“How was Europe?” I asked him.
“Fucking brilliant,” he said absently. “It was great.”
“Get many tickets?”
“Too fucking right.”
“I like the new tattoo.”
“It’s good.”
We were silent for a bit. Then he said:
“I want to show you something.”
“What?”
“It would mean driving up north.”
Determined not to make a mistake this time, I said:
“Would two days’ time do?”
“Are you sure you want to know this?”
I wasn’t sure. But I said yes anyway. In fact it was four or five days before he was free to leave. He wheedled me into letting him drive. A blip in the weather brought strong south-west winds which butted and banged at the RS as he stroked it up the motorway at a steady hundred and twenty. Plumes of spray drifted across the carriageways, so that even the heaviest vehicle, glimpsed briefly through a streaming windscreen, seemed to be moving sideways as well as forwards, caught in some long dreamlike fatal skid. Beyond Nottingham, though, where the road petered out into roadworks, blocked exits and confusing temporary signboards, the cloud thinned suddenly.
“Blue sky!” said Choe, braking heavily to avoid the back of a fleet Cavalier, then dipping briefly into the middle lane to overtake it. Hunched forward over the steering wheel until his face was pressed against the windscreen, he squinted upwards.
“I can see sunshine!”
“Will you watch where you’re fucking going?”
He abandoned the motorway and urged the RS into the curving back roads of the White Peak, redlining the rev counter between gear changes, braking only when the bend filled the windscreen with black and white chevrons, pirouetting out along some undrawn line between will and physics. I should have been frightened, but it was full summer, and the rain had brought the flowers out, and all I could see were horses up to their knees in moon-daisies. The verges were fat with clover and cow parsley. The foxgloves were like girls. Thick clusters of creamy flowers weighed down the elders, and wherever I looked there were wild roses the most tremulous pink and white. Every field’s edge was banked with red poppies. That would have been enough—fields of red poppies!—but among them, perhaps one to five hundred, one to a thousand, there were sports or hybrids of a completely different colour, a dull waxy purple, rather sombre but fine.
“How odd! Did you see that, Choe?”
“Don’t talk.”
After about twenty minutes he stopped the car and switched the engine off.
“This is near enough for now.”
We were in a long bleak lay-by somewhere on the A6. The road fell away from us in a gentle curve until it reached the flatter country west and north. Down there I could see a town—houses for quarry workers, a junction with traffic lights, a tall steel chimney designed to pump hot gases up through the chronic inversion layers of Spring and Autumn.
“When I was a kid,” Choe said, “I lived a few miles outside that place. “He undid his seatbelt and turned to face me. “What you’ve got to understand is that it’s a fucking dump. It’s got that fucking big chimney, and a Sainsburys and a Woolworths, and a fucking bus station.” He adjusted the driving mirror so that he could see his own face in it. “I hated that fucking bus station. You know why? Because it was the only way in and out. I went in and out on one of those fucking buses every day for ten years, to take exams, look for jobs, go round the record shop on a wet Saturday afternoon.” He pushed the mirror back into its proper place. “Ever spend any time in bus stations?”
“Never.”
“I didn’t think you had. Let me tell you they’re death on a stick. Only people who are socially dead use a bus station.”
Everything warm, he said, went on at a distance from people like that. Their lives were at an ebb. At a loss. They had to watch the clean, the happy, the successfully employed, stepping out of new cars and into the lobbies of warm hotels. If the dead had ever been able to do that, they would never be able to do it again. They would never be able to dress out of choice or eat what they would like.
“They’re old, or they’re bankrupt, or they’ve just come out of a long-stay mental ward. They’re fucked.”
All over the north of England they stood around at ten in the evening waiting for the last bus to places called Chinley Cross, or Farfield or Penistone. By day it was worse.
“Because you can see every fucking back-end village you’re going through. The bus is fucked, and it never gets up any speed.” He appealed to me: “It stinks of diesel and old woollen coats. And the fuckers who get on are carrying sandwich boxes.”
I laughed.
“There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a sandwich box,” I said.
“Do you want to hear this or not?”
“Sorry, Choe.”
“I hated those fucking buses except for one thing – ”
He was seventeen or eighteen years old. It was his last summer in the town. By September he would be at East Sussex. He would be free. This only seemed to make him more impatient. Women were everywhere, walking ahead of him on every pavement, packed into the vegetarian coffee-shop at lunchtime, laughing all afternoon on the benches in the new shopping plaza. Plump brown arms, the napes of necks: he could feel their limbs moving beneath the white summer dresses. He didn’t want them. At night he fell out with his parents and then went upstairs to masturbate savagely over images of red-haired preRaphaelite women he had cut from a book of prints. He hardly understood himself. One afternoon a girl of his own age got on the bus at Stand 18. She was perfectly plain—a bit short and fat, wearing a cardigan of a colour he described as “a sort of Huddersfield pink”—until she turned round and he saw that she had the most extraordinary green eyes. “Every different green was in them.” They were the green of grass, of laurel leaves, the pale green of a bird’s egg. They were the deep blue-green of every sea-cliché he had ever read. “And all at the same time. Not in different lights or on different days. All at the same time.” Eyes intelligent, reflective of the light, not human: the eyes of a bird or an animal. They seemed independent of her, as if they saw things on behalf of someone else: as if whatever intelligence inhabited them was quite different to her own. They examined him briefly. In that glance, he believed, “she’d seen everything about me. There was nothing left to know.” He was transfixed. If you had ridden that bus as an adult, he said, and seen those eyes, you might have thought that angels travel route X39 to Sheffield in disguise.
“But they don’t. They fucking don’t.”
After that first afternoon she often travelled from Stand 18. He was so astonished by her that when she got off the bus one day at a place called Jumble Wood, he got off too and followed her. A nice middle-class road wound up between bungalows in the sunshine. Above them, on the lip of a short steep gritstone scarp, hung the trees: green and tangled, rather impenetrable. She walked past the houses and he lost sight of her: so he went up to the wood itself. Inside, it was smaller than he had expected, full of a kind of hot stillness. He sat down for a minute or two, tranquilized by the greenish gold light filtering down into the gloom between the oaks; then walked on, to find himself suddenly on the edge of a dry limestone valley. There was a white cliff, fringed with yew and whitebeam. There were grassy banks scattered with ferns and sycamore saplings. At his feet purple vetches twined their tendrils like nylon monofilament round the stems of the moon daisies. He was astonished by the wood avens, pure art nouveau with their complaisantly bowed yellow-brown flowerheads and strange spiky seed cases. He had never seen them before: or the heath spotted orchids, tiny delicate patterns like intaglio on each pale violet petal.
When he looked up again, sunshine was pouring into the narrow valley from its southwestern end, spilling through the translucent leaves of young ash trees, transfiguring the stones and illuminating the grassy slopes as if from inside—as if the whole landscape might suddenly s
plit open and pour its own mysterious devouring light back into the world.
“So what did happen, Choe?”
Instead of answering he stared away from me through the windscreen, started the car up, and let it roll gently down the hill, until, on the right, I saw the turning and the sign:
JUMBLE WOOD.
“You decide,” he said. “We’ll walk up.”
I don’t know what he wanted me to see, except what he had seen all those years ago. All I found is what he had already described—the wood, smaller than you would expect, full of dust motes suspended in sunshine—and beyond that, on the knife-edge of the geological interface, the curious little limestone valley with its presiding crag like a white church.
“You’re going to have to give me a bit more help,” I said.
He knelt down.
“See this? Wood avens. I had to look it up in a book.”
He picked one and offered it to me.
“It’s pretty. Choe, what happened here?”
“Would you believe me if I told you the world really did split open?”
He gazed miserably away from me.
“What?” I said.
“Somehow the light peeled itself open and showed me what was inside. It was her. She walked out of it, with those eyes every green in the world.” He laughed. “Would you believe me if I said she was naked, and she stank of sex, and she let me push her down there and then and fuck her in the sunshine? And then somehow she went back into the world and it sealed itself up behind her and I never saw her again?”
“Choe – ”
“I was eighteen years old,” he said. “It was my first fuck.”
He turned away suddenly.
“It was my only fuck,” he said. “I’ve never done it since. Whatever lives here loves us. I know it does. But it only loves us once.”
He drove back to London in silence, parked the Escort in Camden and walked off to the tube. I telephoned him daily for two weeks, and then weekly for two months. All I got was his answering machine. In the end I gave up. Someone told me he had moved to Chiswick; someone else that he had left Britain altogether. Then one day in December I got a call from him. He was living in Gravesend.
“All that Jumble Wood stuff,” he said. “I made it up. I only told you that to get you going, you know.”
I said I would still like to talk.
“Can you get down here?”
I said I could, and we arranged a meeting. He rang to cancel three or four times. Each time it was back on within an hour or two. First I was to meet him at the bar of a pub called the Harbour Lights. Then, if I was bringing a car, at his flat. Finally he agreed to be in the main car park at one o’clock.
I drove down there along the coast road, past the rows of empty caravans, exhausted amusement parks and chemical factories which occupied the low ground between the road and the sea. Wet sleet had fallen on them all that month without once turning into snow. You could hear the women in the supermarkets congratulating themselves on being born on a warm coast, though in fact it was quite raw in the town that afternoon. I found Choe sitting on the wall of the car-park, kicking his feet, his jeans rolled up to show off a pair of paint-splattered workboots. He had shaved his hair off, then let it grow out two or three millimetres so that the bony plates of his skull showed through, aggressive and vulnerable at the same time. He seemed bored and lonely, as if he had been sitting there all morning, his nose running, his face and arms reddening in the wind from the sea.
He jumped off the wall.
“You’ll love the Harbour Lights!” he promised, and we began to walk down through the town towards the sea. Quite soon, everything was exciting him again: a girl getting out of a new car; brilliantly-coloured skateboard components displayed in the window of the Surf Shack; an advertisement for a film he hadn’t seen. “See that? Wow!” He waved his arm. “And look at those fucking gannets up there!” Thinking perhaps that he had thrown them something, the circling birds—they were actually herring gulls—dipped and veered abruptly in their flight.
“They could wait forever!”
“They’re big strong birds,” I agreed.
He stared at me.
“I’m fucking scared of them,” he said.
“I thought you were scared of nowt.”
He laughed.
We had come out on to the sea-front, and there was the Harbour Lights, facing out across the bay where a handful of wind-surfers bobbed around on a low swell, their bright sails signalling in acid greens and pinks from a lost summer. “You should see the pies in here,” Choe said delightedly. “There’s a kind of black residue in them. It’s the meat.”
We went in and sat down.
“Tell me about what you do,” he said.
I opened my mouth but he interrupted immediately.
“Look at this place!”
It seemed no different to any other pub on a flat coast, but perhaps that was what he meant. The brewery had put in an imitation ship’s bell; a jukebox played 60s surfer classics. At one end of the long cavernous bar were a few empty seafood trays under chipped glass, while at the other the barman was saying to a woman in a torn fur coat, “You’ve picked a bad day.” He hurried off down to the other end, where he seemed to fall into a dream. She smiled vaguely after him, then took off one shoe to examine the heel. A small tan and white dog, driven to hysteria by this act, rushed barking at her bare foot. The locals laughed and winked at one another.
Choe stared at them with dislike.
“You went along with all this so you’d have something to write,” he accused me.
I got my notebook out and put it on the table between us.
“It’s a living, Choe.”
I went to the bar to get the drinks. “Write something about me then,” he said when I came back. He grinned. “Go on! Now! I bet you can!”
“I don’t do portraits, Choe.”
The lies liberated from this statement skittered off into infinity like images between two mirrors. He must have sensed them go, because instead of answering he stood up and turned his back on me and pretended to look out of the window at the aimless evolutions of the windsurfers –
They would tack hesitantly towards one another until they had gathered in a slow drift like a lot of ducks on a pond: then one of them, his sail like neon in the sleety afternoon light, would shoot out of the mass and fly for quarter of a mile across the bay in a fast, delirious curve, spray shuddering up around him as he leapt from wave to wave. During this drive he seemed to have broken free not just from the other surfers but from Gravesend, winter, everything. Every line of his body tautened against the pull of the sail—braced feet, bent legs, yellow flotation jacket—was like an advert for another climate.
Sooner or later, though, the board would swerve, slow down suddenly, subside. Abandoned by the wind the bright sail, after hunting about for a second or two in surprise, sagged and fell into the water like a butterfly into a bath, clinging to a moment of self-awareness too confused to be of any use. This made Choe Ashton shiver and stare round the bar.
“These fuckers have all committed suicide,” he said. His face was so pale I thought he was going to be sick.
“Be fair, Choe,” I said cruelly. “You like the pies.”
“I won’t let you write anything about me.”
“How can you stop that, Choe?”
He shrugged.
“I could beat the fuck out of you,” he said.
Outside, the tide was coming in resolutely; the light was fading. I went out to the lavatory. Among the stickers on the bar door was one saying, “Prevent Hangovers—Stay Drunk.” When I got back the woman at the bar was doing up her coat. “I’d put far too much cayenne in,” she told the barman, “but we had to eat it anyway!” The tan and white dog was begging from table to table, and Choe Ashton had gone. I found him outside. Twenty or thirty herring gulls had gathered shrieking above him in the darkening air, and he was throwing stones at them with single-
minded ferocity. It was some time before he noticed me. He was panting.
“These fuckers,” he said. “They can wait forever.” He rubbed the inside of his elbow. “I’ve hurt my arm.”
“They only live a year or two, Choe.”
He picked up another stone. The gulls shrieked.
“I only told you that stuff to get you going,” he said. “None of it was true. I never even lived there.”
I have no idea what happened to Choe Ashton in Jumble Wood. Whatever he says now though, I believe he returns there year after year, probably on the day he took me, the anniversary of his first and perhaps single sexual experience. It is as much an attempt to reassure himself of his own existence as that of the girl he believes came out of the inside of the world. I imagine he stands there all afternoon watching the golden light angle moment to moment across the valley. Seen in the promise of this light, the shadows of the sycamore saplings are full of significance; the little crag resembles a white church. Behind him, on the gritstone side of the geological divide, the wood is hot and tranquil and full of insects. His hand resting on the rough bark of an oak he appeals time and again to whatever lives in that place—“Bring her back. Bring her back to me.”—only to be hurt time and again by its lack of response.
I understand that. I understand why he might want to obscure it. From me. From himself. What I don’t understand is my own dream.
I’ve lost no one. My life is perfectly whole. I never dreamed anything like this until I met Choe Ashton. It’s since then that I can no longer accept a universe empty of meaning, even if I must put it there myself.
DOUGLAS E. WINTER
Bright Lights, Big Zombie
DOUGLAS WINTER is an honour graduate of Harvard Law School and a Washington D.C. attorney. However, we suppose we shouldn’t hold that against him, as he also happens to be the horror genre’s premier critic, regularly reviewing for magazines and newspapers. His non-fiction books include Shadowings: The Reader’s Guide to Horror Fiction 1981–82, Faces of Fear and Stephen King: The Art of Darkness.
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