by Graham Joyce
But the landscape had changed. The paths I remembered were no longer there. The hills and valleys almost seemed to have been reordered. And even though my heart was sick and I was unable to shake off the ugly images of the slaying of Hiero, the light was unbearable and beautiful.
The sun was up and I want to say that it was golden, but it wasn’t golden, it was the color of treacle. I want to say the grass was green, but it wasn’t, it was turquoise, the color of a quarry pool. The rocks were lion-colored and glimmered with quartz, and the sky I wanted to call blue was in reality lilac. And the colors were moist. It was as much as I could do to prevent myself from getting off the horse and putting my hands into these colors, to see if they would come off on my fingers.
It was like the world had been remade and though it was a thought I resisted, it felt as if the killing of Hiero had something to do with its renewal. I wandered on my horse through hollows in the land and across hills. I had no idea where to look to find my way back home. I just knew that I would wander until I found it, even if it would take me twenty years.
I stopped only to let the white mare drink or graze. And then on I went. One night I slept under a bush, and another night I spent sleeping in a crevice between granite boulders. When I woke in the morning I had a fat tear on my cheek. A little lizard crawled from the crevice and hopped onto my chest. I gasped but I wasn’t at all repelled by it. It climbed up onto my face and it drank the teardrop on my cheek and I knew it was trying to comfort me. I don’t know why I knew. Then it finished drinking my tear and pattered across my eyebrow and pushed its tiny damp snout against my forehead in a spot right between my eyes. It tickled, but in a nice way, and I felt the tickling go right to the seat of my brain and I heard the lizard say Don’t worry. Then it hopped off my face and disappeared into the crack it had come from.
The world started opening up for me. I knew exactly where to go for food. I found pools to drink from, mushrooms as big as my fist, and apple-sized berries. I had only to look.
One afternoon I’d stopped to let the horse drink and I sat with my back to a rock and a bumblebee came by, buzzing round my head. I reached out and carefully took its wing between my thumb and forefinger. The bee didn’t mind. It grew in size until I was able to climb on its back. We went flying, quite low to the land. I let the bee know what I was looking for, the crossing, the path home. But we couldn’t find it and after several hours on the bee’s back I dismounted and the bee became small again and flew off.
You’ll say I dreamed it; of course you will. I’m not so sure.
Then on the third evening I saw the moon coming up and I made my camp on a hilltop, on a flat slate table of rock that was like a mysterious altar covered in a bed of sparkling green moss, and there in the sky, slightly east and west of me, the sun and the moon met, just briefly, and I sensed everything would be well.
I covered myself in the blanket from the mare and I slept, and in my sleep the lizard led me to a clear pool and there were stones in the pool. The lizard told me each stone was a dream and if I picked up a stone I would have that dream, so I picked up a stone and the dream was you, Richie, you! But you were older, as you are now. And in the dream I taught you some new chords for your guitar, imagine that. Then I picked up more stones and had more dreams and when I woke up, someone was sitting beside my mossy bed.
“Are you ready to come back now?”
I blinked. The figure was in shadow with the rising sun at his back.
“Hiero! It’s you!”
I leapt from my bed and embraced him.
“Of course it’s me! Who’d’ye think it was.”
“But you were dead! ”
“Dead? No, no, it would take more than that to kill one of us. But I’ve got a nice souvenir to show for it.” He lifted his shirt and showed me a wicked scar across his midriff. But it was healed. “That’s the first time I’ve let young Silkie best me in a fight, I’ll tell you. I must be getting old.”
“But I saw them burning your body on a pyre!” I hugged him again.
“No, gracious, that wasn’t me, that was a form. Did you know you smell like that old mare?”
I didn’t understand, but I didn’t care. Hiero was alive. I was so pleased to see him that I wept.
“So you do care about me, then?” he said.
“Of course I do!”
“So why did you run away?”
“I thought you were dead! I just want to go home.”
He looked at me sadly. “I know that. It’s taken me a long time to find you, Tara.”
“But I’ve only been gone three days!”
He shook his head. “No, no. You’ve been gone a few months. Your time to go back to your people is near.”
He told me that I had only seven days in total before the crossing opened again and I could go home. I became excited and he looked more than a little sad. He warned me that things wouldn’t be easy when I returned home, that things would not be the same. Of course, I didn’t heed his warnings; I had no idea what he meant. How could I? And then he told me flat out that he loved me and that he wanted to know if there was any hope for him. I let him down gently, and he asked me if there would be any hope if he were to come back home with me. I told him I couldn’t see that happening. He turned and squinted into the sun and he seemed to accept it.
I let him lead me back to the lake and to his house, where I passed the next seven days in anticipation of coming home. In order to make the time pass more quickly I learned as many things as I could while I was there. Oddly, there seemed to be no more animosity between Silkie and him, and Silkie left me well alone, seeming to blush and walk away whenever I came near.
On the day before I was due to leave, Hiero begged me on his knees to stay with him. He cried and hung on to my legs. Then when he realized that I wasn’t going to change my mind he seemed to become angry. He demanded to know what I had that was so important to go back to. I told him I had you, Richie.
“Blast him,” he said to me. “I will blast him.”
Richie, I think you know now who it was who attacked you the other night.
But nothing he said was going to stop me from leaving. Everyone was cool with me. Ekko and one or two of the others I had come to know better, but none of them tried to stop me or to talk me out of it. And finally, when the day came, Hiero was true to his promise, and he delivered me to the crossing and he faithfully brought me back to all of you.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
URSULA LE GUIN
I am now even more convinced that TM is constructing on the hoof, as it were, rather than remembering a previously constructed confabulation. The indicators are there. Today in my office she looked out the window and saw a man waiting near a bus stop. She seamlessly wove the presence of this random figure into her narrative.
TM is certainly prone to nervous excitement. Her report of maps and globes was wildly speculative and she seemed to be building in a Cassandra complex quite willfully, wanting to be disbelieved. I led her as gently as I could back to reality in asking if she owned any physical object or token smuggled back from her alternative world. For the first time since our initial session she introduced into her confabulation material from the present context by looking out of the window and challenging me to confront the poor man at the bus stop. This depressing development has changed my view of what I at first saw as a case of contained confabulation. It now seems to be spilling into a more conventional case of paranoia.
I say depressing because the paranoia will deflect any attempt by me to affirm a narrative that I had hoped was already completed. My job is to interpret the problem-saturated story that I have been given and to find a preferred alternative version of events satisfactory to the patient. If the condition is indeed paranoia, the story will invent new problems for me to defeat any alternative, positive version of events. There will be no end to the story.
Beyond that I can confidently assert that
there is a strong force of sexual denial at large in TM’s tale. We now have a name for the beautiful sexually incontinent female who earned TM’s disgust. It is Ekko (as TM spelled it out to me), which is of course Echo, and an echo of TM herself. That is to say, the woman copulating so casually, promiscuously, and without discrimination over the matter of gender, whether on the kitchen table or at the lakeside, is clearly TM herself.
Ekko is orgiastic in her appetites and clearly enjoys the sexual attentions of other people in the commune. By objectifying her own appetites in this way, TM can trigger her moral censure of the behavior that led her to leave her home in the first place, thus avoiding responsibility. Likewise, Ekko seems excited by the idea of combat: excited to the point of lust. TM’s search for a man who would fight for her and protect her reaches in Ekko its logical expression, but here again TM, in condemning the behavior of Ekko, manages to dodge all moral blame.
Meanwhile, the external data betrays this assumed moral position. TM’s fierce maintenance of an image of eternal youth may indeed be a protected or deflected (but still excessive) interest in personal appearance. It is a form of passive exhibitionism, provocative and attention-seeking in itself. TM’s brother has reported to me that she has been seen out on the town, behaving seductively and inappropriately. She is, in turn, he reports, excessively sensitive to criticism or disapproval. This may, of course, all point to a formal histrionic personality disorder, but complicated by the need to subsume sexuality under a need for approval within the moral strictures.
Note to self: this business with the dental records needs to be cleared up. At the moment all we have is the unsupported and subjective observations of a dentist.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
No doubt we shall have to sit there all bloody evening listening to some awful drivel about fairies.
WILLIAM HEANEY
Jack logged on to his computer and found an e-mail from Mrs. Larwood. It was written like a piece of English composition.
Dear Jack, Thank you for your great kindness in helping me with my computer equipment. As you can imagine, it is all quite taxing for an elderly person, but with your help I seem to have arrived. There is a reason that I am writing to you, and it isn’t just because you are the only person in my e-mail address book. It concerns your aunt Tara. I would very much like to invite her to have a cup of tea at my house. Of course, she may be too busy to come and chat with a dusty old so-and-so like me, but I do hope you will forward this invitation to her. Meanwhile, I hope you are keeping well and managing to get out from time to time. At least, it does seem to be a little warmer and I hope you are taking advantage of the better weather. Yours sincerely, Helen Larwood.
Jack read the e-mail a second time. He was going to have to show Mrs. Larwood how to write an e-mail.
He typed a reply.
Hi, Jack here. No problem, I’ll tell her. Oh, by the way, we keep e-mails short. You don’t need to go on about the weather unless you’re having an actual real chat about the weather. We also chop stuff. I would write prob but I’ve written problem out in full because you’re new at this. You could say, hi can you ask Tara to come by for tea. That would do it. I’m not stopping you from writing long e-mails if that’s what you want but you probably don’t.
Then he pressed Send and wrinkled his nose.
He opened his desk drawer and took out the leaflet with a picture of Mrs. Larwood’s cat. He still hadn’t made any plans to find a replacement. He put down the leaflet and searched the Internet for local cat-rescue centers.
RICHIE HAD BEEN GETTING serious migraines. They’d been getting worse since he’d been attacked. He went to see his GP, who was concerned enough to get Richie an early appointment at the hospital for a CT scan.
He went along to the hospital, where he was asked to change into a gown. He was given a sedative and was also injected with iodine-based contrast material to help the doctors analyze what they could see from the scan. The injection made him feel flushed and left a metallic taste in his mouth.
He was asked to lie flat on a sliding table that could glide into the white doughnut-shaped CT machine.
“Science fiction,” said Richie.
The radiographer smiled thinly and asked him to hold his breath at intervals while the X-ray images were taken. Each rotation of the scanner took only about a second as it photographed a thin slice of his brain.
When he was interviewed he told the consultant that the migraines had started just a couple of days before Christmas. No, he’d had no history of migraines before that date. Yes, the pains came every day, sometimes several times in the day.
He was told that he would have the results in a few days and he was asked if he had someone to drive him home. He said no, he didn’t. It was recommended to him that he didn’t drive home because of the sedative.
“Right-o,” Richie said. “I hear you.”
He left the CT unit and walked back in the early-morning sun to the hospital car park, got into his car, and drove home. On his way he had to pass by the Martins’ house and he decided to stop in.
“LOOK AT THE STATE of you,” Mary said when she greeted him at the door. “Come in.”
“Is Tara home?”
“I’ll make a pot of tea. Have you been in a fight?”
Neither Mary nor Dell had been told about either the attack on Richie or Peter’s run-in with the law over drunk driving. There was a conspiracy not to pass on bad news to people of their age, as if, like children under the age of sixteen, they wouldn’t be able to handle it well. And with Mary fussing over the tea, the twenty years of silence between them might as well have been nothing.
“Do you want a sandwich?”
“No, thanks, Mrs. Martin. Is Tara home?”
“She’s in the bath. Dell is out bowling. He’ll be sorry he missed you. Now, you always had three sugars in your tea.”
“Still do, Mrs. Martin, still do.”
“I can easily make you a cheese sandwich.”
Richie knew from twenty years ago that Mary wouldn’t let up. “Go on, then.”
He sat in the living room on the tan leather sofa, looking at the velour curtains and the ornate wall lamps, trying to remember what had changed and what hadn’t. He’d spent a lot of time at this house in his teens, waiting for Tara, watching TV, eating meals with the Martins, sometimes sleeping over on a bed made up on the couch that had been replaced by this tan sofa. It had been his second home. He heard Mary call up the stairs to let Tara know that Richie was there.
When Mary came back with the sandwich and the tea, the china cup shivered on its saucer. Mary had developed a tremor over the years. “Where’s the old radiogram? You got rid of it?”
They’d had a furniture-piece cabinet-sized record player on which he and Tara used to spin his vinyl albums. It was already outmoded, with sliding doors that concealed the equipment, and a glass-fronted radio tuner that dialed into frequencies with exotic names like Hilversum, Helvetia, Luxembourg, and Telefunken.
“Years ago.”
“I would have bought that. Collector’s piece now.”
“You could have had it. Dell chopped it up.” She nodded at the dark bruises on his face. “So what’s happened to you?”
“Someone attacked me the other night. Jumped from behind a tree.”
“Who did?”
“No idea.”
“They steal anything?”
“No.”
Mary fixed her eyes on him. “It’s getting so you don’t want to go out of the house. I don’t know what the world’s coming to.”
Richie slurped his tea.
“Did she say anything to you?” Mary said.
“What?”
“When the two of you were out the other night. I’m wondering if she said anything to you. Anything other than this load of old rubbish she’s told us.”
“What has she told you?”
“I’m not even going to repeat it. It’s just a load of old rubbish.” Mary got up and
closed the door, then sat down again. “I don’t mind telling you, Richie, I’m starting to get sick of her around the house and she’s only been back a few days. She spends hours in the bath. She came back drunk as a lord the other night. And the only explanation we’ve been given is this load of old rubbish. I’m ready to slap her face and tell her to pack her bags, but Dell won’t hear of it. We have to tiptoe round her. It’s not fair.” Mary swiped at her eyes to get rid of a resented tear. “It’s not fair, Richie.”
“Don’t get upset.”
“And look at you.”
“What about me?”
“Coming here. The way we treated you.”
“Never mind that.”
“I lost you as well as her, didn’t I?”
“Don’t go getting upset, Mary.”
They sat in silence until Mary recovered. She said, “Well, what do you make of it all?”
Richie put his cup and saucer down on the carpet and leaned forward. “I think she’s fragile.”
“Fragile!”
The door opened, and there stood Tara, fragile, pink, scrubbed, squinting and smiling at Richie. She raised her eyebrows at him and he knew right then that if she asked him to follow her over a hill, or swim across a river, or to leap off a cliff with her, he would do it.
“Richie,” she said, “would you drive me over to Peter’s place?”
“Sure.”
“But you haven’t had any breakfast!” Mary protested.
“That’s all right.”
“She only eats fruit,” Mary said to Richie, in a kind of disgust.
“Fruit and nuts. Where’s that going to get you?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Martin.”
“I’ll get my coat,” said Tara.
Mary offered Richie a thunderous look. Richie picked up his cup and saucer but Mary took it from him and whisked it off to the kitchen, giving Richie a chance to go out to the hall and ask Tara if she’d told her parents that she was moving in.