Between

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  On the cliff where she and the man had previously made their home, there had been other birds. There had been macaws and parrots, creatures she would once have killed. Now she blinked and turned her head in disdain, without either appetite or longing. She knew a deep satisfaction here that she had never known before and a strange happiness lit her life golden. Life had simply been a struggle for survival and the fulfilment of nature over rest, but now she discovered the concept of love, and greatly relished it.

  Obeying more than instinct, she took her man into the tree tops and roosted beside him as he slept, eventually dozing under the sweet heat of the high canopy.

  Way below on the forest floor was the creeping hole. She had felt its threat, a black hatred, a threatening nothingness. But it was left far away. She settled her head down into the ruffles of her neck feathers, rattled her quills, blinked twice, and snoozed.

  Primo stood in the dream. The eagle had kept his body from the pit but in the dream it had claimed him.

  From where he stood, consumed with inactivity inspired by terror, Primo could see the fork leading from the utter emptiness into the re-enactment of his past life, which he dreaded, but could no longer remember. The loss of his identity was the beginning of the nothing, but it meant something else to him too. It meant that what he had once been, which had always inspired such fierce pride in its being, was in fact so trivial that he had forgotten it altogether. It did not even have the power to outlive his death. And so he had been infinitesimal, a simple foolish vanity, a nothing after all, as sure a nothing as the fork in the pit which beckoned with the seduction of absolute annihilation. The honey sweet temptation of oblivion and cessation of all effort. The end of struggle. Even though he could no longer remember what the struggle had ever been.

  So he chose the fork leading back into remembrance.

  But when he found his name, he wished fervently that he had chosen the vacuum. He heard it at once, screamed at him from the valley, and immediately he recognised the self he had once been, and had loathed so violently. In the life he had left, self-loathing had been so ultimately vile that he had chosen the only escape. To compound the identity with a pride in its pure degeneration. He had never given in. He had lived, and embraced the force which inhabited his body, and never denied the power of its ultimate corruption. And yet, though proud of the strength of his own culpability, he had so easily, upon death, abandoned all its glory.

  The pit opened onto the edges of the desert, scrubby and harsh and dirty, with the road wide before him. At his back was the sun and above him the sun and in his eyes the sun, so that he squinted and his tongue became huge.

  Primo sat on the roadside where he had taken back the memory of his life and stared into the dust of the passing wheels. Past moments reasserted suddenly. He relived sensations caught in crystal facets, a kaleidoscope of holograms, each stab of violence containing the full horror of his life in an echo of sinking years. The pressure of his hands on his brother’s neck. Other necks, smaller, softer. The excitement of the snap.

  There had been reasons, but reason was not part of it. Excess had been a motive within itself. Now his name, so newly remembered, shouted back to him in all its fame and in all its notoriety.

  There was no longer cause for pride because there was no longer need to escape. Death had supplied the escape, and so pride had become superfluous. Yet within the sweet escape of death he had lost the purpose and remembered only the bitter, outworn hauteur. He doubled over beside the noisy dry road, and vomited. It reminded him, as he straightened up and wiped the sour bile from his mouth, of standing beside the edge of the pit and spewing something he had not understood. It had, he decided, been the same thing that he vomited now. Disgust, and with it, the cause of it. And the cause was not what he had done with his life but the honour he had taken from the doing of it.

  A car stopped. The tyres kicked hot dust and smelled of burned rubber, the exhaust belched. A woman peered down at him from the part open window. She was elderly and squinted and the dust caught in her perm like a setting spray. “You shouldn’t be doing that here, young man. It isn’t hygienic. Do you need a lift somewhere?”

  He wondered, becoming himself again, if she would be carrying any money in the prim little plastic purse on the seat beside her. It didn’t look like a rich woman’s purse. He nodded. “Yeh. I don’t feel good. It’s too hot to walk.”

  “Into town, then?”

  He nodded again and climbed into the shade of the car. It wasn’t cool, it was stuffy, but he stretched his legs and kicked off his broken sandals. He put the woman’s bag carefully behind on the back seat beside the large wicker basket, and settled himself in the front passenger seat.

  “And don’t you go thinking you can steal something from me, young man. I’ve nothing worth stealing,” she said, nose pressed forward towards the windscreen, fingers gripping the steering wheel as though it might run away with her if she loosened her hold. She was small, and the car seemed too large for her, though it was tiny and battered like herself. This was not a woman, he thought, who had driven easily through life.

  “I don’t steal,” said Primo, and knew that it was, surprisingly, absolutely the truth. His preferred vice was something altogether different.

  She did not look aside at him, but stared intently ahead at the road. Her chin sat the top of the wheel. “You look hungry young man. When did you last have a good meal?”

  Primo thought for a moment. His mind was abstracted, lingering over confusions. Re-living the past, he was now both the original and unsuspecting creature caught in the normal sequences of time, and he was equally the spirit of himself with the knowledge of hindsight and of life after death. “Eaten? I don’t know. A few days ago. I don’t eat often.”

  “Drugs instead, no doubt,” said the woman. “Tobacco? Stealing perhaps?”

  “I told you,” said Primo. “I don’t steal. I don’t do drugs either. Don’t need them. Can’t afford them.”

  “Well then, rubbish food. What they call fast food, though I never saw what was fast about it. Artificial more like.”

  “Stop blathering on about food,” muttered Primo. “Why are you so interested in what I eat?”

  “I never had a son,” said the woman, still fixedly staring ahead, though her eyes were pale and perhaps myopic. However blurred her sight, she would not, unblinking, allow the road to escape her. “I’d have liked a little boy to look after. If I’d had a son, I’d have made sure he ate properly.”

  “Food isn’t that important,” said Primo, slumping into the curve of the back rest.

  “True,” said the woman, with a first blink. “Man doth not live by bread alone. But then, a nice sandwich helps on a long drive. If you reach back into my basket, you’ll find some. Wrapped in clean white paper, and still fresh. Take one. You’re quite welcome.”

  She looked poor. “I don’t need your food.”

  “And while you’re eating,” she continued, “perhaps you can tell me something about yourself. Your name, perhaps.”

  Primo’s arm was half way over the back seat and into the basket. He withdrew it at once. “I don’t tell people my name.”

  “Well,” the woman blinked again. “I won’t insist. What people tell is up to them. My name’s Kate Askey, and I’m pleased to meet you, whatever your name is. Now, about that sandwich, young man.”

  He had taken a first bite, and was enjoying it. Old fashioned thick cut Virginia ham and tomato. Moist and not too salty. Good bread, hand sliced and grainy with a crunch at the crust. He was remembering just how long it was since he’d eaten a damn thing, and his mouth was full and appreciative. At the same time he was wondering what to tell the old woman, to keep her quiet, and happy, and not be rude. Because she was nice and he was ready to show gratitude. There were other thoughts too, as he munched. He’d never killed anyone old before.

  Then he woke up.

  When Primo woke, he felt very small. He was staring downwards through the leav
es of a tree so tall that the ground was too far below to see in detail. He felt sick and raised his head. The taste of food remained, but rancid. His belly was wedged into the cleft of a tree trunk, its bark dark and rough, its soaring branches holding him against the flattened cobalt of a clear sky. Part over him and cool, was the shading and protective wing of a large bird.

  The dream had both cancelled, and then rewarded with direction. Asleep, he had repudiated the nothing, and chosen the challenge of something. Then he had repudiated all the burning heat of his proud dignity, of the self he had once lived and its desperate carnality. He could choose now, as he had never chosen whilst living, the easier path of gentle humility. But he had already remembered far more of his life and his former self than was now comfortable, and he also remembered why his subconscious had chosen to forget.

  His harpy was cooing, as concerned as a clucking chicken brooding her eggs. Primo wriggled up, slowly freeing himself from the clasp of the tree. He looked up into huge intense eyes, as round as the sun over the desert, golden circles around the pitch of black pupils. “Thank you,” he said aloud. “Did I fall? Did you rescue me?”

  She asked if any of his puny human limbs had broken, or the feeble claws of his hands snapped. He said he had broken nothing but felt unwell. She said it would pass, as all things did, and he said he knew. Then, restless with the roosting, she spread her wings and launched herself down through the thick branch cover, albatross of the forests, and on to follow the shadows. Primo unwound, spat out leaves and stood, clinging a moment to the top branch, then launching himself in her wake. Her power left a bow-wave within the air currents and he rode it, surfing warmth. His arms clipped the passing foliage until he tucked them beside his thighs, aerodynamic, fleet as a plummeting hawk.

  He brushed aside both the undergrowth and his ragged thoughts together, loosening his mind in emptiness for the next lesson. He did not know when that might come, hopefully none too soon, but he was, he knew, now ready to make a new home in the internal valley of the fourth plane, and his harpy had chosen it for him. He would build in the thickness of the woods.

  Chapter Thirteen

  At first it was strange to fly. She remembered life-time dreams and the admiration of birds. Conversations as a child. “I’d love to fly. I’d love to be a bird.”

  “The poor little things die in storms, get dashed on rocks, battered by winds. It can’t be so easy, this flying business.”

  “But Daddy, it must feel lovely on a sunny day. I wish I could do that.”

  “Georgia, enough now. I’m busy. Maybe one day I’ll take you in a plane.”

  “Oh pooh. That wouldn’t be the same at all. I want the wind in my hair.”

  Now she had the wind in her hair.

  Think it, Norwen had told her as they first set off, and it will happen. Like Peter Pan, she’d said. Tinkerbelle and fairy dust. Norwen hadn’t known that story but he’d smiled, and understood. Just the omniscience of the mind, he’d said.

  Doubt had been the initial problem. “Me? Who, me? Flying, for goodness sake? I didn’t even drive very well when I was alive. I used to back into the bins on Tuesdays.”

  Norwen had not entirely grasped this explanation either, but he had asked, “Do you fear heights?”

  Georgia thought a moment. “Not really. But then – I never flew without a plane all around and under me. I trusted the jet engines.”

  “Then think of your mind as the jet engine.”

  So she had risen straight up into the dither of warming azure, and had followed Norwen’s flight upwards and onwards. It had been as blissfully delightful as she had ever imagined. In fact a great deal more so, until the fogbanks.

  “The fogbanks will be cold until you acclimatize yourself,” said Norwen. “Thick mists separate most planes and they feel warm to those who are travelling through towards their own natural places. But you are penetrating a barrier where your essence is increasingly alien. So it will be uncomfortable at first.”

  Georgia shivered. “This reminds me of having a horrid pimply physical body again,” she said. “Feeling cold. I don’t see why it should feel this way.” It was her first outright complaint, and she dared to say it, but smiled to cover the discontent.

  “Because everything here is relative,” answered Norwen. “This is the crossing to the lower levels, so is not a place which coincides with your present spiritual state. Therefore, subconsciously, you repudiate it. The vibrations are far slower lower down, whereas yours have acclimatised to a faster speed. Then your senses feel the subsequent slowing alienation as coldness, the state of discomfort being both consequent and equivalent to the difference in your own natural vibration.”

  “Oh goodness,” squeaked Georgia, “do I need to understand that? It’s just so strange to find any sort of unpleasantness over here so I hadn’t expected it.”

  “In other words,” Norwen smiled, “discomfort depends on whether you are heading in the direction of your present and natural progress, or against it.”

  “And the haze? Is that relative too?” Georgia asked.

  Norwen said, “No.” Speaking into her mind, “it is simply a barrier without specific form, being a division lacking physical substance. It divides speeds of vibration and the intermingling of these at the point where they meet will automatically be vague and vapourish, even damp. Between levels such nebulous pathways exist, closing one plane from another and equally providing a route to follow towards an entrance. The fogbanks are the Summerland’s walled highways, roads used by anyone searching for their homes after sudden death. Sometimes those who refuse to accept death will wander in the mist until they accept the truth. Others easily pass over them in the direction of their home plane.”

  First, directly from her place on the seventh, Norwen and Georgia had flown across the barrier lands of lake, soft silvery wetlands of rivulets and estuary where the wild water birds waded, casting their leggy reflections like fishing lines. Then they flew over the great expanses of the sixth plane, often obscured by cloud, often dizzily green and wide and washed in sunshine. Centrally the land was cut by a gorge of myriad colours, a great chasm of amazing depths, one side black shadowed and the other as emerald as a peacock’s plume under the sun. At the cavernous base, the land stretched again into fields, forests and the rush of cascading water. All the drama of a physical landscape, astonishing in beauty and variety, and unexpected in magnitude.

  “Not so bad after all,” Georgia grinned. “So I promise I won’t be a seventh plane snob.”

  “Of course not,” said Norwen. “All the Summerlands are beautiful if seen without prejudice. The sixth plane is a place of emotional extremes, of tumultuous energy. Just because it appears to be lower on the scale than your own home, does not make it ugly. Nor, in a sense, inferior, even though it is in effect further from the pinnacle of spiritual purity. Everything in human nature has its place.” Norwen moved closer, blocking for a moment the rush of wind and the chill of the rising shadows. He reached for her as they flew. “Now,” he said, “take my hand.”

  He had never touched her before and she was surprised at the frisson. She had found the experience of flying quite deliciously exciting, but Norwen’s touch was more so. Every particle of her being tingled.

  “It is the proximity of the spirit,” he said at once. “Although I lower my vibrations in order to travel to your level and be visible to you, my own essence remains at a far higher state of progress. Remember, this is not to speak of superiority, for each of us has this perfection potentially within us. But I have already travelled the road onwards to the ninth plane. You simply find the unexpected closeness of purity tantalising.”

  “You make it sound awfully mundane,” smiled Georgia, “but it’s actually this amazing muddle of states I’ve never known before. You’re much higher up the ladder than me and being close to you is like getting closer to God. But we’re travelling through the sixth plane down into the fifth, and that’s cold because it’s moving away fro
m my own natural state in the opposite direction. Meanwhile I’m flying – actually flying through the air. Heavens. Just thinking of all that - it’s a miracle I’m able to think at all.”

  She felt his answering smile through the proximity of his hand enclosing hers but he said, “The fogs that form the barrier between sixth and fifth feel like frost. Keep your formation very close to mine.”

  The banks rose like dry ice, swirling vines of grasping fear. Georgia entered the blindness with a shudder. Immediately she lost height and her legs became heavy and slow. A whispering filled her head like a paralysis of doubt. Snow needles stabbed, and had Norwen not been holding her she thought she might have lost consciousness. Then his speed increased and they were through.

  They had spent Thursday in Siena, admiring, enthusing, drinking at the little tables by the piazza, first coffee, then wine, then coffee again. The sunshine had bounced from the cobbles and the old stone of the tower. But Wayne had not brought his mountainous back-pack into the medieval city, and he had not been left at the bus station or at any of the little hostels wedged into the narrow, winding alleys. Instead, he had accepted Romano’s invitation to stay a few more days. Romano had made the invitation for one reason only.

  On the way home they had stopped at a cottage tucked into a fold of the curling green and golden hills. Goats nibbled at the bougainvillea and chickens wandered beneath the olive and lemon trees.

  “These people used to work for my family on the land,” said Romano. “All their lives. So when they became too old we gave them a corner of the estate for themselves. Now they bring me fresh eggs.”

  “Positively feudal,” cooed Julian. “Utterly delicious.”