I left the paper. I must have been shocked then to leave it, to leave the only proof behind. Blank or full of writing – I don’t know. Do you know? What was written and what wasn’t? But I had to leave. I saw a meeting with Mark and my bosses, all sucking on their teeth. I saw my humiliation, everything falling to pieces. I was already at the front door.
‘But. I mean—hold up, come back.’ Mark said, ‘Or you just need—’
The path through seemed to shrink. There were more people than I thought, and their voices rose up around me. Until I got to the door and slammed it tight.
Company
A stick falls in a room made of plywood on the edge of a precipice, a gorge over the sea. I heard the seals slab themselves up on the beach rocks. Can you hear them? They make strange calls. I sigh. I have been drinking in a party in a city that doesn’t exist and I don’t know how far out I am in the fields. The car is a way back on the main road, probably. It smells like the sea but also I smell, of cigarettes. Sweat, a bit. Not too bad. This bothy is the place to die in, very chic and echoing – and lonely – fucking beautiful. Even the stove is the perfect accessory, polished but someone before me used it, I can see old ashes in it, which makes me feel. Reassured. It’s real. How better could you get? James is with me, that’s true too. Oh, I know, sorry. Sometimes he crouches on his haunches. Sometimes he looks at me so sternly I want to laugh. James is the groom. James is the master. His book is far off – I left his confession, can you believe that, how could I? Quite a state. No choice or else shown up – but the miles contract accordion-style and I hear a music that I will not hear for real again until a few years from now, at a party, at another party, when I am well. After the party, when I creep downstairs and see everyone sleeping curled up on pillows on the floor and against the sofa. Whose house will it be? The two Jameses asleep in each other’s arms. Me alone against a damp wooden wall trying not to be a part. I slide my foot forward and look at nothing and you. This is another life, the right one. But even there we make poor sticks, we curl up and go soft.
Deep North
I drove up all night when I was still way over the limit. I am fucking ashamed, of course I am, don’t even ask. Until I got to this place – following nothing, following a line crawling on a blank screen – our end of the world which in this small country seems to be every edge, even the inside parts are precipitous. You can turn around twice and find yourself about to fall off this country.
I sit here by the fire. I’m trying to concentrate, get the edges of myself – to know – holding them somehow. My phone was in my pocket. It wasn’t the source of the music. Nothing was but I was. I stare into the flames and let the focus of my eyes go; there’s the stables – approaching – night this time. As if I could just lean forward into it. I replay my entrance. Night this time – I approach the stables – there is a horse under me, a man sagged over in front of me, like he’s drunk. I hold him in place with one arm – into the stable and there is the other James and I send him away. And I turn to my man. Some nothing scooped up off the dark country lane. He begs me. I say, you don’t want something true at last? He looks away. And then the pit of my stomach. You can find yourself doing something strange and awful so easily. And then the knife, and into his neck. I see it again. I breathe too hard. I see it again; the glint of blood by lantern light. Horses stamping and beginning to make noise at the fright. Everything slips. Clattering horses. A low wailing. All such sounds, a din rising over me. My hands on the wheel slippery from fear, sweat. I’ve never been held so strongly as I was by you. And other things that run dark over my hands.
At some point there was a harsh sound and I shook my head. I had the phone in my hand and it was calling – Badr.
‘Hi Badr,’ I said when he answered.
‘Tom! Oh, man. We’ve been looking for you, ay? Whereabouts are you?’
‘Oh I’m up north a bit. Far north coast.’ I looked up through a rainspattered windshield and saw a stove with the warm eye of a fire winking in it.
‘That is a way away, man, phew,’ Badr said, sounding impressed. ‘So what you doing there, you all right? Daniel’s been going nuts. Órla too. Bit of a stress.’
‘Sorry about all the fuss. I went for a drive, and then the road was so nice, I just – kept going. You know how it is. Just one of those times when you just need a holiday from your life.’ I looked at the grime under my nails and felt my nasty breath. I shivered in my clothes. They were fine but they weren’t clean. Nothing was, except the space around my phone: clean, small, safe.
‘When I need a holiday from my life I just go to the cinema, see an action film,’ Badr said. ‘But naw. I get you big man. When you coming back?’
‘Dunno.’ By the window a gull hovered on the currents. It was day; the bothy was steady against a hard wind, my breath in clouds. I closed my eyes. I wanted to tell him how beautiful it was here, dawn especially, which was happening now. And then there was no one who saw it at all and it was more of itself that way.
‘So you’re way up there. I think – you have an address for where you’re staying?’
‘Let me check,’ I said. I walked out to the car. The sky was high gold over the plain of the heath with scratches of clouds against the upper atmosphere. I thought, ‘I could take a picture and post it. But I’m not doing that.’ I opened the car and the GPS turned on – Badr went on talking in my ear – I peered down. For some reason I was shaking – tears streaming stupidly down my face – but everything was fine. ‘It’s just beautiful here,’ I think I said.
‘Okay, cool,’ said Badr. ‘Okay, so, mate, someone’s going to drive up. Join you for a bit maybe. Would you prefer, eh, me or Órla or would Daniel be the best for this. Or someone else . . . ?’
I muttered your name into the phone. The Atlantic air should not look this good. Maybe it’s late, I thought. It’s winter now, already. I had slept, hadn’t I – ball in front of the stove. Like a soot sprite, from a cartoon. A stand of thin trees marked a property a hundred yards away. I blinked it away. Besides that and the road there was so little under the sky. I could hear the ocean breathing in and out over the hill and down the cliff to the beach, rope ladder or careless slip. My hand dropped to my side. Badr’s tiny voice going nothing against all of this. My master looked at me. I followed him away.
Conflare
James and Tom were frozen. They went outside anyway. Whoever made the bothy constructed it so that the door didn’t have to open into the wind. James and Tom couldn’t stand to be far from the heat of the fire – funny how little it takes to get down to a wire thinness and vague with it – they missed nothing of their life, they were a dot on the surface of a rock, a lichen, a hole to whisper in. James and Tom held some heart of rock they had pried out of the ground many hours before up to their mouth and said what they wanted, for five minutes straight. They had never been so honest. And it didn’t matter at all.
Tap water from the outside pole they sucked through chapped lips. James whistled; Tom turned. Horses ran across the fields; one horse – each frame of it – four hooves off the ground and a steaming back. Like an intro to a lavish television show – like an advert for summer here where the land had given up as well as out and was the low browns of nameless dead plants and windflattened grass, stones scarred under the light. They walked to the gulley where the little crooked stairs led to the beach at low tide though it was high now it was narrow and James and Tom thought they could have jumped it. Or could have fallen in trying to and been rushed away into the grey churn and fallen into the kelp forest and the mouth of a basking shark, the nets of a fishing boat trawling for silver fish. On the rocks that made the gully were jellyfish of lichens, big rusts swimming against the soft brown of the cliffs below the brown of the empty land, always above the reach of the sea. There was a cave at one end of the beach, visibly drinking the water in. Tom and James listened; the waves wrote about themselves above the wind, the sound of pen, scratching. They walked into the cave, then, or a
nother time.
A group of players are scratching on fiddles in a big warm house and there are men and women dancing. James and Tom can hear them, almost as if they are in among them, among their flicking sweat and swirling dresses. Their sweat runs down as Tom and James touch the hard rough wall. They can smell the alcohol on their breath and a feeling of hope swells them. They are inside. Outside is the stable where the murder happens. A strange, unfathomable death.
Tyres on loose chip road.
Tom and James walking over into the dimness, night back down, cold again.
Behind the wheel in a figment of light is Daniel – the man – Daniel.
He gets out, looking around him. Small, confused. People who don’t know they are part of something seem smaller and more vulnerable. Whoever he thinks he is looking for is not here.
Swoon
‘Tom!’ James says. He points at himself. I’m one man in the landscape. I’m a bundle of papers. I’m an object going to the plastic heart of the wrecked ocean. It’s everywhere and it’s broken. My heart is full of love. My body is strong and young. His parents are dead. His voice is a gull rising up between us.
‘Remember this?’ I say, holding out a small soft thing. It’s the toy. Mer-unicorn all bright white and glittering eyes. I take it, pass it one hand into another. James murmurs something in my ear.
‘I can’t make it play anything,’ he says.
‘Tom,’ says Daniel, ‘It’s okay.’
There’s a sea that I could just walk straight into. I am so ashamed. I don’t even know why any more. I begin to walk, but Daniel holds me, just a moment, as I dissolve.
Sunk
The fire is crackling again when I wake up. Daniel smiles at me – a smile I’ve never seen before – and I try to get up off the boards to get away from it, and he is handing me a glass of water.
‘Awake, at last,’ he says.
My body won’t let me do much, it’s too weak. I go out of it. I wander across the brown grass. James says if I want, I can keep going, the cliff path, the point where it churns white below. There will be no gulls when I go, nothing at all to see. I shake at this. My throat pinches. Daniel’s holding his phone. Watching me, but not trying to stop me, not trying to engage, but I can feel he wants to. I feel but maybe I don’t feel correctly.
‘Órla’s being stubborn,’ he says, ‘she’s coming up too, she set out a little bit after me. I couldn’t get her to wait for you to come back. So, now we’ll wait here. She’s bringing some food, something to eat. Are you hungry? Do you want to wash your face? It’s a bit dirty there.’
‘I thought she was going to wait outside the house, holding the cat,’ I say. I have my eyes closed because it asks less of me.
I hear Daniel laugh, gently. I listen to the crackling fire. Wind outside now. I think of the gully in the wind, cliffs like the cliffs I had run to in the city. I am called to go. I think I am called to go. This is no place, right here. I think, ‘It’s a matter of opening the door and bolting for the edge to go right off it. You can.’ Then I think, ‘Who wants you to do that?’ And the question horrifies.
There’s Daniel, knitting. No, not knitting. He’s removing the back of his phone. He’s removing pieces of paper from a book and folding them up into boats. He’s surrounded by paper boats. The ends of his trousers are cuffed, and around his black firelit boots a fleet of boats are sailing. In his focus he looks so calm I sob. He looks up. I put my face back down under my head there is smooth fabric.
‘My jacket,’ he says. ‘I used to go hiking, I used to go off and camp on my own all the time on the side of mountains. I haven’t for ages and I don’t know why.’
‘Because a room swallowed you, and a machine. And the story you fed to the machine,’ I said.
I expect him to ask me questions, but he doesn’t. He only looks like he is thinking and returns to his phone. I want him to ask me questions about myself, but he doesn’t. I sit, nothing to do. If he asked me a question, anything at all, it would prove – something. That I really existed. That was it. I want to exist so badly, and I only do if other people confirm it. Otherwise. Otherwise. Only I exist.
I hear a car. It’s Órla. Surely Órla and Badr. And Mrs Boobs. I try or something in me tries to remember why I went. James. I, or something in me that is James, remembers James, standing holding a lantern. James’ battered shoe. I remember also a shoe on a roadside. I stooped to pick it up. A piece of glass. Life scatters everywhere. I want to hold it together. Force it to make sense. But I am tired again, and what if it won’t? What could happen to me. I don’t think I care. I get up and go to the door.
But there is no car and I’m out on the cliff, cold and sweating. I’ve run. A scrap of a voice calls, but I can’t tell what it is, if it has a body.
I want a time back that I never had. My throat pinches. I am looking at water if water is there, too dark, I can’t even see my hands, I remember a knife, and horses stamping, and the smell of men, blood, horseshit, scorched wood. I am overlaid. I am too full. I go to my knees that get wet and I am like cold blood there, so fucking wretched that crying, tearing the grass a little, I find a small rough stone and hold it. Just an ordinary stone. I lean in and tell it things nobody knows about me.
Daniel Lightfoot
Rise
I’d never been that far north before and expected it would have a kind of epic quality to it, this place where the land gives out; it was less dramatic than I thought, even in the hardness of early November. Firstly came the hint of the sea, an ever-wholesome marine smell sucked in through the car’s air vents, while a certain quality to the sky suggested that the moisture in it had come a long distance without the rule of soil. Dissolution, it said. The land that rolled past the car speaking with subtlety of its finality, with lower and lower hills, flattening out as if to make for the sea a welcoming landing spot – though in truth there are cliffs there, so I could feel safe that the sea would only rise to meet it after I was dead, when all the world’s seas are coming in to lap up a portion of what our neglect has promised them.
I wasn’t overly worried or thinking about anything beyond the practicalities of the journey until I parked up just off the main road and approached the bothy on foot along a winding gravel path. I wondered for a moment who might build something like this here. All I could see it being used for at that moment was bafflement and disorientation. It looked like an art installation, it didn’t belong at all; crisp, bright pinewood, almost offensively yellow and new in the gloom. The windows were small slits in the façade, too small to allow an outsider to make out the whole of any scene inside it, though I noted there was light, which meant occupation, I hoped, still, by Tom. There was nothing on either side of this house – and I hesitate to call it that. Not house, nor dwelling, nor residence, nothing fits for a place so jarring. Stepping along on the crunching gravel I had a momentary, faint tilt into dizziness, a sense I could fall. There was no horizon because it was already too dark, and a dozen or so metres back over a few humps of earth was, I later discovered, the cliff. The cliff where Tom had been taking himself at intervals since he had arrived to stand in his temptation to give into the whispers of gravity.
I found Tom in the bothy, worse than I had expected, and about as bad as Órla had. He was filthy. He wore the same clothes he had gone to the party in, several days before, and in addition to not washing or removing the clothes he had been, it seemed, lying on the gritty strand or sitting in the smoke-filled bothy, not sleeping. His breath was awful. His greasy hair stuck up in wild patches, turned a dishwater grey. Purple halfmoons under his veiny eyes.
I couldn’t tell you how we passed that first night. But in the morning, we took our walk to the beach, where I hoped he would feel refreshed at the water’s edge (I don’t now know why I could have thought that) and where he fainted. And I, in the weird mood I was in, tensed and almost expecting something like this to happen, just watched him slump down. I made no sound or rush to find help, deciding, quickly,
that given how far out we were from the nearest village, help would not come before either Tom woke up of his own volition, or he slipped into a worse state. So I stayed still, down on my haunches looking at my friend’s grey face on the pale sand, his hair blowing about. I reached a hand to his cheek and felt the cold there. I don’t know why I wasn’t more concerned, or agitated, at least. I stayed with him a while, taking in his face until its features lost all shape. Then I took in where we were.
The beach was a narrow shelf of sand ending in rocks, and the cliffs high and dramatic on either side of our small bodies. The sea storming in and out was murmuring and breathing, if considered in human terms, with every now and then a slap and fizz as a wave beached itself closer to us. And I thought, looking down at Tom, how much like a place of disaster this could be. If I listened to the enemy. If I made certain choices. The sky overhead was dark, even though it was morning; it was hard to tell where the sun was. Of course I considered this as metaphor. Wind getting up. If I knew this part of the country better, I could tell if a squall was coming in or not.
I searched my mind at last, digging, really, to see if I could overturn the bad feeling I felt should be within me; was I responsible, somehow, for all this coming to pass? I thought of our kiss with that familiar flare of griminess in my stomach. How drunk he’d been. I hissed through my teeth and remembered that this was something my mother had done, now and then, to herself, an anxious intake of breath in response to nothing. To picking up a pen and beginning to write a shopping list, for example. I hadn’t thought of her in a long time. If the voices were hers too, then, that was something. I looked down at Tom. Should I put him into the recovery position? But I was wary of touching him. How drunk I’d been that night too. But had I done this, to him? Look at his face, it’s pale and worn now, but then it was awake and healthy. I pinched a piece of grass seed from his hair, and wondered where the leaf had come from. I held the seed up to my face; it looked like wheat, ripe.
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