help – for I fear that this tyrant may strike soon.’

The Povertists listened with increasing absorption as the wanderer expanded on his theme; that he was a dispossessed poor man, living in oppression, who had nothing to exchange for his protection but a sadness so keen it could slice the world in two, and bring governments down with the force of its absolute beauty. Always suckers for talk of tyranny, the guerrillas chewed a little kelph and allowed their imaginations to be transported by the eloquent conviction of the wanderer’s words, until they were so overcome by the justice of his struggle that they pledged themselves to defend the Arm of Sorrow from any force that might be thrown against it; they left the stoop much later, as the filtered light of dawn crept through the hills, to fetch reinforcements from their comrades in the valley. By the end of the next afternoon, there existed two armed camps, each swearing allegiance to a different blind man, maintaining an uneasy coexistence around the cabin. Guns were positioned, sandbags were brought in, and the house began to take on the appearance of a fortress in a war-zone.

News of the standoff spread quickly back to the Povertist stronghold, and from there it was carried by spies from the hills down to the plains. It trickled across the land by rumour, telephone chatter and word of mouth, until it reached the oil encampments, missionary stations and eventually the towns further south, where local officials and bureaucrats were most interested, and hastened its passage to the eager ears of the armed forces. Word of some miraculous idol, guarded by an army of zealots, lit the imaginations of the various churches, who immediately set about sending emissaries to lay claim to whatever was up there; the military reacted with no less haste, dispatching a convoy of trucks and armoured machinery through the dust-trodden plains in full-scale assault on the rebellious hills. This contingent was followed by a confused mob of bandits, plunderers and general opportunists, keen to get a share of any profits they could find; and even a column of partisan blind men, hearing rumours that their kind was involved, started making for the cabin in stumbling procession, each man’s hands on the shoulders of the man in front. Given the scale of the fever that gripped the land in the dog-end of that long, hot summer, it was hardly surprising that Bernadette’s parents – who assumed that their daughter had been kidnapped by perverts and would never be seen again – heard whispers from their farmstead of a lone little girl at the centre of this furore, and, loading a week’s supplies on the back of the ramshackle motorbike, made their way towards the hills as well.

By the time that they started the journey a regular road had been trampled by the crowds that had gone before, so they were able to make good time; despite regular oil leaks, breakdowns and other encumbrances, they reached the foothills in just over three days. The father drove wordlessly, spitting out dust in great gobfuls, while the mother clung to his waist and mumbled prayers to every angel she could think of into the back of his neck. First they overtook the blind parade, clattering past in a trail of oily smoke, and soon came across the bandits and plunderers, who grabbed the food out of their bags as they passed and shot at their tyres with pistols. They gave a long blast on the horn as they drew alongside several dozen fellow Angelicists, walking hard to keep pace with the sub-bishop’s car some way ahead, and scowled contemptuously at the sight of straggling bands of Monotheists, Polytheists and Schismists, all keeping a careful distance from one another and pretending they were heading somewhere else.

As the battered engine rattled them into the hills, they saw the first signs of military advance; discarded tins and rutted tyre-tracks, as well as the burnt stumps of trees and scattered bullet casings, for the soldiers liked to get in practice before the real event. When they sighted the back of the convoy ahead, the father veered off and took a detour through a neighbouring canyon, happening on an old dirt track that not even the Povertists knew was there, and drove throughout the night on his last reserves of petrol to emerge, almost by accident, at the entrance to the old incumbent’s valley immediately ahead of the invading vanguard. At which point, hitting an ill-placed stone, the motorbike’s corroded front wheel finally flew off its axle and the machine turned two full circles in the air, careening down the slope in a trail of sparks and metal while the parents, by some astonishing fluke, landed completely unharmed in a heap of sandbags some way off. They lay there for a moment, stunned and shaken, gazing up into the sky.

Everything was silent, and the heavens were a clear, pale blue. And a tiny white speck grew quickly bigger as they watched, taking shape as it plummeted towards them.

It was the very first shot of the war. The index finger of a Povertist soldier, recently absconded to the Arm of Sorrow – made edgy by rumours of approaching calamity, and startled by the unexpected racket – tightened around the trigger of a crude grenade tube, and launched a single shell into the sky. The shell described a perfect arc in the air above the valley, narrowly missing a raven on its graceful descent, and fell absolutely soundlessly towards the enemy fortification on which it had been trained. The father just opened his mouth in surprise as it approached, but the mother started laughing, for she thought it was an angel come to take her soul away; and then the shell hit the ground between their heads with a flash, and incinerated both of them instantly.

9

Bernadette heard the faint explosion on the opposite hillside, but had little time to think what it might mean. Immediately nervous gunshots began ringing back and forth across the valley, as converts of the Arm of Joy and the Arm of Sorrow rushed to their positions and started trying to kill each other. The old incumbent broke from his cackles and proclaimed this the start of a holy campaign, in which sorrow would at last be defeated by laughter; the blind wanderer, leaping up from the stoop as his acquaintances mushroomed around him, called upon the faithful to defend themselves from the aggression of joy, and end the incumbent’s tyranny once and for all.

Skirmishes flared across the valley, but nowhere was the fighting more intense than around the cabin itself, where soldiers who until that minute had been exchanging jokes and insults from their neighbouring defences launched against one another with guns, knives, fists, rusted bayonets and rifle butts, struggling to gain control of the sacred shrine. The old incumbent ordered that his room be barricaded, and the windows blocked, and guards outside the door defend its contents to the last drops of their blood; then he tightened the chain around Bernadette’s ankle and instructed her to preserve her left arm above any other part of her body.

Feeling the impending devastation of all that he had ever lived and worked for, the servant, trembling brush in hand, pleaded with his master to hold still for one more portrait; but the old incumbent spat and poured scorn upon the canvas, saying that the portrait was meaningless now and should be used as part of the blockade, or else for burning. The servant’s face collapsed at these words and he fell to his knees in grief, but continued to paint nonetheless. His strokes became wilder as the fighting grew fiercer, and his hands lost all control over the brush, until he was flinging paint across the canvas in a fury and stabbing at the streaked, smeared likeness with his fingers; when, exhausted, he threw down his hand, his master’s portrait was a spattered bedlam of colour that resembled nothing whatsoever except rage. Then he slumped in the corner, his paint-covered body quivering, and pulled his limbs into himself like a creature in a shell. Bernadette stared, wide-eyed, at the gleam of the little knife unfolded in his hand.

At that moment a great explosion shook the valley, rattling the walls of the cabin, and a mighty roar of engines was heard beyond the hill. The converts of the Arm of Sorrow and the Arm of Joy glanced round to see the army convoy bearing down upon them, gathering momentum down the steep side of the slope in a cavalcade of wheeled machinery, articulated trucks, gun-wagons and even an ancient tank dug out from the dumpyard of some forgotten war. Some of the guerrillas continued fighting each other, grappling on the steps of the balsawood staircase, but most threw aside their divisions and turned their weapons on this mutual enemy, launching homemade explosives and detonating buried stores of ammunition; the forces met below the cabin with a deafening crash, and the battle was further complicated by the subsequent arrival of the foremost bandits, desperados and religious fanatics, all of whom immediately attacked the soldiers, the Povertists, each other, and anyone else they could find. Smoke rolled in waves across the valley, and blasts of fire tore the rocks from the hillside until the paintwork on the cabin’s walls blistered from the heat, and even the black feathers of the terrified ravens were singed.

Back inside the house, the barricaded window suddenly gave way to a pressure; scores of acquaintances rushed through the broken hole, filling the air with a penetrating whine, and after them scrambled the blind wanderer, who had lost both his eyebrows and most of his hair. ‘Where is she?’ he cried, sweeping the room with his aluminium stick, ‘Bernadette, come to me, we must escape!’ The stick swiped the cheek of the old incumbent, who leapt from his chair with a screech and grabbed his own stick from its bracket on the wall, uttering vengeful curses as he stumbled after his enemy. Bernadette took the opportunity to lift the empty chair and slip the ankle-chain from underneath, but had no chance to flee the room because the blind men had met, face to face, in the middle of the floor. The tips of their sticks were just touching, and neither of them moved; poised like rival mantises, they held themselves absolutely still while the sounds of fighting momentarily died around them. And then a close explosion made the cabin lurch on its foundations, and the two of them came together in a lightning flurry of stick-work, fencing blind across the floor. They stabbed, thrusted, parried, lunged, their white sticks slicing the air like rapiers, but somehow managed to look less like swordsmen than a couple of furious insects, poking and jabbing at each other with their nasty antennae. Within minutes both men were covered in blood, and the wanderer was limping from a slash to the thigh, but they carried on fighting, each circling his opponent in seething concentration before scuttling in to deliver that last vital wound; their furies, however, were equally matched, and it seemed as if neither would prevail. Until abruptly the servant, drawing on some last reserve of mental strength, rose from his miserable heap on the floor and advanced towards the fighters with the knife held out before him. Bernadette tried to scream a warning as he approached across the floor, but nothing came; she watched in silent horror as he drew back the blade, his eyes cold as death, and waited for the moment to strike. And then he struck – a single swift thrust into flesh – and Bernadette gasped in surprise; for it was his master he had stabbed in the small of the back, and not the blind wanderer at all.

The old incumbent gave a horrible groan, and sunk upon his knees, while the servant wiped the knife on his trouser leg and took a few dazed steps backwards. The wanderer, sensing his enemy’s defeat, drove forwards with the point of his aluminium stick until it protruded from between the old man’s shoulder blades; but just as he made to withdraw his weapon, the incumbent brought his own stick up in instinctive spite and pierced the wanderer’s stomach with its tip. The wanderer howled in shock and pain, and then both of them collapsed together in a tangled mess of limbs and blood, their sticks projecting from them like a couple of broken flagpoles; and the old incumbent wept in defeat, and the wandering blind man laughed, until the separate noises their bodies made merged strangely into one, and from there gargled into nothing.

Bernadette tried to make a dash for the door, but the servant blocked her way with the easel. He turned his wretched eyes upon her, and the force of his gaze fixed her feet to the floor as he fingered his knife once again. She covered her face with her hands and waited, thinking that her moment had come; but nothing happened, and when, after a while, she dared lower her fingers, she saw that he had turned away from her and was wiping the splattered paint from the canvas with an oil-soaked rag. When yesterday’s portrait was visible again, he began scratching at the face with the tip of his knife, scraping off the topmost layers of paint; and continued to do this, stripping layer after layer with meticulous precision, as the sounds of the battle grew closer and closer and bullets thudded into the walls. He worked quickly, sensing there was not much time, and before long had uncovered the face of his master from one month ago, then two months, then six months, then a year, travelling backwards through the ages with each paring of the blade. And Bernadette watched as the incumbent grew younger, losing his wrinkles, his liver spots, his ugliness, his stains; as his beard got shorter, his face became stronger, his hair turned darker, and his skin grew tight around his bones once again. Within a matter of minutes, five-thousand five-hundred layers of history were entirely scraped away, and fifteen years of age had been reversed; the servant stared in wonder at the face of his master – full-sighted and handsome, not blind anymore – as it had been on the first day of portrayal. But he didn’t stop there. Disregarding all emotion, he scratched this away too, to reveal something bone-white underneath the fresh pinkness of the skin. It was a skull. Bernadette’s mouth fell open. The servant cleaned the last flecks of flesh-coloured paint from around the eye-holes, the grinning teeth, the gleaming cranium, and then sliced around the shape and cut it free from the canvas altogether. Finally, letting the knife fall to the floor, he put the painted skull over his own face like a mask and attached it round his ears with bits of string, then stumbled to the window. And there he lingered, motionless now, gazing out at the destruction like a lonely skeleton who couldn’t find his way back to the grave.

‘Bernadette?’ The little girl spun on her feet. ‘Bernadette, come to me, come quickly…’ It was the blind wanderer, impaled on the stick, in his last fleeting moments of life. Most of his acquaintances had faded already, dispersed back into atoms again; the few that remained were little more than faint impressions in the air, drifting back and forth like smoke across his body. ‘Bernadette, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…’ he whispered, as much to himself as to her. The girl crossed over to where he had fallen, and touched his face gently with her hand. He gave a sigh and tried to reach for her arm, but she wordlessly moved it away. ‘You’ll never read it,’ he croaked as his mouth filled with blood, ‘you’ll never know what it says, Bernadette. Only the blind, Bernadette, can know. Only the blind can see.’ And his acquaintances blinked out like lights one by one as his body rolled back, and he died.

Explosions blew three walls right off the cabin, and the floor collapsed behind her feet as she escaped from the room. She clambered through the wreckage of abandoned barricades and made her way unnoticed to the hillside, for the soldiers of the Arm of Sorrow and the Arm of Joy had fled, or else been killed. The ancient, battered army tank was hauling itself up the slope as she reached the reinforced tin hut behind the house, crushing all beneath its tracks; but the door of the hut had been blown from its hinges, and Canker was waiting inside. She grabbed the halter of her beloved mule and together they hurried from sight, down an overlooked trail that led through a chasm into the valley beyond. And as the two of them made their way to safety, a spark from a random projectile hit the dynamite concealed beneath the cabin and the balsawood staircase, and the entire hillside went up in the most almighty blast that the battle had seen so far, raining burning debris down upon the land.

And then, after that, was only silence.

Bernadette kissed old Canker’s nose, and fondled his moth-eaten ears, shedding tears for the carnage that was done in the name of her arm. The dots upon her skin were as inscrutable as ever, and she ached to know the truth more than anything else in life. ‘Only the blind can see,’ she whispered, and found that her fingers were wrapped around the servant’s discarded paintbrush, which she had grabbed without thinking as she fled. And then, directing Canker to the silent valleys westwards – and I wish I didn’t have to write this, but I do, because it happened, and can’t be undone – Bernadette did the only thing that made sense to her now, awful as it seems: she stabbed out her eyes with the end of the brush, and blinded, in her solitude, rode onwards.

He continued to watch them out of the corner of his eye. They were definitely talking about him. They spoke to each other in low voices, leaning forwards over the table, and every now and then one of them would turn in his direction – not enough to look at him directly, but enough to have him in their peripheral vision – and then turn back to face each other, smirking. He carried on stirring his coffee and tried to work out what they might be saying.

By positioning his chair a little to the right, he discovered that he could make out their reflections in the window, so he could watch them while pretending to gaze at the street outside. In this manner he studied them closely, growing increasingly annoyed with their intrusiveness. The one with the laugh-lines was the younger of the two, and had the sort of smug, fleshy face of someone who might work in a funfair. The bony-headed one had sour lips and hair shaved down to a rough grey stubble. He could see the gleam of a jewelled ring on his finger, three silver-capped pens in his top pocket.

It was raining in the street outside. The reflections of the two men floated ghostlike in front of passing cars and pedestrians. He realised, with a sudden shock of anger, that the younger one was now meeting his eyes in the glass, staring back at his reflection. A knowing smirk played around the corners of his mouth. And then he winked. The man actually winked! His body stiffened with fury, and he swung back from the window to face them. Neither of them looked at him now, but he knew they were still watching him. The older man scooped some cream off the top of the cake and popped it in his mouth.

He stood up quickly, tense with anger. He didn’t know what he was going to do, but he wasn’t about to let them get away with that. There had been something so blatant and invasive in that wink, as if the man expected no consequences. First they aggravated him with their glances and muttering, and then they threw down this as a direct challenge. He couldn’t remember the last time anybody had infuriated him so much. All he had wanted this afternoon was to be left alone.

The girl behind the counter looked up as he approached, putting down the mobile she had been texting on. He noticed that each of her fingernails was painted a different colour. “More coffee?” she asked.

“No coffee,” he said, speaking slowly and clearly across the counter. “Just one of those little spoons.”

Holding the spoon between his thumb and forefinger, he crossed the room to the table by the cigarette machine. The two men looked up blankly, as if they had never seen him before. Up close, the older one had watery eyeballs, perhaps recovering from some infection. His skin looked tired and ill. The younger had a small gold ring in the lobe of his left ear.

Standing at full height like this, when he drew his shoulders back and didn’t allow his body to slump, he was a tall man. His arms were long, with strong, elegant hands. There was power in his neck and upper body, and his face was dense, like a muscle. His eyes, which were sensitive – hurt-looking, he’d been told – appeared strangely out of place.

He cleared his throat, and then pulled up a chair and sat down.

“Do you if I join you?” First he looked into the eyes of the older man, then the younger. “I’d like to try a piece of your cake.”

They watched him, puzzled, saying nothing. He watched them back so they couldn’t glance at one other, couldn’t consult in any way. He knew he had the upper hand, and needed to maintain it. Slowly, he reached out with the spoon and helped himself to the cake.

After he’d swallowed the first piece, he took another. Slightly larger this time.

“I like this place,” he told them. “I come here every afternoon, and I always sit at that table there, by the window.” Still the two men said nothing. For a moment he thought that perhaps he’d made a mistake, that they hadn’t been talking about him at all. But then he looked at the face of the younger man, at those laugh-lines around the clever mouth, and he caught the lingering shadow of a smirk. He remembered the wink in the window.

“Do you know why I like it here?” he asked in a measured voice, trying to keep his anger hidden. The older man just stared at him, while the younger acted out a bored shrug. “I like it because the people who come here generally mind their own business. I don’t enjoy being stared at or talked about, and I don’t like people winking at me in my own reflection. In my own reflection.” He raised his voice, and then brought it back down. “Isn’t that reasonable enough?”

Neither of them said anything, and he knew that he had won. He laid the silver spoon on the table, a reminder of invaded space.

He was about to stand up and walk back to his table when the younger man spoke quietly. “Who does he think he is?”

“Excuse me?”

“I asked him who he thinks he is, coming over here like this? Does he think that’s a decent way to behave?” The smirk had crept out from its shadows and spread across his face. “He needs to learn some manners himself, before he lectures other people.”

“I’m not the one with no manners here. You were talking about me, don’t pretend you weren’t. I saw you looking at me.”

“The way I remember it,” the younger man said, “it was him that was looking at us. We were just having a nice conversation. Until he started staring like a nut, playing his silly-bugger games.”

“I’m trying to tell you, nicely, to leave me alone and respect my privacy.” The anger was foaming up in his head; he tried to keep it controlled. “Do you understand me?”

“Oh, I understand him alright, I understand him perfectly. Perhaps he should apologise and buy me and my friend here another slice of cake.”

“Listen to me, you little shit, don’t try and talk about me like I don’t exist.”

The older man broke in then, flexing his long fingers. There was no smile on his face, and his voice was the voice of someone who was used to getting his way. “There’s no need for him to speak like that, no need at all,” he said calmly. “I’m sure he’s just having a little misunderstanding. We don’t mind about the cake, we could never have finished the whole thing anyway. Perhaps, though, he might like to give us an apology, eh? And then we can all be friends.”

He found he was breathing very quickly. Suddenly he couldn’t understand what was going on.

“What does he say to that?” continued the older man. “It’s only a little mix-up. There’s no need for anyone to get upset. What does he reckon?”

It was getting too confusing. He no longer had the upper hand, the eloquence of the silver spoon had been lost. “Are you talking to me?” he demanded, shouting it out across the table.

“Of course I’m talking to him,” said the sour lips, surprised.

“Yes, he’s talking to him alright. Who does he think he’s talking to?” said the younger man, and the smirk on his face had twisted wrongly, towards a kind of violence.

“Then why are you addressing me like that? Why are you doing it? Stop talking about me as if I wasn’t here!”

“I really don’t know what he means,” said the older man, looking into his eyes. “We’re trying to talk to him in a civilised manner, but he keeps shouting at us, getting angry. And when one person starts getting angry, other people start getting angry too. I think it might be better if he just sat back down at his table, and then everything can go back to the way it was before.”

“Listen to me, you bastards, I’m not going anywhere until you address me properly! Do you understand? Do you hear me?”

“I hear him,” said the younger man, rising to his feet. His smile was dark and dangerous now, his arms and shoulders ready. “And I’m warning him, I won’t tolerate very much more of this. If he’s asking for trouble, he’s going to get it.”

“Don’t talk to me in the third person, damn you!” He reached for the nearest thing on the table, and it was the silver spoon.

“Go fuck himself,” the younger man said. And he winked.

It happened quickly then. The elegant fist at the end of his long arm connected with the smirking jaw, and then another crashed into the skull above the ear-ringed ear. He pulled the younger man over the table by the lapels of the brown jacket, dragging him through the cream cake. The older man was on his feet, and he punched him in the stomach and again in the back of the stubbled head as he doubled over the table. He brought the two heads together with a crack, saw blood on the white tablecloth, and then, finding the little silver spoon somehow still in his hand, tugged the head of the younger man around and buried the handle of it deep in the winking eye. The girl with the rainbow fingernails started screaming. He pushed the spoon in as far as it would go and tried to smash the cake plate over the other man’s head. Then he straightened up, took a deep breath, turned and walked quickly to the door.

He didn’t stop walking until he reached the end of the long street, and then he started running. He heard sirens as he turned into the larger, busier shopping street that led off from the first, but they faded away and didn’t come back until he reached the railings of the park with dripping oak trees at its border. He climbed the railings clumsily and ran wildly into the open space before him, and then decided he was too tired to run and slowed to a walk. The policemen easily caught up with him in the middle of the deserted park. He was waiting for them with his hands in his pockets, an irritated frown on his face.

…

“And then what happened?” asks the policewoman, watching him from over the table in the little interrogation room.

“Nothing else. You caught him, he came quietly. Now he’s waiting for you to decide what to do with him.”

“And you say you still can’t explain your actions? No reason for any of what you did?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

The policewoman sighs and stares dully at the notebook in front of her. “Alright then. He still can’t explain his actions? He can’t give any reason for doing what he did?”

“He’s written this down,” he says, gesturing to the handwritten sheets of paper that lie between them. “Isn’t that enough?”

“You, he, whoever you say, blinded a man in one eye,” says the policewoman, without passion. “And all because they talked about him? Because they were rude or made some stupid joke?”

“They weren’t rude,” he says patiently, having gone through all this before. “They didn’t make a joke. They negated his existence. They made him cease to be, do you understand? So he doesn’t.” He gazes at her as if he is bored beyond belief. “I don’t see why you’re talking to me about it.”

“Okay.” She closes the notebook sharply, gathers up the pages he has written. “That’s it, as far as I’m concerned.” She stands and makes her way to the door, then glances back at him. “But what’s he thinking about now?” she asks before walking through. “What’s going on in his head, if he doesn’t exist?”

He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t like the woman very much. What he is thinking about – he doesn’t know why – are the fingernails of the girl behind the counter, each one painted a different colour. He is wondering how long it took to paint them, all those colours, and whether she had to use a different brush for each one.

In the street we had passed a procession of men. They were bearing a body wrapped in blankets down the muddy streaming road. They sailed past us like a boat, very quiet, even courteous. No-one spoke. She accompanied me back to the room and didn’t leave. She said when she slept alone she had nightmares. Her face felt hot from across the bed, and her breath was very fast. I felt like reaching out to her and I did reach out to her. She froze. The rain clattered down on the roof and on the lake, and perhaps I had already been there for hundreds of days. Half a year later and I feel like saying to her now: “well, happiness, I left.”

I swam in the lake each morning, before the rain. The walk took me through narrow mud pathways between houses, past the orange juice sellers and the little girls who sold banana bread, over a rise of tangled greenery and from there down to the boulders. The drop was high enough that I could feel the frightened flinch of nerves inside my feet, and the shock of the cold water smacked all sleep out of my body. I would swim out far from the rocks and turn a full, slow circle, taking in the mountains and the clouds, the unreal green of the volcanoes, the white smoke hanging over the villages. Men fished in small angular canoes, very far apart from one another, with no sound. Further down along the boulders there would be a row of women washing clothes.

A lump of white volcanic rock floated past me. The women used them to scrub out stains. I took it back to where I was staying, and later a little bearded man carved it into a flower with six petals. He was half German and half Italian, and he told me that his surname meant ‘dwarf.’ He was more or less the height of a dwarf, but slimmer, and better balanced. We smoked local mota rolled in fresh tobacco leaves, and one day he announced that he was going to climb the volcano to fast for three days on water and cocaine, and after that I never saw him again.

I couldn’t walk out of the room without losing myself. The town was like an unfinished thought, a directionless sprawl of pathways that meandered from the lakeside to the slope of the mountain, disappearing into coffee plantations at one side and fields of maize at the other, or else abruptly ending. Everything was disconnected, but the place somehow managed to function. It was like a socket with all the wires pulled out but the circuit still complete.

“I own this fucking town! I own this whole damn country!” He was screaming incoherently at a crowd of totally expressionless people, this American with a too-smooth face. I stood up to get a better look at him. He shouted, “sit down, fucking sit down, I can have you killed! I can have anyone in this town killed!” and also, “in ten minutes I can have two hundred Indians down here to cut you into pieces with machetes!” I sat down. His fury was so great it caused him to swagger around in a circle like a bee. But he didn’t look convincing in his anger. It wasn’t something that came naturally to him, like it does to some people. Anger didn’t really suit his face. In the crowd there was a tiny old lady wearing the traditional traje of the town, watching with an expression of tired bemusement. I found out later that she was his landlady, and it had originally been an argument about the rent.

After a while he marched off to a small wooden shed beneath a tree and shut himself in there for some time. He came out with a meek, not-quite-apologetic smile, shook hands with a couple of people, and left. I saw him again the next day, wearing a pair of white trousers. A boy was selling him some mangos.

I spent most of my time wandering, the same as everybody else. There weren’t many places to end up at, because all the pathways met and turned back on themselves and brought me to the same place that I started. Or else they would turn into something entirely unexpected – a wide paved street would end up as a track through a maize field, or a scrubby paddock with horses grazing – and from there I wouldn’t know how to get back. Between the top of the town and the mountain was a forest of low trees with discarded plastic bags carpeted beneath them, and occasionally there would be a wall and a yard with chickens and dogs in it and dark-eyed children staring. When I met people up there they would look at me with polite curiosity, although there was something so deep and impenetrable in their eyes I knew that I hardly existed. I wasn’t much more than a ghost to them. I would stay for a time and then leave – for what purpose they would never understand – and afterwards no memory of me would remain.

It was a town of two populations. One always left and the other always stayed. One had existed here forever and always would do, keeping maize and pigs and chickens, fishing in the lake, praying in their churches, washing their clothes with fragments of volcano. Their eyes were silent, inward eyes that gave away nothing. They were dense, close people with hands like shovels, opaque people with skin as heavy as clay.

The other population were the drifters, who did not really seem to exist anywhere. They were transparent people with no substance, nothing to weigh them down. They came and went, and it didn’t matter. It was this population that I was a part of, although at the time I didn’t really feel a part of anything. Everyone had peculiarly bright eyes.

In the evenings when it didn’t rain the sky would turn pink, and glow luminous with the clouds. Bare bulbs would come on in blank-walled rooms. The silhouettes of vultures could be seen hunched in treetops. In the yard outside the room where I was staying, different people would come for a while and settle. Every night a new community formed by the huge green leaves, and there may have appeared a hammock or guitar, a chess game, milk powder, a different type of marijuana. Things would come and go with the need. Smoke would rise from the cooking fires, the dogs would yelp between the buildings, and children would pass carrying baskets on their heads or buckets of maize for grinding. There was always a radio, somewhere; the incessant, manic sound of the marimba.

I became friends with an electrician who was trying to rewire the lights of a hostel. He got electrocuted several times a day. He had been there for seventeen months, and had studied with a local shaman, and didn’t know whether or not to go home. “I was sleeping with a girl from the village,” he told me one night when we were sitting on the roof. “Something happened that terrified me too much. We were kissing madly in the street, passionate, furious kissing, and then suddenly we were both thrown backwards away from each other, like a magnetic repulsion. And in that instant her face was transformed into something … hideous. I don’t know what I believe in any more, but I know I saw something that I shouldn’t have seen. I think I saw her demon. And then she hurried off, and after that I never spoke to her again. Whenever we passed in the street she would cross over to the other side. You see, the thing that really scared me wasn’t that I saw hers. But that she must have seen mine as well.” I liked this man because he seemed less lost than most of the people here, less loose and purposeless. Perhaps it was something to do with his hands, which were hard, clever hands, hands that would be capable of everything. The other thing he told me was how to get connected in this town. “It’s very cheap here, and very pure. There’s a yellow door on this street at the top of the town, and if it’s open, you go in. You’ll meet the lady. Ask for concepción.”

I found the yellow door the next evening. It was in the wall of a building next to a low, sunken bar, where men sat on empty boxes drinking beer. I stepped inside the door, and was greeted in the hallway by a six-year old child. The lady was his grandmother, a very gentle old woman with a thick embroidered skirt and incredibly shiny black hair. I said the word concepción and she led me to the scales, measuring out the powder with great care. When all was done she took me to the street, smiling happily, and touched me on the shoulder as I went. There was a power-cut, so everything was lit by candles which threw shuddering shadows on the walls. Faces looked medieval in that yellow, smoky light.

One night I found a giant moth clinging to the outside of my door. Its body was as fat as two thumbs, and its wings were large enough to have flown a bird. It remained there for about three days, staying completely still. The French-Canadian film-maker in the room next to mine watched it for a long time. “That’s a big moth,” he kept saying.

Everyone seemed to be getting away from something. I used to go to a small bar run by Israelis avoiding their military service. My little Italian German friend would normally be there, and a grinning Frenchman who carried on his shoulder a kitten with very sly eyes. At one table there sat an old man with a flowing white beard, doling out hallucinogenic mushrooms. These people were all linked, somehow. They were part of that same transparent world. I would sit at the edge of a table, on the fringes of the room, and drift between the real and the imagined. I could almost feel myself passing in and out of solidity, being placed and displaced recurrently. There was no way of telling where one thing ended and the other began. But I liked this sense of vagueness, for the time.

Sometimes I would go down to the jetty where the boats came in. Their engines made no sound until they got up close to shore, swallowed by the vastness of the lake. I would watch the different people disembarking, congregating for a minute on the dockside while they gazed around, and then dispersing their separate ways into the town. It was a constant flow of people in and out, one face continually being replaced by another. It was like a natural cycle. On the steps leading down to the jetty there would be a ragged group of jembe drummers, some little girls with their baskets of sweet cakes and banana bread, a couple of dealers here and there, a few touts. Women would be waiting for supplies to be delivered, babies slung tight across their backs. I saw a child who was like a stout little man next to a woman like a stout little child. And the boats would come and then go again, shuttling back and forward through the long, loose afternoons. There was always a part of me that wanted to leave, very urgently at times. And there was always a part of me that wanted to arrive again, with fresh eyes, that saw things newly.

I experienced an intense, unknown nostalgia. I was walking between the mountain and the lake when I came upon a carefully-tended cabbage patch, lying just off to one side of the path. The sky was rough and cloudy, brilliantly blue when it cleared, and the late sunlight was filling the world with a dreamlike luminescence. Something about the scene – the spreading cabbage leaves, the blue, bright air – was so incredibly familiar, intimate, almost, that my chest gave a stab of pain so sweet it hurt me. I can identify four times when this has happened before, the exact same sensation as this. It has something to do with boulders, pebbles, rivers – a memory, perhaps, buried very deep – and an unreal intensity of light. It has something to do with strung-out washing, things flapping in the wind, and scattered bits of rubbish over green, green grass. Everything is sharp and tightened, achingly familiar. It is not beauty. It feels more like history.

“There is something familiar about those cabbages,” I thought or perhaps said, when I saw them. And afterwards I wrote that down.

An old man in a shed at the top of the town made me a pair of sandals. He measured my feet by drawing around them on a sheet of newspaper, and when I came back the next day they were finished. The straps were leather, attached to the soles with tiny nails. The soles were cut-out pieces of car tyre. He was a proud, dignified old craftsman, with a creased face and well-trimmed white moustache, and he wanted me to give him my hat. I told him he couldn’t have it.

I can’t, from this distance, place any of these things in proper order. Everything went round in loops and spirals. The lake was beautiful, the people were beautiful, and everyone was lost. I had only the vaguest sense that time was passing. There was a kind of numbness to it all, attributed only in part to the cocaine, which passed as a constant undercurrent through the town and through people’s personalities. It was also caused by the isolation of the place, the frozen beauty of it. It was easy to see how people could chance upon this refuge and stay for years – some had been here for decades – simply by forgetting to leave. Nothing seemed to happen at all, but time went by and weeks had passed. No-one was ever aware of this. They had forgotten their shoes and families. Eventually, and probably for no reason at all, they would leave, but there was never any hurry. They would wander out the same way they had wandered in, following the invisible threads of connection that linked even this place to the world.

I climbed the volcano one morning. It was dawn, and I was running on nothing. I had spent most of the night with two strangers, a jewellery-maker and an artisan, in a dimly-lit room of billowing drapes and mosquito nets, blue smoke and diagrammed walls. I was spun. The room was an intense conversation that kept building and building towards something that seemed at the time truly revelatory, something immense, but would always lose its aim and crumble into nothing. It was like approaching the top of a mountain that kept disappearing from view. The lines went back and forward, cathedrals of ideas mounted and collapsed, my body was surrounded by distractions – feathers and idols hanging from strings, dried green leaves, ephemeral sarongs, a drum-skin – religious clutter and endless jabble. Nothing would ever be resolved here. I became lost. When I finally left the room, my mind was buzzing as if electricity was running through it. Sleep was out of the question and I had nowhere else to go, so I ended up taking the main path through the town and following it until it reached its end, then turning round and pacing back again. I saw no-one, just dogs lying in the road like dead things. The night was so black that I could feel it. Walking was effortless, I seemed to be travelling at great speeds, but I managed to tire myself enough to sleep for two hours when I returned to my room, and woke with my brain still doing spirals. I changed my clothes and threw cold water on my face, squinting at the terrible daylight, and went down to the shore of the lake to meet my guide.

It was uphill for three steady hours. We left the last dilapidated houses of the town behind us early, entering the coffee plantations that sprawled up the slope to the fringes of the cloud forest above. The forest ended in deeply-scored ravines of hanging vines and boulders, which in turn gave way to the coolness of pines. We passed through a dead zone of broken, splintered trees, the early morning mist still rising through them. The pain in my muscles turned into something else, converted itself somehow into energy, and the little man guiding me strode steadily ahead never speaking a word. I reached a point beyond exhaustion, a state of numbness in my legs and brain, and this release into mindlessness carried me almost smoothly up the steep final slope to where the trees cleared, leaving only rock. It was so high up it felt like flying. I looked down on the entire wrinkled world.

By ten o’clock in the morning I’ve taken several liberal swigs from a bottle of aguadiente – a local sugar cane liquor – and hauled myself up to the vantage point of a half-constructed concrete roof to witness the spectacle of dozens of horsemen galloping wildly up and down the dusty road, all of them in stages of advanced drunkenness.

Several riders have already fallen. There are bloody noses and broken limbs this morning. But no-one lets this put a dampener on their day, the biggest and most exciting fiesta of the year here in the north-west highlands of Guatemala; indeed, the danger of the race is its thrill. Below me, packed along both sides of the road, is a sea of heads in blue-brimmed round straw hats; part of the traditional costume or traje of the town, along with the distinctive red and white striped trousers and elaborately patterned blue blouses. The galloping horsemen are resplendent in brightly feathered hats, the most daring of them riding without reins, their arms stretched out either side of them, or even – as the ultimate demonstration of bravado – clutching live chickens by the legs as they ride.

This is the small town of Todos Santos Cuchamatan, and the races are part of the annual Día de los Muertos festivities. The Day of the Dead, most famously celebrated in Mexico, is also an important event throughout Guatemala, particularly in isolated rural areas such as this. It is not only a day to remember and honour the deceased but to celebrate the lives that they lived, and the Guatemalans take their celebrations very seriously. In the weeks leading up to the events, tombstones are freshly painted in bright colours – the Catholics use white while the Evangelicals, who have recently made much headway into Guatemalan religious life, use blue or green – and on the day itself, families gather in the cemetery with flowers, candles, decorations, alcohol and food. The local marimba bands circulate in the graveyard, playing by request on top of the most popular tombs, while families drink and dance on top of the graves of their loved ones. It is a time of strong emotions; from intense happiness and joy to intense grief, and this is augmented by the state of intense drunkenness which continues throughout the week of the fiesta. For the entire five days I spend in Todos Santos, the majority of the town is drunk. And by drunk I don’t mean merely tipsy. People are unconscious in the gutters by midday. Women are stumbling along the streets supporting barely-conscious husbands; men are stumbling along the streets supporting barely-conscious wives. Old men are cackling and hiccoughing in every shop doorway. The little town jail is full, although the friends of the incarcerated are still free to pass drinks and cigarettes through the bars, so the party continues just the same inside. The manic sound of the marimbas never ends. I have never seen a town in a state of such revelry for so long.

And then there are the other entertainments. A rickety Ferris wheel spins slowly through the air, occasionally stopping to leave couples stranded at the top. A troupe of travelling performers dance the Dance of the Bull, dressed in masks depicting caricature Spaniards with enormous noses and moustaches painted gold. There is a punch-like figure in a leopard costume who plays tricks on the crowd, stealing oranges from children and trying to look up girls’ skirts. There is also a popular sideshow called The Disembodied Head, which features a pretty young woman’s head in a mirrored box, with no visible body, the queue for which stretches the length of the street; although apparently some people are avoiding it, saying it might be witchcraft. And over all of this activity comes the incessant boom of exploding fireworks, which ricochet along the slopes of the valley and out of the mountains, heading south.

But the races are the reason I am here. Several hundred other travellers and tourists have descended on the town for this event; the few hotels that exist are full, so most people have found accommodation on the floors of local houses. The people of Todos Santos are proud of their fiesta, and happy that outsiders are prepared to travel for hours or days over pot-holed mountain roads to see it; even happy for visitors to accompany them to the cemetery, where the real grieving is done. Perhaps this is because, although the Day of the Dead is in one sense a private remembrance of death, it is also a very public celebration of life. And the races, with their splendour and crazy bravado, celebrate life at its most intense and colourful; they are, quite literally, death-defying.

The main event is in fact not so much a race as a test of endurance. The aim is not to outdistance the others but to outlast them, as well as bettering the competition in acts of daring to win the praises of the crowd. It is considered a great honour to take part, and even more of an honour to suffer an injury through falling. Falls have, in the past, been fatal; this is considered the highest honour of all. These races have been taking place for hundreds of years, originating, by one theory, soon after the Spanish introduced horses to the Guatemalan highlands. The Mayans were a proud people and wanted to prove that they could handle these unfamiliar animals as well as their colonial ‘masters;’ hence the heavy drinking, which demonstrated that they could ride better than any Spaniard even in states of extreme intoxication. Whether this is true or not, the event still possesses an amazing sense of dignity, despite all the scenes of drunkenness. As well as being an exhibition of recklessness it is a show of fortitude, of stubbornness, of strength; all of which the Mayan people have needed to withstand five hundred years of attempts to undermine or eradicate their culture.

This is particularly pertinent in the town of Todos Santos, which is renowned for the strength of its adherence to Mayan traditions. Not only do the men wear full traje – an unusual thing in Guatemala, where even in rural areas most men wear Western-style clothes – but many people still use the Mayan calender, an ancient system which pre-dates the Spanish invasion by thousands of years. In the face of continued and frequently violent repression, the region has managed to remain proud of its history and its culture. What these races really show is the ability of the indigenous tribes to adapt to new ways of life – such as horse-riding – at the same time as resisting the most destructive advances of the invaders, who sought to conquer not only Mayan strength but Mayan identity, to destroy their sense of self and of freedom. The wild displays of this festival seem to suggest that the attempt has, ultimately, failed.

I lose count of how many riders fall in the course of this year’s race, upholding these centuries-old traditions. There are plenty of minor injuries and plenty more near misses, many lucky escapes and many empty bottles by the side of the track, and by the end of the day some of the horsemen are visibly slipping in and out of consciousness in their saddles. Sometime towards late afternoon the last remaining rider falls, and is carried off the road, bleeding but triumphant, by the jubilant straw-hatted crowd. The Todos Santos races are over for another year, the celebrations of life and of death go on; and of course, the drinking continues.

In the village of Santiago, on the shores of Lake Atitlan in the western highlands of Guatemala, I visited the folk-god Maximon. A wooden effigy with cowboy hat, sunglasses and grey silk tie, he sits behind a bank of candles and flowers, receiving gifts of cigarettes and coins. People talk to him patiently, intimately, as a friend, lifting his hands or touching him in the place his heart would be. They put cigarettes in his mouth and stand close to knock the ash away; I saw one girl rub the ash into her sleek black hair with a sort of casual reverence. They tip him back in his chair to tip rum down his throat, wiping his black lips carefully after he has drank. They lift his hat from his head and wear it on their own, or pick up his walking stick to emphasise points in their entreaties. He is treated with absolute respect at all times, but there is none of the grovelling awe we have come to associate with religious idolatry in the West. He seems to be a friend more than a deity; an extremely powerful friend. The colours of the candles burning before him represent different aspects of his power: red for love, green for business, pink for health, black for vengeance, white for protection from sorcerers. But perhaps the most surprising thing about the shrine of Maximon is the presence of the two other idols – Jesus and the Virgin Mary – at the back of the room. These two are offered no cigarettes or rum.

The official line of the Catholic Church is, predictably, that paying tribute to Maximon is akin to devil worship and should be avoided. But in reality the two faiths seem to exist in the small towns and villages of the Guatemalan highlands surprisingly easily. For religion in Central America has, since the days of the Spanish Conquest, always been an amalgam of two different cultures. The conquistadors never completely succeeded in replacing the indigenous religion with their own, despite the determination of their assault. Often they succeeded only in changing the symbols around, such as the goddess figure for the Virgin Mary, or the ancient Mayan cruciform (representing the sacred ceiba tree) for the crucifix. Mayan religion also laid heavy emphasis on blood-letting ceremonies, in which the most suitable blood was considered the blood of kings; thus when the Catholics preached that the King of the Jews had spilled his blood for all mankind, the Maya could easily understand the symbolism. Maximon, too, is an amalgam of different symbolic figures, and the mixture is surprising and bizarre. For what the cigarette-smoking, rum-drinking figure in the cowboy hat represents is a combination of Mayan gods, the genocidal conquistador Pedro de Alvarado, and the biblical Judas.

At first it’s hard to understand what this paradoxical idol could possibly mean. How can these people simultaneously worship the gods of their ancestors, the murderous invader who attempted to wipe out their entire culture and religion, and the man who betrayed Jesus? I still don’t understand the reasons for this weird combination, but visiting Maximon has made me think a lot about the rationale behind religion in general.

In another town I sat in a Catholic church and watched an ancient, tiny Mayan lady go down on her knees before Christ and kiss the stone floor at his feet. At the time I could not understand how she could devote herself so utterly to the god of the foreigners who, for the past 500 years, have systematically oppressed and slaughtered her people. It seemed perverse and inexplicable. But after visiting Maximon, the combination of a bloodthirsty oppressor and a traitor, I think I understand the sentiment – if not the logic – for worshipping a symbol of pain. Real love is loving someone no matter how many times they hurt you. In human terms, no matter how many slaps or bruises; in terms of a culture, no matter how many butcheries, genocides, rapes. A society that has been through such grief can surely find much psychological relief in prostrating itself collectively before the ghastly, battered, blood-stained, tortured body of Christ; the manifestation of an even greater, a universal, suffering. And in the case of Maximon, merging the figure of a cultural nemesis with the gods that he tried to destroy is an effective way of assimilating him, paradoxically negating his malevolence through its idolisation and worship. Perhaps loving someone is the greatest power you can have over them; and the greatest release from the sins they have done you in the past.

So I gave Maximon three cigarettes and lit a thin red candle before him. He smoked the cigarettes down to the filter, and the candle burned to a waxy stump on the concrete floor. As I left, I crossed myself – something I could never see myself doing in a Catholic church – and an old campesino nodded at me on his way through the door. I noticed he was carrying the black candle of revenge in his right hand, and in his left, a small bunch of flowers.

I had three days to reach Todos Santos in time for the Day of the Dead festivities. I was deep in the Cuchamatan mountains, one of the most isolated and impoverished regions of Guatemala, with a fifteen year-old guide called Juan, a large black dog called Rampo and a baggage-horse called Chapolin, or ‘Grasshopper.’ This was the end of our third day of walking, and the sun was just starting to sink into the soft green landscape ahead of us in the west. We were approaching a small Mam village, not much more than a clutter of wooden and tin buildings gathered along the side of the road, when we realised that Rampo was no longer with us. Just then we heard a woman screaming furiously. We looked around to see the dog trotting happily down the road with a bloodied lamb dangling from his jaws, and the villagers advancing in a large, excited group towards us.

I had met Juan in the Ixil village of Nebaj. At first he seemed shy, but I’m sure that was just an initial unfamiliarity with talking to strangers, and once that wore off he impressed me enormously with his intelligence and enthusiasm. I told him I wanted to get to Todos Santos and he offered to take me. That was how our little expedition started. He led me from his home village deep into the Cuchamatans, over densely forested hills and up winding mountain tracks, across bleak rock plateaus and down through bright valleys of flowers. He was incredibly knowledgeable about the area, and knew of little outside it. From Juan I learnt the names and properties of dozens of plants and flowers on our path; he taught me which could be used for food, which for medicines and which for poisons. He took me to a Mayan shrine high in the hills, evidently still in use from the offerings of candles and liquor we found; he showed me the places where the guerillas had hidden in the Civil War, and the small bitter leaves they were forced to eat when the army destroyed the crops in their villages below; he explained to me the local legends and folk-lore, such as how the snakes came out at night to make poisonous mushrooms.

The night before, we had eaten in a dark, fog-shrouded village on the very top of the mountain, in a crowded shack with people so poor they didn’t even have candles, let alone electric light − for illumination they burnt sticks of resinous ocote wood − yet were generous enough to feed us and allow us a space to sleep. Cooking was done on a smoky wood fire in the middle of the hard dirt floor, around which the entire family sat huddled, the children staring at me as I ate with wide, fire-lit eyes. The highlands of Guatemala are so remote that every half-day’s walk brought us not only to a different tribal area but into another language area, and once we were out of Ixil territory (marked by an ancient cactus we passed, deep in the forest), Juan was able to communicate less and less with the people we met, for even Spanish was often unknown to the people in these high mountain areas. Yet he had always managed to cope with each situation we had found ourselves in, and never shown anything but good humour and confidence.

This is why I started worrying, as the occupants of this Mam-speaking village began to gather around our dog and the dead lamb in his teeth, at Juan’s sudden loss for words. For the first time he seemed scared, as if this situation might be beyond his control. The fact that Rampo wasn’t even his dog − he had appeared from nowhere and followed us from the first day of walking, as Juan fed him the occasional tortilla or piece of cheese − didn’t matter. The dog was clearly with us, and we clearly bore responsibility for the lamb it had killed. And Juan seemed suddenly nervous of these people, as if he didn’t know them or what they would do. Certain parts of Guatemala have, until recently, been considered highly dangerous; the country is still suffering from the effects of a particularly brutal thirty-year civil war which only finished in 1996, and this, coupled with five hundred additional years of colonial oppression and exploitation, gives many of the indigenous people a good reason to resent outsiders. In fact the village of my destination, Todos Santos, had been the scene of a tourist lynching only a few years before, when a Japanese tour group started taking photographs of local children. I realised suddenly how foreign I was in this place; and, as one Mam woman took the bloody lamb in her arms and began shaking it at me angrily, how incompetent.

Luckily, the situation resolved itself quickly. A Spanish-speaking man pushed to the front of the crowd and addressed me. He seemed more bemused at my presence here than angry, and asked only that I buy the dead lamb from the family who owned it, which I was only too happy to do. I was then faced with the interesting dilemma of what to do with it. Juan swiftly solved this by throwing the body down in front of Rampo, who was clearly ravenous after three days of dry tortillas and ate the entire lamb − starting at the head and not pausing for a break until he had got down to the back legs − in under fifteen minutes, leaving only the wool and the two back hooves, while the assembled village gaped at the sight. And then we walked on down the mountain, Rampo now covered in blood from his muzzle to his ears, anxious to reach Todos Santos before dark.

I got to the town in good time, though I had to leave Juan at the main road and hitch a lift in the back of a pick-up truck; one of the best and most comfortable ways to travel in rural Guatemala. The last I saw of Juan was a small figure waving at the end of the road, night falling in the mountains behind him. He was one of the most remarkable people I had met on my journey through that country, someone who had showed me a side of Guatemalan life that many travellers do not get close to. I knew that he now had another three-day walk ahead of him, alone this time, to get back to Nebaj and his family. Myself, I just had a couple of hours to go until my destination and the fiesta for Day of the Dead, when the lives of the deceased are honoured and celebrated. Later that night I drank my toast to the lamb.

Arrival

Following my directions, I caught a bus from the centre of the small church town. A decommissioned school bus with a curved tin roof, it shuddered like a horse when it reached the first slope of the hill. I tried to memorise the ways the road was taking.

The seats were filled with dense, round faces which looked at me even when they were not looking at me. Their eyes were dark and bright at the same time. The women and girls chattered in a language I did not know, and the men sat in heavy silence with their machetes cradled loosely in their arms. I knew I would never know what these men were thinking.

There were crosses and little plastic Christs swinging from the driver’s mirror. There was a child’s shoe, dangling by its laces from the ceiling.

The bus left me at the top of a long, hot slope that stretched all the way back down to the plains, and from there I started walking. I followed the path that led towards the mountain.

There were dry green trees and yellow rocks, shadows that looked like deep holes in the ground. The brown dust swirled around my boots like a liquid. There was a chewed-up-looking horse behind a crumbling wall, and behind it a concrete house surrounded by fruit trees and half-buried tyres. I couldn’t see any children but I knew there were children there, and I wondered what they would make of the sight of me.

I overtook a girl leading a donkey on a knotted rope. Her eyes slid shyly off my face, and when I asked her if I was on the right path to Granja Sacbe she nodded uncertainly, as if she knew that not to nod would be an inconvenience to me. I walked on, deciding I was lost, but came in time to the white-painted rock that I was looking for, next to an old agave cactus with deep scars in its leaves. I paused for a while to watch it, this mother shark of plants. The leaves relaxed outwards from a central spine that tapered upwards to a perfect needle, a brutal, graceful, ancient-looking thing.

I left it alone. It had nothing whatsoever to do with me.

I realised I must be near the house when the foliage became a garden of half-grown fruit trees. A white dog and a black dog appeared from the bushes and followed me expectantly, as if they had hoped that someone might be coming. The trees opened out into a weird kind of herb garden, and the house was above it on thick wooden stilts, looking down on me with unreflecting windows.

A flight of rough stone steps lead to the door. No-one answered my knocks. The dogs stayed below and looked at me like they were waiting to see if I would go in, so I went in. There was a wooden floor and a table with a cast-iron grinder bolted on, shelves of books and bowls of drying beans.

There was no note for me, only half a loaf of bread and a list of instructions about how much water to give the fruit trees, how to feed the chickens, what the dogs ate, what the cat ate, and the people nearby who I might meet. I went to the sofa in the corner and put my bags on it, then sat down beside my bags. It was about five o’clock in the afternoon.

I waited to see if the owner would return. Nobody came. The light went blue and then the blue went black, so I switched on the bare bulbs and everything went yellow. I ate some of the bread and tried to make some coffee on the gas ring, but the gas was so low I could hardly get the water boiled. I looked around. Upstairs was a platform with a mattress and blankets on it, some framed photographs of unknown people. There was a trunk full of mismatching clothes. There was an entire wall missing, and the wild whistling through.

I tentatively unpacked my bags.

When I got back downstairs, the cat was waiting.

Something about the cat suggested unusual intelligence. I approached it as if it was a person, holding out my hand. It regarded my fingers, smiling, then touched them lightly with its nose and quickly backed away. Within a few minutes, however, it was all over me, rubbing up and purring, flexing its claws into my legs and stomach, with an intensity that became too much and started to feel a bit embarrassing. When I tried to calm it down it grew more and more excited. It had a concentrated, manic energy which made me wonder if it wasn’t in some way unbalanced.

A storm came. There was no thunder, no lightning, no rain, just a wild black wind that battered on the walls and rattled the doors with increasing violence. Branches flailed against the windows and banged the roof, the house felt suddenly unsteady. I sat through this and waited without really knowing what I was waiting for.

The cat began to pace the floor. Agitated by the wildness of the night, we became increasingly nervous of one other. Its behaviour grew more and more uneasy, until suddenly it spun around and flung itself up the wooden stairs, letting out weird, undulating yowls and leaping back down again, dashing back and forwards and around in circles, spitting at me and clawing the air. I tried to placate it, I asked it please to stop, I talked to it out loud, but it would not. I was too much of a stranger in this room.

The wind was inside the house, unsettling everything. A basket of oranges jumped from an open cupboard and rolled across the room. When I straightened from picking them up the cat was inches from my face, staring from a high shelf on the wall. It had eyes like an owl. It had a face like an owl. It stared and stared until I went away.

I sat back on the sofa to calm myself, picking up the nearest thing to hand. It was a paperback book about shamanism. There were two bookmarks inside it which fell out as I leafed through. One was a thin white bone, and the other was a severed bird’s wing.

I heard the cat walking around upstairs, chasing itself back and forwards across the floorboards.

I slept in my clothes on a pile of blankets, not daring to try the bed above. The storm died down sometime in the blackest part of the night. The cat went out, I think.

…

Other Places

Other places now. I wake and through the slatted window see a chained dog vomit on a pile of splintered wood. When it’s done it rubs its ears, makes its way with some reluctance back up the concrete steps til it gets to the end of its chain.

A toothless man is staggering down the sandy road towards me. He cackles and curses at the houses. Before I can avoid him, he plants a kiss on the side of my mouth like a dirty charm. In one hand he holds a paper bag of nails.

I find myself in a graveyard swamp of broken sticks and trees, bleached wood, black standing water, a place where crabs and iguanas live. Ants bite around my ankles. Yet someone here has built a lovely house, with trees and flowers.

In the shaded bamboo bar, I entertain lines of glancing people. They connect, smile, and then move on. It’s a trick that makes the solitude feel full. And when the khaki policeman busts the pungent smoky swinging room, I leave, without company.

This is a good life here. Could almost settle, almost. Their skins are young and tight and gold. Above the sharky sea, the cloud forms mass in pillars a thousand feet straight up.

On this crowded bus, a sweating expat in a dirty pink shirt. Into the lap of a beautiful young Mayan girl – very beautiful, very young – he drops a cheap plastic crucifix necklace that makes her whole face smile. He calculates, smiling, in return. I’m glad she keeps her eyes averted now until he leaves, but keeps the necklace.

Bright morning in a small town. Men in tall hats go to work with their machetes in the hills. Women carry children on their backs, fruit in head baskets. They surge in and out of mass like a tide, it’s simple.

I sit beneath my cypress tree and shovel earth into seventy-five plastic bags. A man with a machete and a hoe swings by, grinning. One of his feet is on backwards. Toribio with his dark eyebrows and one gold tooth carves spoons out of coffee wood. They tell me when to start and when to stop.

The man says he has a gun in each pocket. He keeps reaching down inside his trouser legs. He says he is in love. He wants to sell cocaine. He grows angrier with every refusal, breathing like a boxer, and pulls out his guns. It is only two hidden bottles of beer – one of which he offers, in tears, almost. And wants a hug before leaving.

And once again I feel it, that absurd happiness. It’s to do with freedom, or a sense of the ridiculous. Which are perhaps the same thing.
This girl is washing her clothes in an outside basin. She is wearing little, and when she rubs the cloth together all the golden flesh on her body trembles, like a lake.

I watch the volcanoes. Clouds suck against their slopes. The town huddles around its dignified cathedral. They ring the bells with a sort of clumsy pride. I don’t know what to say.

The sun collapses. The birds scream, the church bells scream. The half moon rushes through a cloud at a million miles an hour.

For three days I follow this boy, up over forested hills and down through bright valleys of flowers. The horse behind us clops, pulls grasses. The air is blue with butterflies. The folds of the mountains glow green. Serpants make poisonous mushrooms, he tells me. He wants me to know the name of every leaf and tree.

A circle of goblin shadows. Mud floor, blackened cooking pans. Smoke in the eyes, wide firelit eyes, darkness. Bare dusty toes. Pine splinters for candles, fairytales. The drunky spits, grey meat in a bowl. The baby sicks. A crone.

The little restaurant is full of young soldiers eating tortillas and beans, their automatic rifles resting on ther knees. They glance at me, wish me a good meal, and go back to watching their Schwarzenegger film.

Sometimes it seems there are too many incidents, scraps, already. I feel they should connect together, somehow. There doesn’t seem to be any way of telling.

In truth, I am comparing myself to strangers. And starting to enjoy the deaths of mosquitoes.

Through the yellow flat sierras, this landscape of creased-up eyes. Long silences of hills and horizons, cactus gods, bleached bones.

I am possessed by a quiet, absolute conviction of confidence. Nothing will touch me in this land.

In the ruins of three thousand years of this dead civilisation, I am waiting for the day to wear away. Giant muscle roots, like thumbs, have heaved apart the stones. The trees suck water from the banks like hydraulic machines. Everywhere there is life. The pull is in the air. A vital hum, throbbing vines, columns of ants in progress.

I have not been looking after myself. Nevertheless, feel comfortably melted down. But need a friendly bed, an impulse to eat twice a day. Covered in dust and old sweat, scratches, gently drifting away on mushrooms, insects.

The temples are like batteries. It seems whatever they were built to do is still being done.

I must force myself to jump into deep water from heights that scare me. Each time the fear of physical pain becomes easier. Because if I can’t force myself to take this plunge, what else might there be that I cannot do?

We swallow half a star. Artec squints and smiles through sun beams, the deep-angled microscope of every connecting thought and observation down to the soft green specks in the light of a half-eaten pear.

And some of the synapse leaps of that: just gold dust clouds billowing under, green blue greenblue sparkles intensity pelican foldings and bodies, the sea is stronger than all of us, and dogs in the water heaving neon sea-light, rolled in sand brown and gold churnings, glittering in this Pacific.

Pounded by the sea. A supercolour photograph. Smiling Daniél with sticky black opium paste. Everything is dangerously timeless.

The capacity these people have for watching. It is older, somehow, than curiosity. And not exactly hostile, not exactly friendly, like a long deep pull on a drink with the eyes.

These bodies, like hand-smoothed clay pots for holding water, pebbles, ashes. Soft weights of earth reposing. Slow release of light. A bathtub. Her knees are drawn up and glisten like mud. She takes on the shape of a rose.

Arriving, one more time, in a lonely mariachi square. Mustachioed men in white sleeves, pigeons, all the rest of it. Sometimes I feel I am on an endless, pointless wheel.

Couples wrap themselves around one other in the public plaza, coloured lights are falling through the sky. A white-tuxedoed salsa band is playing. It makes me think of daquiris I have never had, something from someone else’s past.

And the Virgin floats past me, on a raft of polished wood. A small brass band behind her makes a very slow, sweet tune. The sky is pink, the incense overwhelming. The dignity. The sweetness. I am startled, here in the middle of this dream, to find myself in tears.

After hiking with bags down an endless hot road well into the dark, and reaching the beach, and then lost on the beach, eating tuna and cold refried beans, and losing my homemade sandals, and curling up to sleep in the sand, and then the mother of all tropical storms and drenched to the skin beneath my palm tree, and afraid of coconuts, and then crawling beneath the overhang of someone else’s cabaña to string my hammock above a sleeping dog like a sack of stones, and a night of insane dreams, and the end of the rain, and the dawn.

The dawn is like the beginning of the world.

Blasted, I’m watching wood grain. I have heard the shaman stories and the Tibetan monk link, am stung by the directions that could be taken. Find myself not understanding the words of an indistinct princess in a four-poster bunkbed talking to me in a fairytale room in a castle that has turned inside out from the real world, suddenly. It’s easy to be utterly lost.

Eventually it will all make sense together. The Virgin Mary spread out like a giant moth. The feeling of a fingernail. The clouds across the mountain. The entire sense of touch. Her one dead tooth.

The mist rolls in, like smoke across the water. The mist tempts the water. The sound of machetes hacking wood, far off, like footsteps in a cave. I walk down to the sacred lake and wash my hands.

…

Sacbe

Solitude

By the end of the following day the owner still hadn’t come, and I realised I would spend the next five weeks alone.

I settled to the life surprisingly quickly. After those first few hours of madness the cat came to accept my presence, and in time even seemed to grow bored of me. I fed it twice a day, following my instructions, and it was satisfied and kept its distance. The dogs ate only when they needed to, waiting patiently at the bottom of the steps when they were hungry. They disappeared into the mountains during the day, and came back at night to sleep in the sawdust beneath the wooden balcony.

Every morning I stood there to feel the heat of the sun, and in the evenings to watch the light change in the forested hills. There were no more storms. Each night as darkness fell, I heard donkeys braying from very far away, filling the valley with a sound like broken grieving. Occasionally, the music of a distant radio.

The house came to accept me the way the cat did. I slept on the mattress upstairs and had no bad dreams. I fed the fruit trees. The chickens expected me. I took one egg from them each day, and they didn’t seem to resent this.

In the dark tienda near where the bus had dropped me, there was an old woman who sold sweet bread and soft drinks and cigarettes. Sometimes, when she had enough, she sold me the remains of whatever she had cooked that day for her children and grandchildren: thin, spicy soup, refried beans, little plastic pots filled with salsa or mole. The rest of the time I bought supplies from the market in town, making the journey in the morning before the sun got too high. It was a crumbling, teeming place in the shadow of quiet mountains.

The mountains were the strangest I have ever seen. They were more like giant sculptures than natural features, weird bulbs and trunks of rock sprouting out from the earth and from each other, smoothed and made gentle by trees. At the peak of one of these outcrops an iron cross was hammered. Some long-forgotten person must have climbed fifty feet of rock to put it there.

The people of the town were shy, self-contained, and capable of great kindness. Old campesinos with missing teeth sat all day in the market square, watching the buses pull in and out and changing position with the sun. People began nodding when they saw me. There were other foreigners there, semi-settled travellers and organised hippies who wandered the markets, self-absorbed, in their amulets and scraps of local clothing. I never met any of them, or anyone. I liked the anonymity. No-one knew who I was, or anything about me.

Back in the house, away from the world, I wondered how to cope with these weeks alone. I had already begun talking to myself, conversationally, as a person. I spent long periods of time just sitting in one place, watching the way things changed. I tried to write, but there wasn’t much to say. From my bag I unwrapped the marijuana I had carried from the coast. I watched the tiny scorpions hiding in cracks in the walls. The afternoons lengthened into drifting, golden times.

I worked in the garden whenever I remembered to. The rock wall of the herb spiral had to be rebuilt with whatever I could find, the steps to the front door repaired. Watering all the trees and plants properly took two hours or more, the water glugging into the roots through half-buried earthenware jars. It was comforting, this sound of drinking.

After these jobs were finished, I went back to the house and attempted writing. The tiniest thing was capable of distracting me.

One day, after I had been there long enough to lose myself in the progression of days, forgetting when I had arrived, fully accustomed to the fact of being alone, I took a long walk into the mountains.

The path from the farm ended in a field of rocks. A donkey lay in the dust with folded elbows, watching me mournfully from the shadow of a cactus tree. Nearby was a sunken house with smoke trailing from an aluminium chimney, and I avoided this, making my way between piles of stones and dry, scrubby bushes, until I came to the upland forest.

From here the trees became cooler and greener, the air scented with pine resin. It was a steep climb that brought me out onto a kind of plateau between two vast rocks, parasitic cacti clinging to their sides. I had broken through to a higher atmosphere. The ground was a rubble of pine cones and fallen branches. I passed through different levels of insects droning in the canopy, different levels of birdsong, and of light.

After another, even steeper climb, the trees suddenly opened up and there was nothing above me but sky. The mountain levelled out onto a shoulder of rock which protruded into the air, ending at a single dead trunk. In its branches was a torn white sheet, flapping in the wind like a flag. I made my way to this and took a seat.

I didn’t move, perhaps, for hours. There didn’t seem much point in going back. Very far below, beyond a mess of rocks and chasms, fissures and trees, lay the white town with its single squat church tower. I could see its crumbled façades and walls, the tiny buses shuttling back and forward. I followed the road I had arrived on, a sharp line scored against the earth, until it faded into the haze of yellow fields and low brown smoke that stretched away into the vastness of the plains. The horizon was so huge, so calm, it seemed more like a sea than land, an endless water-filled bowl, and in the distance pale mountains rose up like the backs of whales. The mountains were an anomaly in this landscape, giant carbuncles springing from the earth, tumours, mushroom growths. Wordless things. And above all this the sky, and nothing else.

I sat there thinking of nothing, I watched the light change on the rocks, I talked to myself quietly. I thought of the vastness of this land, the rise and fall of city states, these plains across which armies could march forever. I laughed out loud. Perhaps I cried. I watched an eagle float.

No-one in the world knew where I was. I enjoyed this fact just as I enjoyed the warmth of the sun on my face, the nagging of thirst, and the view.

By the time I remembered how far I had come, the light was already fading, and shadows had spread between the trees. I made my way back down the mountain with only a couple of falls, but somewhere at the foot of the rock went wrong and wandered into a tangled sprawl of scrub and identical pathways in which I soon lost all sense of direction. The brush led into patches of fields and low trees, criss-crossed by broken stone walls. The paths made no sense. I walked in circles, increasingly lost.

At last I heard the noise of someone digging. I headed towards it through the gathering darkness, tearing my way through dry, scratchy trees and stumbling on loose rocks until I came to a clearing in the undergrowth. Ahead of me a man was chipping at a boulder with an iron spike. A strong, shy campesino with an inward-looking face, he showed no surprise at my appearance, but kept his eyes to the ground as he directed me quietly back the way I had come. I walked away, a stranger.

I retraced my path until the sound of his chipping was lost again, and eventually found myself at a place I thought I recognised. The path was wider here, better trodden, and soon it led down to the road. I was surprised at how closely returning to this house already resembled the sensation of coming home.

The dogs were not there to greet me, which was unusual for so late in the day. It wasn’t until I had climbed the steps that I saw the yellow light behind the door.

The door opened before I even reached it. A young man with heavy stubble and tousled black hair was staring at me wildly. “Hello I am Marco, who are you?” he demanded.

My time alone had ended. Company had come.

…

Twenty-Nine Million Other Component Cells

Night

Daniél picks me up early evening in a battered little car he seems most proud of. He is wearing that smile I remember from the bright afternoon on Mazunte beach, a gentle contentment that radiated just the same on the three hour hitch we shared down winding mountainsides with three kilos of marijuana stashed inside a fake door speaker by an emaciated surfer and his mother… that’s how the story started, but I won’t go back that far. That belongs to another memory, and now we are bombing through the dazzling streets of Mexico City over potholes under bridges eight-lane flyovers on the way to a house in the middle of god knows which identical suburb of taco stands and burger lights and shops with metal shutters on the doors. I never catch the name of the girl in the back seat but her sister is called Blancita, fourteen years old and wants to live in England for some reason that involves the images she saw once on TV. It’s a lie, I tell her as they hand me a plate of mashed tortilla and white cheese that leaves a chile verde burn inside my lips, but she is a bright curious girl and will find this out and at least she doesn’t want to go to the States to scrub floors for idle whites. The inside of the house is painted sky blue with a huge enlarged photograph of the family father on one wall, a skinny awkward-looking man wearing an uncomfortable moustache beneath his nose. Tito is the name of Daniél’s friend, he has joined us now and has already given everyone a quarter of a Dr. Albert Hofmann acid tab which sinks on the top of the tongue making a nice melty glow on the edges of things – all except Blancita, who shows nothing but a mild curiosity for this and most other things we do, but she comes with us crammed in the back seat out into the enormous night of the city that has no end to be seen. Daniél pilots the full car through the streets with a kind of jerky grace, taking fast swerves through screaming traffic lanes and braking hard to shout out questions of directions from policemen taxi-drivers old sandbag-faced men on the side of the road and behind us is a second car of merry tequila-drinkers driven by a Mexico City rich girl with the biggest most darkest shining eyes I have ever seen… also in our vehicle have materialized this pretty little girl in white with fur boots and feathered earrings whose name is Palomita, Little Dove, and beside me is a gangly Californian with dreadlocks that hang below his waist, he speaks atrocious Spanish in a gnarly voice and is a friend of Tito from the deserts of San Luis Potosí, a meeting similar to myself and Daniél in the mountains of Oaxaca – and now all of us together in this battered car with a broken bumper heading high above the soaring city lights towards the hills on the edge of town.

Corbenz is the name of this strange Californian dude, Blancita can’t get enough of his dreadlocks, ‘rastas’ she calls them, she wants rastas like she wants the excitement of everything else in the world – “¿ya comiste?” Daniél asks him, “have you eaten?” meaning a Hofmann of course, and he replies in his high surf drawl “nooo, not yeyt.” He sounds unsure of himself when he speaks and I wonder if maybe he isn’t into that scene, but later find out that he’s come to this city specifically to sell LSD and is at present carrying a book of fifty tabs in a plastic pouch secreted in his badly-fitting jeans. We are climbing a long steep slope and the city has slipped away and now there are trees and parking cars and we pull up outside the high wall from behind which come the first dull thumps of this night’s party. The men at the gate wants two hundred pesos entrance fee per person, seems this is some kind of huge rich private house, though it looks more like a conference hall or some kind of university extension – half our people go ahead and pay but Daniél and this big-lipped man Ángel in a low red hood tell me to wait, it’s too much, something can be arranged. Daniél has that quiet, convinced smile, it means he has a little plan and he knows that it will work, that everything will always go just right in one way or another, so we hover in the car-park for a long time watching then movements of security men. He waits until a fat one in a suit is walking past and then slips close speaking to him in a familiar conspiratorial tone – the man shakes his head, ignores him and walks swiftly on. Daniél smiles like this is exactly what he wanted, and soon the guard walks past again and the exact same thing occurs. It happens two or three more times, “he isn’t interested,” I try to say, but then an even bigger man arrives and some kind of negotiation starts – I can’t follow it all but Daniél is nodding and Biggy is frowning and then the guy motions us to follow and leads us straight to the front of the queue, stamps our necks with ‘pagado,’ ‘paid’ in red ink and we are inside the garden for the price of only two hundred pesos for the three of us. I give thanks to Mexican corruption. In this country there is always a way, and this I am beginning to discover is one of the secrets of Daniél’s steady smile. Everything is possible and the rules are not straight, not rigid like the rules of the West, but curved at the edges allowing all sorts of loops and slips and shortcuts for those who know their ways. Our friends are already dancing and the garden is filling up nicely, there is an empty swimming pool and a giant screen throwing psychedelic patterns out to the moving crowd – this is drugs by numbers, I think, sanitised hallucinogenics, these people require no imagination only a computer-generated self-repeating pattern for commercialised trip experience, but later find out that this screen has its place and significance in the night after all.
Half a tab more each is on our tongues and settling nicely into the steady pounding earth-thump beat and soon the straight lines and edges are melting down like the Mexican rulebook and budh, budh, budh the night begins to flow. The secret is the bending out of time, the leaving behind of thoughts memories stages and logistics and the entering into the true state of trance, it is a ritual like any other towards a state of grace and it is happening smoothly all around inside various people slowly blending into this one timeless dance affair. Corbenz is off suggesting acid to unlikely customers in his incapable Spanish and before me a girl is doing a dance that looks like a complicated pattern of signals, her feet planted firmly on the ground and her arms clicking sharply from one set position to the next, Palomita beside her dancing in wild loops and out-of-keel finger switches and I look and look away and look back and she has gone into what must be some kind of ritual ancestor bird pose – little dove in white feathers looping rapidly around the fixed pole of her own spine and high stamping foot rotations. Yes this is a ritual of dance patterns played out according to the needs of this arcane collective of strangers – for example the girl performing the dance of the deer and here I am with heavy plodding feet connecting directly to earth, until perhaps the crowd needs air and my body code changes of its own accord and now I have to do this wind dance. Daniél perhaps is water with his streaming black hair curls and waterfall wrist involvement. I realize I am high as ever have been. Breaking from the beat to negotiate a strip-lit toilet corridor that looks like a wing of a mental institution and my feet are smooth sliding entities of their own doing all the walking for me. The crowd rejoined and wait, this is not a crowd, hours have passed now, time enough for the merger to take place and what I see is a single entity before me, one living organism pumping fluctuating in light filaments like a great amoeba under an electric microscope. I will not allow my arms to overlap the thing before me, I don’t want to join it that completely, Daniél hands me half an Albert H or is it quarter in my teeth and I am inside the body politic already, nothing to be done when the beat is the moving blood and the beat is inside me and so what can I be but just another muscle in this one organic mass. When I close my eyes I get a complicated pattern of bent legs in herringbone trousers and brown suede shoes tessellating swiftly, I think the psychedelic screen is getting through my eyelids so I keep them wide and open, but no this is my own brain throwing patterns to my cortex when I move.

Before me these three guys are busily eating some kind of powdered crystals, they look devoted and serious like monks around a holy cup, I don’t know what it is but maybe it’s what causes this other man with a 1950s haircut suddenly to flip and rip himself violently out of the body polyp with an awful snarl like an animal mask. He stares and wheels around, sidesteps, leaps like something is flying towards him, my god he looks utterly possessed – he breaks away from helping hands and dashes into the crowd, pulling himself up to stare wildly at faces then swinging round as if he can’t bear what he sees. The viscera of the living crowd collapses with his breakdown leaving a torn vacuum space like a scar as he leaps and gurns and rolls his nightmared eyes. Hold him down, he needs help, fleeing up the garden now then returning shirtless and jerking as if his sense of time has splintered and all he sees is a sickening fragmentation. Some demon is pursuing him up and down the crowd, leaping out to grin from behind innocent faces then vanishing before he can get a hold on the ghastly thing – it distresses me to see this, though Daniél is laughing because Daniél laughs at everything. And then both him and his demon are gone, I can’t see how or where, leaving the hole he made to slowly close as people move back in like skin cells rejoining in a wound, and good energy pumps back in like blood reoxygenated. And as dawn filters through the trees the colours grow in this trembling unreal brainlight, only the survivors left now huddling close around the speakers, and I see as Daniél motions me closer to the core that there are four DJs behind a bank of decks – so there are actually people making that sound, it didn’t even occur to me. And now the trampled grass is a kaleidoscope and the skin of Corbenz is glowing with flat supernatural light – the sunlight opens to a field of dancing people in luminous jackets and M C Escher pattern trousers and everyone is hiding behind ridiculous dark glasses – a bizarre collection of night creeps and rave specimens caught by daylight. And soon this living mass will break up and disperse again into its separate elements like polyps breaking and dividing back into the city of twenty nine million other component cells…

…

Sacbe

Company

“Hello man. I am Marco, this is Maki. We come this afternoon. We see your stuff, we know someone is here. We wonder where you gone. This is nice place, eh, lot of work gone into this. Where you sleep, up there? We can sleep down here, but there is scorpions, no? Don’t matter, we sleep down here, we bring blankets. How long you been here, man? I am Marco, this is Maki.” He motioned towards the kitchen table, where someone was rising.

Maki was one of the most beautiful people I have ever seen, a slender, moon-faced Japanese girl dressed in light, flowing fabrics with a silk scarf draped over her head. She smiled at me as if we were already friends, while Marco ushered me into the house as if it was already his.

In the short time they had been here, they had made themselves at home. Their bags had been emptied across the room, and food was cooking in a pot above the gas ring.

“What you doing here, man? You working, looking after the place? That’s good, man, it’s a nice place. Are you hungry? We’re making something now. We feed the dogs already, and tomorrow we work with you in the garden. I am from Sicily, Maki is from Japan. Where you from? How you find out about this place?”

It seemed that they had just turned up here. They had been staying at some sort of community in a nearby valley, and a friend had told them that this was a good place to stay, so they followed some directions and arrived, as I had. The resentment I immediately felt at the appearance of strangers into what had become my seclusion vanished very quickly. They were friendly, they were interesting, and they were here. There was little more to say about it.

Over dinner, which Marco cooked and served, I found out they were jewellers, making their way through the country trading stones. Marco talked rapidly. His friendliness was almost aggressive in its intensity, while Maki spoke in a soft, considered manner, choosing her words well and taking her time. Between them they balanced each other. After we had eaten, Maki and myself talked longer at the table, while Marco retired to the far end of the room to pluck intensely at a guitar, sometimes glaring up to demand our attention.

“That fucking man, he’s too much. That fucking man…” Maki would murmur now and then, lovingly.

Later that night, in a similarly tender way, she christened me Nick-Mock, which she said was a brand of Asian instant noodle.

I settled to life with company as quickly as I had settled to life alone. We would wake early, before the sun had breached the mountain, and brew strong coffee. One of us would see to the chickens and check for eggs. When the sunlight had reached the balcony the two of them would engage in long, self-absorbed ceremonies of yoga and meditation until I had finished watering the fruit trees, and then Maki would bring from her bag a special wooden box and commence her slow, practised ritual of rolling a joint, which we shared gazing out at the hills and the sky, the forest, the green valley. Mostly Marco would talk; a confused, intriguing babble about life, religion, death, the Mafia, reincarnation and prophesy. Him and Maki would often talk over one other, interrupting and disagreeing constantly. It was a while before I understood that it wasn’t an argument, but simply their method of communication.

“Take,” he would demand, thrusting his hand out.

“Give,” she would snap in reply. And the two of them would burst out laughing.

After another joint, perhaps, the greens and the golds of the garden vivid now, soaked in colour, we would work on whatever needed doing. We worked in silence and apart from each other, breaking off for smokes or siestas, returning to the house when the light had left the garden. Sometimes we finished early and walked up to the hills, or caught the bus to town for food supplies. In the evenings we wore shoes inside the house in case of scorpions. Charming, arrogant Marco would cook, because he believed himself to be the best, jealously guarding his kitchen space and issuing directives for assistance. After eating he played Gypsy tunes on the guitar, while Maki and I played chess with pieces we had chipped from wood. Marco then reclined on the sofa like a king, demanding his bedtime joint. Like many charismatic people, he was also chronically lazy.

“Maki, you make me one joint. You roll it and bring it to me. I deserve it because I cook, that meal was the best meal you ever have in your life. No-one else can cook like me, so now you make me one joint and bring it over here. I’m not getting up, I just lie here, you make me one joint. Maki, here. One joint for Marco, please.”

“I no bring you a joint, you stupid man, you want one then you get up and make it yourself. Stupid lazy man, I no make you anything. Ah, Nick-Mock, he’s too much, that fucking man…”

This is the way the days went by, and soon I had forgotten it was ever any different.

The black dog disappeared for some time. He was old and grey at the muzzle, and we thought perhaps he had gone up to the mountains to die. At around the same time appeared a second white dog, almost identical to the first, sneaking into the garden and sometimes the house to steal food. It was a gaunt, miserable animal, creeping low to the ground with its tail between its legs. We felt sorry for it, until one day it attacked our white dog in a jealous fury, drawing blood. From then on, whenever it appeared, we had to drive it from the garden with a hose.

From the market, under Marco’s instructions, I bought a bag of raw cacao beans. He showed me how to roast and de-husk them, and then grind them down in the cast iron grinder and melt them into thick, dark paste. From this we made a slab of pure chocolate. It was so rich and bitter it was almost a drug, the food of Aztec emperors. We ate a square of this a day, and roasted our own coffee, and were happy.

I witnessed a war between ants. The aftermath of a failed invasion. The black ants were swarming over the rock pile, hunting down the remnants of an invading force. The red ants were scattered and fleeing with stolen eggs in their jaws, trapped in a wasteland of pebbles. When the black ants caught them they worked as a team to bring them in, at least two to pin down each frantically-struggling leg and the rest biting and tugging, dragging their prisoner down into the nest passageways through a blackly teeming hole.

I focused on one ant at a time. One invader broke free from its captors and escaped to the lower levels of the rock pile, only for a fat, brutal spider to hop out from a crack and grab the egg straight from its jaws. Idly, I intervened. I knocked the egg away from the spider and placed it back by the black ants’ hole. They carried it away immediately, and returned to their battles. The miracle passed unnoticed. It was only one small incident in a wider, more desperate war.

I wondered, sometimes, if this intervention might somehow be remembered. A tale passed down through generations; orally, or with hieroglyphics, or however ants record their mythologies.

And still the days went by. There were innumerable chess games. The sun streamed down, the garden grew, the water glugged into the earth. I didn’t write. There was nothing to say. We listened for the white dog fights.

Marco engaged the world in incessant monologue. His enthusiasm and antagonism were limitless. The strength of his beliefs and ideas became aggressive, at times, in its intensity, and could oppress me. There were days when it seemed that Maki and myself were just floating, like bubbles, in the sphere of his personality.

“You can look at something for a long time, man, you can look at something for a long time and not see. You know this? You have to stop looking and start seeing. I’m telling you this. You no want to listen. You can listen for a long time, and not hear. Just listen to me, man, listen to me and see if you hear what I’m saying. I think you no want to hear it. I’m telling you things as they are, perhaps you no want to hear them. But I say them anyway, okay? I say them anyway.”

He passed me the joint with a slight bow, an affectation that was starting to irritate me. The joint went back and forwards, spreading smoke. We were sitting by the door in the warm, sun-soaked room, the day going by around us. I wanted to go outside, to be alone, but couldn’t move. I couldn’t get away from the glare of his attention.

“Some people is spiritually superior to others. That’s what I believe. That is true. You no like me saying it? You think this is bad thing to say? It is true, man. You no like to think about it because it makes you uncomfortable. But listen to me. Are all people equally intelligent? Are they equally healthy, are they equally well? Eh? Then why should everyone be equal spiritually? Some people are on lower level than others, you no understand this? You think this is wrong of me to say? It is true, no?”

The joint swung back my way. It was impossible to argue. I wanted to disagree, but couldn’t summon the conviction. His confidence drained me. It was exhausting, trying to generate enough scepticism to offset him.

“I no say I am the best. I no say that Marco is the most spiritual out of everyone. All I say is that I am on a higher level than many other people. Why can’t I say this? I know it is true. And there are some people on higher level than me. The teachers, the gurus, they are above me, and I am trying as hard as I can to reach their level. I might not do it in this life, but perhaps in the next. Or the one after that. At least I can see things as they are. I am trying, and I think that you are too. Eh? I think that you are trying to do this too, man, but you pretend to yourself that you are not.”

I felt my personality crumbling. It was like being hit repeatedly over the head with a heavy bell. All I could do was shrug, shake my head, and try not to lose myself in the jabble.

He was speaking of Vedic texts he had read, explanations of Babylon and Shiva, karma, Quetzlcoatl, Kali, the Buddha, the Mayan calender codes. In his wanderings over the earth he had picked up gods the way a tourist collects souvenirs. I started to become lost. I couldn’t shake him off me. Sitting there in his amulets, fierce-eyed, relentless, never letting me get a word in.

“I am not free, man. None of us are free. We all pay the price for another incarnation’s past actions. You know this? We are born with this, and we spend our lives trying to escape it. I have lived in caves, man, I have talked to the sadhus of India. You know why the Gypsies left India? Because they turned their backs on Brahmin. That is all we have to do, turn our backs on the things that are weighing us down. But you have to stop looking, man, you have to stop listening. There are no temples, no churches, nothing. You have to start seeing, you no understand this? You have to start seeing, not looking.”

I said I had to walk into the hills. It was an effort of will, to tear myself free from the smoke and from Marco’s exhausting scrutiny. “Hey, I come with you,” he said.

We climbed a tall rock that sprouted, mushroom-like, from the mountain. The evening was cool, the air was calm, and the whole valley green beneath us. Birdsong bubbled like fountains in the pine trees. It felt like we were perched on the edge of a void, looking down on the entire world below.

I listened to him ramble, and it no longer mattered. My exhaustion had peaked and turned to something else. “You create your own universe,” he said, “there’s nothing else, it’s inside you.” From very far away came the clumsy sound of cow bells.

I understood then how a cult starts. Marco’s personality ceased to threaten me. And I was seized, for an instant, by an impulse to hurl myself off the rock into the void before me, to fall through empty space and land unhurt on the pine-covered ground. I wanted to shock him, to interrupt his certainty, his supreme display of will. I wanted to show him that I wasn’t bound by fear.

The fall wasn’t too great. The landing would be gentle. I knew that I could do it, if I did.

I didn’t jump. Thinking back, I should have.

…

Twenty-Nine Million Other Component Cells

Morning

We are back in the car rolling downhill, no sleep just the roads of morning. Miles and miles of sprawl suburbs slums abandoned buildings broken buildings uncompleted buildings, gaunt pylons concrete towers wooden boxes traffic lanes and dogs dogs dogs, pillars girders cars cars cars and Daniél surely driving. On and on through the terminal collapse of this enormous city – old women in shawls setting up for the day selling batteries chewing-gum whatever useless junk – a dog twists jerking on the side of the road with a broken back? or only scratching? maybe it broke its back scratching – someone has built a stack of kennels outside the house where we drop silent Ángel, a towerblock of scabby canines guarding who knows what, adios Ángel, then a ride past huge connected sections of concrete piping like a giant worm struggling from the polluted ground – the Aztec feathered serpent writhing in tarmac deathtrap – here the road is actually comprised of rubbish, metal ring-pulls and plastic bags set into the surface as the tarmac heats and cools, and here by a yard of cactus pots and abandoned signs we drop Tito and Paloma, buenos caminos amigos, good roads, little dancing dove and Toti-Tito… it is only myself and Corbenz left in the car and Daniél’s navigation. There is no hope of sleep, not even breakfast, we are heading straight to another party. Can there be? It’s seven-thirty a.m, the poor hardworking people of Mexico City are going out to scratch a living for the day, but it’s true it seems there’s word of a gathering of souls still happening in the hills two hours drive away – Corbenz makes his phone call, we stop at a scrap tienda for a gulp of precious water then straight off, what else can we do, but not before picking up more people – the second shift comes on in electric morning – and now meet Raphael who I rechristen Papa Moai after a character from Max Cannon’s Red Meat – he looks like an Easter Island head, he has the strangest-shaped skewed flapped ears and long soft putty nose, dressed all in yellow and carrying a glass jar of peyote cactus enriched in Vitamin D – my god – and next to him his girlfriend also in yellow behind enormous robotic sunglasses. It is now I notice that old friend Corbenz has eyes that have somehow knocked themselves out of alignment – his pupils float two different ways – he is like a long stringy animal with this little mouth that is always readjusting itself and black crust on his lips, frequently licking and tasting his fingers as if there is something very interesting on them – perhaps they are soaked in LSD – and here we are on Venture Number II heading out of the city through rubbish fields and carriageways and stagnated water systems filled with scum and fallen tyres.

We pass a vast plain of scrapped automobiles, mounds of burning rubbish, and all I can think is “once this was a land of beautiful lakes.” I become anxious, where in hell are we going, how is this land ever going to heal itself? Answer, it cannot, there are too many people, too much concrete, too many plastic bags, it has reached a critical mass where all anyone can do is carry on polluting, there is no possible point trying to clean or restructure or recycle this mess, it’s beyond help, beyond nature, the land is dead or dying. The vast bowl of the Valley of Mexico, filling up with toxic waste and toxic people, endlessly spilling over – less than a millennium ago the wandering Aztecs found their promised land (an eagle killed a serpent on a cactus, why did this have to mean anything?) and cities were formed, vast centralised cities and absolute religion – and then the Spaniards came slaughtered pulled down every edifice and paved their own cruel city with the slabs of this destruction, reassembled cathedrals out of temples with the building blocks of brick-by-brick religion. I am caught in the endless flow of the road, the drugs still working through me, and am just wondering what would happen if for some reason now I was stranded here, abandoned goon with a skull full of light and twenty pesos left, not enough for a bus or bribing a ride, no food, no water, how long until collapse? And now and then the weird sight of sweet green tended fields and donkey carts nestled under motorway flyovers, scraps of last available arable land still eking a survival though the very sucking roots of wheat and maize must grow in sewer water. The car screeches to many halts and Papa Moai leaps out between rolling and smoking huge joints of sticky weed to ask directions from expressionless men in white shirts and sombreros, a scrawled map on a scrap of paper bag and his big arms flapping in the sunlight – this place does not exist, I think, and wonder why it is I am not hungry just as we finally pull in up a long dirt road and here is a field of broken machinery a line of cars and inside the confines of an old stone boundary wall are two hundred people waving their arms beneath the wide blue cloud-encompassed sky.

It is ten a.m, the sun is high and what is there to do but join the beat, dance ourselves out of all fatigue, and Corbenz tears in three another magic tab and here we go once more back into melty all-connecting liberty – and this certainly is a crowd of party loons, disco beads and desert boots and luminous skirts and light-reflecting robes, and in the middle some kind of dancing dervish with a wrapped-up head and multicoloured Arab scarf all flapping in the breeze. The backdrop is rising smoke and hills and some kind of drystone barn giving the impression of a delinquent farmyard lost its goose and invaded by mad children – “tu camisa es muuy boniiita” from a sleek haired jiggling little man in campesino trousers, he wants to buy the shirt off my back, my patterned blue magician’s shirt that doesn’t make sense to the eye, I tell him not for sale, it was a gift from “mi amigo mejor en el mundo” and he happily shakes my hand and dances off, I see him later in Dionysian whirl ecstatic leapings tongue flapping like an Aztec god pumping the music with his hands drawing the rhythm back with an outstretched arm then delivering a single thrust smash kick to the air at the exact moment that the music breaks – he is tuned absolutely, psyched with the sound, how long has this morning run for? I feel like a journalist the Berlin Wall is coming down I am here to witness the most magnificent social implosion. The sun is burning down from high and the single line of shade creeping close against the wall, I consider constructing some kind of hat out of cast-off string and a plastic beer cup but content myself instead with four oranges, the juice of which soaks my hands and turns bitter by degrees until I feel my skin has changed its taste and rub and lick my fingers now as often as Corbenz – speaking of whom he is out there doing his shuffling dance nose to the ground dreadlocks swinging asking only this patch of ground and a rhythm to keep him moving – and the acid, of course, the acid. I grab Daniél and point to the blackshirted man dancing in his socks with the catfish moustache, recognizing him from two months ago on Mazunte beach in the filthy hostel with cheesecloth curtains classical music sand in the beds and grey fried rice every morning, working for Carlos Einstein that eccentric alcoholic – he has a shifty face and untrustworthy eyes but a coincidence is a coincidence though I suspect him of sudden violence so hug him extra hard so he remembers it. Daniél however has interests elsewhere, a girl with extremely low-hung trousers walking in circles moving her hands as if patiently performing a complicated necessary ritual. Her name is Tanya and she never seems to think too much of me, Daniél however effortlessly draws her in the way he does everything in life so now he smiles lounging in the sun Tanya slung across him her skinny buttocks overlapping her trousers and the man with the stub pipe next to me glances down and frowns and tells me “chica loca” in a disapproving, weary kind of way. And black smoke rises from very far away and high above us a dust typhoon of dazzling trash whirlwinds upwards, glittering in god’s sky…

…

Sacbe

Departure

Marco and Maki took me to visit a friend.

Charlie lived in the valley below, in a sprawling adobe house he had spent the last twenty years building. He was one of the many people I met in this land who seemed to be escaping from something. “I got away from the political scene long ago,” was one of the first things he told me, leaning into me with bulging eyes. “I got away from all that bullshit, and since then, Christ, since then I’ve done fifteen years straight mysticism.” And he laughed in his mad, hilarious way, as if he was laughing at himself. And through himself, somehow, at the world.

His appearance was almost embarrassing, until I learned to like him. He had a broken nose, huge white teeth and a tangled yellow moustache. His costume was a straw hat with a red band around it, a tattered vest and wide cotton trousers secured at the waist by a red and white striped cummerbund, into which he stuck a pair of plastic flutes that he carried with him everywhere. He was a natural musician. He made his money busking in the market square and performing “spinal readjustment” massage on the local population, who treated his eccentricities in an affectionate, tolerant manner. He also played the trumpet in the town brass band.

The fact that he was quite mad was really beside the point. They were all mad, these lost, gentle people, cluttered by rites and superstitions, the invisible connections that held them all together. They floated round the world like ghosts, like children, the satellites of a forty-year old social explosion. Scattered populations of freak pioneers, grown old and kept alive by yoga. This land was full of sweet, ridiculous people, and Charlie was the sweetest, most ridiculous of all.

And yet there was also a sadness to him. He carried it in his eyes, like a mule. There was sadness in all of them, these people. As if they had ventured too far, and had forgotten how to get back.
Sometime towards the end of these final days at Granja Sacbe – for already many weeks had passed, and I was leaving soon – Charlie led us up the magnetic mountain.

“It’s the birthplace of the Feathered Serpent, Quetzlcoatl,” he said. “One of the natural points of energy in the world. The rock is a gigantic battery. You can feel the magnetism go through you. It’s the mountain of light, the rock temple. That’s why I came to this valley, and stayed so long. That’s why all these people stay. The magnetism holds them here, like iron filings. This is where we go to be restored.”

To get there we took several buses, winding higher and higher through the hills. Charlie played his flutes all the way, grinning and whistling at the fascinated children, while the women watched him silently with impenetrable black eyes. We arrived at last in a shambling village that clung to the edge of the mountain, and Charlie strode from the bus with his bags like a conquering hero.

“Let’s announce our arrival,” he said in his playful, serious way, and blew a sudden blast on a conch shell. The sound resounded, deafeningly loud, through the streets and out into the valley, reverberating off columns and pillars of rock and eventually dying out across the plains. Immediately, from all around us, donkeys started braying.

Charlie threw back his head and laughed delightedly. “Them donkeys know we’re here!” Having truly shattered the morning peace, he set off at an eager pace up the steep dirt road. People stared from doors and windows at his passing. He seemed utterly unaware of the extraordinary appearance he cast.

He wasn’t a young man, but he bounded ahead of us and his steps grew lighter as we ascended. “Let’s let the mountain know we’re coming!” he cried now and then, wielding his conch like a trumpet and sending waves of sound throbbing out towards the far horizon. The replies of the donkeys grew more urgent. Maki laughed constantly, while Marco ambled after in a detached, contented manner. We passed through high green forest and eventually out, onto the boulder-strewn summit. There was no sound but the insects’ droning. Trees cast delicate, wavering shadows in the morning light.

I can’t remember how long we stayed there, at the peak of the magnetic mountain. I can’t remember what we did, or what we talked about. There are several images that remain with me, and that is all. The play of shadows on Maki’s beautiful, moon-clear face; the light shifting behind the leaves of slender trees. The peacefulness of Charlie as he meditated, his lumpen features smoothed and calmed, made still; and the sadness, too, in his eyes, when they opened once more on the day. Maki and Charlie playing flutes together, bound to one another by a thin red rope, staring into each other’s eyes. Marco on top of a high, solitary rock, sitting with his back to us, gazing invisibly outwards; Marco and himself, Marco and the void, Marco and the nothingness of clouds.

The image of a bird, the images of ants. A butterfly landing on a stone.

I have no images of myself. I know I was there, because I carry these things. The real things only pass away.

And the magnetism? Yes, I was held there, for a time. I was held there, and later let go.

Twenty-Nine Million Other Component Cells

Day

It doesn’t end. No food for fifteen, what, twenty waking hours now not even the oranges which I ate one of juggled three of dropped and gave away. We are back in the car, Tanya Loca in the passenger seat, sliding down the long hot road and Daniél has this idea we must go directly now to the pyramids. Teotihuacán, Teotihuacán, a city that was great before the Aztecs, a place so immense even the zealot Catholics left it standing – no cathedral in the world could be built with that sheer weight of rock – so we roll up music pumping hanging from the windows in the car-park of Sunday afternoon tourists throwing us strange glances especially Corbenz constantly moving his long fingers as if making tiny adjustments to the air. They require identification at the gate, I have none, can hardly be expected to identify anything at this late stage, and Daniél tries to bargain but rules are rules until he simply looks the man in the eye and asks him “¿por favor?” “Si,” the guard replies and in I walk. And I realize that this is what I love about this country, the simple human contact, this is a people who have not yet been smothered and stifled by the ghastly regulation of the West, it occurs to me that what we call corruption is perhaps a sign of a healthy population responsible for its own inactions and unbound by all the petty laws that make our lives so tight – the simplicity of that por favor touches me deeply and makes me wish that the culture of my home could hear it too and recognize it for what it really is – not a sign of unprofessional behaviour but an instance of human decency, Common Trust, Common Touch, Common Tenderness and Common Tranquility in Allen Ginsberg’s words.

But there is no thinking now of laws or the lack of them, not once inside that ticket gate, for we are walking with high clear eagle vision down the Avenue of the Dead, the Temple of the Feathered Serpent rising up before us, and petty regulations surely never existed here – Common Tenderness can’t survive on steps as sharp as these, the rigid angularity of Aztec geometry, the insane mathematics. This is a place of power, sure, I feel it in the guts and hair, and “mira el espiral” says Papa Moai pointing at the pyramid before us, and surely enough yes it coils like a serpent from its massive heavy base, twisting up wrapped around itself slowly tightening and I see gigantic snakeskin DNA helix galaxy spiral whirlwind plughole the shape at the centre of it all. Walking slowly up the awful avenida kinglike now and imagine the sacrifice lines thousands of captives deep stretching up to that bloody altar in the burning god of sun, no room for little rules here, no space for health and safety, this was a place of absolute ritual where blood meant more than blood and every action held a meaning – the energy of a gigantic stylised dance and the night comes back to me beat by beat and could this be the very first touch of exhaustion? I am putting one foot in front of the next up the Pyramid of the Sun, the centre of the universe is here, the impossible mass of stone bearing down on the weight of the world. Arms stretched in our separate spaces we have reached the top and stand to crepuscular rays tearing down on this ancient land, Tanya Loca curls up like a foetus on the rock with Daniél’s smile on her lips, everyone is silent in the heat of the sky and I find myself sat in temple position cool-eyed brain-high in primary stages of a wise one.

It’s just too huge. That’s all I can think. And why was it built, was it really just power manifestations of a priestly class, absolute belief and slave labour? The pyramids of the sun and moon aligned exactly, the four directions of the earth, and endlessly played out, the lines of that energy, on and on. On and on, we are halfway to the Temple of the Moon plodding flat yellow grass beneath our feet drawing no closer to the edifice which grows no bigger no matter how far we seem to struggle, and here we have been joined by three more representatives of Mexican drug culture who are drawn by the dreadlocks of Corbenz, these signifiers there for anyone to see who knows. Hyperactive Éric in red with gold earrings, neck hung heavy with talismans crucifixes religious medallions, silent baleful Éric in black with mushrooms on his back who stares at the earth in a kind of gloomy horror and never says a word, reminding me of my poor ex-junkie neighbour when he went through his paranoid year, and this bright-eyed Chiapan girl with white velcro space-boots packed with marijuana, ecstasy inside her bra and a t-shirt covered in pictures of sperm and the words ‘¡esperma go go go!’ She glances at me curiously smiling, by this point I am far beyond the use of words, all I can do is float and gaze and all of us go to the top of these high tiered steps for the inevitable ritual of smoking. Daniél and Tanya are no longer behind us, they have vanished completely, my energy is dipping to below the level of function, I still am not in the least bit hungry but running on emergency stores of chemicals or travelling inertia. There is something strange about this Éric delegation, witness the doll they carry with them carefully like a very honoured guest, a hideous-faced imp leering with an expression of absolute squirming delight and it stares right at me as Éric Black sits it precisely leaning up against a rock, I try to ask its name for the sake of friendliness but the girl just looks at me kindly as if she doesn’t understand a word I say. The little ugly imp has green clothes and luminous orange hair and appears to be on the point of bursting into manic giggle fits, the girl is adjusting its hands, smoothing its hair, she sits it on her knee to share the joint with its little piggy eyes dancing in almost orgasmic pleasure. I look away, I am burning out. We still have one more pyramid to climb. Daniél is nowhere to be seen in the sinking light of this late afternoon.

Three quarters of the way up the Pyramid of the Moon, me, Papa Moai, Éric Red, Corbenz, a small fat guard is trying to turn us back, it’s closing time, the rules are rules and I haven’t got the stomach to climb another step or outwait the guard with psychology tricks as Éric is gleefully planning, I need sleep now, I have to sleep, or at the very least have sleep as a future possibility, but I am in the company of the most distracted people in the world and the pyramids are too vast to even stagger. A small crowd gathers. The guard blows his whistle in a fury. I feel myself grow desperate, I find my fists are clenched, I suddenly want to scream and tell myself to stay calm, find peace, indifference, Common Tranquillity, but we are hours and hours away from anyplace and can’t they understand how tired I am? This feels like the start of a hysteria. Perhaps I can crawl off in the grass and rest, lie down for one sweet moment, but no the long walk back has begun and the sun is an orange ball and above the pyramid the entire volcano mountainside is purple red, glowing with falling power. I keep myself together, one foot then another, and the dead avenue is a giant landing strip for the aeroplane that is myself, wings outstretched, coming down smoothly from this reeling high to solid land once more, taxiing down the runway, that’s good, I’m landing safely, but what is that madman doing now raiding a bin for rubbish scraps what on earth can he be looking for? Éric Red surfaces triumphantly with a brown paper bag and diverts everyone into a long expanse of grass and gentle feathered trees, “one joint for the journey” says Papa Moai firmly, sensing the return of my anxiety and what else can I do but sink to the ground and stay there? Chiapan girl is ringing a tiny silver bell on a green stick and Éric Black is sitting up the doll against a wood stump, I try to stop it looking at me turn away roll over in the dust I am starting to feel hysterical again, with a great conscious effort of will pull my resources around myself and concentrate on breathing. With one side of the brown paper bag Papa Moai is rolling up one of the biggest blifters I have ever seen, it’s as fat as a thumb and as long as two index fingers, he’s doing it so very slowly, everything takes so long, the sun is almost sunk and Christ I have to rest. Relax, relax… when it comes my way it enters the lungs with a palpable BOOM I sit up straighter, draw again, feel the strength of it opening up enormous space inside me, I feel my body settling, this numbs the nerves, the sky is creamy yellow and I know I can survive it, I call on hidden powers, time will pull me along with it now no matter how slowly it goes I don’t mind, as long as it doesn’t go backwards and just keeps moving.

Back at the empty car-park Daniél’s vehicle of course is gone, I knew it would be so. But in Mexico everything has this way of working out so into Éric’s tiny car we pile – it’s even smaller than Daniél’s but in we go – seven people, the two girls crammed against the windscreen Papa Moai laid out like a big sponge on top of us three in the back and baleful Éric Black will not even look at me, just glowers away, even though we are practically sharing the same molecules in the air. The car is so heavy it can barely get started, moves slower than a cripple’s walking pace and can hardly even climb the speed bumps let alone what will we do if we come to an actual hill – and a huge speaker behind me pumps bass so loud and low it seems to slow the engine even more, barely crawling we boom along the side of the road old faces staring from lighted doorways “what is this generation doing?”, and Éric Red is laughing driving ecstatic waving arms rolling joints at least we’re actually moving – but now oh lord the car is sputtering to a halt, we’re out of petrol, of course we are out of petrol what else could have happened but running out of petrol on a day like now? – but finally I am beyond caring in the least and can only stand on the kerb and smile as traffic zooms on past me. And then one of those things happens that always happens when you decide that nothing matters in the end after all – Éric Red is off to find petrol up the road with the very last coins of my money, I have nothing left but a metro ticket and even that is so creased and bent I doubt it will fit in the machine – and out of nowhere screeches a familiar white car with a badly hanging bumper and a blaze of lights and here comes Daniél leaping from the driving seat hugging me laughter all over his face. And before I can even comprehend this luck we are screaming back into Mexico City lights together and Daniél is happy and smiling because everything always goes just right, mad Tanya beside him playing with his hair and giggling unstoppably in a way that sets my teeth on edge but a small price to pay for this beautiful ride towards shelter, Corbenz is trying to explain at great length about bad vibrations from that hideous doll and Éric Black was planning to kill him in the back seat of the Beetle – quite possibly, who knows, nothing matters, only the salvation of protein ahead and hot water in the shower and the cool sheets of my hostel bed. There are multiple stoppages along the road like the bumper falling off and meeting in suspicious lay-bys for hasty joints and swapping drivers getting lost and changes of direction, but after all of everything they drop me outside the fence around the metro line and all I have to do is climb the bars jump over and beyond all hope my ticket works just perfect and soon I am sliding along underground alone feeling like a creature washed up on a beach in this smooth clean strange contraption…

A boy gets on at one stop and takes up position by the door. He has torn shoes and tiny battered hands and without looking at anyone he begins reciting Bible verses, a strange inhuman monologue that goes on and on like a programmed machine and this spectacle is altogether too ghastly to contemplate. He holds out his hand. I have nothing left to give. I really have nothing left. The subterranean lights stream past, I have nothing, the tunnel sucks me onwards with a ghostly roar, I close my eyes, he holds out his hand. No tengo nada, nada, nada. Nothing left at all.

…

The Exact Same Sensation As This

“You know what it is about this lake?” she asked me, this girl whose name meant happiness. “It gets into your blood. It will stay with you. I don’t think you can leave.” We were sitting on a camp bed in a low-ceilinged room, and the rain on the tin roof sounded like buckets of falling nails. She was holding a lime I had picked from the dripping tree outside, and she didn’t know what to do with it. She kept turning it around and around in her hands.

In the street we had passed a procession of men. They were bearing a body wrapped in blankets down the muddy streaming road. They sailed past us like a boat, very quiet, even courteous. No-one spoke. She accompanied me back to the room and didn’t leave. She said when she slept alone she had nightmares. Her face felt hot from across the bed, and her breath was very fast. I felt like reaching out to her and I did reach out to her. She froze. The rain clattered down on the roof and on the lake, and perhaps I had already been there for hundreds of days. Half a year later and I feel like saying to her now: “well, happiness, I left.”

I swam in the lake each morning, before the rain. The walk took me through narrow mud pathways between houses, past the orange juice sellers and the little girls who sold banana bread, over a rise of tangled greenery and from there down to the boulders. The drop was high enough that I could feel the frightened flinch of nerves inside my feet, and the shock of the cold water smacked all sleep out of my body. I would swim out far from the rocks and turn a full, slow circle, taking in the mountains and the clouds, the unreal green of the volcanoes, the white smoke hanging over the villages. Men fished in small angular canoes, very far apart from one another, with no sound. Further down along the boulders there would be a row of women washing clothes.

A lump of white volcanic rock floated past me. The women used them to scrub out stains. I took it back to where I was staying, and later a little bearded man carved it into a flower with six petals. He was half German and half Italian, and he told me that his surname meant dwarf. He was about the height of a dwarf, but slimmer, and better balanced. We smoked local mota rolled in fresh tobacco leaves, and one day he announced that he was going to climb the volcano to fast for three days on water and cocaine, and after that I never saw him again.

I couldn’t walk out of the room without losing myself. The town was like an unfinished thought, a directionless sprawl of pathways that meandered from the lakeside to the slope of the mountain, disappearing into coffee plantations at one side and fields of maize at the other, or else abruptly ending. Everything was disconnected, but the place somehow managed to function. It was like a socket with all the wires pulled out but the circuit still complete.

“I own this fucking town! I own this whole damn country!” He was screaming incoherently at a crowd of totally expressionless people, this American with a too-smooth face. I stood up to get a better look at him. He shouted, “sit down, fucking sit down, I can have you killed! I can have anyone in this town killed!” and also, “in ten minutes I can have two hundred Indians down here to cut you into pieces with machetes.” I sat down. His fury was so great it caused him to swagger around in a circle like a bee. But he didn’t look convincing in his anger. Anger didn’t really suit his face. In the crowd there was a tiny old lady wearing the traditional traje of the town, watching with an expression of tired bemusement. I found out later that she was his landlady, and it had originally been an argument about the rent.

After a while he marched off to a small wooden shed beneath a tree and shut himself in there for some time. He came out with a meek, not-quite-apologetic smile, shook hands with a couple of people, and left. I saw him again the next day, wearing a pair of white trousers. A boy was selling him some mangos.

I spent most of my time wandering, the same as everybody else. There weren’t many places to end up at, because all the pathways met and turned back on themselves and brought me to the same place that I started. Or else they would turn into something entirely unexpected – a wide paved street would end up as a track through a maize field, or a scrubby paddock with horses grazing – and from there I wouldn’t know how to get back. Between the top of the town and the mountain was a forest of low trees with discarded plastic bags carpeted beneath them, and occasionally there would be a wall and a yard with chickens and dogs in it and dark-eyed children staring. When I met people up there they would look at me with polite curiosity, although there was something so deep and impenetrable in their eyes I knew that I hardly existed. I wasn’t much more than a ghost to them. I would stay for a time and then leave – for what purpose they would never understand – and afterwards no memory of me would remain.

It was a town of two populations. One always left and the other always stayed. One had existed here forever and always would do, keeping maize and pigs and chickens, fishing in the lake, praying in their churches, washing their clothes with fragments of volcano. Their eyes were silent, inward eyes that gave away nothing. They were dense, close people with hands like shovels, opaque people with skin as heavy as clay.

The other population were the drifters, who did not really seem to exist anywhere. They were transparent people with no substance, nothing to weigh them down. They came and went, and it didn’t matter. It was this population that I was a part of, although at the time I didn’t really feel a part of anything. Everyone had peculiarly bright eyes.

In the evenings when it didn’t rain the sky would turn pink, and glow luminous with the clouds. Bare bulbs would come on in blank-walled rooms. The silhouettes of vultures could be seen hunched in treetops. In the yard outside the room where I was staying, different people would come for a while and settle. Every night a new community formed by the huge green leaves, and there may have appeared a hammock or guitar, a chess game, milk powder, a different type of marijuana. Things would come and go with the need. Smoke would rise from the cooking fires, the dogs would yelp between the buildings, and children would pass carrying baskets on their heads or buckets of maize for grinding. There was always a radio, somewhere; the incessant, manic sound of the marimba.

I became friends with an electrician who was trying to rewire the lights of a hostel. He got electrocuted several times a day. He had been there for seventeen months, and had studied with a local shaman, and didn’t know whether or not to go home. “I was sleeping with a girl from the village,” he told me one night when we were sitting on the roof. “Something happened that scared me too much. We were kissing in the street – passionately, furiously – and then suddenly we were both thrown backwards away from each other, like a magnetic repulsion. And in that instant her face was transformed into something… hideous. I don’t know what I believe in any more, but I saw something that I shouldn’t have seen. I think I saw her demon. And then she hurried off, and after that I never spoke to her again. Whenever we passed in the street she would cross over to the other side. But listen, the thing that really terrified me wasn’t that I saw hers. It was that she must have seen mine as well.” I liked this man because he seemed less lost than most of the people here, less loose and purposeless. Perhaps it was something to do with his hands, which were hard, clever hands, hands that would be capable of everything.

The other thing he told me was how to get connected in this town. “It’s cheap here, and very pure. There’s a yellow door on this street at the top of the town, and if it’s open, you go in. You’ll meet the lady. Ask for concepción.”

I found the yellow door the next evening. It was in the wall of a building next to a low, sunken bar, where men sat on empty boxes drinking beer. I stepped inside the door, and was greeted in the hallway by a six-year old child. The lady was his grandmother, a very gentle old woman with a thick embroidered skirt and incredibly shiny black hair. I said the word concepción and she led me to the scales, measuring out the powder with great care. When all was done she took me to the street, smiling happily, and touched me on the shoulder as I went. There was a power-cut, so everything was lit by candles which threw shuddering shadows on the walls. Faces looked medieval in that yellow, smoky light.

One night I found a giant moth clinging to the outside of my door. Its body was as fat as two thumbs, and its wings were large enough to have flown a bird. It remained there for about three days, staying completely still. The French-Canadian film-maker in the room next to mine watched it for a long time. “That’s a big moth,” he kept saying.

Everyone seemed to be getting away from something. I used to go to a small bar run by Israelis avoiding military service. My little Italian German friend would normally be there, and a grinning Frenchman who carried on his shoulder a kitten with very sly eyes. At one table there sat an old man with a flowing white beard, doling out hallucinogenic mushrooms. These people were all linked, somehow. They were part of that same transparent world. I would sit at the edge of a table, on the fringes of the room, and drift between the real and the imagined. I could almost feel myself passing in and out of solidity, being placed and displaced recurrently. There was no way of telling where one thing ended and the other began. But I liked this sense of vagueness, for the time.

It was in this bar that I met the girl whose name meant happiness.

Sometimes I would go down to the jetty where the boats came in. Their engines made no sound until they got up close to shore, swallowed by the vastness of the lake. I would watch the different people disembarking, congregating for a minute on the dockside while they gazed around, and then dispersing their separate ways into the town. It was a constant flow of people in and out, one face continually being replaced by another. On the steps leading down to the jetty there would be a ragged group of jembe drummers, some little girls with their baskets of sweet cakes and banana bread, a couple of dealers here and there, a few touts. Women would be waiting for supplies to be delivered, babies slung tight across their backs. I saw a child who was like a stout little man next to a woman like a stout little child. And the boats would come and then go again, shuttling back and forward through the long, loose afternoons. There was always a part of me that wanted to leave, very urgently at times. And there was always a part of me that wanted to arrive again, with fresh eyes, that saw things newly.

I experienced an intense, unknown nostalgia. I was walking between the mountain and the lake when I came upon this carefully-tended cabbage patch, lying just off to one side of the path. The sky was rough and cloudy, brilliantly blue when it cleared, and the late sunlight was filling the world with a dreamlike luminescence. Something about the scene – the spreading cabbage leaves, the blue, bright air – was so incredibly familiar, intimate, almost, that my chest gave a stab of pain so sweet it hurt me. I can identify four times when this has happened before, the exact same sensation as this. It has something to do with boulders, pebbles, rivers – a memory, perhaps, buried very deep – and an unreal intensity of light. It has something to do with strung-out washing, things flapping in the wind, and scattered bits of rubbish over green, green grass. Everything is sharp and tightened, achingly familiar. It is not beauty. It feels more like history.

“There is something familiar about those cabbages,” I thought or perhaps said, when I saw them. And afterwards I wrote that down.

An old man in a shed at the top of the town made me a pair of sandals. He measured my feet by drawing around them on a sheet of newspaper, and when I came back the next day they were finished. The straps were leather, attached to the soles with tiny nails. The soles were cut-out pieces of car tyre. He was a proud, dignified old craftsman, with a creased face and well-trimmed white moustache, and he wanted me to give him my hat. I told him he couldn’t have it.

I can’t, from this distance, place any of these things in proper order. Everything went round in loops and spirals. The lake was beautiful, the people were beautiful, and everyone was lost. I had only the vaguest sense that time was passing. There was a kind of numbness to it all, attributed only in part to the cocaine, which passed as a constant undercurrent through the town and through people’s personalities. It was also caused by the isolation of the place, the frozen beauty of it. It was easy to see how people could chance upon this refuge and stay for years – some had been here for decades – simply by forgetting to leave. Nothing seemed to happen at all, but time went by and weeks had passed. No-one was ever aware of this. They had forgotten their shoes and families. Eventually, and probably for no reason at all, they would leave, but there was never any hurry. They would wander out the same way they had wandered in, following the invisible threads of connection that linked even this place to the world.

I climbed the volcano one morning. It was dawn, and I was running on nothing. I had spent the night with two strangers, a jewellery-maker and an artisan, in a dimly-lit room of billowing drapes and mosquito nets, blue smoke and diagrammed walls. I was spun. The room was an intense conversation that kept building and building towards something that seemed at the time truly revelatory, something immense, but would always lose its aim and crumble into nothing. It was like approaching the top of a mountain that kept disappearing from view. The lines went back and forward, cathedrals of ideas mounted and collapsed, my body was surrounded by distractions – feathers and idols hanging from strings, dried green leaves, ephemeral sarongs, a drum-skin – religious clutter and endless jabble. Nothing would ever be resolved here. I became lost. When I finally left the room, my mind was buzzing as if electricity was running through it. Sleep was out of the question and I had nowhere else to go, so I ended up taking the main path through the town and following it until it reached its end, then turning round and pacing back again. I saw no-one, just dogs lying in the road like dead things. The night was so black that I could feel it. Walking was effortless, I seemed to be travelling at great speeds, but I managed to tire myself enough to sleep for two hours when I returned to my room, and woke with my brain still doing spirals. I changed my clothes and threw cold water on my face, squinting at the terrible daylight, and went down to the shore of the lake to meet my guide.

It was uphill for three steady hours. We left the last dilapidated houses of the town behind us early, entering the coffee plantations that sprawled up the slope to the fringes of the cloud forest above. The forest ended in deeply-scored ravines of hanging vines and boulders, which in turn gave way to the coolness of pines. We passed through a dead zone of broken, splintered trees, the early morning mist still rising through them. The pain in my muscles turned into something else, converted itself somehow into energy, and the little man guiding me strode steadily ahead never speaking a word. I reached a point beyond exhaustion, a state of numbness in my legs and brain, and this release into mindlessness carried me almost smoothly up the steep final slope to where the trees cleared, leaving only rock. It was so high up it felt like flying. I looked down on the entire wrinkled world.

A man called Raphael took me across a lake. It was dawn, and the mist was rising. The hills looked like the snout of a sleeping crocodile. As he paddled into the mouth of a reed-choked river, Raphael imitated the whistles of birds and the grunts of cocodrillos. Tiny bats scattered from a rotting log. Raphael leapt onto the bank now and then to gather plants – maize and sweetcorn, rushes for making thatch, a handful of lilies for his wife. It was very peaceful. I watched Raphael’s face. He was possessed of kind, sloping features, very open, very calm. It occurred to me that it didn’t look like a face that has lived through a thirty-year war.

Guatemala’s war ended in 1996. There have been less than ten years of peace, and the country is still in recovery. The legacy of that violence shows itself in the regular army checkpoints, the armed police outside every government building, bank or supermarket, the bulletholes in walls and road signs. What is harder to see is the scars on people, other than the one-legged war veterans begging outside expensive shops. Guatemala’s tourist industry is booming – the Maya are the country’s number one tourist attraction. It is hard to remind yourself that every person you see over the age of ten has experienced, in some way, a brutal war.

The civil war started in the 1960’s, but the roots go back a long way before that – right back to the Spanish invasion and the attempted extermination of the original Maya inhabitants. Guatemalan society has long been divided into three sectors – at the top, the descendents of the first conquistadors and European settlers (who still own about 70% of the land) – in the middle, the mixed-race mestizos – and at the bottom of the political and economic hierarchy, the indiginous Maya, who still retain much of their language and traditions after five centuries of foreign colonisation.

The rule of Juan Jose Arevalo, in 1945, was what started the latest wave of conflict between the Maya and their Spanish conquerers. Arevalo was a philosopher who attempted to redistribute much of the land to benefit poorer people, but was strongly opposed by the armed forces – during his six year reign there were 25 coup attempts. Arevalo was succeeded by Colonel Jacobo Guzman in 1951, who tried to go even further in democratising the country – he broke up large private estates and then expropriated vast lands belonging to the US-owned United Fruit Company. This was too much for the USA. A CIA-backed coup toppled the government in 1954, sparking off three decades of military rule, assassinations, secret police repression and war.

The atrocities peaked in the presidency of General Rios Montt, an evangelical Christian who, in the name of stabilisation and anticommunism (this was the height of the Cold War) initiated a “scorched earth” policy that exterminated entire villages in suspected rebal areas. Over 400 villages disappeared from the map completely, and huge numbers of Mayan men, women and children were tortured and murdered. After 1983 this outright genocide died down, but the war continued, with over 100 political assassinations estimated every month. By the time the peace accords were signed in 1996, over 200,000 people – overwhelmingly Maya – had died.

Since then, thankfully, things have improved. The Maya are now bringing the Guatemalan government thousands of dollars a year through tourism. But tensions still exist, and the Maya are still without economic equality or meaningful political power.

One of the hardest hit regions in the war was the northeast El Peten district, home to the ruins of the great Mayan civilisation of Tikal. This was where I met Raphael in his boat on the shores of the lake. Raphael is in his mid-forties, so must have lived through that genocide and known war for the best part of his life. Of course, I did not ask anything about this. I don’t feel I really have the right. I have no way of knowing if he was forced to fight, or was one of the thousands of people arrested and tortured by the US-backed government troops – though as a Mayan man of “combat age” throughout that time, it is surely quite likely. Yet Raphael was one of the gentlest, calmest and kindest people I’ve met on my travels so far. And despite five centuries of foreign invasion, oppression and slaughter of the Mayan people, he welcomed me, a foreigner, unquestioningly.

The thing that really shocks me is the expression on this woman’s face. For her grin doesn’t appear to be one of sadism or cruelty, as we might expect – or even understand – but of happiness. Happiness. She looks happy, as if she’s really enjoying herself. When I first saw it, I couldn’t stop looking at this picture, at the smile on her face, trying to work out just what was going through her mind. Trying to understand how she could possibly detach her compassion and humanity so completely from the bloodied, broken body on the floor.

I suppose it could be attributed to the brutalising nature of the army, the desensitisation of warfare, and the steady demonisation of Arabs in the Western media. But I also think it has a lot to do with certain Western ‘values’ themselves, and the way in which our culture has grown to perceive itself in recent years.

In Tuesday’s G2, I came across an interesting feature by David Aaronovitch, responding to an earlier article by Susan Sontag. Aaronovitch paraphrases Sontag’s ‘them not us’ interpretation of the Iraq prison torture scandal, in which she lays the blame on ‘America’s increasingly out-of-control culture of violence, in which sex, entertainment and physical brutality are intertwined.’ This trinity of sex, entertainment and violence struck a chord with me, because it articulates exactly what I find repellent about a certain extreme of American – and increasingly British – culture. This is the way in which everything is packaged as entertainment. Sex has become entertainment through pornography. Violence has become entertainment through films and computer games. And pornography, violence and entertainment are the three things that characterise the Abu Ghraib torture photographs, in which sexual humiliation is used as a form of violence, and this violence – judging by the grins and thumbs-ups of the soldiers involved – is the greatest entertainment ever.

The words of a Rage Against The Machine song, ‘a thin line between entertainment and war,’ sum this situation up succinctly. But the line, I think, has undoubtedly been crossed. Entertainment is war. War is entertainment. Turn on the TV at any hour of the day and you’ll see this. Surely this cannot help but have a brutalising effect on a society? And what about the extreme, explicit violence that typifies computer games? Is this obsession with blood, pain and gore really as harmless as we all make out?

A few months after the invasion of Iraq, a war-game called ‘Shock And Awe’ was being proposed in America. That particularly revolted me, because it crosses the line from entertainment to reality, and turns people’s real suffering into a game. But is a ‘fictional’ game like Grand Theft Auto any different? Isn’t it just a part of the same disturbing process, sending out the same message: that human life means nothing whatsoever, and killing people – whether in a game or in reality – is not just easy, but fun?

Of course I’m not a fan of censorship, and I believe that the internet is the most important development to have taken place in democracy for a very long time. And I know that people have always been killing and humiliating one another, both in war and out of it, and seemingly enjoying it immensely. But something else in Aaronovitch’s article struck a chord with me: in responding to Sontag’s criticism of the West’s commercialisation of sex, he asks, ‘But who – an intelligent conservative might ask – championed sexual freedom if it wasn’t us on the liberal left? Who made films full of shocking violence and endless sex? Didn’t the conservatives warn us that this would happen?’ This uncomfortable thought makes me question the ideal of freedom that I have always – as a left-leaning person – held sacred. Perhaps the liberal left does have a burden of responsibility for those photos of Abu Ghraib. I have always been accustomed to thinking of censorship as a form of oppression – and applaud writers like Genet, Ginsberg and Burroughs who fought off obscenity charge after obscenity charge in the name of artistic freedom – but maybe, after seeing those pictures, which I believe are in many ways the product of an increasingly amoral and degrading culture, I have to admit that something is wrong.

Is there such a thing as too much freedom? Conservatives and authoritarians have always said there is. In his novel Atomised, which charts the perceived disintegration of moral values from the 1960’s onwards, Michel Houllebeq explains how the mass-murderer Charles Manson is viewed by the American right as nothing if not the inevitable product of a social degeneration – characterised by freedom, free love, contempt towards Christianity and the law – that lost all control of itself. John Walker Lindh, the ‘American Taliban,’ is similarly seen by some as a typical unpatriotic California liberal who took too big a step over the line. I don’t necessarily agree with this, but I can see the logic; sometimes it is possible to take a good thing to a bad extreme.

It also reminds me of Paul Bowles’ novel Let It Come Down, which charts one man’s discovery of personal freedom – first putting himself outside the law by stealing his employer’s money, then transcending reality itself through various revelations on hashish – and then the corruption of that discovery, as he takes his freedom too far and ends up horribly murdering his only friend for no other reason than a kind of idle curiosity, and a total inability to distinguish between right and wrong. This, again, is all about taking something too far and losing moral control in the process. Has the same thing been done with entertainment? Can we really blame the individual soldiers involved in this torture – or even their commanders – when pornography, violence and entertainment are so inextricably bound up in our society? Can we really blame the political right for the complete lack of moral control in its armies, when the liberal left has been breaking down these very same moral boundaries for the past forty years and shrieking with hysteria every time anyone suggests that making films or games about horrific violence might just have a negative effect on our culture?

Have we taken freedom too far?